How Green-Lefties make their own neighbourhoods worse

Abundance, a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, says excessive regulation makes social problems like homelessness worse.

What prevents governments from housing the homeless A new book argues that “Nimby” policies have made the situation in San Fransisco worse. Picture: Getty

San Francisco, the heartland of the American left, is also the city in which poverty is most painfully on display. On pretty much every block in its Tenderloin district there is an encampment of homeless people, their mattresses, belongings and sometimes ­faeces distributed around the pavement. The wealth that technology has brought to the city has made property unaffordable for most, but it’s not the rich whom Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of Abundance, blame for the homelessness crisis: it’s the green, left-wing Nimbys who run the city and resist the ­development that could relieve its acute social problems.

That Klein and Thompson point the finger at America’s left is surprising, for they are part of it. Klein is a New York Times journalist and podcaster who conducts long and brilliant interviews with brainy people; Thompson writes for The Atlantic, a progressive magazine whose editor has just become a celebrity because Donald Trump’s acolytes, hilariously, included him by mistake in an online discussion planning war in the Middle East.

 

Focusing on the left is also an unusual move at a time when the world’s progressives are transfixed by the destruction that the Trump ­administration is wreaking. But according to Klein and Thompson, the left bears some of the responsibility for the rise of populism because it nurtured the sprawling bureaucracy that has turned people against the state.

The American project, according to the ­authors, has always been about abundance. In 1817 William Cobbett wrote of the American diet that “such an abundance is spread before you … that you instantly lose all restraint”.

But abundance created pollution, which gave birth to environmentalism, which created new problems – the “degrowth” movement, which rejects abundance as a goal, and the regulations that make it hard to build houses for homeless people and the clean-energy infrastructure that could provide limitless cheap power.

The right does not escape blame. In the view of Klein and Thompson, it is largely responsible for the bureaucratisation of scientific research. Right-wing politicians do not trust civil servants, so every penny of federal spending must be ­accounted for. As a result, scientists spend half their lives filling in forms while risk-averse officials choose safe-sounding projects.

The returns from scientific research, in terms of new inventions that contribute to abundance, are declining and truly innovative scientists struggle to get funding.

Thus Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian immigrant who moved to America in 1985 and worked on mRNA vaccines at the University of Pennsylvania, couldn’t get research grants and eventually lost her academic post. Her work was picked up by BioNTech, a German company, and Moderna, an American company, which used it to produce a Covid vaccine, and mRNA is now being trialled for a cancer vaccine. Kariko won the Nobel prize, having not received a penny of government funding.

More rehabilition centres are desperately needed as cities across the US face a fentanyl problem, such as here in San Francisco, California. Picture: Getty

Government has become a vehicle for stopping change rather than facilitating it. As a ­result, America has moved from the politics of abundance to the politics of scarcity. The politics of abundance are easy because there is always more to distribute every year. The politics of scarcity are difficult because people fight each other over limited resources.

This has a particular resonance in Britain, with its stagnant economy: Keir Starmer wants his to be the government of “the builders, not the blockers”, but is hampered because many of the blockers are on his side of the political divide.

Although the problems feel intractable, the book is optimistic. Scarcity, the authors point out, is a choice. So is abundance. Some cities, such as Houston, take a liberal approach to construction, and thus avoid the homelessness crisis from which San Francisco suffers.

Slicing away at the restrictions on building would also allow the creation of a clean-energy infrastructure, which would usher in an age of virtually free clean energy. That would lower ­energy costs, boost living standards and improve the environment by powering vertical farming that would allow the land to be rewilded. By hastening the development of AI, cheap energy would increase productivity, allowing workers more leisure.

The technology to achieve all of this is available: we just need to change the way government works, so that it removes bottlenecks rather than creating them. The vaccine program showed that that could be done, but warp speed can be achieved without a pandemic.

In 2023 the Interstate 95 bridge in Philadelphia collapsed. Because it was essential to Pennsylvania’s transport system and the governor staked his reputation on mending it swiftly, he ripped up regulations and it was rebuilt in 12 days.

A homeless person lies against a mural of the Golden Gate Bridge in downtown San Francisco, California.Picture: AFP

The book is full of great nuggets. Ordinary Americans today have more material comforts than aristocrats did in past centuries. To illustrate this, the authors cite the memoir of a visitor to the Palace of Versailles in 1695 who remarked on the ice on the glassware and the impressive furs that the royals wore to prevent themselves from freezing. To illustrate the importance of state funding of basic research, they explain the drug Ozempic, widely used for weight loss, was synthesised from a hormone in the venom of the Gila monster, a large lizard, that allows it to go for months without meals.

Not everybody on the American left is delighted by this book. Progressives who reckon that the country’s troubles spring from overly mighty corporations have been critical on the grounds that a government focused on facilitating growth would make big business mightier still.

But the authors make their case powerfully, and the book is a good read – ambitious, entertaining and mercifully short.