Abundance, Like School Reform, is a Just-So Story

which doesn't make it wrong

Friends, we are in the Baby Tyrant Era of this newsletter. Junho is lovely and wonderful and perfect and deserves to be tried for terrorism for his campaign against our sleep schedule. Mom remains a champion and a hero. I’m excited to get back to work here but we’ll likely have a lighter publishing schedule for at least the next several months. Now is a really excellent time to subscribe if you aren’t already; I have labored very hard to make this newsletter a great value proposition at $5/month, the lowest amount Substack will allow me to charge, and I need to make up the gap through volume, particularly now that I’ve got another mouth to feed. Another great form of support would be to preorder my forthcoming novel; you can find links to do so at my professional website. It’s good.

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance is on my yet-to-read list, which has grown longer than it has in many years thanks to the stork. Obviously, that means that I can’t comment on the book itself. I would also very much prefer to avoid getting into the same old debate that this stuff is all ultimately the same old debate - that when you look past some of the branding, the “abundance agenda” is just another volley from right-wing Democrats who think that the market is our only tool for absolution, that a quarter of the way into the century of George W. Bush and Donald Trump the essential problem with America is somehow that dastardly left with its regulations and labor movement. That conversation is probably the most relevant one but also the most tedious. What I can do is react in broad strokes to the general case that the American left-of-center needs to switch to a “just build” approach to policy, tearing down regulatory barriers to ambitious infrastructure projects and private sector housing development, which in theory would unleash growth which would lift all boats and help us avoid nasty conflicts like whether to raise taxes on the rich and corporations….

But then, we’re back in that part of the debate that I said I would prefer to avoid. Sorry. The abundance agenda broadly holds that there are too many chokepoints that prevent various kinds of building and development, in American life, particularly in housing, energy, and transportation. We also suffer, more abstractly, from an aversion to the kinds of risk that once drove this country’s famous dynamism. In both cases, the most obvious villain is regulations which were erected to protect the environment or workers or consumers but which, the story goes, now do more harm than good. If we undertook a massive program of deregulation we would prompt a flurry of private investment in these sectors, easing upward pressures on stubbornly expensive unavoidable costs (like housing, education, and healthcare) in a way that would reinvigorate our economic growth rate, which in turn would improve everyone’s life and reduce the salience of our partisan disagreements. That’s the idea as I understand it.

The left critique is predictable: deregulation almost always ends up serving the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, and the proper driver of this kind of construction and innovation regime is the public sector, the government. The abundance agenda is typically very friendly to private development and investment, and thus to the wealthy and corporations, who will be even further empowered in our system under an abundance regime. What’s more, abundance politics are typically mute on core left commitments like a formal legal right to healthcare; many ask why, exactly, it’s more important to expend political capital modernizing the electrical grid and not ensuring poor people can see a doctor. Some abundance types are comfortable supporting ideals like single payer health insurance, at least in the abstract, but most would prefer to keep the conversation centered squarely on the evil that is regulation.

Conveniently, while I was finishing this piece Matt Yglesias released a post that looks at an aspect of all this that is (somehow) underdiscussed: whether it would actually work, whether these abundance policies would actually lead to abundance. I think this is a really important question, as it points to a lot of past failures for the market liberal/neoliberal/New Left approach: a lack of epistemological humility that leads wonks to wild overconfidence in their predictions. The abundance agenda involves an awful lot of grand promises about incredibly complex and unpredictable systems.

You could specifically look at something like the one-time fervor for Cass Sunstein-style “nudges,” small-bore policy efforts from behavioral economics that were thought to have outsized positive consequences. These were attractive to the market liberal set in part because of that tendency’s addiction to policy without politics, to gains that can supposedly be wrangled without the dirty business of ideological combat. (Beware the politician selling you progress without pain.) Unfortunately, a lot of nudges turned out not to nudge, with the category proving quite sensitive to the p-value squishiness and research methods problems that became notorious in psychology research. A lot of very well-credentialed people thought that nudges would work, they mostly didn’t, and yet the overarching philosophy of soft paternalism and policy-without-politics continued to grow. More abstractly, we might point to neoliberalism’s obsession with economic growth as the only metric that matters, the salve for all of our social problems - and the fact that America’s economic growth rate is now half of what it was in the bad old days of the 1960s, where regulation supposedly choked the life out of American dynamism and innovation. Neoliberalism tells a lot of just-so stories, and I can’t say that they often come true.

But the real glaring failure that I think of, when I think of analogs to the abundance movement, is the school reform movement, which conveniently enough has long been championed by the kind of neoliberal who also loves abundance. The “abundance liberal”/pro-charter Venn diagram is not quite a circle but isn’t far from one, and the cautionary tale is obvious. Education/school reform, of the “accountability” variety, was sold in the harshest and most strident terms from the absolute heights of elite American policy, and maintained something like broad bipartisan support for decades. The school reform movement enjoyed a level of philanthropic funding and coziness with local governments that most policy movements can only dream of. Yet that effort has failed, again and again and again. Its proponents love the story, though, and insist on debating in the realm of abstraction, never allowing real-world failure to obscure the beauty of their theoretical vision. This is precisely the pitfall I see for the abundance set. My challenge to Thompson and Klein and their growing cohort is pretty simple: how will you know if your theories have overpromised, if reality underdelivers? At what point would you declare your project a failure? When will you feel forced to take an L? History suggests that this is a harder question than you might think.

I’ve written reams about ed reform before, obviously. My perspective is that school reform fails to work the way its proponents insist it should work, and that this failure is bound up in basic incoherence about what education is for and how it should function. Massive amounts of evidence demonstrate that educational aptitude is a generally static product of individuals; students sort themselves into academic ability bands very early in life and, with remarkable fidelity, remain in those bands throughout formal education. We have no reason at all to believe that schools or teachers can move students around in the relative performance distribution, certainly not reliably or at scale. Meanwhile, prominent achievement gaps exist well before formal schooling begins, making the effort to locate the source of those gaps in schools a bizarre exercise. Nor is it clear what success would actually look like, thanks to the previously-mentioned definitional incoherence. There will always be a distribution of student performance, so long as we assess outcomes on scales of excellence, and some kids are always going to occupy the bottom rungs of that distribution. You can try to hide the distribution by eliminating assessment, as the social justice types prefer, but if you investigate student aptitude, some kids are going to be Left Behind. A meritocratic system that separates good from bad definitionally cannot be a tool for increasing equality. Striving for excellence will always increase the distance between the best and the worst performers and thus deepen the social plight of the latter. Etc, and etc, and etc. None of it ever made sense.

None of this has been more damaging than the assumption that “accountability,” whatever that means, is a tool that could be used to manipulate student outcomes. The ed reform movement has long been associated with the belief that poor performance from our worst-performing students - our median students are fine and our top-performing are the envy of the world, not that they’ll tell you that - is easily fixed with tough-minded policy. Teachers are lazy, their unions are corrupt, and bad outcomes for impoverished students and students of color are a product of insufficient willpower to change what could easily be changed. The tools that the reform movement nominates, including charter schools, private school vouchers, merit pay, and the dismantling of teacher tenure all employ the same basic mechanism based on the same reasoning: you could inspire those lazy teachers to actually work hard, or you could get rid of them and get better ones, if you only had the tools you needed to scare them into doing better. This reasoning was necessarily built on the false assumption that educational outcomes are variables of teachers and schools rather than of students. If a student’s outcomes are instead the product of factors that schools don’t control, which appears to be overwhelmingly the case, then the whole thing falls apart; no amount of scaring teachers straight will make any difference. And fall apart it has, in slow-motion, as there are no 10,000-foot metrics that would suggest that our massive experiments in accountability measures have had any meaningful effect.

Accountability in anything can only work if the people being held accountable are actually in control, and in education, they aren’t. As I wrote way back in 2017

You see, by enabling choice, you create a market for schools, where once there was just the vile hand of government placing students into geographically-appropriate schools. And markets make things better! So in the conventional story, if I'm Johnny Capitalist and I open a widget factory, I have an existential need to offer a value proposition to my customers. I can make a good-enough widget for cheap and offer customers a value proposition. I can make a great widget for more and offer customers a luxury. Or I can offer some combination of the two. One way or the other, though, if I don't make a widget that consumers want to buy, my customers will switch to one of my competitors, I will soon run out of money, and my widget factory will close. That pressure forces me to do a better job, and the consumer wins.

Now, this tidy narrative is in fact bogus even in the world of widget factories - real markets are an unholy mess of monopoly, crony capitalism, fraud, deceit, and marketing - but what's relevant here is that a child's brain is not a widget. The whole simplistic market analogy implies that schools have about the same control over a child's educational outcomes as a business has over the product they create, and this is a plainly ludicrous idea. A school is like a widget factory if, rather than creating and controlling their widgets from the beginning and without exception, factories took widgets into their care four or five years after they were created, if the conditions of that creation and of those four or five years were profoundly unequal, and if the factory handed the widget off to the care of others for 18 out of every 24 hours. A widget factory has ownership over its widgets in a way that schools simply don't have over students. Market forces can only possibly compel people to create a better "product" when those people enjoy substantial control over that product, and the number of variables that dictate academic performance which are not under the the control of schools is massive.

An analogy to athletics is useful here: no amount of accountability for a track coach will enable that coach to take a runner who lacks natural talent and make them an Olympian. You can fire coach after coach, subject them to endless evaluation, eliminate their unions, tie their pay to the performance of the athletes, get super self-righteous about Leaving Track Athletes Behind, and it won’t matter if their runners have the genetic and physiological profile of someone like me. Market mechanisms can’t make paper as strong as steel or steel as light as paper. And, indeed, the average track coach probably has far greater ability to alter athlete performance on the track than a teacher has with their students, given that muscle and lung development etc are more tangible, manipulable, and observable than the cognitive and neurological processes that underlie learning. Schooling provides many wonderful benefits, but there is no reason at all to believe that schools or teachers have the power to substantially change how well different students perform relative to each other. We find ourselves unable to grapple with this reality because we’ve decided that acknowledging that different individual people have different individual levels of academic potential is cruel, bigoted, racist. Thus the Cult of Smart.

Like I said, you’ve heard all of this from me before. What’s the connection to abundance, and Abundance? In both cases, there’s an odd tendency to fixate on meta-policy disputes rather than on the basic question of epistemological humility, whether or not the proposed efforts would actually work. And those debates seem to happen for less often than they should, in large part because of the force of the insistence that they simply will, that they must, as any fool who understands the world knows… which mirrors exactly the remarkably aggressive reformer certainty that accountability measures could not possibly fail to fix our schools. I really need to underline this: part of what has made intellectual development within the school reform movement so limited, part of the reason why the NO EXCUSES crowd failed to ever update their rhetoric to match the gathering evidence, was the culture of certitude about the power of markets to save our poor left-behind students. It wasn’t that charter schools might do better than traditional public, but that they absolutely must, and anyone who put a question mark down instead of an exclamation point was a tool of Big Teacher. It wasn’t that merit pay was a worthwhile experiment in raising test scores, it was that merit pay simply could not fail to raise test scores. IT’S ECON 101 PEOPLE. Reformers shamelessly anointed themselves the champions of our country’s poorest, brownest students, and they were equally shameless about equating that moral project with the correctness of their prescriptions and predictions.

And yet more than a quarter century after ed reform became one of the most powerful policy forces in American life, even many passionate reformers concede that the median charter school performs no better than the median public, and the high-profile exceptions are black boxes of selective admissions and attrition from which we can draw now scalable conclusions. College enrollment has fallen, SATs are stagnate, NAEP scores are down. Much like how growth-obsessed neoliberals have presided over a half-century of slowing growth, the dominance of ed reform beliefs among our ideas class has coincided with broad disappointment in the very metrics reformers care about.

Aggressive certitude about chancy and contingent futures is the exact technique of the abundance agenda’s advocates. It’s not that zoning reform has a good chance to dramatically reduce housing costs over time, it absolutely has to, and the only reason that someone might doubt that is economic illiteracy. It’s not that loosening regulatory protections for workers will likely result in a sudden flowering of domestic American industry, it certainly will. When I go to the comments of Yglesias’s newsletter and suggest that YIMBY policies might not actually work as advertised, with the gentleness and grace for which I’m known, the response is usually that what I’m saying isn’t just wrong, but ludicrous, unthinkable, wildly out of step with reality. Everyone knows that zoning reform will apply immediate and massive downward pressure on the costs of houses. Everyone knows that ripping up clean air and clean water regulation will accelerate the green energy revolution. Everyone knows that greedy unionized construction workers are why we don’t see improvements to mass transit. But of course, if you asked even the average Democrat politician in the mid-Obama administration, they’d tell you that everyone knows that replacing traditional public schools with union-hostile charters would certainly end our supposed education crisis. The only question was one of will. So too with a lot of “just build” types.

For the record, I think a lot of the abundance stuff makes sense. In particular, it’s true that the zoning regime in the United States has become a massive impediment to building housing where it’s desperately needed. We are starting to see some green shoots in that direction. And in general it’s true that regulation is no more generically good than generically bad. I do hate many of the annoying tics of the YIMBY and abundance crowd; for various cultural reasons, no faction in contemporary political life is more dedicated to in-group signaling than that cohort, probably something to do with the inherent loneliness of the policy nerd. Whatever the reason, they have their foibles, such as trafficking in blatantly false characterizations of their enemies, like the notion that all NIMBYs are affluent white people. (I invite you to get acquainted with the highly-active anti-gentrification movements in Inwood or Crown Heights, if you’d like to disabuse yourself of this notion.) They also relentlessly inflate the scope of the housing cost problem, projecting it across the entire country, when the problem has always been primarily defined by a relatively small number of chic urban enclaves - precisely the kind of place go-getting young policy types congregate. (Coincidence!) They also tend to be rhetorical maximalists about opposing all forms of local control, which is precisely the refusal to compromise they love to mock among the socialist left. But would I like to see the elimination of all parking minimums, a dramatically less onerous zoning reality, liberalization of rules regarding ADUs, an end to subsidizing single-family suburbs? Yes! Of course. And I think those things could help economically. Up to a point.

It’s what “up to a point” really means that constitutes the second of two big problems with the abundance agenda. The first is just what the lefties say it is: this is a program that seems wildly naive about the influence of the right wing and what exactly is most likely to shake out of an effort like this. The trouble with the “let’s deregulate but redistribute” tendency in the American left-of-center is that the right will say “Agreed, let’s deregulate,” and not bother to help with that whole redistribution part. A large-scale deregulation effort, even if launched by people with generally progressive politics, might very well end up with a return to child labor and no reduction in housing prices to show for it. As for that second big problem, well, I believe in failure, I believe in entropy, I believe in unintended consequences. The history of public policy is the history of dreams that didn’t come true, of dogs that didn’t bark. (Obamacare didn’t really bend the cost curve.) Because life is complicated.

I do think that an abundance agenda could ultimately be beneficial, if we’re very vigorous in not allowing such a movement to serve as a useful idiot for the right. But the effects would probably be modest. There would be an initial set of metrics pointing in the right direction and a lot of spiking the football, and then that growth would slow, the benefits would attenuate, the outlook would get cloudier. Why? Because of path dependence, because of insider capture, because of coalitional breakdowns, because of the profit motive, because of unintended consequences, because things fall apart. Of course I can’t tell you how well it will work, exactly. And maybe the path from ending local control of zoning to Star Trek is just as frictionless as the zealots believe. But I doubt it, and I can tell you for sure that wonk’s disease means that the overall public conversation will always err on the side of irrational optimism.

Thompson and Klein have both become fairly passionate AI evangelists lately. And I think their zeal there comes from a similar place: the enthusiasm for the cool thing that might happen, and the tendency to ignore the humble human reality that failure is always an option. They’re excitable and they’re excited. There are certainly worse failings! But somebody has to be the asshole and point out that, usually, the world does not have much respect for our best laid plans. With AI, the problem is that the voices with platforms are almost universally guys who grew up reading cyberpunk novels, who filter their perception of possibility through their adolescent sci fi dreams. They point to graphs and projections and talk in studious tones but every word of their wild predictions is pregnant with the many hours they spent dreaming of jacking into the Matrix when they were 12. With abundance, the perspective is a little more grounded, but the yearning for another, more inspiring world has the same potentially deluding effect. Yes, I too dream of a shinier, hipper, greener, cooler future where we take silent electric bullet trams to walkable mixed-used developments in the heart of urban cores. But I also understand that there’s no getting there without the ordinary, ugly, grinding work of politics, which means fighting with people who want to protect their own best interest - and that means opposition from the wealthy and powerful, who the abundance crowd are usually so unwilling to target.

Many readers know that I live in Connecticut, in the New Haven area. Connecticut is a good laboratory for the kind of efforts that school reformers love, despite its generally muscular teachers unions. The state is very wealthy. There are many different ways that you can define such things; in terms of the income needed to be part of the state 1%, to pick one, Connecticut is at the top. But the state is also home to vast inequality, with pockets of brutal poverty, and the contrast is unmistakable thanks to the fact that it’s physically tiny, such that you can drive for five minutes and move from wicker chair affluence to street corner destitution. It’s also a very blue state, with a ton of universities and nonprofits and foundations and a populace that’s unusually willing to use government for do-gooding purposes. There’s also a lot of rich fretful liberals, VC and innovation types, who want to engage in “results-oriented” philanthropy. Which all means that it’s proven fertile ground for a certain kind of charter school. It’s not that they’re particularly prevalent in number, here, but rather that those built are of a very particular kind - a little crunchy, obsessed with STEM and building a new Black meritocrat class, long on ideology, righteous, messianic. You can drive around New Haven or Hartford or Bridgeport and pass by an endless series of charter schools and magnet schools and “leadership academies,” named after intellectual and political heroes, suffragettes, Roberto Clemente. They etch pompous mottos into their walls. And, without fail, in the end they do no better than the supposedly-failing public schools they were meant to replace. The outsized vision of their founders proves little protection against reality.

I would simply caution Klein and Thompson to think of those schools, while they predict their future of abundance. Every brick in those buildings was laid thanks to the certainty of people with big ideas and good intentions. And then the world takes those grand ambitions and says, so what?