Does abundance begin at home?

Asterisk interview: Is localism the enemy of abundance?

Excerpt: "Clara: The reason I wanted to have this conversation is that you, Jasmine, had a really interesting post where you talked about civic culture in Taiwan compared to the US. In this post, you cited a Twitter thread by Kelsey about a microschool that she helps run as an example of the kind of bottom-up civic participation that Taiwan does well.

You also talk about Abundance in that post, from an angle I haven’t seen discussed as much as I think it should be — a lot of it is implicitly or explicitly anti-localist. How does that square with building up an ethos of civic participation, of people trying to do things and build things and create things — of bottom-up abundance as opposed to top-down abundance? Are these compatible? Is it possible to do both?

Kelsey: This was one of the bigger things I felt some dislike for as I read the book, which was that I think Ezra and Derek are just more big-government liberals than I am. I am also in favor of a lot of the deregulatory policy that they're in favor of. I'm in favor of making it much easier to build stuff on your own land. But for me, a lot of that is coming from a slightly more libertarian ethos.

We agree on the same diagnosis of the problem — that government-run programs are often boondoggles that don't really deliver despite spending a ton of money, and that this is a big problem. They want to solve it, but I'm like, "Okay, maybe they can solve it. I hope they can solve it." You know what works to deliver services at scale without all those resources? Markets. Markets work great for that. I am fundamentally more interested in policies that let people do things than in policies that let the government do things.