(2025-03-19) Davies Cybernetic Abundance And Its Limits

Dan Davies: cybernetic abundance and its limits. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book “Abundance” has been described as “not so much a book as a Discourse-generating machine”, and you know how much I love one of those

taking the cybernetic perspective just makes it so much easier to express one of the key problems here and to see what the tradeoffs are.

Mike Konczal starts by setting out the issue that Abundanceism aims to address:

The Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building at 102 stories, was completed in 1931. Building that majestic structure, later called one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, took just one year and 45 days. Contrast that with just about anything we try to build now

My first point here might be to express “surprise at the surprise”. Of course things are slower and more difficult now – the reason that it’s more difficult to build the second million homes is that the first million homes get in the way!

In fact, usually the bigger things get, the more difficult it becomes to grow them any more

More effort needs to be put into their plumbing, metaphorically but also literally. There are more people who will be inconvenienced by the new thing, and there is just more … bloody … stuff in the way.

So does that mean abundance is doomed? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t think there’s any good reason to believe that we’re in the same endgame phase as the slate quarries. I just wanted to put that point up there, so that, as ever, we’re starting from a position of respect for the problem. I do think it’s correct in an important sense to say, as Mike does, that “modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no”.

The problem of abundanceism, restated in this form, is simply that the liberal regulatory state isn’t adequate to the task.

Specifically, the problem is that, for the reasons noted above, as things grow and become more complex, a greater proportion of their energy and resources have to be devoted to purely internal and administrative matters.

If it doesn’t, then the people who still have the job of stopping things getting in the way of each other will reorganise, in order to try to continue to do their job with an inadequate model. One of the most effective organisational techniques to do this is to replace, as much as possible, “how and why” questions with “yes or no” questions

As the resource imbalance gets bigger, another organisational/cognitive technique which helps reduce the load even more is to adopt something like the Hippocratic principle.

Neither builders, nor blockers, but planners.