(2025-03-30) Can The Startup Mindset Fix America

Can the Startup Mindset Fix America? The defining document of the internet is not a hacker’s manifesto or some cyberpunk screed espousing the virtues of anarchy. Instead, it is a permission slip, dotted and signed by the U.S. federal government, entitled Section 230. This portion of the Communication Decency Act, which was enacted in 1996, allowed websites to publish users’ content while not being held legally liable for what those users posted.

However, it feels like many within the technology sector have retconned the internet years as some sort of laissez faire, who is John Galt, utopia

However, it has been remarkably difficult to find a clearly articulated vision by the left about our technological future. This week, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson co-published a book aimed at remedying that.

...posit that by embracing technology and crafting new policy that encourages more supply-side providers, Democrats can fix America.

They argue that most policies spearheaded by Democrats since the 1970s have focused on subsidizing consumer demand, such as offering home loans to disadvantaged buyers. If instead they focused on also encouraging more competition, such as new homebuilding technology, encouraging more construction entrepreneurs, or slashing zoning regulations—Democrats could reduce the price of essential services and the world would be a better place.

The authors identify four areas of governance failures in the U.S., and spend much of their book looking into specific problems in California and New York City. These two places act as important case studies because they are centers of Democratic power—the left cannot blame anyone but themselves for governmental shortcomings in these states.

one striking feature is that the two states have the highest loss of population due to emigration to other states

Klein and Thompson mostly focus their arguments the things that matter most to quality of life for Americans:

1) Housing

2) Transportation

3&4) Energy and health:

To solve these issues, the authors say, Democrats need to swap all this heavy-handed legislation for targeted, intelligent intervention. Government is at its best when it is pushing society forward in ways that market-based mechanisms can’t. This is particularly true in circumstances of technological innovation.

A more intellectually honest way to examine the government’s role in technology markets is as a crucial actor and subsidy source. Beyond the internet, many of the most exciting sectors today were supported by government entities... all have at least a partial lineage of government support in their technology tree. Abundance is aware of that fact and wants to make sure that similar ideas are applied to healthcare, housing, and other areas of stagnation in American society.

Where the book falls flat is in its recommendations.

It falls flat because they don’t really have any specific policy recommendations. Klein and Thompson defend this lack of specificity by saying they’re giving “a lens, not a list.

They end the book with a rallying call, albeit a somewhat tepid one, that the abundance mindset can save the left.

Perhaps that is all that is required. This is a book for the disillusioned elites in the Democratic party desperately grasping for a message that helps them move on from a devastating election loss and a Biden presidency that ended in a whimper. In that, it accomplishes its goal.

In the startup world, ideas are cheap, and execution is everything. The same thing applies to policy. If we want an abundant future, we need a specific list of actions and people gritty enough to execute on them.

The challenge lies not just in having an abundance mindset, but in cultivating a new generation of policy innovators. People crazy enough to execute on the idea the authors propose.