The Purpose of a System is What It Does

From The Purpose of a System is What It Does by Charles Fain Lehman.  The subheading is Review: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.  

A very substantiative review.  It reviews the book as a book and then the book as portfolio of ideas and finally the book as a process.  

Some points:

Abundance, the new and much discussed work from the NYT’s Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is a book with two distinct visions. The authors would like to believe that these are, if not one and the same, then reconcilable. Unfortunately, they are not.

The first way to understand Abundance is as an intra-coalitional argument. Klein and Thompson are (they take great pains to remind us) liberals. And the book’s primary audience is fellow liberals, with the goal of galvanizing one side of an intra-liberal debate while chastising another.

In Klein and Thompson’s view, the liberal agenda is in conflict with itself. On the one hand, liberals want the state to deliver many goods and services efficiently and universally. They want health care and roads and houses and science funding and so on. Most importantly, they want the state to solve big problems: to fix climate change and disease and poverty and the rest.

On the other hand, liberals also want to regulate the processes by which these things are produced. They want to make sure that the housing is produced in a way that is not disruptive of community character, or doesn’t hand too much profit over to business. They want to make sure the solar panels are not constructed in a way that disrupts anyone’s view, or hurts endangered species. They want to distribute life-saving medication, but in a way that promotes racial equity.

Klein and Thompson think that liberals have leaned too heavily into this regulatory agenda, in a way that stifles the production of the things they want the state to produce.  

[snip]

This version of Abundance—a book about the idea that liberalism needs to get out of its own way—is fundamentally laudable. I am not in Klein and Thompson’s coalition, obviously. But I agree with many of their goals: I want more houses, more renewable energy, more scientific innovation, etc. And I am glad that someone from within their coalition wrote a book making their argument to fellow coalition members. I think America is a better place with a liberalism that wants to build than with a liberalism that wants to choke building off at the root. Abundance is a book that will get people talking about the right problems, and for that alone it deserves praise.

What I am not sold on, however, is the idea of a liberalism that builds.

This is the second way of reading Abundance: as a claim about what the state ought to do. When Klein and Thompson talk about a “politics of abundance,” they are envisioning a far more aggressive role for the state in the actual process of making things—of building—than it currently occupies.

[snip]

There’s a phrase from systems thinking that gets used frequently on Twitter X: “the purpose of a system is what it does.” As coiner Stafford Beer put it, there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” The liberal state constantly fails to build. Why should we think that’s what it’s supposed to be doing?

Rather, a better way to understand the everything bagel phenomenon is as coalition management.4 It’s not that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built in spite of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top. It’s that the IRA got passed or public housing gets built because of the giveaways and procedural requirements layered on top. The pay-offs to and carveouts for unions and local agitators and everyone else exist because that’s how you make sure things actually get done. In their absence, those people exercise the vetos that are inherent to the state building in a democratic society.

The idea generalizes. The fact that California spent billions of dollars without producing usable high-speed rail (a favorite foil of abundance liberals) can be viewed as an accident. But it is more parsimonious to say that California succeeded at its goal—allocating billions of dollars to innumerable contractors and private interests—and, incidentally, some train tracks were eventually constructed.

[snip]

A “politics of abundance” is an oxymoron. Politics is for the divvying up of the fruits of actual productivity, sometimes well and sometimes poorly. To ask it to do the work of production is to miss what it is for.