The Straussian Message of Abundance

Redistribution Doesn't Matter

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, is politically self-conscious. It has a particular ideological audience in mind and a specific plan of influence focused on progressive political elites. That means Ezra and Derek have to carefully cut and frame their message into a form that progressive elites will accept.

This kind of political pressure is exactly the motivation behind the subtextual messages identified in the works of ancient philosophers by Leo Strauss. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson won’t face forced suicide for unorthodox views like Socrates did, but they do risk a form of exile. The reaction to Derek’s appearance on Richard Hanania’s podcast shows there is still some heat left in the ashes of cancel culture.

Most materially, they risk not convincing anyone with their work. On Hanania’s podcast, Derek Thompson says his goal for the book is to “persuade you that we share the same values, and make the case that your processes don’t lead to the values you actually share.” Thus, to sneak past the defenders of progressive orthodoxy, Ezra and Derek must hide the most radical parts of their message.

Redistribution doesn’t matter

If you really believe that there can be industrial revolution-level growth over the next several decades leading to massively increased per capita incomes, energy consumption, and a slate of new technologies and medicines which improve and extend life, then there’s just nothing you can do with redistribution today that would come close to the importance of this progress.

Under the Abundance vision for the future, doing redistribution today is like doing redistribution in 1750. No matter how you shift the shares of wealth across the population, you’ll still be left with a world of utter poverty, poor health, and backwards scientific theories. If you divvied up global GDP today equally across all 8 billion people, everyone would be well below the US poverty line. The highest national life expectancies are only around 85. No universal healthcare plan can cure cancer and no public transportation infrastructure can get from New York to London in 2 hours.

Klein and Thompson subtly reveal this message throughout the book. The first hint is in their three-page sci-fi opener that paints a picture of what life could be like in 2050 if we focused on growth.

Out the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich, especially when we discovered that key molecules were best synthesized in the zero-gravity conditions of space. But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth where it’s saved millions of lives and billions of healthy years.

The message here is hidden in what they don’t say. There is no UBI, no welfare, no food stamps, and no Medicare in their vision of the future. There is no redistribution at all except for a passing reference to how the profits from AI are “shared” (If you get consumer surplus from ChatGPT then the profits are shared already). Redistribution doesn’t matter in this future. Gains to human welfare come from new inventions and from technological progress lowering the cost of all the goods we want more of today, like housing, medicine, and energy.

Several times throughout the book Ezra and Derek damn progressive redistribution efforts with faint praise.

Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money … The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance that people can use to pay for health care. Food stamps give people money for food. Housing vouchers give them money for rent. Pell Grants give them money for college. Tax credits for child care give people money to buy child care. Social Security gives them money for retirement. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit give them more money for anything they want.

These are important policies, and we support them. But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have.

And another pulled punch here:

American liberalism has measured its success in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. Liberals fought for expansions of health insurance and paid vacation leave and paid sick days and a heftier earned-income tax credit and an expanded child tax credit and decent retirement benefits. Worthy causes all.

…

The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds … What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.

About halfway through the book they get closest to stating the Straussian anti-redistribution message outright:

Almost every product or service that liberals seek to make universal today depends on technology that did not exist three lifetimes ago — or, in some cases, half a lifetime ago. Medicare and Medicaid guarantee the elderly and poor access to modern hospitals, where many essential technologies — such as plastic IV bags, MRI and CT scan machines, and pulse oximeters — are inventions of the last sixty years. It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination: it would be a kind of generational theft … Politics itself becomes a mere smash-and-grab war over scarce goods, where one man’s win implies another man’s loss.

Without more rapid growth and invention, they compare redistribution to theft and war. With rapid growth and invention, redistribution might help some people get access to important goods, but just as in their sci-fi vignette, most of the gains to access will come from rising incomes and falling prices. Compared to things that can quicken the arrival of these higher incomes or new technologies, redistribution of today’s resources just isn’t important. If redistribution slows down income growth or invention then it should be avoided. This is the straussian message of Abundance.

While writing this post, Derek actually tweeted to dispel the notion that Abundance is against redistribution, using the passage I quoted as faint praise above as evidence.

Firstly, I am envious of Leo Strauss whose subjects were always centuries dead and thus never able to contest his esoteric interpretations of their work.

Second, I don’t think this is inconsistent with the argument I am making here. I don’t think Ezra and Derek are against redistribution, just that they don’t think it’s particularly important compared to the growth and invention that is possible over the next few centuries.

Caveats and Rebuttals

A lukewarm position on redistribution doesn’t mean Ezra and Derek aren’t interested in using the government to shift resources around. They are very positive on the science funding efforts of the government which they believe can hasten economic growth and invention. That can be framed as form of redistribution, though it’s usually a regressive form which sends money to the wealthy, educated, and entrepreneurial classes rather than those in material need.

There may be ways in which other, more traditional forms of redistribution increase the economic growth and technological progress that Ezra and Derek value. Public education is probably the easiest example (though perhaps the effects on innovation are negative), or immigration. Again though, valuing these efforts as a means to the end of faster growth is very different than seeing the transfer of resources from the rich to the poor as an end in itself.

Public education as a means to the end of more inventors probably means searching for the few most brilliant and high potential students, likely to be the sons or daughters of already-wealthy inventors, and supporting them as much as possible. Not sending billions to ailing school districts in an effort to bring them up to minimum standards.

Immigration policy, too, changes when the goal is not just improving the lives of migrants but rather raising the rate of economic growth and the innovative potential of the receiving country. High-skilled immigration policy means targeting the best and brightest, for example by auctioning off H1-B visas to the highest bidder rather than allocating by lottery. Or by accepting immigrants preferentially from countries with the most stable governments and track record in innovation, not refugees from failed states.

A final rebuttal to consider is that even if you do truly believe in the importance of redistribution as an end in itself, you might still focus on growth and innovation because there’s no better way to generate wealth to redistribute. This is the Fully Automated Luxury Communism argument which Ezra and Derek mention in the book. It is also similar to Tyler Cowen’s argument in Stubborn Attachments that essentially no matter what you value, whether it is redistribution, justice, art, or technology, economic growth will always come to dominate the contributions to that goal because compounding growth is so powerful.

This is the best way to make Ezra and Derek’s focus on growth and innovation consistent with a genuine belief in the importance of redistribution as an end in itself. I suspect that this is also what the authors would claim as closest to their actual views if they were presented with this post. Perhaps reading any more into their views on redistribution is just libertarian projection.

Even this more moderate view massively downgrades the importance of redistribution on the margin compared to current progressive priorities. Half of the federal budget is already spent on transfers to individuals and government transfers make up 40% of the income of people in the bottom 20th percentile of household income. Parceling out more of present day wealth to these efforts is well past diminishing returns and probably has negative growth effects which far outweigh the benefits. Under this view, redistribution does matter but we already have more than enough of it. Now, let’s focus on abundance!