Ad-hominem is a great way to understand a group of people that are obviously full of shit and engaged in self-serving advocacy.
Unless you think this guy is actually interested in building more housing:
https://fortune.com/2022/08/13/atherton-california-housing-m...
Maybe I'm missing context but this would be the exact opposite of the Abundance agenda.
If your point is that Andreesen advocates for abundance policies, but then also opposes them in classic NIMBY fashion when it affects him, well, that's an indictment of Marc Andreesen, not Abundance mentality. In fact, your point inadvertently seems to say "Marc Andreesen is not Abundance enough!" since he is engaged in anti-Abundance activity in lobbying against multi-family housing.
It’s Andreesens all the way down.
The abundance movement is not a grassroots group of people, it’s a lab creation of billionaire/donor types. Andreesen is one of them, that’s the context for the link. Reid Hoffman is another.
These people want to find a way to distract from the appeal of progressive policies of the kind put forward by Lina Khan and others who actually attempt to directly take on the concentrated economic power that’s strangling normal people in this country. They’re the ones doing the strangling.
It’s propaganda, a PR project by oligarchs. It’s fundamentally done in bad faith and there’s absolutely nothing obligating me to take them at face value.
Nothing in your assertion addresses the actual merits of the abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book.
If you want to argue that Andreesen is co-opting or manipulating those ideas for his own ends, that's something else.
The abundance mindset as described in Klein and Thompson's book fails to address the actual problem that prevents abundance, as defined by them.
The problem that they've identified is real and obvious: people can't afford housing, things are increasingly precarious for the middle class, and so on.
The actual solution is that concentrations of market power have to be broken up, we are being strangled by monopolies and cartels, and the way we run the macro economy is in favor of the financial sector. We prioritize returns on large scale capital over absolutely everything else.
There's no way to address the actual problems without doing things differently. In order for regular people to win, some powerful people will have to lose, at least a little.
Those powerful people don't want this, so they're happy to fund Klein and Thompson and a slew of other think tanks and politicians to advance the narrative that there's some other way to do things. Mostly the usual tactic of "blame it on the hippies" that has been so effective for them since the 1990's and the Clinton administration.
Given all this context, there aren't really any merits to the argument of the book. It's the equivalent of someone arguing with you that better diet and exercise is the way to fix an open stab wound. Also they're the person that stabbed you.
Like diet and exercise are good ideas. But if I'm like hey what the fuck you're a murderer and you come back with something about how that's an ad-hominem, and also why are you disagreeing with the ideas that diet and exercise are good, I don't really need to engage with you on the merits of those arguments right this second.
What we need to do first is take the knife away.