Visions of Progress

A new book provides a progressive view of futurism. Is this an opportunity to build a broader coalition?

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is the book I’ve been hoping someone on the left would produce for a while now. I have noticed with frustration that left-wing movements across the western world have taken the production of goods and services for granted, believing their job is only to redistribute the bottomless spoils of a capitalist economy - often whilst unfairly criticising that economy.

As well as being of generally interesting to me, this topic is quite relevant to space because the same strands of thought which this book blames for myriad sticky problems on Earth are also virulently anti-space. This has led to the vitally important issue of human expansion into space becoming a partisan issue largely owned, in Western countries, by the political right. If you’re a right wing space advocate you may be satisfied with that as long as Donald Trump is in office, with Elon Musk at his side - but political winds change and a sustained effort needs a broad consensus.

So I wanted to see if Abundance, in promoting a kind of progressive futurism, could help craft an appealing model of space colonisation that might appeal to their readers.

The core thesis of Abundance is that overregulation isn’t just a burden for the private sector - it also makes government get in its own way and reduces state capacity. To advocate that government do more for people, one should therefore want it to be able to get things done quickly and efficiently. If this is achieved, then widely shared prosperity can follow.

The authors take their own political team to task for being “obsessed with procedure over outcome”. Building the housing and transportation they want, as well as developing the new technology which will make everybody’s lives better, is stifled by excessive layers of bureaucracy and well intentioned attempts at decentralising decision making which have been a boon for various groups looking to block projects with, for example, environmental review.

This book is about the United States, but its message resonates in Britain and this should not be surprising. It takes aim at the paradigm established by the Clinton administration in the 1990s, and Tony Blair took direct inspiration from them. All parties that have been in government here since 1997 have been more or less openly Blairite, and so the UK has effectively been run by Clinton Democrats for thirty years, with predictable outcomes. The maladies of California that Abundance points to are all present - from the stifling environmental review process, through to the crippled high speed rail project - but in a country substantially poorer. A regionalised version of this book could be written with scarcely believable tales of bat tunnels and fish discos. Given the dispensation of our respective governments, the message might also be acted upon sooner here.