Abundance: THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and FT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD NOMINEE: How We Build a Better Future Kindle Edition
by Ezra Klein (Author), Derek Thompson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (3,426)
by Ezra Klein (Author), Derek Thompson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (3,426)
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**LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2025**
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR
'A must-read for progressives' BARACK OBAMA
'Downing Street's current hot read' ANDREW MARR
'Forceful, quick-moving, important' FINANCIAL TIMES
The threat to liberal democracy isn't just autocrats
- it's a lack of effective action by so-called progressives.
We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability and public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas. It's time for change.
Bestselling authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have spent decades analysing the political, economic and cultural forces that have led us here. In this once-in-a-generation intervention, they unpick the barriers to progress and show how we can, and must, shift the political agenda to one that not only protects and preserves, but also builds. From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.
From the Publisher
Product description
Review
PRAISE FOR WHY WE'RE POLARIZED BY EZRA KLEIN
"Polarization is the story of American politics today. It affects almost every aspect of American political life and has been studied by scholars from many different angles, with dozens of good historical and experimental approaches. Wouldn't it be great if someone would digest all these studies, synthesize them and produce a readable book that makes sense of it all? Ezra Klein has done just that with his compelling new work, Why We're Polarized. . . . Powerful [and] intelligent." --Fareed Zakaria, CNN
"Why We're Polarized delivers. . . . What Klein adds especially to [is] our understanding of how we got here--why Trump is more a vessel for our division than the cause, and why his departure will not provide any magical cure. . . . A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis." --Norman Ornstein, New York Times Book Review
"Superbly researched and written . . . Why We're Polarized provides a highly useful guide to this most central of political puzzles, digesting mountains of social science research and presenting it in an engaging form. . . . An overall outstanding volume." --Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post
"Brilliant and wide-ranging. A book about what just might be our central, perhaps fatal problem. This is the kind of book you find yourself arguing with out loud as you read it and will stick in your head long after you've finished. Absolutely crucial for understanding this perilous moment." --Chris Hayes, host of "All In with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC and author of A Colony in a Nation
"Klein's careful book explains how different groups of Americans can see politics through such different lenses, examining how various psychological mechanisms allow committed partisans to rationalize almost anything their party does. . . . This book fully displays the attributes that have made Klein's journalism so successful." --Dan Hopkins, Washington Post
"Eye-opening . . . Klein's brilliant diagnosis and prescription provide a path to understanding--and healing." --O Magazine
"A fascinating book, rich in politics, history, psychology and more." --David Leonhardt, New York Times
"Well worth reading." --Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine
PRAISE FOR HIT MAKERS BY DEREK THOMPSON
"Enthralling--full of 'aha' moments about why some ideas soar and others never get off the ground. This book picks up where The Tipping Point left off." --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
"A wonderful book . . . While giving Lady Luck her due, Thompson studiously examines the myriad factors that make the things we buy, like, and follow so irresistible: whether Facebook, TV shows such as Seinfeld, Bumble (the app, not the insect), even favorite lullabies. In Hit Makers, his first book, Thompson tackles this mystery with solid research, ready wit, and catchy aphorisms." --USA Today
"Superb." --Fareed Zakaria, CNN Book of the Week selection
"Hit Makers is thoughtful and thorough, a compelling book. . . . A terrific look at what makes a hit, from the Mona Lisa to Donald Trump." --Vox
"Fascinating . . . Thompson has huge enthusiasm for his topic and has amassed an amazing amount of material, including many offbeat and engaging stories. . . . [Should] be read for insight and provocation." --Financial Times
"Derek Thompson has long been one of the brightest new voices in American journalism. With Hit Makers, he becomes one of the brightest new voices in the world of non-fiction books. Ranging from Impressionist art to German lullabies to Game of Thrones, Hit Makers offers a fresh and compelling take on how the media function and how ideas spread. As deftly written as it is keenly argued, this book--true to its title--is a hit." --Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at the New York Times. He is the author of Why We're Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named one of Barack Obama's top books of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. A news analyst with NPR, Derek appears weekly on the national news show "Here and Now" and is a contributor to CBS News. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers. He lives in Washington, DC.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Book Review: ‘Abundance,’ by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson - The New York Times
Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?
In “Abundance,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson prod fellow liberals to think beyond their despair over Trump’s return to power.
The John Amos power plant in Poca, W.Va.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University and the author, most recently, of “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.”
Published March 18, 2025Updated Aug. 25, 2025
ABUNDANCE, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
In 1833, John Adolphus Etzler, a German engineer who immigrated to Pittsburgh, announced that earthly paradise was suddenly in reach. Economic growth and modern technology were changing everything. Coal might run out, but humanity would harness wind, tidal and solar power. A trillion or more people could call this planet home, constructing islands across the seas to make room. And, as you built up land, you could drink directly from the ocean: Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade. After millenniums of austerity and poverty, the age of limitless “superabundance” was at hand.
Two centuries later, we remain so, so close. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in “Abundance,” a guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization, the United States can still blaze the path to progress, but only if progressives get out of the habit of putting obstacles in their own way. “If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen,” the authors write, “they need to offer the fruits of effective government.” But how?
Klein, a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, and Thompson, a journalist for The Atlantic, are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. “Abundance” expands on their previously published work over the last decade or so, and Klein and Thompson have no shortage of policy proposals on affordable housing (build more!), renewable energy (go nuclear!) and sustainable agriculture (vertical farming?).
Hear the introduction, read by Ezra Klein
But their book comprises more than a set of concrete steps to fix specific socioeconomic problems in America. It’s mainly a sharp cry against myopic Democrats who block new ideas and govern through checklists, leading to what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”
Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.
Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.
This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.
Borrowing a term from a 1954 book by the historian David M. Potter, the authors style themselves revivalists of the belief that American life revolves around the promise inherent in being a “people of plenty.” For the last 50 years, American voters have believed in anything but, electing politicians who mug for the camera as they tighten belts and slash budgets.
How did this happen? Mainstreaming a leftist talking point, Klein and Thompson point the finger at “neoliberalism,” the political movement against robust government that took flight in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and that has been adopted by presidents of both parties ever since.
Major government investment is an indispensable element of the innovative spirit. In the 1960s and ’70s, institutions like the U.S. Defense Department devised transformative technologies like the internet, which helped spread ideas and goods around the world. But today, the authors explain, modern Democrats are more focused on growth-slowing regulations than they are on pouring federal dollars into green, pro-growth solutions like climate-friendly cement. Great moments of American ingenuity still crop up, as pandemics and wars have shown, but they always involve government action. Why not a government promoting progress and plenty all the time?
Imagining an abundant, green future emerging out of federal spending rather than from government rule-making does sound appealing, but Klein and Thompson omit that the neoliberal era wasn’t just about conservatives downsizing government and liberals putting all their energy into regulatory wins like better food labels and fiscal transparency. If austerity policies cramp innovators, they have hurt others worse. Dramatizing the innovator’s plight, “Abundance” occasionally reads like the brief of a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities who are mainly upset by clogged transit and red tape. (Government efficiency, anyone?)
Neoliberal policies drove a great divide between the innovative few and the stagnant many, with investment bankers and Silicon Valley types increasingly liberated from the American masses whose best option, apparently, is to get better deals on urban rent so they can cut the hair and cook the food of the people who code and trade.
This is a bad place to end up. Even at the height of American optimism in the 1950s, historians and policymakers knew that the people of plenty had to keep inequality and immobility from bringing the experiment crashing down. Klein and Thompson refer to “redistribution” as a familiar liberal goal that they hope to supplement with their government-fueled growth agenda. But if the ability to innovate itself isn’t spread more widely, then, as Potter observed, “many people either lose confidence in themselves or rebel against the society which, as they feel, betrayed them with a false promise.”
Klein and Thompson have no answers for how to get the masses back their mojo, and “Abundance” does not seriously confront a big reason for Democratic aversion to dreaming big: neoliberal globalization. When making stuff migrated elsewhere, most Americans were invited to join the care and service economies and consume their way into national and personal debt. Clearing government obstruction only for a small vanguard could exacerbate this gap between the creative few and the consuming many.
The authors are focused not just socially, but geographically, homing in on a handful of urban centers, partly because those cities are where most of the country’s restive innovators work and live. But if the problem is a divided country, progressives should want to spread the opportunity to usher in utopia. A publicly controlled venture capital firm, for instance, could bring startup culture to places liberals long ago abandoned to the right, so that the next artificial intelligence company has as much chance to emerge from Tulsa as it does from Menlo Park. It could also promote a model of entrepreneurship that would include more people, especially if success means something other than the Silicon Valley standard of billion-dollar valuation.
“Abundance” opens with an idyll worthy of Etzler himself. The authors envision clean energy to grow meat in labs, more food on smaller plots of land, less work for more pay and Mach 2 jetliners that run on synthetic fuel to ferry people during the free time won for leisure — what’s not to like? Klein and Thompson call for a renewed commitment to “the fiery creation of the new,” suggesting that the opposite of austerity is an embrace of invention as a collective way of life. But they also seem ambivalent about whether creativity matters for its own sake or for the utopia it brings about. What happens when we stop innovating because we feel we have enough? If abundance just leaves us with consumption as an end in itself, reclaiming American originality would lead it to drown again — even if it is in a sea of lemonade.
ABUNDANCE | By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson | Avid Reader Press | 288 pp. | $30
A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2025, Page 21 of the Sunday
We have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability and public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas. It's time for change.
Bestselling authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have spent decades analysing the political, economic and cultural forces that have led us here. In this once-in-a-generation intervention, they unpick the barriers to progress and show how we can, and must, shift the political agenda to one that not only protects and preserves, but also builds. From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.
From the Publisher
Product description
Review
PRAISE FOR WHY WE'RE POLARIZED BY EZRA KLEIN
"Polarization is the story of American politics today. It affects almost every aspect of American political life and has been studied by scholars from many different angles, with dozens of good historical and experimental approaches. Wouldn't it be great if someone would digest all these studies, synthesize them and produce a readable book that makes sense of it all? Ezra Klein has done just that with his compelling new work, Why We're Polarized. . . . Powerful [and] intelligent." --Fareed Zakaria, CNN
"Why We're Polarized delivers. . . . What Klein adds especially to [is] our understanding of how we got here--why Trump is more a vessel for our division than the cause, and why his departure will not provide any magical cure. . . . A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis." --Norman Ornstein, New York Times Book Review
"Superbly researched and written . . . Why We're Polarized provides a highly useful guide to this most central of political puzzles, digesting mountains of social science research and presenting it in an engaging form. . . . An overall outstanding volume." --Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post
"Brilliant and wide-ranging. A book about what just might be our central, perhaps fatal problem. This is the kind of book you find yourself arguing with out loud as you read it and will stick in your head long after you've finished. Absolutely crucial for understanding this perilous moment." --Chris Hayes, host of "All In with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC and author of A Colony in a Nation
"Klein's careful book explains how different groups of Americans can see politics through such different lenses, examining how various psychological mechanisms allow committed partisans to rationalize almost anything their party does. . . . This book fully displays the attributes that have made Klein's journalism so successful." --Dan Hopkins, Washington Post
"Eye-opening . . . Klein's brilliant diagnosis and prescription provide a path to understanding--and healing." --O Magazine
"A fascinating book, rich in politics, history, psychology and more." --David Leonhardt, New York Times
"Well worth reading." --Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine
PRAISE FOR HIT MAKERS BY DEREK THOMPSON
"Enthralling--full of 'aha' moments about why some ideas soar and others never get off the ground. This book picks up where The Tipping Point left off." --Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
"A wonderful book . . . While giving Lady Luck her due, Thompson studiously examines the myriad factors that make the things we buy, like, and follow so irresistible: whether Facebook, TV shows such as Seinfeld, Bumble (the app, not the insect), even favorite lullabies. In Hit Makers, his first book, Thompson tackles this mystery with solid research, ready wit, and catchy aphorisms." --USA Today
"Superb." --Fareed Zakaria, CNN Book of the Week selection
"Hit Makers is thoughtful and thorough, a compelling book. . . . A terrific look at what makes a hit, from the Mona Lisa to Donald Trump." --Vox
"Fascinating . . . Thompson has huge enthusiasm for his topic and has amassed an amazing amount of material, including many offbeat and engaging stories. . . . [Should] be read for insight and provocation." --Financial Times
"Derek Thompson has long been one of the brightest new voices in American journalism. With Hit Makers, he becomes one of the brightest new voices in the world of non-fiction books. Ranging from Impressionist art to German lullabies to Game of Thrones, Hit Makers offers a fresh and compelling take on how the media function and how ideas spread. As deftly written as it is keenly argued, this book--true to its title--is a hit." --Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at the New York Times. He is the author of Why We're Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named one of Barack Obama's top books of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. A news analyst with NPR, Derek appears weekly on the national news show "Here and Now" and is a contributor to CBS News. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers. He lives in Washington, DC.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?
In “Abundance,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson prod fellow liberals to think beyond their despair over Trump’s return to power.
The John Amos power plant in Poca, W.Va.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBy Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University and the author, most recently, of “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.”
Published March 18, 2025Updated Aug. 25, 2025
ABUNDANCE, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
In 1833, John Adolphus Etzler, a German engineer who immigrated to Pittsburgh, announced that earthly paradise was suddenly in reach. Economic growth and modern technology were changing everything. Coal might run out, but humanity would harness wind, tidal and solar power. A trillion or more people could call this planet home, constructing islands across the seas to make room. And, as you built up land, you could drink directly from the ocean: Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade. After millenniums of austerity and poverty, the age of limitless “superabundance” was at hand.
Two centuries later, we remain so, so close. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in “Abundance,” a guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization, the United States can still blaze the path to progress, but only if progressives get out of the habit of putting obstacles in their own way. “If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen,” the authors write, “they need to offer the fruits of effective government.” But how?
Klein, a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, and Thompson, a journalist for The Atlantic, are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. “Abundance” expands on their previously published work over the last decade or so, and Klein and Thompson have no shortage of policy proposals on affordable housing (build more!), renewable energy (go nuclear!) and sustainable agriculture (vertical farming?).
Hear the introduction, read by Ezra Klein
But their book comprises more than a set of concrete steps to fix specific socioeconomic problems in America. It’s mainly a sharp cry against myopic Democrats who block new ideas and govern through checklists, leading to what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”
Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.
Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.
This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.
Borrowing a term from a 1954 book by the historian David M. Potter, the authors style themselves revivalists of the belief that American life revolves around the promise inherent in being a “people of plenty.” For the last 50 years, American voters have believed in anything but, electing politicians who mug for the camera as they tighten belts and slash budgets.
How did this happen? Mainstreaming a leftist talking point, Klein and Thompson point the finger at “neoliberalism,” the political movement against robust government that took flight in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and that has been adopted by presidents of both parties ever since.
Major government investment is an indispensable element of the innovative spirit. In the 1960s and ’70s, institutions like the U.S. Defense Department devised transformative technologies like the internet, which helped spread ideas and goods around the world. But today, the authors explain, modern Democrats are more focused on growth-slowing regulations than they are on pouring federal dollars into green, pro-growth solutions like climate-friendly cement. Great moments of American ingenuity still crop up, as pandemics and wars have shown, but they always involve government action. Why not a government promoting progress and plenty all the time?
Imagining an abundant, green future emerging out of federal spending rather than from government rule-making does sound appealing, but Klein and Thompson omit that the neoliberal era wasn’t just about conservatives downsizing government and liberals putting all their energy into regulatory wins like better food labels and fiscal transparency. If austerity policies cramp innovators, they have hurt others worse. Dramatizing the innovator’s plight, “Abundance” occasionally reads like the brief of a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities who are mainly upset by clogged transit and red tape. (Government efficiency, anyone?)
Neoliberal policies drove a great divide between the innovative few and the stagnant many, with investment bankers and Silicon Valley types increasingly liberated from the American masses whose best option, apparently, is to get better deals on urban rent so they can cut the hair and cook the food of the people who code and trade.
This is a bad place to end up. Even at the height of American optimism in the 1950s, historians and policymakers knew that the people of plenty had to keep inequality and immobility from bringing the experiment crashing down. Klein and Thompson refer to “redistribution” as a familiar liberal goal that they hope to supplement with their government-fueled growth agenda. But if the ability to innovate itself isn’t spread more widely, then, as Potter observed, “many people either lose confidence in themselves or rebel against the society which, as they feel, betrayed them with a false promise.”
Klein and Thompson have no answers for how to get the masses back their mojo, and “Abundance” does not seriously confront a big reason for Democratic aversion to dreaming big: neoliberal globalization. When making stuff migrated elsewhere, most Americans were invited to join the care and service economies and consume their way into national and personal debt. Clearing government obstruction only for a small vanguard could exacerbate this gap between the creative few and the consuming many.
The authors are focused not just socially, but geographically, homing in on a handful of urban centers, partly because those cities are where most of the country’s restive innovators work and live. But if the problem is a divided country, progressives should want to spread the opportunity to usher in utopia. A publicly controlled venture capital firm, for instance, could bring startup culture to places liberals long ago abandoned to the right, so that the next artificial intelligence company has as much chance to emerge from Tulsa as it does from Menlo Park. It could also promote a model of entrepreneurship that would include more people, especially if success means something other than the Silicon Valley standard of billion-dollar valuation.
“Abundance” opens with an idyll worthy of Etzler himself. The authors envision clean energy to grow meat in labs, more food on smaller plots of land, less work for more pay and Mach 2 jetliners that run on synthetic fuel to ferry people during the free time won for leisure — what’s not to like? Klein and Thompson call for a renewed commitment to “the fiery creation of the new,” suggesting that the opposite of austerity is an embrace of invention as a collective way of life. But they also seem ambivalent about whether creativity matters for its own sake or for the utopia it brings about. What happens when we stop innovating because we feel we have enough? If abundance just leaves us with consumption as an end in itself, reclaiming American originality would lead it to drown again — even if it is in a sea of lemonade.
ABUNDANCE | By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson | Avid Reader Press | 288 pp. | $30
A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2025, Page 21 of the Sunday
====
===
From Australia
Robert
5.0 out of 5 stars Abundant optimism
Reviewed in Australia on 3 September 2025
Verified Purchase
Increasingly in our world faced with the grim headwind of polarisation, rising inequality and the increasing spectre of climate change. Few books present a cognisant and positive view for how the future could be.
Ezra and Derek present a narrative that short circuits the increasingly high walls of political partisans and paints a positive future ground in the society of plenty. Plenty for all both rich and poor, plenty for business while ensuring that we do protect the plentiful bounty which only this planet can provide.
A remarkable piece or research and thought and a book which leaves my heart refilled with plenty for the future that faces us all.
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Spartacus
4.0 out of 5 stars A must read for anyone interested in economic and societal progress.
Reviewed in Australia on 24 August 2025
Verified Purchase
A fantastic read that opened my eyes as to how all the good intentions in the world are just slowing us down. Now I can’t help but see examples everywhere!
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Chris Hosking
5.0 out of 5 stars A book for tomorrow - today!
Reviewed in Australia on 9 July 2025
Verified Purchase
Amazing. Hard to put down.
This is just the kind of book that people who want to create the future should read.
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Gerard de Valence
5.0 out of 5 stars Can future-oriented growth restore government capability and solve scarcity?
Reviewed in Australia on 27 March 2025
Verified Purchase
It's interesting the way some books arrive at the appropriate moment. Abundance argues liberalism has not only lost the ability build and deliver projects, but liberals and progressives have prevented building necessary things such as housing, renewable energy and public transport in the US through legislation, rules and regulation. For example, environmental regulation stops replacing fossil fuels with green energy and local zoning prevents housing developments. Basically, ‘To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.’
The Abundance agenda of ecologically friendly economic growth, regulatory reform, more public investment in housing, infrastructure and technological progress, is an attractive idea. Klein and Thompson conclude ‘What we are proposing is less a set of policy prescriptions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not have?’ Their answer is to confront the reasons for scarcity, to increase supply, and to turn away from a politics of scarcity toward a politics of abundance.
3 people found this helpful
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Christopher Edwards
1.0 out of 5 stars The billionaires will save us all if only we remove all those pesky regulations holding them back.
Reviewed in Australia on 1 August 2025
This book just pushes the current populist line that 'liberals' are to blame for everything (as if 'liberals' are a coherent group unto themselves') whereas the billionaires and corporations are just champing at the bit to give us 'innovation' and 'progress' that will create a utopian abundance for us all. I have rarely read a more self serving pile of unfettered propaganda. This type of book is the problem, not the solution.
2 people found this helpful
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From other countries
Niccolò Cardini
5.0 out of 5 stars Ottima analisi
Reviewed in Italy on 24 August 2025
Verified Purchase
Molto interessante
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Andre G BAUWEN
5.0 out of 5 stars A ne jamais oublier en LISANT
Reviewed in Belgium on 16 July 2025
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Les anciens Moines Cisterciens
vivaient PLUS LONGTEMPS
parce qu ils avaient APPRIS la SOBRIETE
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Translate review to English
Graham Armitage
5.0 out of 5 stars Clear plan for the future
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 May 2025
Verified Purchase
Great read, good references and a well laid out vision of how to make the western world and particularly the US could create a better administation
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Ettore
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book
Reviewed in France on 20 July 2025
Verified Purchase
Wonderful book, recommended !
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rahski
5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read
Reviewed in Canada on 24 April 2025
Verified Purchase
This is simply a Must read. Todays world, new rules and disruption. Wonderful take on what is happening and how to understand the driving forces behind it.
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===
What the “Abundance Agenda” Leaves Out
By
Matt Bruenig
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/abundance-klein-thompson-book-review
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance has plenty of merits, writes Matt Bruenig, but its emphasis on growth and innovation must be married to other egalitarian concerns.
Ezra Klein during an interview with Seth Meyers on September 14, 2017, and Derek Thompson at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019, in Park City, Utah. (Lloyd Bishop / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal via Getty Images and Michael Kovac / Getty Images for Acura)
Jacobin‘s fall issue, “Borders,” is out soon. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly.
Review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Ispent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly to make of it all.
The main policy argument of Abundance is that the administrative burdens placed on construction are too high. This argument is familiar to anyone who has followed debates about housing policy over the last decade. It’s the exact same thing but applied to transportation and energy infrastructure too. The secondary policy argument of Abundance is that the innovation system in the United States is broken in a number of ways, including too much risk aversion in science financing, high administrative burdens on scientific research, and too little support for converting scientific discoveries into efficient mass production.
The authors seem to think these two arguments, and the dozens of sub-arguments flowing from them, all fit together because they relate back to “abundance,” a word that appears to just mean growth and innovation. But I find myself agreeing with Mike Konczal’s point that bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling. Lots of problems relate back to growth and innovation, but that does not mean they all avail themselves to similar analysis and solutions.
Of course, if you treat the various policy topics of the book as separate issues requiring their own specifically tailored technocratic solutions, then you don’t really have a book. You just have a list of discrete proposals that could make up one section of a Project 2029 white paper but don’t amount to a political manifesto.
Klein and Thompson are not content with simply assembling a list of policy suggestions. In the conclusion of the book, they make it very clear that they want Abundance to be part of a vanguardist movement that remakes the Democratic Party and then the political order. To achieve something as grandiose as that, the authors are forced to pair the policy ideas with a specific declinist historical narrative, contestable ideological commitments, and a utopian vision of the future. Not surprisingly, it is these aspects of the book that have drawn the most attention from critics.
Competing Historical Narratives
Idon’t personally understand why policy arguments need to be coupled with historical narratives to be compelling. If some aspect of the status quo is bad, then that is true regardless of whether it used to be less bad and regardless of how it got to be that way. But I am clearly an outlier in this regard. Whether because people are hardwired to love stories or because stories do actually illuminate something that I seem unable to comprehend, building a historical narrative around one’s policy preferences appears to be an indispensable part of stoking a political movement or, at least, selling a book.
If some aspect of the status quo is bad, then that is true regardless of whether it used to be less bad and regardless of how it got to be that way.
In the history offered by Abundance, the main economic story of twentieth-century America is that the country went from having low administrative burdens on construction to having high administrative burdens on construction. The book is actually a little scattered when it comes to explaining why this happened. Sometimes the blame is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader.
The authors also rehearse a number of broader political theories that state that, as societies become longer lived and more affluent, they tend to feature a proliferation of interest groups and deliberation that invariably slows down large-scale decision-making. Fellow Abundist Matt Yglesias has yet another theory that speculates that the proximate cause is the migration of the upper class to the political left, which has led to “the adoption of a kind of English gentry attitude that prioritizes ‘open space,’ quiet, good taste, and a harmonious social order over dynamism, prosperity, and the kind of broad, upward absolute mobility that is made possible by growth.”
Among the Left, for whom the book is written, this historical narrative has quite a lot of competition for the master story of the late twentieth century. Alternatives include:
The country, along with the rest of the Western nations, underwent a neoliberal wave of reduced unionization, welfare state retrenchment, privatization, and deregulation. As David Schleicher notes, when it comes to regulation at least, the preferred narrative of Abundists is exactly at odds with the narrative of the “neoliberal turn.”
The country underwent a wave of monopolization and corporate concentration following changes to the interpretation and enforcement of antitrust and related regulations. Three of the most critical reviews of the book came from Zephyr Teachout, Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, all of whom appear to be big believers in the centrality of this historical narrative.
The country underwent a shift from managerial capitalism where executives were given relatively free rein to govern corporations according to their personal judgment to shareholder capitalism where executives became extensions of the shareholder class and were forced to make decisions with the sole aim of maximizing short-term cash returns. J. W. Mason is the most prominent proponent of this story.
I personally don’t have any stake or much interest in this debate. When it comes to the economic policy topics I focus on, the United States has always been pretty awful and so there is no real or imagined past worth idealizing. Maybe mid-century Sweden, but not mid-century America. But as noted already, I am clearly unusual in thinking that none of this particularly matters. The spreading of particular historical narratives helps popularize and center specific policy agendas and so individuals with other policy agendas will inevitably take issue with an Abundist historical narrative that, were it to become the dominant story believed by liberal thought leaders and politicians, may have the effect of sidelining their policy topics.
Sidelined Agendas
Normally, I am dismissive of critiques that take the form of complaining that a specific bit of policy writing does not address some issue that it is not aiming to address. But, again, Abundance, by its own telling, is not simply a book aimed at adding some items to the policy radar. It is meant to become the focus of first liberal and then American political life, the answer to the question of what the Democratic Party should look like post–Joe Biden.
Because these fairly narrow technocratic policy issues are pitched in this way, critiques about what Abundists leave to the side are, I think, completely legitimate. What are we meant to be moving away from if we remake American liberalism in this way?
One of those things appears to be welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism more generally. Indeed, at times, the authors even slip into saying so explicitly. For instance, they write that:
For decades, American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. Liberals fought for expansions of health insurance and paid vacation leave and paid sick days and a heftier earned-income tax credit and an expanded child tax credit and decent retirement benefits. Worthy causes, all. But those victories could be won, when they were won, largely inside the tax code and the regulatory state. Building a social insurance program does occasionally require new buildings. But it rarely requires that many of them. This was, and is, a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.
The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds.
As someone who actually spends his time trying to convince people to adopt Nordic welfare institutions, the bolded sentence stopped me in my tracks. American liberals are internationally notable because of how thoroughly they reject proposals that mirror these systems.
The bigger issue here is that the authors do appear to be contrasting their agenda with the welfare state.
The Nordic countries don’t use means-tested tax credits to provide cash benefits to children. They just send all of the kids a check each month. The Nordic countries don’t expand health insurance via means-tested tax credits and mandates to buy private health insurance. They have universal public insurance. (On this point, the authors miss a chance to see how the inefficiency and administrative burdens they loathe in construction actually plague the welfare state too, something liberals are very much to blame for but also have no desire to fix.)
But putting that all aside, the bigger issue here is that, contrary to what Eric Levitz wrote in his review, the authors do appear to be contrasting their agenda with the welfare state. Elsewhere, they write that “the world we want requires more than redistribution,” which they punctuate by writing that “We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” They lump together the unexpected electoral performances of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and conclude that they show “how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable.” As Malcolm Harris notes, the implication is that both politicians flourished in the context of scarcity crises by indulging scarcity-thinking and offering zero-sum redistributionist solutions. The abundance agenda is presented both as a policy alternative to the “socialist left” and “populist-authoritarian right” — a Third Way if you will — and as a way of ushering in new economic conditions that will diminish their appeal.
Of course, I think it would be a huge mistake, on the merits, to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction, both because parceling out the present matters but also because these institutions will determine how the authors’ utopian future will be parceled out. Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.
This point is more general than Musk of course. Many of the anxieties that stoke opposition to the kinds of construction projects and rapid technological innovations favored by the authors are downstream of economic inegalitarianism. People block housing construction because they fear living next to the people that our economic system provides so little income to. They block nearby transportation and energy infrastructure because they don’t want to tumble down the economic ladder by impairing the value of their personal real estate assets. They resist productivity-enhancing technology because they fear job loss and permanent income loss. The preservation or deepening of economic inegalitarianism could easily turn the authors’ utopian vision of 2050 into a dystopian nightmare. Attending to distribution is a must.
Other critics of the book raise similar concerns about their agendas being sidelined. This has mostly come from antitrust advocates who managed to successfully fight their way to the top of the progressive economic agenda after the prior focuses on Sanders-style welfare statism and macroeconomic stimulus faded. Klein and Thompson don’t appear to say anything about antitrust in the book, neither to discuss its policy merits nor to use it as a contrast to the abundance agenda.
The only overlap seems to come when the authors pan a local San Francisco procurement regulation requiring that public money flow to small construction firms. Nonetheless, because it is the reigning top dog, antitrust advocates are right to worry that they have the most to lose if the narratives and policy focuses of Abundance become dominant. (As Gyauch-Lewis notes, we are already seeing hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of new organizations being established, all aimed at achieving this task.)
Political Practicality
One of the personally amusing aspects of reading Abundance is that it kept reminding me of a two-hour discussion I had with Klein in 2019 about Medicare for All. In the discussion, Klein is fairly agreeable to the point that moving to a universal public health insurance model would be hugely preferable over the status quo. Indeed, one of the main arguments in favor of such a move is the very abundance-style argument that it would cut out half a trillion annually from pointless health care administrative burdens. Another argument for Medicare for All is that it would reduce health care unit costs, something Abundance actually does discuss, but only in the context of hoping to induce a bidding-down of doctor pay by increasing doctor supply, something that would clearly not be as effective as a public insurer using monopsonistic price-setting power.
In our discussion, Klein balked at making Medicare for All the centerpiece of a Democratic health care agenda because he thought it was not politically practical. There is too much opposition of it from too many powerful constituencies on top of the usual status quo bias and general human fears of rapid change. At one point in the discussion, he asks how I would overcome employer opposition to the change, and I responded that we will just have to beat it, which he clearly did not find persuasive.
It’s not hard to imagine having the same conversation about Abundance but with the roles reversed. Whatever the merits of their proposals, Klein and Thompson are pushing an agenda that requires direct confrontation with many powerful, entrenched constituencies. The main thing they lament about the administrative burdens of construction is the way in which we have given homeowners — who account for two-thirds of the adult population and are older, richer, and more politically engaged than non-homeowners — effective veto rights over construction in their area, sometimes directly in the public planning process and other times indirectly by empowering them to sue developers. Will these homeowners want to be divested of this power so that transmission lines, railroads, energy plants, and apartment towers can be built right by them?
It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have.
In science, they are upset at the way in which the financing system favors older researchers institutions and individuals who know how to ply the grantmaking system. Do these people and institutions really want to see their funding redistributed to others? Do the American Medical Association and doctors more generally want to see a huge influx of doctor supply, something that is being pitched explicitly as serving the purpose of bidding down doctor salaries?
What about the firms that manage to win a lot of government business because they have figured out how to navigate the administrative burdens that drown so many of their competitors and drive up the cost? What about all of the highly paid consultants and paperwork jobs generated by the current system? Are these not exactly the same as the medical billers and health insurance claims adjusters that Medicare for All would displace in the name of efficiency? Doesn’t the diminution of their prospects make the whole thing a political nonstarter?
To be clear, this is not an argument I particularly care about. But it is one Klein purports to care about, at least when attempting to clip the ambitions of the Left. Yet Abundance never really grapples with it.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the book seems fine to me. I’d say the policy specifics are a bit of a retread, but that’s not really a critique: the authors never claim novelty and the book itself is literally a retread of some articles they wrote for the Atlantic and the New York Times. It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have. In short, I think the pique over the book is out of proportion to what the book is.
With that said, the broader Abundist world that the book is attempting to push forward — a world that appears to be teeming with libertarians, right-wing Democrats like Jared Polis and Ritchie Torres, refugees of the effective altruist implosion, and tech sector types — does seem like it could head in some pretty bad directions that Abundance would fit naturally into. But this would not be the fault of Klein and Thompson.
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Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.
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Book review: "Abundance"
In which Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer a whole new way of thinking about political economy.
Noah Smith
Mar 19, 2025
“We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” — Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” — Deng Xiaoping
I’ve been waiting a long time for this book. Late in 2021, Ezra Klein wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting”, in which he called for a new “supply-side progressivism”. Four months later, Derek Thompson wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems”, in which he called for an “abundance agenda”. Many people quickly recognized that these were essentially the same idea. Klein and Thompson recognized it too, and teamed up to co-author a book that would serve as a manifesto for this new big idea. Three years later, Abundance has hit the stores. It’s a good book, and you should read it.
The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change, and yet environmental regulations have made it incredibly difficult to replace fossil fuels with green energy. Many progressives dream about the days when government could accomplish great things, and post maps of imaginary high-speed rail networks crisscrossing the country, yet various progressive policies have hobbled the government’s ability to build infrastructure.
This is a story that many center-left commentators and researchers have been zeroing in on for about a decade now. I myself have written several posts in this vein. It’s also the theme of a recent book called Why Nothing Works, which is on my short list to read — in fact, some reviewers view Abundance and Why Nothing Works as companion volumes. (I strongly recommend this review of both books by Mike Konczal.)
Why have people been zeroing in on the idea of abundance right now, when these problems were already getting severe two or three decades ago? I think there are four basic motivating forces that have all come together at the same time.
First, there’s the housing shortage, and the YIMBY movement that has arisen to fight it. The orthodox progressive alternative — putting ever more onerous requirements on developers to subsidize rental properties, while throwing more public money at the problem — has failed spectacularly. And the anti-gentrification movement, which believes that building new housing raises rents, is simply wrong about how the world works. Economics is what it is, and the only way to make housing more affordable is to build a lot more of it.
Second, there was the experience of Covid. The U.S.’ initial failure to provide its people with enough Covid tests or face masks left the widespread impression of a dysfunctional and failing nation, but the successful effort to create and distribute vaccines very rapidly created a burst of hope that America’s dysfunction could be overcome.
Third, there’s the challenge of climate change. The average American doesn’t place a high priority on climate issues, but progressives do, and the 2010s were filled with grand plans like the Green New Deal that promised big government action to replace fossil fuels with more sustainable technologies. That effort hasn’t entirely failed, but it has proven much harder going than expected. Gallingly for progressives, the biggest thing blocking the greening of American energy hasn’t been the fossil fuel lobby or small-government conservatives, but progressive environmental laws that have allowed NIMBYs to sue solar plants and transmission lines into oblivion.
And finally, there’s the challenge of China, which Americans of both parties have (very belatedly) recognized as a major threat to their way of life. The contrast between China’s ability to build anything and everything with incredible speed and massive scale, and America’s seeming inability to build anything at all, has provided a terrifying wake-up call for progressives and conservatives alike.
Klein and Thompson discuss all of these challenges in detail. Of the five concrete items they want Americans to have more of — housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, and health care — four are clearly downstream of those pressing recent challenges.
Why does America not have enough housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, or health care? The typical progressive explanation is to blame lack of funding and the obstructionism of small-government conservatives. But while Klein and Thompson do acknowledge that this is sometimes part of the problem, they marshal powerful evidence that an even bigger obstacle is progressives getting in their own way.
Even when the checks do get written, the things progressives want tend not to get built. And even when they do, the cost ends up being so exorbitant that the money doesn’t go very far. California’s high-speed rail, hyped so much over decades and given billions of dollars in funding, still doesn’t exist. “Affordable” (i.e. subsidized) housing often costs half again as much to build as privately built housing. Biden’s programs to build nationwide systems of electric vehicle chargers and rural broadband ended up producing almost zero chargers and almost zero broadband.
Meanwhile, Texas, a red state known for its fiscal conservatism and its libertarian attitudes toward private business, has blown past blue states like California in terms of both green energy and affordable housing — a galling result for any progressive who can bear to look at the data. It’s specifically the well-funded blue-state and Democratic party initiatives that can’t seem to get things done.
Klein and Thompson identify three big categories of progressive policy — all of which were enacted in the early 1970s — that stymie progressive goals.
The first is procedural environmental laws. Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive laws. This legal requirement — which typically only applies to developments that receive government support — adds huge delays, uncertainties, and costs to most projects, even those that don’t end up getting sued.
The second progressive own goal is contracting requirements for government projects. Sometimes these take the form of requirements that the government use minority-owned or woman-owned contractors. When racial discrimination of this sort is outlawed (such as by a California ballot proposition in 1996), progressives often turn to requirements they think will accomplish the same goal, such as mandates to use small business contractors. But this adds vast amounts to the price tag, because it prevents contractors from achieving the scale needed to drive down costs. Other contracting requirements add costs directly, by forcing developers to provide various expensive community benefits in exchange for government support.
The third thing progressives get wrong is outsourcing. You might think progressives would like to have big-government bureaucrats do everything, but in fact they tend to outsource government functions, either to progressive nonprofits or to consultants. This ends up adding lots of costs, because nonprofits and consultants don’t have any incentive to save the taxpayer money.
Notice how all three of these progressive policies end up hobbling government more than they hobble the private sector. Procedural environmental laws typically only apply to projects that the government has a hand in. Contracting requirements apply specifically to government procurement. And outsourcing robs the government of the state capacity that it needs to be effective.
American progressivism has the reputation of supporting big government, but in practice it often just tries to use government as a pass-through entity to write checks to various “stakeholders”, while preventing it from actually being able to do anything other than write checks. This is a problem that European and Asian countries, with their powerful bureaucracies, simply don’t have to nearly the same extent. America’s progressivism is uniquely libertarian in nature, and its conception of the proper role of the state is uniquely legalistic instead of bureaucratic.
Basically, Klein and Thompson call for a return to the older tradition of a progressive state that gets things done instead of just paying people out — more FDR and less Ralph Nader. But in doing so, they also articulate an alternative vision of political economy — a fundamentally different way of thinking about policy debates in America.
Currently, most American policy debates are framed in terms of ideology — small government versus big government. Instead, Klein and Thompson, like the YIMBY movement that inspired them, want to reframe debates in terms of results. Who cares if new housing is social housing or market-rate housing, as long as people have affordable places to live? Why should cutting burdensome regulation and hiring more bureaucrats be seen as alternatives, instead of complementary approaches? And so on.
This is only one way that Klein and Thompson would have us focus on outputs instead of on inputs. Progressives love to focus on the number of dollars the government spends on high speed rail or green energy; Klein and Thompson would have us focus instead on how much actually gets built as a result of that spending. Progressives obsess over specifying which procedures government and the private sector have to follow whenever they build something; Klein and Thompson would rather we focus on the outcomes instead.
Interestingly, this reminds me a little of the debate over corporate culture in Japan. Traditionally, Japanese managers focus on how many hours their employees are working, instead of how much work they’re actually getting done. The result is astonishingly low levels of white-collar productivity. In recent years, there has been a push to shift to a more results-oriented culture. Klein and Thompson are essentially arguing for something similar in the U.S., but for government instead of big business.
But in any case, this is a huge idea, and one that America desperately needs in these trying times. For half a century, we assumed that America was this golden goose — the greatest industrial nation in the world, blah blah — that would reliably pump out massive amounts of stuff, and that we were all essentially just the custodians of this cornucopia. The fetish for ideology, for proceduralism, and for numbers on a page all reflect this bedrock assumption. But over that half century we forgot about feeding the goose, and now we’re waking up to the fact that we’re not the greatest industrial nation in the world anymore, and all the rules we devised for divvying up that bounty are worse than useless when the bounty dries up.
There is much work still to be done in order to explain the new output-oriented perspective. It has been a long time since progressives thought in those terms. You can see this in some of the critiques that are already being leveled against Klein and Thompson’s book. For example, law professor Zephyr Teachout expresses confusion about whether Klein and Thompson want big-government or small-government solutions:
[T]he vision they lay out could either fit a broad deregulatory agenda, like that of the “shock doctors” of the 1990s, or an FDR vision of rural electrification: both were driven by a hunt for vitality…[I]t would be very easy to take their critique as a muffled call for deregulation writ large; if they are not careful, the ambiguity could be used by big financial interests to make abundance a bible for a Ronald Reagan–style deregulatory juggernaut…There’s some language that casually evokes economies of scale hinting at a Chicago School efficiency and consumer welfare framework of economic productivity, but also some praise of Bidenomics, which directly confronted and rejected the efficiency paradigm…I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.
This confusion vividly reveals how accustomed Teachout is to thinking of policy debates in terms of ideological procedure — big versus small government, industrial policy vs. deregulation, Chicago School versus antitrust, etc. She’s sitting there puzzling over the color of Deng Xiaoping’s cat.
Klein and Thompson’s answer to Teachout’s question is that it’s the wrong question. If deregulation produces more housing, then deregulate. If building more social housing produces more housing, then build more social housing. Why not both? The point is not what legal philosophy you embrace in order to get more housing. The point is that you get the housing.
Progressivism should not be a ritual to be followed; it should be a tool to getting real stuff that makes life better for the middle class and the working class of America. That is the big insight at the core of Abundance, and of the movement behind it. And it’s an insight that legalistic, theory-oriented progressives will take a long time to understand, if they ever do.
But here we get to my main criticism of Klein and Thompson’s book. While they do a good job of explaining their philosophy of government, they are often vague and overly nonconfrontational when it comes to the ideological motivation behind that philosophy.
Throughout their book, Klein and Thompson take great pains to specify that the goals of progressive obstructionism are good, and that they only disagree with the methods. It’s littered with statements like “Every one of these is a worthy goal,” and “Each individual [obstructionist] decision is rational.” But is this really true? If San Francisco outsources critical city functions to politically friendly nonprofits, is that actually a worthy goal, or just corrupt? If federal funding is saddled with onerous reporting requirements that prevent anything from getting done, is that rational, or just plain stupid?
Klein and Thompson never spare the opportunity to pull a punch. I suspect this is because of the personalities of the authors. Thompson — who, I should mention, is the man who got me my first paid op-ed gig, at The Atlantic — is the nicest of nice guys, and not the type to bash the opposition. Klein can be a little more hard-edged at times, but ultimately he’s a big-tent coalition builder — the kind of guy who ends the meeting by saying “OK, so we all know what we need to do.”
But in this case, as at times in the past, Klein has brought a gavel to a knife fight. Progressives didn’t just adopt anti-growth attitudes because they were reacting to the excesses of Robert Moses. Anti-growth attitudes are motivated by more than just NIMBYism and fear of change. There are deep class resentments involved.
Deng Xiaoping — perhaps the most pro-abundance leader of all time — understood this all too well. He famously declared:
Our policy is to let some people and some regions get rich first, in order to drive and help the backward regions, and it is an obligation for the advanced regions to help the backward regions.
He understood that unleashing growth would lead to a few people and places getting spectacularly rich. And he offered the same bargain that abundance liberals in the West have always offered — redistribution as a palliative for inequality.1
To some, that deal is not good enough. Leftists believe that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, even if the policies that allow a few people to be billionaires result in the masses getting cheap food and clothing. The Warrenite progressives and labor-left types who are stepping up to criticize Abundance are not so extreme, but it’s clear that a lot of their skepticism comes from concern over the relative power of different social classes.
In her book review, Zephyr Teachout offers antitrust as an alternative to the abundance agenda:
If we just…took on the real bureaucratic behemoths of today—the private equity cartels and the monstrous platform monopolies like Google and Meta—we would unlock far more innovation and creativity and vitality…My view then, and now, is that to transform a bloated corporate feudal system into a dynamic one, we need to break up feudal power[.]
Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, who have another negative review2 of Abundance (also in the Washington Monthly), also label it as a “centrist” alternative to anti-corporatism:
[A]bundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and antigovernment politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.
Why are all these critics of abundance liberalism talking nonstop about monopolies and corporate power? It’s not as if Klein and Thompson think antitrust is bad. Part of it is just because these are Elizabeth Warren types who are ensconced in a very small elite thought-bubble, who have somehow convinced themselves that A) bashing corporations is a populist crusade that will lead people flooding into the streets,3 and B) breaking up Google and Meta would somehow make the average American rich.4 That’s part of it.
But part of it has got to be class resentment. There are a number of elite progressives who simply don’t like the idea that in an America of growth and abundance, a few techbros would be very rich. Redistribution isn’t enough to make this bargain palatable — rich entrepreneurs must be cut off from the sources of their wealth, through antitrust, regulation, wealth taxes, or whatever tools are available.
Abundance liberalism just doesn’t care about that stuff; zero-sum status struggles like that are simply not a goal. What matters to the abundance agenda is that regular people — the middle class, the working class, and the poor — have a less onerous life. If that means rich people have to give up some of their wealth, then fine, but if it means that rich people get richer, that’s also fine.
Klein and Thompson either didn’t come prepared for this ideological fight, or made a conscious decision to avoid it. But it’s probably unavoidable. In order to make the abundance agenda the new “political order” of America, its proponents are going to have to make a forceful ideological argument for why enriching the average American is Job #1, rather than one job among many.
Those arguments are out there. They include humanitarian appeals, and appeals to dignity. They include appeals to national unity and solidarity, and the idea of an America where anyone can get ahead. They include the idea that abundance is a form of freedom, and that all Americans deserve that freedom. At times in the 20th century, these arguments won out over those who were more concerned with class warfare and power than with material well-being.
But these arguments must be made forcefully, instead of quietly relegated to the background. If abundance liberals are going to win, they need to get tough.
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1
Though it was Hu Jintao who actually made good on that promise, at least to some extent.
2
This article, by the way, is incredibly bad. It makes a blizzard of bad arguments — repeating the discredited Left-NIMBY claim that market-rate housing doesn’t reduce rents, blaming corporate developers for high rents, blaming private utilities for the lack of new electrical transmission, and so on. Glastris and Weisberg also willfully ignore most of what Klein and Thompson actually write — they offer state capacity as an alternative to the abundance agenda even though Klein and Thompson spend much of their book talking about the need for higher state capacity. Many of their arguments recapitulate Klein and Thompson’s arguments, but then somehow paint this as a criticism of Klein and Thompson. One gets the impression that Glastris and Weisberg didn’t actually read the book they were reviewing, but simply skimmed pieces of it and decided it must all just be about deregulation.
3
A prominent progressive thinker recently argued to me that Luigi Mangione showed that there’s popular rage against corporations, and that this rage could be harnessed by the antitrust movement. I laughed out loud.
4
It would not.
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Discussion about this post
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/book-review-abundance/comment/101610524
DougAz
3월 19일
I've felt for a couple of decades that my left Democrat party was so poorly focused that, as we say (said ie old school) they couldn't manage their way out of a paper bag.
Focus means understanding, the proper and powerful end goal.
Goals are scores. Scores count. Playing well does not mean winning.
Outcome thinking is awesome = increase things you can actually see, hold, buy.
This is a great beginning game plan.
But.
We will need such a strong charismatic, simple but elegant speaking leader. A person to first gently and persuasive get the Dems in and on board. Putting all the mangled many tongued narcissists aside, inside or smash them outside.
Focus is needed. Consistent hammering of Abundance OUTCOME benefits. Again and again
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Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal)
3월 19일
Edited
Excellent -- especially the part about the tendency to bring a gavel to a knife fight, not understanding that the people are going to notice who is holding the gavel (the elites). Indeed there are deep class resentments involved. But I think the resentments are less about money than power. Who has the power to hold the gavel actually matters: voters wouldn't mind more abundance of power to decide how a town is managed and which small towns matter -- where are the big high rises going to be built, and the factory, and who will get a voice. There was a reason union bosses had power back in the day. That's the language that works.
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