The timing of Abundance, the new book by the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is extraordinary. The good news is, the authors have dropped a potent political manifesto into the lap of a Democratic Party that seems confused about any messaging bolder than “Trump take egg.” Klein and Thompson offer a vision of a “liberalism that builds,” a can-do antidote to blue-state malaise.
The bad news, for this book and many other things besides, is our actual existing government, whose actions further undermine Klein and Thompson’s ideas with each new day. Abundance has a chapter about how the National Institutes of Health has grown more conservative in its grantmaking, to the detriment of scientific discovery. Meanwhile, long-shot research projects have been singled out for mockery and defunding by Elon Musk and DOGE. The authors argue for a more flexible immigration policy, just as Tom Homan disappears asylum-seekers to the Panamanian jungle. And the authors suggest that climate change can be staved off only by investment and invention, right as the administration tries to claw back or freeze grants to green energy projects and universities.
Abundance
By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Avid Reader Press.
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It’s a bit like discussing how you’d like to redecorate your house while your neighbors strip the copper wiring from your walls. Still, if the book’s vision of a world after abundance seems distant, its optimism is also compelling, even joyous. I’d say it’s odds-on that the Democratic National Committee platform in 2028 uses the word abundance to describe some of its aspirations. It helps that Klein’s megapopular column and podcast at the New York Times has him in contention for “the most influential Democratic media figure.” Just the other day, he was talking abundance with U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, and no doubt more Democrats will follow.
To see why this word has “captured the imagination of the coastal wonk class,” as Jordan Weissmann wrote last year, it helps to understand Klein and Thompson’s diagnosis of Democratic paralysis. “Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford,” they write. Such policies have made up the backbone of Democratic politics for nearly a century: Social Security, minimum wage, food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, Medicare, Pell Grants, child tax credits.
But those demand-side subsidies quickly lose their power if you do not ensure an adequate supply of the goods and services you want people to access. And here, we have a problem: “Liberals spent decades working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or slow to construct, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all.” Thompson, a persistently clever reporter at the Atlantic, framed the antidote in a 2022 column that now reads like a book proposal: “abundance.”
The writers acknowledge up front that parts of the book are sewn together from their own published articles, and it suffers at times from a lack of clear structure. But Abundance is unabashed in synthesizing good ideas, stringing together (and generously citing, in the text) books and papers about NIMBYism, construction, environmentalism, clean energy, government technology, procurement rules, medicine, science, and invention to make its point. Klein and Thompson argue that liberals (with the occasional assist from conservative saboteurs) have hamstrung their own ability to do good.
This is a familiar diagnosis. It was the subject of two books just last month: Marc Dunkelman’s historically rich Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back and Yoni Appelbaum’s more focused Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. But neither of those authors has the star power to ditch publishing’s de rigueur explanatory subtitle, a choice that crystallizes this book’s ambition. This book is not an idle account; it is open in its aims to drive changes in Democratic strategy.
Government failure can be separated into three categories. First are the cases where our laws have been captured by narrow interest groups to the obvious detriment of the public good. One such case is the straitjacket of “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, policies that have frozen many neighborhoods in amber over the past 50 years. One of the more compelling examples of the abundance agenda in action is the opposing YIMBY movement, for “yes in my backyard.” Over the past decade, pro-housing activists have blitzed city councils and statehouses with popular, commonsense bills that permit more neighbors to move in, prevailing over the objections of a few local homeowners. Democrats from AOC to Barack Obama have embraced the cause.
Second, there are the cases where government sluggishness is the deliberate result of smothering the administrative state beneath blankets of foolproof rules. Thanks to Klein’s background as a crack health care reporter, this book is strongest in its critique of complicated grant applications, notice-and-comment rulemaking, procurement box-checking, endless committees, and frequent court challenges that dog government action and interaction. “The American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less,” Klein and Thompson write. Many of these checks and balances have their roots in liberal suspicion of government, but today this risk-aversion strategy impedes Democrats’ effective exercise of power at all levels.
When these checks are circumvented—often in an emergency—the results are striking. Consider how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro managed to rebuild a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia in just 12 days. Under an emergency declaration, state Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll was able to forgo an environmental assessment and a traditional bidding process, enlisting two unionized contractors who happened to be working nearby. It was a triumph: Shapiro was celebrated for showing that government could still get things done, and wrote that the first lesson was to “empower strong leadership” that could (legally) decide which customs to follow and which to ignore, and subsequently accept credit or blame for those choices.
Third, and most challenging, are the many instances where the administrative bottlenecks to abundance represent distinct interests of the Democratic coalition. Unions, for example, reasonably support wage requirements for the workers who build public buildings and Buy America mandates for the equipment on public transit systems. Accessibility requirements for affordable multifamily housing represent a civil rights victory for Americans with disabilities. Contracting preference for women or minority-owned businesses speaks for itself.
In a 2021 column, Klein memorably described liberals’ tendency to weigh down policy with other priorities as the “everything-bagel problem”—put too many things on the bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. The expression has circulated widely since. It’s in untangling these trade-offs that the rubber meets the road for abundance policy. “To unmake this machine will be painful,” the authors note. “It will require questioning treasured nostrums and splitting old alliances.”
The book falls short of delineating which alliances to split—a choose-your-own-Bluesky-pile-on awaits for every politician who appears on the Ezra Klein Show. But there are lessons from pop psychology, where decades of gurus have pitted the “abundance mindset” against the “scarcity mindset.” Many actors in American society, our president most of all, take as a first principle that the size of the economic pie is limited. Trade unions cling to outdated staffing rules on the assumption that there is a limited amount of work to go around. White-collar professionals like doctors and dentists protect their turf with occupational licensing laws and educational requirements. Small-business owners cling to a parking spot outside the shop because they cannot imagine that new customers might arrive from a new apartment building across the street. For abundance to take hold, the thought that life could be better—as the poet said—must be woven, indelibly, into their hearts and their brains.
In its rejection of this zero-sum thinking, what makes “abundance” different from the old pro-growth liberalism of America in its midcentury boom years—itself already the subject of, among other studies, a 2007 book called The Age of Abundance? As in many theories of politics, the key is: more good things and fewer bad things.
At midcentury, the nation built an abundance of urban expressways and manufactured an ocean of disposable plastics—maybe let’s leave those behind. Then came millennial consumer abundance: near-universal access to cheap meat, fast fashion, and addictive screens. It turns out not everything about that is great either.
This time around, Klein and Thompson suggest, our abundance focus should be on housing, transportation, energy, and health—who could argue for less? But some conflicts lie down that road as well. The most popular policy use of the word abundance in recent years has been in a Republican talking point: energy abundance. That means continuing to burn coal, gas, and oil. Abundance is not a replacement for a value system. You need to know what you want and don’t want before you ask for more.
If there’s an elephant in the abundance room, it’s the Republican Party. Donald Trump and his followers are basically absent from what amounts to a liberal intervention. Where the GOP does appear in Abundance, it is in a handful of maddeningly framed “both sides” phrases: “Liberals might detest the language that Trump and Vance use to demonize immigrants. But blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics.” (Jane Jacobs never sent anyone to Guantánamo for sporting a Michael Jordan tattoo.) Or: “We are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.” (That is not the first way I would characterize our current “conservative movement.”) But perhaps it’s for the best: Who knows what the GOP stands for these days, besides Trump’s latest whim? At least if Dems can solve problems in blue states, they might be able to pitch a national Project 2029 to voters. The work of “institutional renewal” has never seemed more urgent.
The book’s core lesson, convincingly delivered, is that liberals ought to make it easier to do the things they want to do. “What is scarce that should be abundant?” Klein and Thompson write. “What is hard to build that should be easy?” Identifying the goals is often difficult; putting them into practice shouldn’t be. This will alienate some constituencies and lead to some embarrassing mistakes. But the result will be, well, results. Imagine if, in three years, voters could look to New York, California, or Massachusetts and say with pride: This is what democracy looks like.
