At the beginning of their book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson lay out their vision of utopia. Utopia uses clean energy, for everything. It’s long vacations and quick travel. It’s eScooters and EVs. It’s fresh fruits and vegetables, grown at the local vertical farm around the corner. For many, especially upper-middle class parents who feel overworked and overstressed, it sounds like perfection. For those concerned about the climate, it sounds pretty great too. The rest of the book lays out their roadmap for how to get to this near future. While the fiction writing isn’t the best, I think it serves as a goalpost, something to aim for when considering which path the Democrats should take when looking to bring the country into the future.
Why does it feel off? What’s wrong with this utopia?
Klein and Thompson note at the beginning of their book that their book is strictly for Democrats – they cannot speak to Republicans (it goes unwritten if this includes anyone to the right on them on climate, which is probably a majority of the country) because there isn’t anything to talk about: anyone who would deny the importance of climate change isn’t worth reaching. The logic of this reasoning aside, this does narrow the audience for the book and this is helpful when looking at areas of likely agreement or disagreement.
One of the useful things about utopian thinking is that it serves as a kind of Rorschach test of the author – what do they value in society and where should these values lead us when considering what makes something “the good life”. 
One of the glaring weaknesses in the book is the degree to which Klein and Thompson uncritically accept the notion that return to office policies are necessary to maintain productivity and innovation. Certainly, there are industries that require in-person collaboration more than others (creative endeavors like video games or film come to mind) but most spreadsheet jockeys really do not need to be in the same place to do their jobs. While Klein and Thompson don’t bring it up directly, many CEOs and corporate leaders also bemoan the perception that development and training will drop, especially for junior employees.
Of course, companies train less now than they used to, especially for white color jobs, so I find it rich that companies are using the excuse, “our junior employees aren’t getting enough training!” when they have been cutting back on training for years. 
Per a 2023 Forbes article entitled, “The Decline in Workplace Training”, writer Adi Gaskell cites Research from the London School of Economics which “suggests that while training is usually the most effective route into new work, it's increasingly something that is unavailable to many of us. The paper reveals that the proportion of workers who say that they've been involved in work-related training in the past few months has fallen by 5 percent to less than a quarter. This fall was particularly sharp among the under-25s.”
This also assumes that training cannot be done remotely or in-person at regularly scheduled intervals. If someone had evidence showing me that corporations have decided this is a problem and wanted to start funding training again, I would take this argument more seriously – this isn’t the case. 
Sorry for the tangent but – the title of the show. I read a book called Last Call for Bud Light: the Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer. The author was a VP at the company during the years leading up to the Dylan Mulvaney controversy and the backlash and boycott that followed. He noted that AB InBev, which is a corporate conglomerate of companies from Belgium, Brazil, and the United States used ZBB or zero-based budgeting. Zero-based budgeting is, as I understand it – I’m not a finance guy – where you, theoretically, start each budget cycle at zero and justify each and every cost for the upcoming period. Training is something that, from a short-term perspective, often doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a cost today that may not pay off for many years, if ever, in some cases. There are a lot of bad arguments that go something like – if we spend money on training, employees will take the training and go to our competitors. This argument seems to take deepest root in places where compensation is below the industry average, so make of that what you will.  Eventually, the lack of training manifests itself in not being able to find workers – why? You see phrases like “hit the ground running” implying that the employee has to know everything about doing the job before they take it. Some industries? This makes sense. Most industries benefit from having some training before jumping in the deep end. If you are a potential employee, why would you want to feel like a company didn’t do everything it could do to help you succeed at the role? It also will manifest in employees leaving because they cannot move up the chain, often because there is no pathway to being trained on necessary skills to get more lucrative jobs within the organization. ZBB is not inherently going to lead to this if done well but training is often times overlooked as an unnecessary cost that should be minimized instead of as a tool to make the overall organization more effective, with workers who are more satisfied and ready to do their jobs.
Here’s a quick fictional conversation between a CEO and his COO to drive this point home.
CEO: What’s this Training Seminar item? Twenty grand??
COO: Yeah. That’s John Miller. He comes out for two weeks each year. Great guy. Mentored me back when –
CEO: Kill it.
COO: Woah. Hold on. It’s a Q & A session. The guys at the plant love it. John’s old salt and he –
CEO: Why are we spending $20,000 on a training session? For two weeks? Most of these guys have been working here since I was in undergrad. 
COO: 1. John knows his stuff backwards and forwards – he’s the expert on the M-9000. The 20K is the friend price – he could easily charge like 5X but he uses the weekends to see his grandkids and sees this as a vacation as much as anything else – we pay him like it’s a vacation. 2. It’s the only time the entire year that both shifts get to meet up. It makes sure everyone’s on the same page and it increases espirit de corps and -
CEO: I’m not French. You haven’t given me a business reason to allow it to continue. It’s dead.
And scene. That brief and poorly written exchange showcased that CEOs are often very talented at seeing the big picture and the best ones can take an organization and lead them to the vision. What they often lack is institutional knowledge – they don’t know what is and is not vital to the way that the organization functions, even if it doesn’t always make the spreadsheet.
Before we move on a word from our sponsor.  
If you’ve unsure about the productivity argument, consider this: COVID-19 was something of a natural experiment. Despite given the high levels of psychological stress and the number of great changes that needed to happen very quickly, productivity held steady (or maybe even increased) across many industries. To see these numbers and then take the side of CEOs who claim that they need employees -butts in office - without asking the question of “why” is a dereliction of journalism.
The obvious reasons, if you disregard the productivity argument, are A). companies are heavily invested in corporate real estate and, if that crashes, it will hurt the broader economy and B). they want to use the productivity argument to have stealth layoffs so as to not take a PR hit when they start firing people. My favorite, C – they just love control – is also on the table.
The reason that this is such a problem is that Klein and Thompson proport to care deeply about climate change – they say so at the beginning of the book. They make it the dividing line for who the book is for and who it is not. Which is why the inability to really question the need for in office work for a large portion of the working population is so strange. 
Transportation does a lot to add to greenhouse gases. Per the EPA, transportation makes up nearly a third of Greenhouse gas emissions. 80% of that looks to be driven, pardon the pun, by cars. Around 10% is from air travel – more on that later.
If you really wanted to put a dent in greenhouse gas emissions, wouldn’t you be pushing for MORE WFH and not less? I understand that there are tradeoffs here (and this is one of the things that Klein and Thompson seem hell bent on avoiding) but you have to pick a pony – either climate change is an existential threat with a rapidly narrowing window of time where something can be done about it or it isn’t. If it is, allowing people to work from home who have the skills and technology to do so seems like the lowest of low hanging fruit. Unless, of course, you believe cities must be protected and set up to thrive.
As I noted above, the book tries to avoid trade-offs. One of the ways it does this is through dismissing and handwaving legitimate areas of disagreement that readers may have. One of those areas is cities.
The book just assumes that all people want to live in cities. Again, they’ve narrowed the audience for the book to people who are left of the dial. Even still, I imagine there are quite a number of liberal leaning people who would rather spend two hours a day sleeping, seeing their children, or doing literally anything other than commuting an hour each way to the office. Klein and Thompson are very pro city and discount this group, as well as the people who have moved to cities in hopes of higher earnings only to be disappointed. The book doesn’t make space for either of those people – it assumes that if you are a productive member of society, you’re going to want to live in a city.
There are certainly some truths to this – New York City is nearly back to pandemic levels of population. However, the list of cities that haven’t rebounded is longer – San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orleans, Buffalo, etc.
Time will tell if these places do recover but if they don’t, I think it speaks to the resistance that many have, even with the pressure of losing their jobs, to return to places they have left behind. 
Another area where I feel Abundance has a one-size fits all solution is rail. 
 

A few years ago, I rode the ACELA from Union Station in DC to New Haven. Other than the early morning departure time (it was like 2 or 3 in the morning), the experience was fine. The seats were comfortable and the food was good. I like being able to get up and walk around. I didn’t feel like I was in a prison cell the entire time I was on the train. Yes, it was overpriced for the experience and, for a bullet train, it wasn’t really that fast BUT if you asked me, would I rather travel by train and skip the TSA line and the delays and waiting, I probably would, in most cases. 
If this is the average experience in the future for rail, is it clear to me that this would end the dominance of air travel and send everybody clamoring for rail? Not really. Even if you were able to make the experience marginally better by lowering the price, I still think that the likelihood of switching over would either take an extremely long time or simply never happen at all. 
The people who are probably most likely to be in favor of rail are also probably the people who fly the least – if you look at the environmental cost of flying, compared to driving, it is quite high. If you really had a moral qualm about environmental impact and your role in it, you simply would never fly unless it was the direst of circumstances. 
The people who fetishize travel are probably not going to be convinced that rail is the way to go. Obviously, for international trips, rail doesn’t provide an alternative. I also think that for some people, the ritual of travel is a real thing and the inconveniences I’ve always associate with airports are things that simply don’t bother them or that they view as part of, in their eyes, the mystical experience of flight. 
You then get into the politics of airlines and company towns, like Atlanta, that have benefitted greatly from air travel and don’t want to see that revenue go away. 
You also run into the issue here that you ran into above – does it make sense to push for what is likely to be a series of projects that, at best, are going to take a couple of decades to finalize or, at worse, spend enormous amounts of capital and never materialize a minimum viable product) Another way in saying this is, would high speed rail be harder or easier to develop than green fuel for jet engines?
These are trade-offs that one has to think about in a world where renewable resources are endless but money is not. This is probably the biggest weakness of the book, IMO: it doesn’t try to look at things from a cost-benefit perspective – it actively works against this model and implicitly believes that all technological advancements are equal, will arrive at the same time, and be adapted by all people.
The country’s energy grid, which has remained relatively stagnant for decades, suddenly needs to be expanded and modernized due to the current and future demand for AI. How do we meet these needs? Klein and Thompson don’t call for a mass mobilization ala World War 2, where everyone does their part to fight climate change. They do call for the government to do more – they believe the government is too timid with big risks and should take more of them. They also call for more public-private partnerships through prizes – incentives where a set of money is set aside if a company or organization is able to achieve a specific goal. Of course, this requires policy makers who are adept at understanding technology and a prize that is large enough to spur competition but not large enough to cause questions as to if the government has evaluated the benefits correctly. Not necessarily an easy thing to do. 
A question some may have is – fine Ezra and Derek. You’ve convinced me – climate change is that bad. Why not just “solve it” with a full mobilization, get us to something akin to 110% of our current grid electrified with renewables, and call it a day? They may say that this doesn’t get us to high speed rail and 2 hours from New York to London. Klein and Thompson still want to utilize the power of markets to get these technologies – they seem to believe that there are still moonshot technologies that will surface during the next 10-20 years that will be game changers in climate change. When you consider industries like Cultivated (ie. lab grown) meat, you’re almost surely correct. This poses a problem.
If you believe that climate change is or will reach a tipping point – that is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere reaches a level that will cause an irreversible increase in the temperature of the Earth – then you have to make a decision: do you wait until a better technology comes along (cheaper, easier to install, more effective) or do you take what you have, whatever that model is, and deploy it at scale? Klein and Thompson throw in wrinkles about vertical greenhouses and cultivated meats – technologies that are likely decades away – not so much as distractions but attractors to their visions. 
You may be saying isn’t this a false choice – we can have both? Maybe not all today but first the renewable energy and then the greenhouses and the meats? I don’t think it’s a false choice. Here’s why – you’re probably sick of hearing me mention it at this point but the MIT Professor and author of Climate Future Robert Pindyck notes that we really don’t know when and where the tipping point is and because the cost of waiting is so high, immediate action is recommended. 
If you, for whatever reason, look at the cost of deploying widespread renewable technology and say, “well, I care about the future but not that much!’ and are waiting for the cost to decrease or for the technology to improve (or, or, or), you increase the risk of hitting the tipping point – simply because we waited for the perfect time to enact widespread change.
This isn’t to say that Klein and Thompson don’t take the issue seriously – they 100% do and more than most. However, if you read the book, you may walk away from it thinking they care more about the goodies that may arise from 100% renewable energy (cheap transportation, lab grown meat) than the potentially devastating effects of climate change (forced migration, large swaths of the country that are unlivable, the price of most things increasing, global instability). 
This could be simply an optimist’s view of things – that it is easier to bring people to your vision with the goodie bag than by scaring them. However, you risk people like myself going – I’m really okay not having lab grown meats and high-speed rail and fast air travel, so there’s nothing here for me. 
There’s also an invisible hand here that allows for the abstraction - who will do the work of building out the infrastructure? – some other will take the government subsidies that you voted for and build, build, build, nothing else of you is required. 
The degrowth movement – the idea that climate change should be attacked on the demand side as well as the supply side– has a portion of the book dedicated to it. Klein and Thompson, more techno-optimists, dismiss the demands that degrowth would make of the average America (to buy less, eat less, travel less).  
Again, an analogy of World War 2 is useful – only a small portion of Americans physically fought in the war. Many more went without comforts like nylons, sugar, meat, and butter. Others created victory gardens. 
Klein and Thompson indicate that they feel that asking for a shared sacrifice is a step too far. To this, I say, “Why?”. The generations most likely to be impacted by climate change, Gen Z onward, acknowledge the likely impacts and think more, not less, should be done. If the arguments had been made through a cost-benefit lens, the reader could argue with the trade-offs: maybe it makes sense to sacrifice the high-speed rail for some extra heat pumps. This doesn’t happen in the book.
This issue has been cited by many reviewers. For instance, Anne Bradley, writing for Religion and Liberty Online, states, “The most important economic question is never addressed: How much will all this cost? The U.S. national debt currently stands at $36 trillion and is continuing to rise. Wall Street is worried, and interest payments on the national debt exceed $1 trillion annually. The authors advocate for increased housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, and healthcare. The debate lies in how we accomplish this. They want to live in a world where there are more marvels, a point that should elicit universal agreement…It’s what we disagree about that’s the challenge”.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on YouTube or iTunes. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.