Collectively, these books advocate what might be called supply-side liberalism. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the hell with demand, let’s just create more stuff. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the government should get out of the way. But their preferred method to achieve this is not tax cuts but deregulation, typically at the local rather than federal level.
“Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked,” write Klein and Thompson, “is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.” Well, sure. But ignoring demand is also a convenient way to dodge potentially divisive questions about distribution. “The world we want requires more than redistribution,” Klein and Thompson state grandly. “We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” That doesn’t offer much sustenance to the rest of us drudges condemned to inhabit 2025.
Rather than speculate about the future, let’s consider the supply-side liberals’ revisionist history. To varying degrees, all three books portray Robert Moses, who bulldozed thriving neighborhoods throughout New York City to build his expressways and thruways and parkways, as a force for good. The only reason we don’t recognize this, they argue, is that Robert Caro portrayed Moses as a destructive force in his 1974 biography, The Power Broker.
Moses’s most formidable opponent was Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Moses wanted to build an elevated highway through SoHo and Little Italy that would bisect Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived. Jacobs stopped him. Bizarrely, Caro left Jacobs out of The Power Broker because the book was too long to include her. (The missing chapter probably resides in one of the 100 boxes of papers Caro recently donated to the New York Historical Society; some enterprising magazine editor should find it and persuade Caro to let him publish it. But I digress.)
The delicate ecology of the neighborhoods Moses blasted through didn’t interest Moses, but it did interest Jacobs. She wrote about how a mix of retail and residential structures enriched a neighborhood, and how pedestrian flow and smaller-scale construction kept neighborhoods safe by allowing “eyes on the street.” At the time, urban renewal policies favored building the exact opposite: tall Brutalist high-rises surrounded by inhospitable concrete plazas. In lower-income neighborhoods, housing projects of this type became the perfect breeding ground for violent crime.