I keep seeing Progress Studies and Abundance Agenda popping up on intellectual Twitter. I can’t help but be reminded of fascism with those terms, but I can’t tell. Has anyone looked into this more deeply? Is this the next sneerworthy thing, or is it worth supporting?
Progress studies is an attempt at creating a new field that studies technological breakthroughs and can let us predict/create the preconditions for new breakthroughs. I think it’s mostly the work of Jason Crawford and Tyler Cowen, with support from the Stripe billionaire Patrick Collison. It got dunked on a bunch by history twitter when they first proposed it in an Atlantic article a few years (?) back for basically trying to reinvent history for VC types. Crawford seems to be pretty bent towards deregulation as a panacea, Tyler Cowen is Tyler Cowen and Collison is one of Scott Alexander’s billionaire fans, so it’s kind of kooky, although some of Collison’s experiments with medical research funding mechanisms during the pandemic may have been valuable.
The abundance agenda stuff is a more general idea across neolib through to socdem twitter that America (and the world) has gotten bad at building stuff over the last several decades, with both government projects and private development getting less ambitious, slower and more expensive for worse results. It holds that we need to be as ambitious and capable as we were in the 50s and 60s, and wraps in techno-optimism regarding renewables, new nuclear and carbon capture, techno-optimism regarding disease-eradication, YIMBYism, and more out there “where’s my flying car” stuff. It’s adherents see it as an antidote to pessimism and degrowth ideology. I wouldn’t say it’s rightwing the way Cowen’s progress studies stuff is, but it’s a big tent and the progress studies stuff is in there.
Neither movement is fascistic, and the abundance agenda stuff attracts a fair number of big government social democrat types. You could accuse them (particularly progress studies) of being very California Ideology-esque, and both are vituperatively opposed to anything that has even a whiff of degrowth, and punch left at the hippies a fair amount.
Progress studies is what you get when you rehash whig history and cultural evolutionist anthropology. It’s [White’s law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White’s_law) but now that we have computers we can do obsolete anthropology faster and with more variables.
Interesting.
It does indeed look like a philosophy that can start out neoliberal (Entreprenurial mindset etc.) and can easily be taken up by Nazis (Industrial productionism).
Partly because the overlap in goals of both movements that occur naturally and partly because building that neoliberal-to-far-right bridge is exactly what rationalists are doing.
First built a theory in which a neoliberal technocracy is necessary, argue for a enlightened dictatorship (but it’s a benevolent AI), then argue for a biological high IQ elite, then bemoan the AI isn’t here yet, allow the far-right to put pieces of the puzzle together for years within the movement.
The simplest argument is that the people who are running the economy are screwing up, and that abundance politics puts those same people in charge of the solution. Rewards them to do more of what they’re already doing.
Another argument is the overproduction crisis. Creating abundance to stop inflation is a distraction. Inflation is people increasing the price of products. It happens anyway, abundance or no abundance. The 2008 financial crash wasn’t caused by a lack of abundance, but by people not being to afford said abundance, and a lending economy built to increase demand so people could keep buying stuff. Banks scaffolding capitalism.
As soon as the housing bubble burst, people couldn’t pay their loans, had no money, couldn’t afford new cars, and car factories closed down.
No way increasing supply will lower prices enough. The entire point of abundance politics is that they don’t want to increase wages enough so people can buy these products. They want to increase production of products nobody can afford anyway.
“Abundance Agenda” is just more neoliberal claptrap, reading the link, yes making things CHEAPER through making more of them MIGHT help, but people still need to be paid enough to buy them. For example, the US already has a glut of housing compared to homeless. The problem is much of it sits empty and bought up for speculation. It’s wasteful to PRODUCE MORE.
So in this case, MORE REGULATION would be better. End purchasing of single family homes by large private investors, caps on turning housing into short term rentals like AirBNB, etc.