Things to think about #12 - Oxygen and Abundance
I was pool side at the start of the month which means, in my case, the time to run through one of the larger audiobooks in my Audible library in large uninterrupted chunks while sipping a cold drink. My choice on this occasion was Nick Lane’s Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World. The book travels far and wide, and it’s well worth the time, though parts of it are rather technical for those of us who aren’t biological chemists, despite Lane’s best efforts to make the content accessible. I dozed off more than once midway through — as one tends to do when horizontal at the pool — and had to rewind and restart a few chapters.
The most engaging parts of the book, for me, were the beginning and the end. The opening lays out the history of oxygen as a molecule and tells the story of Earth’s biosphere through the lens of oxygen. This is a perspective I found both original and absorbing. The final chapters, which delve into the role of oxygen in human ageing, were equally fascinating. I bookmarked several passages which I will use when I finally get to do an update of my chapter/essay on life expectancy as part of my demographics project.
So what are the book’s overarching conclusions? I’ll do my best to summarise. Oxygen is essential for life, but it’s a delicate balance. Too much, and it’s toxic; too little, and life fails. That might sound trivial, but in an evolutionary context, it becomes a powerful insight. The fine-tuned balance between oxygen production (via photosynthesis) and consumption (via respiration) has evolved to create the precise conditions that support life as we know it. I was not even remotely aware of this perspective before being presented by it in this book.
The link between oxygen and ageing is thought provoking too — though Lane is clear that his interpretation sits within a field marked by ongoing scientific debate. Ageing is such a universal feature of biological life that it must have evolutionary roots. Lane highlights two key evolutionary theories that help explain it. The first is the disposable soma theory, which holds that organisms face a trade-off between investing energy in reproduction versus maintaining the body (the soma). Ageing arises as the inevitable cost of prioritising reproduction. The second theory is antagonistic pleiotropy: the idea that some genes provide benefits early in life, typically by enhancing reproduction or survival, but have harmful effects later on. Natural selection favours these genes because the early-life benefits outweigh the long-term costs, especially since most organisms have already reproduced by the time those costs manifest.
Mitochondria sit at the heart of Lane’s argument. He contends that it’s their very function—respiration—that ultimately contributes to our decline. Mitochondria generate nearly all of the cell’s energy through aerobic respiration, a major evolutionary leap that enabled complex multicellular life. But their DNA is especially vulnerable to oxidative damage, and over time, this damage accumulates—gradually compromising cellular function and, ultimately, contributing to ageing and death.
In summary, Nick Lane’s thesis is that we quite literally rust to death. Ageing is the cost of using oxygen to power complex life. This vulnerability to oxidative damage is not a design flaw, but an evolved trade-off. It is the price we pay for the extraordinary energy and complexity made possible by mitochondria, nature’s great invention.
Abundance + MMT = Utopia
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is arguably the most hotly debated non-fiction book of the moment, or at least, it was when it was released earlier this year. In a nutshell, it makes the case for state-directed economic activity to foster the abundance of key goods such as housing, energy, and food. The book proposes a reinvention of a political economy currently shaped by the logic of scarcity and the mechanisms used to divide limited resources among competing groups.
It's no exaggeration to say that Abundance invites a fundamental shift in mindset—across politics, policy, and perhaps even economics itself.
The book draws significant attention, I believe, because it is, at its core, a progressive argument for better economic policy, while simultaneously taking aim at the failures of contemporary progressive economic policy. To the extent that Messrs. Klein and Thompson can be identified as progressive liberals—and I think that’s fair to say—they are directing their critique at their own ideological camp. That always ruffles feathers, as it has here.
Abundance deserves real credit for trying to work through the practicalities of what a politics of abundance might look like, mainly in the U.S. context. But this is also where the book ultimately falls short, in my view. Initial conditions and path dependency matter. A politics of abundance would be challenging enough if we were starting from scratch—but we’re not, and that makes the vision more difficult, perhaps even fanciful.
Klein and Thompson are clearly aware of this. They devote considerable effort to outlining how a realistic politics of abundance could take shape in the 2020s. But I remained unconvinced. That said, this critique is separate from my appreciation of the book as an intellectual exercise: it is both timely and thoughtfully executed. The difference between our current state and a state of abundance exists on a spectrum, and their ideas help us imagine how we might take one—or several—steps toward the latter.
Finally, Abundance complements the broader progressive economic project of casting off the perceived constraints of supply and demand as binding limits on policy. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) addresses this challenge from the demand side, arguing that a sovereign government can always generate sufficient aggregate demand—primarily by creating money within a fiat system—to achieve full employment and material prosperity. In doing so, however, MMT largely overlooks key issues such as inflation, international trade, and currency stability. Its proponents often pay only lip service to the radical shifts—such as capital controls and the end of independent monetary policy—that would be required to implement the theory effectively.
Abundance, by contrast, approaches the same challenge from the supply side. It argues that the constraints on economic policymakers—scarce resources, capacity limits—can be overcome through a rethinking of how governments control, create, and distribute essential goods like housing, energy, food, education, and healthcare. In short, MMT + Abundance = utopia: a world with neither demand- nor supply-side constraints.
I want to believe—but I remain skeptical about the feasibility of such ideas in practice. That said, progressives are often at their best when articulating bold visions at the edge of the possible. From that perspective, Abundance is an important and provocative contribution.