America is in a funk. People are unhappy with every major institution of government, from Congress to the Supreme Court to newspapers to the Democratic Party, and they lack confidence in the future. The rent is too damn high and wages too low, the health care system is broken, fires and floods are wrecking our communities, and we can’t even build a decent high-speed rail to rival 1990s Europe.
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.
To be a vital economy, we know we should be building new and better things—more housing, better transit systems, and solar everywhere the sun shines and wind farms everywhere the wind blows. We should be innovating to build technologies never dreamed of. We should be tearing down bloated power structures, tapping into the profound innovative capacities of Americans to build, create, and flourish.
In certain corners of the Twitterati, Substack, and elite magazines, the notion of “abundance” has started to circulate as a possible response to this modern malaise. The “abundance movement,” with roots in “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) advocates and environmental permitting reform advocates, positions itself as an answer to the funk—and as the core future agenda of the Democratic Party.
In Abundance, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson seek to stake out what this movement should be. They argue that America’s inability to build is the result of deliberate policy decisions, bureaucratic inertia, and progressive ideological commitments that have prioritized redistribution over production. They advocate for a version of supply-side progressivism, in which the government plays a proactive role in expanding the supply of essential goods and services, rather than simply subsidizing demand or withdrawing from economic support.
The book opens with a utopian vision of the year 2050, in which clean energy, vertical farming, and AI-assisted productivity have transformed daily life. This future is not a work of science fiction, the authors argue, but rather a political and economic possibility—one that will only be realized if policymakers reorient themselves around abundance. Klein and Thompson contrast this optimistic vision with the failures of the early 21st century, where the U.S. struggled with a housing crisis, a broken health care system, and political gridlock that prevented meaningful action on climate change and infrastructure. They argue that while America once prided itself on ambitious, large-scale projects—such as the postwar housing boom and the construction of the interstate highway system—it has now become a country that knows what it needs to build, but fails to build it.
The foundational premise of Abundance is the assertion that there is a widespread ideology of scarcity, a quasi-theological belief that America lacks the resources, technology, or capacity to solve its most pressing crises—whether in housing, energy, or health care. Both Republicans and Democrats are allegedly in the grip of this ideology, which has led them to abandon the future, although in different ways. The authors argue that while conservatives have long championed deregulation and tax cuts under the banner of supply-side economics, they have largely abandoned the idea of government playing a role in actually building the things society needs. Meanwhile, liberals have focused too much on subsidizing demand—providing assistance for housing, health care, and education—without ensuring that the supply of these essential goods grows to meet the rising need. This has led to high costs, limited access, and worsening economic inequality, despite enormous government spending.
Their key example of the left’s version of this failure is the housing crisis in America’s wealthiest, predominantly Democratic, cities. The authors argue that restrictive zoning laws, environmental regulations, and local opposition have made it nearly impossible to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco and New York. The result? Burdensome rent, unaffordable homes, and urban life that is grim, costly, and lacking in economic opportunity. As they put it, cities “are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” They argue that this pattern is repeated in health care, infrastructure, and energy—areas where well-intended regulations have inadvertently stifled the very innovations needed to make essential goods and services more abundant.
One of the most damning real-world examples they use is the California high-speed rail debacle, a project that was meant to revolutionize transportation but has instead become a symbol of bureaucratic dysfunction. The project has been stalled for decades due to legal challenges, environmental reviews, and political infighting, resulting in billions of dollars spent with little progress. This failure exemplifies for them how excessive regulation and a political tendency to search for “no” can cripple ambitious public projects.
Instead, they argue, we should look to supply-side success stories and work to replicate them. Over the past decade, the cost of solar energy has dropped by nearly 90 percent; they claim that this is due to public investment, technological advances, and economies of scale. Significant and fast change is possible if policymakers commit to scaling up solutions rather than merely tinkering around the edges.
It can be jarring to read about zoning while Elon Musk chainsaws through the government, plundering public money for his own benefit, but Klein and Thompson argue that there is a direct connection: a failure to build represents a political stagnation that has led to political crises. Without cheap housing and energy, affordable health care, and basic infrastructure, public trust erodes and populist movements thrive. A government incapable of solving material problems creates a vacuum that demagogues fill. The authors imagine an abundance movement that will “marginalize the most dangerous political movements” by “prov[ing] the success of your own.” (A minor question I had throughout is whether their theory means that abundance cannot be a popular public movement until it succeeds, or whether they also believe that abundance could be an organizing principle for a grassroots bottom-up movement before any reforms have been implemented.)
The authors have special disdain for progressive governance in California, which they claim should be a model of liberal success but instead struggles with housing shortages, homelessness, and infrastructure failures. They argue that while liberal politicians have embraced redistribution, they have been reluctant to embrace the production-oriented policies needed to make essentials like housing and transportation more affordable. As they bluntly state, “Democrats learned to look for opportunities to subsidize. They lost the knack for making it easier to build.”
In the final chapters, Abundance lays out a vision for a new political economy—one focused on building, investing, and expanding the supply of essential goods and services. The authors argue that policy-makers must embrace a proactive role in technological and industrial policy, ensuring that breakthroughs in clean energy, biotechnology, and infrastructure are not just invented but also widely deployed. As they might put it, a society that innovates but does not deploy, that invents but does not build, is a society that chooses stagnation.
I frequently disagree with Ezra Klein, but I almost always find him compelling, thoughtful, and worth engaging. Derek Thompson has a knack for elegantly identifying some of the great spiritual challenges of our time. So I opened Abundance with a fair amount of excitement. Like or hate it, I’d finally understand what this abundance thing is all about, and get to wrestle with a big political vision. As I closed it, however, I was still left wrestling, but not with big ideas—with far more mundane questions about scope and meaning.
The book toggles between very specific examples and a very broad spiritual stance, with a lot less meat in the mid-zone. That means the 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. While the authors insist that the book’s examples of high-speed rail, expensive cities, and blocked wind projects are intended to stand for something other than significant reform in those areas, the signified “something else” never quite comes into view.
For instance, in a chapter on green energy, they explain how more than 60 federal laws, including the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many others, are regularly used to slow or halt green energy wind projects. They support NEPA reform, and a proposal that would fast-track green energy projects so as not to pit green against green, but are very clear that law is not enough, we need “a change in the political culture.” What do they think that “change” would be? Liberalism “needs to see the problems in what it has been taught to see as the solution … it is not always clear how to strike the right balance. But a balance that doesn’t allow us to meet our climate goals has to be the wrong one.” A version of this vague conclusory exhortation is far too common throughout the book.
As a result, it 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.
The zoning reform example ends up revealing that the authors are burdened by the very scarcity mind-set they diagnose. They seek to dismantle the zoning rules and some of the procedural hurdles that require local input in residential building. Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it.
Or is it? It emerges that the examples they give from New York and San Francisco are not examples at all. Instead, they and a few other coastal cities are the whole object of reform. These cities seem to bear almost magical capacities for the authors, who cite research that purportedly shows that they are more productive than other places. But rather than ask what policies have drained wealth away from such once-vibrant centers of innovation as St. Louis or Cincinnati, they presume that if only more people moved to New York or San Francisco the nation’s productivity would soar, and that the only big obstacle to this happening is exclusionary zoning and burdensome building permit requirements.
Doctor, heal thyself! They seem to be blinded by their own scarcity mind-set. When it comes to the resources of humans and places, they imagine that only a few places can be the engines of the country. I live in New York City now, and I love New York City, but the “fiery creation of the new” does not only happen here or in one of a few supercities. Frozen food, the radio, the airplane, were all created far from any major urban hub. As for for productivity and contributions to GDP, places like Rockford, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Cleveland, Ohio, were all among the 25 richest metro areas as recently as the mid-1960s.
It cannot be that people need to move to a handful of elite coastal cities to produce abundance. The growth of regional inequality of opportunity that the authors’ own scarcity mind-set represents is a real problem, and has little to do with land use regulation and everything to do with the deregulatory push from the 1970s to the 2020s and the resulting concentration of power and shift of resources from the real economy to the financial sector.
The 40-year stagnation of wages, and the drop in small and medium-sized businesses, is a supply-side story that they simply don’t engage—one that, as the former chair of the FTC Lina Khan and many others have recognized, is a direct result of monopolization and financialization.
If they took their own “stop the scarcity mind-set” medicine, they’d realize that the industrial policy of the 1980s to 2020, not zoning, was what caused the scarcity of opportunity throughout the country—and we can change that policy. During the most productive and innovative era in American history, places like Corning, New York, known as a glassware technology powerhouse, and St. Louis, which once had 22 Fortune 500 companies and a thriving “creative class,” were the centers of the dynamism. If we just got out of the modern coastal-scarcity mind-set and 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.
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. For instance, they trace America’s decline in semiconductor manufacturing and argue that ceding ground to Taiwan and South Korea was not due to inevitable economic forces but rather a failure to have a long-term industrial policy. They highlight Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act as a belated attempt to reverse this trend, and argue persuasively that interventions must be sustained and expanded if the U.S. is to reclaim its leadership in critical industries.
Which is to say, 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.
It happens that I have a personal affinity for the language of abundance. My very first speech in my very first campaign for public office was about abundance and scarcity, and how we needed to reject Andrew Cuomo’s scarcity mind-set, which was holding back New York’s economy.
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, unlock the brilliance that accompanies human freedom, and allow small and medium-sized businesses to prosper. We have to stop thinking of economic development as giving out big grants to big donors. Instead, we need to start thinking about it as building platforms for entrepreneurs and new ideas
to flourish.
This position has a long lineage and is currently at the center of major public debates on industrial policy. After finishing Abundance, however, I’m unclear about where the authors stand on those debates. I know what they think about permitting reform, NEPA, and the NIH, and I know they think we need to be more solution oriented. But I don’t know what their agenda requires outside of that.
The post An Abundance of Ambiguity appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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