The Abundance™ marketing is deliberately misleading
A deliberate confusion of first and second-order effects.
I’ve mostly ignored the Abundance™ discourse thus far because this is clearly one of those things we are only talking about because some rich guys are pouring money into getting us to talk about it. As such, it is not really in that mode of discourse where sensible criticism and analysis can really have an effect on anything. Make as sharp an arg against it as you like, and a week from now Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson will be saying the exact same things they were saying a week ago, and on platforms infinitely larger than ours.
Still, there is some low-hanging fruit here, and I can’t help but reach for it:
Let’s consider two approaches to artificial scarcity:
You give people stuff → abundance
You deregulate → this hopefully makes it easier to build, and → abundance
In the first approach, people getting stuff is a first order consequence of your action. You try to give people stuff, and if you succeed then you get it. But in the second approach, people getting stuff is only a second-order consequence of your action. You try to deregulate, but even if you succeed this does not necessarily get people stuff because then deregulation has to have the consequence of making it easier to build. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but the point here is that logically, approach two depends on two things happening rather than one.
The Abundance™ people have called their politics Abundance™ because they do not want you to pay attention to the fact that their approach has two steps. They want everyone to simply take for granted that deregulation will create abundance, so their rhetoric consistently presents their agenda as
You deregulate → abundance
Thus we get tweets like Huber’s with his first point obviously skipping right over the central point in contention. No one opposes abundance per se; however, socialists have good reason to oppose Abundance™, since that is just a marketing term for a campaign of deregulation that may or may not reach its purported outcome.
This deliberate conflation of terms is on its own good enough reason for skepticism of the entire project. If all you really want is abundance, then your primary focus should be on building political will to give people stuff, with bank-shot strategies like “deregulate and that might create abundance as a consequence” being a distinct and secondary concern. That the Abundance™ folks have built their entire strategy around conflating abundance and deregulation is all the evidence you need that they do not want us thinking about the two as distinct.
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