Derek COOKED Zephyr Teachout
Three points here.
First, I have nothing to do with the Abundance Institute, and they have nothing to do with me. I'm as responsible for their AI policy as they are responsible for my attitudes toward parking requirements and NIH funding—which is to say, 0% responsible.
Second, this guilt-by-association style of politics might be emotionally satisfying, but does it really make any sense?
From my POV, the Trump White House seems very likely to embrace a corrupt version of antitrust policy, in which threats against big companies will be used as a cudgel to force the private sector to bend to Trump's will. But I don't think that makes consumer protection and broader neo-Brandeisianism bad ideas! I think they're often good ideas, which have some really important applications, even if they don't come close to solving every problem.
I would ask folks like Zephyr to extend the same good faith toward my work with Ezra. Rather than blame us for every disagreeable idea from every organization that uses the word Abundance in their name or marketing materials, engage with the book's ideas on their merits.
- If housing scarcity is all about greed, why is it so much more expensive to build homes in CA than, say, FL or SC—are Florida developers really half as greedy as Californians?
- If energy policy is mostly downstream of big oil lobbying, why has Texas added the most solar and wind power? Don't they have a lot of big oil?
- If, as Sam Seder claimed, NYC can't build houses in part bc the state has failed to take on developers by taxing vacancy rates down to record lows, how do you explain the fact that NYC in the last few years ... already has decade-low vacancy rates?
Third, some constructive criticism: I think there is a tendency on the antitrust left to see everything as part of the same thing. Every problem is a problem of corporate greed and market concentration. Everybody who uses the word abundance is planning in secret together. This is just not the way I see the world, at all. What I see, instead, is that there are a lot of problems, with diverse causes, diverse solutions. We have to be curious enough to understand them.