(2025-03-28) Davies Abundance On The Cheap

Dan Davies: abundance on the cheap. Don’t worry, readers, this is not going to become an Abundanceism blog

I am currently completely innocent of that book, though, so apart from reading through the other “Law of Abundance” papers I am experiencing this as Pure Online Discourse

the cost of that railway is much more driven by tunnels dug in order to placate homeowners along the line, but my gosh the bats are copping the blame for it.

But … why can’t we have the railway and the bats?

What am I on about? Bats, obviously.
There really are a lot of people involved with Abundance-adjacent politics who are really committed to killing more bats.

The point of Abundance as a political project is that currently our system is handling conflicts over scarcity really badly, so we need to get rid of the scarcity, not just try to push the costs onto things which we think might be worse at speaking up for themselves.

I want an abundance of abundance! I want to live in an economy where we say “yeah, build a kilometre long structure to make sure the habitat is protected

Habitat destruction is something that’s very tricky to fit into an accounting framework because it’s all about tail risk.

The point of Abundance as a mindset has to be to organise things better, to remove bad regulations and to restrict the use of “stakes not odds” reasoning to contexts where it’s actually necessary.