Sewer Socialism, Zohran Mamdani, and Abundance

Thinking out loud about abundance and "Abundance"

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Let’s start with the disclaimer that I do not live in New York City. However, I still do the social media thing, particularly the Twitter/X thing, and I have friends who live there, and, at a certain point, a tumbling snow clod becomes an avalanche. All of this is to say that I’ve been thinking a lot about the DSA candidate Zohran Mamdani, who by all appearances seems like a lovely guy running a savvy campaign for New York mayor (at least at the primary stage). There are some other people in the ranked choice running, including a disgraced former governor, and several other candidates whose names I’ve learned more gradually who also seem nice and have great policy proposals of their own. But this isn’t a politics newsletter, I really don’t know that much about them, and, importantly, this is not an endorsement¹, so I’m here to talk about Mamdani, his economic ideas, and both abundance and Abundance.

My first exposure to Mamdani came through all around nice guy, New York City resident, and DSA member Dennis Meany. I can’t remember exactly when I started following Mamdani (or at least, his mayoral campaign) on Twitter, but this campaign ad was made during the winter, and it had that particular cold, dark, snowy aesthetic familiar to anyone who’s overwintered in a Northeastern city once or more. Mamdani’s ad showed him visiting residents of Queens and beyond talking about the cost of the city, the struggle these working residents made to stay in their homes, and how he was focused on governing a city and increasing access to its public services and the economic opportunity that bring so many to New York. It was compelling, pressed every button that mattered to a progressive who is also an economist, and (importantly) was very low stakes to follow the Mamdani for Mayor account, so I did. Now the primary election is today (early voting was open from June 14 through the 22, thank you friends in the city!), and despite not living in the city, I’m eagerly awaiting the results, though not (I assume) as eagerly as city residents.

What I’ve been so impressed with from Mamdani has been his consistent focus on the economic underpinnings of life in the city², and how a mayor can approach making that easier for longtime residents that are not uber wealthy³. In “Ten Questions” with the NYTimes, he argued that affordability is the most important issue in the city, and even without the inflation that has occurred in the past few years, this checks out. Housing is prohibitive, public transit costs add up, and don’t get me started on childcare⁴. All of these are important services, and there are different ways to approach doing so, from subsidies, to making services free, to using public spending authority to build more, and more. As with pretty much any economic policy, there are pluses and minuses of using any given approach, whether it’s a tax cut, a waiver/subsidy, building public-private partnerships, having the government step in to just do the thing (build houses, provide childcare, etc), and more. But what’s so refreshing with Mamdani’s campaign, from my Twitter’s eye view, has been his consistent focus on the supply aspects of the rising costs that New Yorkers face, and how to lower those costs in pragmatic ways.

This is particularly interesting given a dialog occurring on “the left” about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book Abundance, which is part of a slate of recent books arguing that many urban areas are too expensive to live in, in large part due to housing shortages. Abundance the book talks about a lot of other things too – how the lack of new public transit infrastructure hampers development in a carbon friendly way, how grant funding has become more sclerotic, and how planning and red tape hamper well-intentioned public works – and offer some policy recommendations that I mostly agree with. However, the book itself seems to have become both a lightning rod and a Rorschach test for a certain subset of commenters’ preferred approaches to problems. Some argue that the book is inadequately anti-trust, and fails to address corporate power and other structural causes of the shortages apparent around us. Some fixate on the utopian fantasy at the start, and argue that the vibes of promoting cheaper consumer goods (including housing) are unseemly given the challenges faced by service workers in the city. Malcolm Harris accuses the book of commodity fetishism. Many are angry that Klein and Thompson are bullish on the prospects of using both deregulation and a mix of private corporations and government rewards to generate more, whether that’s housing, public transit, scientific breakthroughs, you name it⁵. That said, a central example of success in their book is the story of Pennsylvania’s governor fast tracking the reconstruction of a highway overpass, with union labor, and many of these reviews damn Abundance with faint praise, given its (I would be the first to agree) anodyne/airport bookstore friendly presentation.

Ultimately, Klein and Thompson’s book makes an argument that building more housing and public transit and reigniting scientific development in the context of climate change, housing crises, and more requires new approaches to fostering that growth, including deregulation. This is, as others have noted, necessary but insufficient to deal with all the other problems in our society (eg, day care accessibility and more). But it also resembles arguments that Bhaskar Sunkara made about the history of sewer socialism back in his book The Socialist Manifesto, and also about the big economic pushes of The New Deal in arenas like power generation and more. Klein and Thompson even cite Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism as a visionary text, imagining how an alternative to capitalism could generate more, rather than leaning in on degrowth⁶ Small is Beautiful tendencies that have characterized a lot of left activism from the 70s onward.

So imagine my surprise when I saw that Derek Thompson had talked with Mamdani about Abundance, and that Mamdani says he is running on an agenda of abundance, and thinks Abundance makes some interesting points that have been oversimplified in “the discourse”? Well, as someone who thinks that sewer socialism (the emphasis by left candidates for public office in Milwaukee at the turn of the 20^th century on the provision of quality public services to American underclasses, chiefly sewer services) is abundance and that programs like the Works Projects Administration under the New Deal were abundance, I actually wasn’t that surprised. In essence, any policy that aims to increase the supply of different goods and services is abundance oriented. Mamdani’s language on the campaign trail has focused on price controls (rent freezes on stabilized cost housing), increased public construction and subsidization of affordable housing including by changing building zoning regulations to foster the increase in construction of housing, improving the quality of public services so that more people will avail themselves of them, and municipal grocery stores that receive subsidies from the city to serve food deserts with lower cost groceries. From the outside, there are aspects of these policies that I like a lot, and that I would want a lot more detail about too.

None of this is easy. The feasibility of abundance style programs is challenging; there are vested interests opposing the construction and provision of more, the legal procedures to get there can be byzantine, and, as mentioned before, there are costs and benefits for different policy approaches (subsidies/tax breaks, means-tested/universal). But it’s invigorating to see these proposals.

Whether Mamdani wins or not, whether his proposed approaches to these challenges are my personal choices, and whether or not there’s a gap between any candidate’s rhetoric on the trail versus in office, seeing a DSA candidate speak on the record in approval of this big tent abundance approach to improving the economic aspects of living in New York City is affirming. We’ll see what happens!

1. See above! I don’t know the other candidates in the running, economic issues are not the only issues, and I do not live in New York City! If you live in New York City, you’ve probably already voted, and if you haven’t and still need help making a choice, you should talk to some informed residents!

2. Again, with the caveat that I do not live in New York City, and I have not paid attention to other candidates’ platforms! Virtually every other candidate in this primary seems to be thinking about affordability too.

3. Also, his bagel order sounds delicious.

4. Again, full disclosure that I don’t live in New York, but I put two infants to toddlers through unsubsidized daycare in Boston and its metro area, and I have to imagine similar dynamics are at play in NYC.

5. For what it’s worth, I think that the two best critiques of Abundance are David Karpf’s, which argues that the arguments Klein and Thompson make are effectively moot as the Trump administration demolishes the state apparatus that they want to marshal, and Joe Weisenthal’s, which has some frank questions about how to finance everything. I also think that David Dayen’s note that the last time the US tried housing abundance, we ended up with the subprime mortgage crisis, and am thinking about this a lot.

6. About which more later!