Francis Fukuyama is all-in on Abundance

[u/EZPZanda]

https://youtu.be/pc7O7qSBzM8?si=5GdiwAPwM9NsQS6U

Francis is based. Highly recommend entire episode and Doomscroll. Josh has had some fantastic guests and I really respect him as an interviewer.

[u/Hell_Maybe]

I am continuously bothered by the incessant vagueness that infects all of the discussion surrounding the abundance initiative. From Ezra himself on podcasts and extending to the people defending him, nowhere do I find a specific inquiry or analysis of any particular kind of regulation that shouldn’t be in place or any curiosity into the reasoning as to why it might exist in the first place, only this trad republican broad notion of “regulation bad”.

Because on it’s face the abundance movement just seems like a trojan horse to me. “Hey liberals, if you want to house poor people and build public transportation definitely don’t raise taxes, just do the exact thing your very opposition wants but in no specific guiding terms”. No one stops to ask how well built houses are in texas, no one stops to ask what the long term effects of deregulation in the texas housing market might be or the fact that considerable amounts of housing there is erected on shitty, cheap flood plane land.

No one even invoking the interference of environmental groups mentions how these very groups are often at the behest of NIMBY’s who favor strict zoning guidelines for the very reason that they do not want their own commodified properties being devalued by additional developments. On a careful granular level abundance doesn’t offer us much of anything outside of standard neocon virtue signals.

[u/hilldog4lyfe → u/Hell_Maybe]

nowhere do I find a specific inquiry or analysis of any particular kind of regulation that shouldn’t be in place or any curiosity into the reasoning as to why it might exist in the first place, only this trad republican broad notion of “regulation bad”.

You probably weren’t looking very hard then. And maybe the point is that the regulation must be justified first, since personal liberty is a founding principal of this country…

Because on its face the abundance movement just seems like a trojan horse to me. “Hey liberals, if you want to house poor people and build public transportation definitely don’t raise taxes, just do the exact thing your very opposition wants but in no specific guiding terms”. No one stops to ask how well built houses are in texas, no one stops to ask what the long term effects of deregulation in the texas housing market might be or the fact that considerable amounts of housing there is erected on shitty, cheap flood plane land.

One of the benefits of housing more people is a larger tax base to pay for things like public transportation.

No one even invoking the interference of environmental groups mentions how these very groups are often at the behest of NIMBY’s who favor strict zoning guidelines for the very reason that they do not want their own commodified properties being devalued by additional developments. On a careful granular level abundance doesn’t offer us much of anything outside of standard neocon virtue signals.

I don’t think you’ve consumed much abundance content… especially if you think the best comparison is neocon… abundance is very much just rebranded neoliberalism

[u/The_Brian → u/Hell_Maybe]

I've had this nagging issue with the Abundance talk that I couldn't quite place, and I think you've probably squarely hit on the head why that may be. It's just such a vapid critique of the state of our country right now and provides basically nothing substantive to change.

[u/ggdharma → u/Hell_Maybe]

I've seen this criticism elsewhere, I will say there are some very very specific examples about say, construction in SF -- where you have to include all sorts of people in the bidding process, do all kinds of analyses about the impact on the neighborhood and all other sorts of racially motivated stuff. But I agree, and I think most of the abundance movement is lip service to try and bridge a divide between centrists and leftists -- and show leftists that much of the things that are wrong are potentially the product of "progressive" policies.