In their highly anticipated new book, “Abundance,” journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson assert that “[w]e are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.” They argue, now “may be the moment for the politics of abundance,” by which they mean “more homes, more energy, more cures, and more construction.”
So far, so good.
But Klein and Thompson go too far when they claim that such an agenda could help Democrats recover political power by demonstrating good governance in states like California. In reality, good state governance is about much more than homes, energy, cures, and construction. Unless California Democrats also deliver quality education, orderly streets, and economic mobility, our state will not offer a credible example of good governance.
Consider K-12 education, the state’s largest public expenditure at $115 billion per year. The book’s index contains not a single reference to “education,” “schools,” “collective bargaining,” or “public employee unions” — astonishing omissions given California’s 5.8 million public school students and longest-in-the-nation shutdown of schools in subservience to teachers’ unions. As The Standard recently reported, some parents who can afford homes in San Francisco choose to leave the city rather than educate their children in its public schools, illustrating how homes alone are not enough. Better governance also requires better public schools.
Likewise, Californians confronting encampments know that street living is not just the result of a housing shortage. Encampments also result from substance abuse and mental illness that too many political leaders in California have been unwilling to address.
Similarly, some of the high-income individual taxpayers on whom the state depends for tax revenues leave California when they learn the enormous sums the state spends on compensation and benefits for more than 1.3 million members of state and local public employee unions. Unions then donate some of that money to elected officials and organize squads that hound politicians who don’t do their bidding.
No elected official in California could tell you what all those employees actually do, but still they keep adding new positions. The number of state employees per 1,000 members of the population has risen 20% since 1973. Is it any wonder that the productivity of public employees has grown at less than one-quarter of the productivity rate of private-sector employees since then? To add insult to injury, California’s private-sector workers toil in a state with the second-highest unemployment rate in the country, a serious obstacle to economic mobility.
When California does invest in medical discoveries and infrastructure (the “more cures and more construction” portion of Klein and Thompson’s premise), it’s often marred by cronyism. While serving as special adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, I eagerly led his administration’s support for a bond measure to support stem cell cures at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, only to later watch with regret as proceeds feathered the nests of political insiders such as the retired chair of the state Democratic Party, who was appointed to a high-paying vice chair position. While serving on the board of the High-Speed Rail Authority, I found the front rows of every meeting filled with politically connected contractors seeking fat contracts. And while on the board of the State Teachers’ Retirement System, I observed self-serving behavior that would soon cripple school districts and other government entities with massive unfunded liabilities.
Californians also know that even when infrastructure gets built, it often gets managed for the benefit of public employees, not customers or taxpayers. BART lavishing pay increases on its workers during the pandemic is just one of many examples.
More material abundance alone does not constitute good governance. The overall vision in “Abundance” is laudable but insufficient for individual taxpayers providing most of the state’s revenues, public school families, residents confronting unclean and disorderly streets, and private-sector workers seeking plentiful jobs and rising wages. Solving these issues requires an abundance of something that is currently quite scarce — political courage.
David Crane is a lecturer in public policy at Stanford University and president of Govern For California.