abundance on the cheap
if this is the bright new future I want my old job back
Don’t worry, readers, this is not going to become an Abundanceism blog – I will do what I did when I thought it was too much “AI all the time” and consciously try to write about other things for a while (other than to promote the full white paper version of my Niskanen Institute piece), until I’ve finished reading Ezra Klein’s book when I will hopefully do a review.
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. Which is often an interesting way to consume thought; like listening only to the third-tier bands in a scene, you get exposed to really crude and blunt versions of tropes that aren’t noticeable in the more sophisticated works.
That’s not to say that anyone should be blamed for their fans or epigones – god no, absolutely not, I wrote a whole series about that with respect to Taleb. But it can be an intellectually stimulating exercise in seeing where fault lines might be, or where work has to be done to clarify easy points of confusion.
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. If all you had to go by was my social media feed, you might think that “less protection for habitats” was one of the core principles.
Not only that, but people argue for it in explicitly scarcity-oriented terms. When talking about the HS2 bat protection structure [1], it is very common to see its cost expressed as pounds per bat, and as money that could and should have been used more efficiently elsewhere. In actual fact, 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? Forget about biodiversity for precisely one paragraph. In my book, if your argument is that beautiful native woodland and interesting lovable furry animals are a luxury we can no longer afford, you’ve got no business calling yourself Abundance. 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. Make it look nice and don’t cut corners on costs, this is infrastructure and it’s going to be around for hundreds of years”. 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.
OK, remember about biodiversity again. Habitat destruction is something that’s very tricky to fit into an accounting framework because it’s all about tail risk. And it’s all about a system that we don’t understand but nonetheless have to manage. So you have to use “stakes not odds” reasoning – we might believe that it’s £x00,000 per bat and they don’t pass the cost benefit test compared to rewilding a moor somewhere else, but then one day the pollinators all die off, or the region gets overrun with plague weevils or whatnot. Requiring some kind of habitat regulation is important – it’s not “ignoring tradeoffs”, it’s emphasising a particular kind of tradeoff, while recognising that we don’t actually know the downside risk but we know that if we get a sufficiently bad outcome then we won’t be able to get back in the game.
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, rather than incentivised by particular financial and institutional structures. (That’s what my paper’s about!). It ought to be about expanding the frontier, not squabbling about which direction to tilt the budget line.
[1] This shed is regularly described as “a tunnel” in actual policy papers – I don’t think I’m being pedantic here, I think it’s very important that a lot of public debate seems to take place in terms of iconic examples which people use with no knowledge at all about their factual predecessors. I also do kind of think that the sum of “OMG £100m on bats!” needs to be put in the context of the overall project – the Sheephouse Wood structure covers one kilometer of track, and the average cost of HS2 at current estimates is about £300m per km for 225km. I think it’s very unlikely that this icon of waste is in the top twenty most expensive kilometers of the whole track and it might not be in the top fifty.
Apology: I used to joke about “The Post-It Note” that I metaphorically attached to my computer saying “Do Not Use The ‘Stack To Pursue Social Media Arguments In An Environment Where It’s More Difficult To Answer Back”. This note has, you might notice, definitively fallen off again. I’ll write new one and stick it back on.
Look to the French. When asked how the French managed to have such a good health care system Paul Krugman answered “No one knows”. The French have wildlife bridges and tunnels. My answer is the French are bloody minded enough to say “we are French, and we think this is important, and therefore we will make it so.” They insist their language is important. We have lived with them in Canada now for almost 200 years. They drive at least half the country round the bend, but they have helped to save us from ruin and have enriched us immeasurably. The British love wildlife. Decide it’s important, which I think is your point. I endorse it wholeheartedly.
We lost almost all of our little brown bats (their actual name) in the maritimes due to white nose syndrome (brought from Europe) and the result was an explosion of biting insects, and we have serious ones other than mosquitoes - think horse flies and black flies. They rebuilt Notre Dame in record time because it’s an iconic French landmark and therefore important. Think like the 🇫🇷 French. We are gradually nursing our little brown bats back to health, and as Joni Michell says “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Loved your book. Read it twice.
One of the dysfunctions of UK governance is an over reliance of the checkpoint of 'permission to do a project' to deliver broader strategic goals. There are all sorts of ways in which one could imagine preserving a network of habitats for bats. You could explicitly build or maintain them. You could set aside specific parcels of land and monitor them.
It's part of the free lunch mentality of UK gov that instead tries to do this entirely on the back of developers / people doing projects. If you've ever sought any kind of permission to develop a rural building, you'll know how extremely carefully you have to look for bats, even when there is almost no chance that you will find any. The environment agency and other bodies are completely uninterested in most of the country most of the time. But when someone wants to do a project somewhere, they flip into demanding the most minute examination of every inch of it, and the most stringent preservation of anything that's found there.
This is paired with a total lack of interest in enforcement of common or garden environmental crime when it occurs outside of the context of development. If, by contrast, you merely go door to door killing bats wherever you find them, the EA almost certainly will never notice. It's only when you need planning permission that they get interested.
It isn't at all clear that this is an efficacious or proportionate way of achieving the aim of 'bat preservation' — actually there is good reason to think it's not. It certainly makes any kind of development very slow, expensive and annoying, as well as incentivising anyone who can get away with it to just ignore the rules. But it appears to the government to be a 'free' way of achieving these aims, so it's the one we've adopted.
It doesn't have to be 'bats vs growth' but the current way we do this clearly both anti-growth and ineffective