. . . congestion pricing is a policy unicorn – it accomplishes a key goal (reducing congestion) and raises money. This is in contrast with highway widenings which are the opposite: they cost money (often billions of dollars) and fail to accomplish the goal of reducing traffic due to induced demand.

Nothing succeeds like excess.  Abundance.  A new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson asserts that liberals have largely lost their way in actually producing things and have given in to providing widespread veto powers that have crippled the provision of badly needed goods and services.  The messaging clearly draws from the emergence of the YIMBY movement which has made just this case for housing.  But the Frontier Group’s Tony Dutzik warns that claims about the universality of abundance are simplistic and in many ways wrong.  In fact, many of America’s problems stem from an excess of goods and services favored by public policies.  As Dutzik argues:

Scarcity is not, by and large, America’s problem. It is, rather, the problems that result from our abundance – the ecological impacts of a high-throughput consumer economy; our failure to replace the sense of meaning and purpose once drawn from work that has since been automated away; the tech-driven stratification of society and accelerating concentration of wealth – that threaten to do us in. These are problems that cannot be “solved with supply.” And failing to keep those problems front of mind in a renewed quest for “more” could wind up making them even worse.

For example, we’re awash in food, thanks to everything from agricultural research to farm subsidies–and yet fresh nutritious food is often scarce  and we’re suffering from an epidemic of obesity and poor health due to our diets. Likewise, we have a super-abundance of roads, cars and parking, all of which have fueled sprawl and car dependence, which has contributed to climate change, sedentary lifestyles, and not incidentally, increased social isolation.  As the negative effects of social media indicate, even the tidal wave of easy access to data has significant downsides.  So the real issue isn’t an inability to produce abundance, its that we produce abundance of things that make us better off.

The city is back. There’s a lot of good news in New York lately.  Congestion pricing is working fantastically well.  And as Paul Krugman points out, contrary to what many naysayers believe, New York is safe, and getting safer.  As Krugman argues, there’s a political dimension to these anti-urban beliefs.

But of course pointing out that life in New York is OK is itself political, because trash talk about our big cities, New York in particular, is a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric. According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.

The truth is that New York, which really was a dangerous place a few decades ago, is now incredibly safe. The city’s weekly crime report provides some historical comparisons:

As Krugman points out, there are still challenges in urban areas, notably the high cot of housing.  But paradoxically, what that really shows is there’s much more demand for urban living, in great and interesting cities, than there is supply.

Follow City Observatory on Bluesky.