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.

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[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.