An "Abundance" of Gibberish
Chapter Five - Deploy
In March 2025, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson published their #1 NYT Bestseller Abundance. This essay is the sixth of seven that evaluates the book’s premises and prescriptions for facts, fallacies and falsehood.
This installment will focus on Chapter Five – Deploy. This is where ideas are put into action. Where the rubber meets the road. Where the proof is in the pudding. And tapioca pudding is all there is.
It seems the purpose of this chapter is to prove the author’s vision for a utopian society that includes, free housing, free transportation, and free medical care – all in a pristine natural environment, is realistic. But Deploy proves the opposite by offering no explanation for the cause of poverty and desperation that lasted for centuries, or the cause of the occasional period of prosperity and justice.
In fact, Abundance dismisses great scientific breakthroughs as lacking the funding and infrastructure they need to be deployed quickly. Klein and Thompson’s solution? Global bureaucratic panic over a pandemic virus or an international war triggered by the murder of millions of people that mobilizes government like never before. World War I wasn’t good enough:
It was inconceivable that a single firm might invent, test, approve, and manufacture a therapy in record-breaking time. In the case of mRNA technology, an ingenious invention wasn’t enough. We needed an equally ingenious plan to bring that invention to life. And, just as the US government did for penicillin in World War II, the US succeeded by providing a model for how to turn invention into implementation.
The context dropping in there is stunning, but not surprising. The authors don’t know how any of this works. But as before, I will divide my analysis into themes, but exclude history: Economics, Ethics and Reality.
Economics
These four excerpts from chapter four that make some sense:
1. Tinkering, embodiment, scaling: these are examples of what Mokyr calls microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product. (a constant in all companies trying to stay competitive)
2. Germany subsidized solar technology from both sides – paying companies to make panels and paying consumers to buy them. (Germany is now burdened by unreliable and costly electricity that requires Russian oil and gas)
3. Seventy years ago, the New York Times had anticipated that America’s solar revolution would lead to “limitless energy.” (eighty years ago, they were betting on Stalinist Russia)
4. We embraced a venture capital approach, said Paul Mango, then deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services. (they got rid of the regulatory roadblocks that always paralyze progress and waste capital)
But like the previous two chapters, it gets even worse:
1. In a parallel universe where we had continued to develop and deploy solar, we might today have the green energy paradise of our dreams: an economy fully fueled by the sun. (and the environment of many states destroyed by solar arrays and the unbridled mining needed for their construction)
2. It is a vision of a new kind of entrepreneurial state. It is the government of bottleneck detective. (you read that correctly)
3. This policy . . . is called “advance market commitment,” or AMC. An AMC is particularly effective when the world needs an abundance of brand-new technology that is currently too expensive. (Who pays? Effective by what standard? Who is the world? According to whom? Too expensive by what standard?)
4. Building, deployment, and implementation are not the stuff of happy breezes. The require deliberate acts, laws, and policies. (for your own good)
Now we’re getting somewhere. The acts, laws, and policies need to be grounded in America’s founding principles of political liberty, economic freedom, and the power of ideas that manifest themselves organically as capitalism.
It bears repeating, economics is about cause and effect. Production creates wealth. Wealth creates demand. Supply lowers prices. Markets create information. Markets reward efficiency. Efficiency creates profit. Profit attracts capital. Capital finds talent. Talent obeys reality.
Ethics
This really comes under the category of human cognition, but as rational beings with free will as our defining attribute, the choice to think or not has a direct bearing on ideas and our character. The last subsection of the last chapter of this book - and it is only four pages. But by its title, it is the most important subject for nearly any book that discusses your capacity for volitional consciousness.
Not surprisingly, none of the ten paragraphs under the caption Focus is a Choice gives any impression that the author’s know or care about mental focus or individual choice. The premise, like far too many of them in Abundance, is false. The author’s have adopted the “collective mind” fallacy.
Inevitably, that leads to faith as means of knowledge – in this case the omniscience and omnipotence of the State. It also leads to collectivism as the force driving the political system – your life is owned by society or some tribe. And to the moral code altruism – everyone who is competent owes a duty to society.
Reality
Another barely mentioned but extraordinarily relevant subject to the theme of Klein and Thompson’s version of Abundance can also found near the end of the last chapter,
The cause of energy abundance even more urgent . . . In the next few decades, trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure could be built somewhere in the world. The biggest question is where. If the US fails to add energy supply in the US, the results could be chaotic, at best, and catastrophic at worst.
Right on cue – chaos and catastrophe are in store for us poor, dumb slobs if we don’t heed the clarion calls of the credentialed experts with a spotless track record for causing economic mayhem with no skin in the game.
But to put this in perspective, the electricity demands of artificial or augmented intelligence are staggering. And this is on top of the electricity demands of Bitcoin mining that are staggering. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, data center will double to about 9% of US electricity demand and crypto mining power usage will also double to 2% of 3% of US power generation.
But as usual, money is not stupid, and the entrepreneurs who build everything are building at a furious pace in America. According to a recent article in City Journal, the capital dedicated to data center construction exceeds all other commercial, manufacturing or power generation construction in the United States.
As a consequence, the demand for skilled trades and construction robotics is also robust. And if we were to add to that mix the concentrated energy of hydrocarbons and nuclear, America would be improving on its most environmentally, economically, and ethically defensible fuel sources. Nothing creates or responds to scientific discoveries or engineering breakthroughs more efficiently and more justly than free market capitalists.
And the reason is simple. People who understand and adapt to the natural world are productive, happy and confident. For them, success is the norm and catastrophe is the rare exception. The benevolent universe is natural to those who apply reason to reality. To learn more, please click The Moneyball Method.