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Abundance
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2025)A groundbreaking work from bestselling authors and journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
7 pages, Audio CD
First published March 18, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,119 reviews
February 24, 2025
This was a pretty big let down for me, I wanted to feel inspired and excited by the thinking in this book. Their thesis is very thin and feels more like two guys lecturing the reader on all that is wrong than actually providing a vision for a world of abundance instead of scarcity. Mostly it is a few essays expanded and tacked together, which is a bummer because we could use real rigorous thinking about how to create better futures and systems. The writing is good but the arguments are lacking.
March 23, 2025
Abundance is a brilliant work of synthesis, tying together a lot of ideas that have been developed in the policy community to make a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts. I find myself almost entirely in agreement with the book. But there is no fun in agreement so after briefly summarizing it I will spend most of this review talking about what I think is missing or could be extended. (I should say, with books where I disagree with the overall thesis I put my effort in the opposite direction, trying to figure out what I agreed with, learned from it, or was challenged by.)
I will let Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson summarize: “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” The book is in argument with the de-growthers and in supplement to the focus on the demand side. Underlying it is a political diagnosis that, “America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it” and a real anger at the way in which blue states, especially California, have failed their citizens—and helped discredit government in the process.
The book focuses on four areas: (i) the need for land use reform to build more housing and lower the cost, (ii) the massive amount of infrastructure that needs to be built for clean energy to be able to electrify everything (“The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land.”), (iii) the need to build state capacity, and (iv) investing in science and innovation, including making sure existing dollars go further by, for example, funding earlier-stage scientists doing higher-risk research.
From my perspective (and Ezra and Derek may well agree), Abundance provides a useful motivation to find more tools for the toolkit. It is not close to a complete economic plan; taxes, subsidies, and redistribution are important, but it presents elements that are often underappreciated. Many of these have beneficiaries that are not local residents for housing or in the future for climate change or scientific research; helping to organize them into a movement, like NIMBYs, can help overcome some entrenched interests and help get more stuff done. Moreover, I am convinced Abundance provides a toolkit for governing and influencing the people who are governing, but I’m somewhere between agnostic and skeptical about it as a political movement to win elections.
Still, I would highlight six places where I either have disagreements with Ezra an Derek or have a complementary view that is underrepresented in their book (which is perfectly fair; you can’t cover everything):
1. Scarcity is a pervasive fact of life. Scarcity of money. Scarcity of the things people want, like great views from their houses or across natural vistas. Scarcity of time, attention, resources, and more. The authors are right to emphasize pushing out the production possibility frontier, but it will still be there with all the tradeoffs. Why does this matter? Because much of the opposition to their ideas will come from the people that are losing out—and it is pointless to deny that there are those losers.
2. What groups are the obstacles to their vision? As many have pointed out, the authors are coy about what Democratic interest groups they are against. Some of the environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, are clearly depicted as part of the problem. But how about labor unions? The authors are mostly silent on them. Or various identitarian groups? Or the Brahmin left? Why exactly is it that Republicans get this more right than Democrats? Is it because they are less in thrall to the “groups”? The authors want to build a big tent and not alienate anyone, but that may not be possible.
3. The focus on energy, housing, and medical innovation is too limited. From 1948 to 1973, productivity rose at 2.8 percent per year. Since then, it has risen at closer to 1.8 percent per year. This is the biggest factor in the slowdown of wage growth for typical families over the last half century. Housing matters, but it is only a fraction of the typical household’s budget. Energy needs to be cleaner for climate change, but one should not overstate how transformative it is. For most purposes, when you plug something into a socket, it works the same whether the electrons were generated by coal or by solar (cheaper electricity will open up new avenues for electrification, including most exciting carbon removal at scale). Ultimately, higher productivity growth is going to require innovation across the wide range of what people currently buy—plus all sorts of stuff that does not exist yet. I wish there was more on economic growth overall and not just these areas.
4. Does America really have a development failure? The book laments the fact that the United States invents stuff but then doesn’t make them, with examples including the elevator and solar power. This felt more anecdotal and less grounded in research than the rest of the book. I just do not know how pervasive an issue this is, what solutions are needed, and generally with limited exceptions prefer the government to stay as far towards the R side of R&D as possible. I am open to it being a bigger issue but would like to know more than just the solar example—which by itself was convincing but just because of the associated externalities.
5. Personnel matters. The saying “personnel is policy” is overstated; in my experience, personnel are often very responsive to the people above them—and ultimately elected leaders—helping to fill out their vision. But personnel is management (better phrases for that most welcome). A friend who has worked extensively with state welfare agencies said Republican ones are much better run because they hire experienced business people, often in a national search, whereas Democratic governors elevate a local do-gooder who cannot manage as effectively. Getting more business people into government would help advance a lot of their goals.
6. How to measure success—and not bullshit oneself. One advantage of demand policies is that it is often easier to figure out what was done at scale. Provide $200 tax credits limited to only a dozen children, and people will notice that you did not accomplish much. But now multiple blue-state governors are embracing the abundance rhetoric and talking about everything they are doing to streamline permitting and increase building. But are these token steps? More substantial? You have to be deeply immersed in the details to know (in fact, I often could not tell when I worked in the Obama administration which of our permitting reform efforts were more hype or more reality). So some way to establish metrics and accountability instead of just celebrating any rhetorical successes will be necessary for this approach to truly be a success. And maybe the business types working in government can help with that.
I will let Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson summarize: “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” The book is in argument with the de-growthers and in supplement to the focus on the demand side. Underlying it is a political diagnosis that, “America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it” and a real anger at the way in which blue states, especially California, have failed their citizens—and helped discredit government in the process.
The book focuses on four areas: (i) the need for land use reform to build more housing and lower the cost, (ii) the massive amount of infrastructure that needs to be built for clean energy to be able to electrify everything (“The Interstate Highway System is forty-nine thousand miles of road. The interstate clean-energy system—the solar farms, the wind turbines, the geothermal land, the transmission lines, the pipes—will touch more than five hundred thousand miles of land.”), (iii) the need to build state capacity, and (iv) investing in science and innovation, including making sure existing dollars go further by, for example, funding earlier-stage scientists doing higher-risk research.
From my perspective (and Ezra and Derek may well agree), Abundance provides a useful motivation to find more tools for the toolkit. It is not close to a complete economic plan; taxes, subsidies, and redistribution are important, but it presents elements that are often underappreciated. Many of these have beneficiaries that are not local residents for housing or in the future for climate change or scientific research; helping to organize them into a movement, like NIMBYs, can help overcome some entrenched interests and help get more stuff done. Moreover, I am convinced Abundance provides a toolkit for governing and influencing the people who are governing, but I’m somewhere between agnostic and skeptical about it as a political movement to win elections.
Still, I would highlight six places where I either have disagreements with Ezra an Derek or have a complementary view that is underrepresented in their book (which is perfectly fair; you can’t cover everything):
1. Scarcity is a pervasive fact of life. Scarcity of money. Scarcity of the things people want, like great views from their houses or across natural vistas. Scarcity of time, attention, resources, and more. The authors are right to emphasize pushing out the production possibility frontier, but it will still be there with all the tradeoffs. Why does this matter? Because much of the opposition to their ideas will come from the people that are losing out—and it is pointless to deny that there are those losers.
2. What groups are the obstacles to their vision? As many have pointed out, the authors are coy about what Democratic interest groups they are against. Some of the environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, are clearly depicted as part of the problem. But how about labor unions? The authors are mostly silent on them. Or various identitarian groups? Or the Brahmin left? Why exactly is it that Republicans get this more right than Democrats? Is it because they are less in thrall to the “groups”? The authors want to build a big tent and not alienate anyone, but that may not be possible.
3. The focus on energy, housing, and medical innovation is too limited. From 1948 to 1973, productivity rose at 2.8 percent per year. Since then, it has risen at closer to 1.8 percent per year. This is the biggest factor in the slowdown of wage growth for typical families over the last half century. Housing matters, but it is only a fraction of the typical household’s budget. Energy needs to be cleaner for climate change, but one should not overstate how transformative it is. For most purposes, when you plug something into a socket, it works the same whether the electrons were generated by coal or by solar (cheaper electricity will open up new avenues for electrification, including most exciting carbon removal at scale). Ultimately, higher productivity growth is going to require innovation across the wide range of what people currently buy—plus all sorts of stuff that does not exist yet. I wish there was more on economic growth overall and not just these areas.
4. Does America really have a development failure? The book laments the fact that the United States invents stuff but then doesn’t make them, with examples including the elevator and solar power. This felt more anecdotal and less grounded in research than the rest of the book. I just do not know how pervasive an issue this is, what solutions are needed, and generally with limited exceptions prefer the government to stay as far towards the R side of R&D as possible. I am open to it being a bigger issue but would like to know more than just the solar example—which by itself was convincing but just because of the associated externalities.
5. Personnel matters. The saying “personnel is policy” is overstated; in my experience, personnel are often very responsive to the people above them—and ultimately elected leaders—helping to fill out their vision. But personnel is management (better phrases for that most welcome). A friend who has worked extensively with state welfare agencies said Republican ones are much better run because they hire experienced business people, often in a national search, whereas Democratic governors elevate a local do-gooder who cannot manage as effectively. Getting more business people into government would help advance a lot of their goals.
6. How to measure success—and not bullshit oneself. One advantage of demand policies is that it is often easier to figure out what was done at scale. Provide $200 tax credits limited to only a dozen children, and people will notice that you did not accomplish much. But now multiple blue-state governors are embracing the abundance rhetoric and talking about everything they are doing to streamline permitting and increase building. But are these token steps? More substantial? You have to be deeply immersed in the details to know (in fact, I often could not tell when I worked in the Obama administration which of our permitting reform efforts were more hype or more reality). So some way to establish metrics and accountability instead of just celebrating any rhetorical successes will be necessary for this approach to truly be a success. And maybe the business types working in government can help with that.
June 29, 2025
A dear friend of mine has, for at least 20 years, told me he is sick to death of reading about US politics and so on. And yet, nearly every book he recommends to me is about US politics. It is a strange paradox. And so this is one of the books he recommended to me. He said that it is being talked about a lot and so is one of those books you should read for that reason alone. In a way, it is a left-ish version of how to make America great again.
In many ways, it is a less leftwing version of another book I was advised to read years ago – Fully Automated Luxury Communism. I never reviewed the book – as I didn’t think nearly as highly of the book as the person who recommended it to me did. I’m not as convinced that more technology is necessarily the answer to the problems technology has gotten us into – nor that just because technology has been something of a disaster in the past, it will inevitably prove to be the opposite in the immediate future.
There is a long part in the middle of this book where the author runs through the problems facing the US. I can’t see how these problems will be overcome. I can’t see a way for them to be overcome given the current political realities in the US. And I can’t see a movement there that is likely to take hold and shift the priorities of the majority of the US population. Someone a few years ago became my ‘friend’ here on Good Reads and, unlike so many other people who become my ‘friends’ here actually wrote to me. I used to do this as a matter of course – write to people to thank them for their friend requests – it seemed like a normal thing to do, at the time. But I quickly learned – from the lack of replies – that this was anything like a normal thing to do. Whatever ‘friend’ means on this site – actual communication doesn’t seem to be a large part of it. She told me that she was a great fan of Musk - and wanted to know if I was too. I told her I was anything but. She seemed very surprised - perhaps she is less so now. But this attitude that the great and powerful in the US are the answer and that they can do no wrong and that we mere mortals should get out of their way and let them fix things seems to be to be a very American attitude and one that is unlikely to change any time soon.
I didn’t come away from reading this book with a great sense of how the envisioned future discussed here was likely to come about. It did reaffirm my belief that the American empire is in fatal decline and that there is probably nothing that can be done to stop, or even slow, that decline. That half of the voting population could look at a serial sex offender and bankrupt and think he was the answer, does make you wonder what they thought the question was.
Like my friend, I’m quite bored by US politics. This didn’t do very much to persuade me to change my attitude.
In many ways, it is a less leftwing version of another book I was advised to read years ago – Fully Automated Luxury Communism. I never reviewed the book – as I didn’t think nearly as highly of the book as the person who recommended it to me did. I’m not as convinced that more technology is necessarily the answer to the problems technology has gotten us into – nor that just because technology has been something of a disaster in the past, it will inevitably prove to be the opposite in the immediate future.
There is a long part in the middle of this book where the author runs through the problems facing the US. I can’t see how these problems will be overcome. I can’t see a way for them to be overcome given the current political realities in the US. And I can’t see a movement there that is likely to take hold and shift the priorities of the majority of the US population. Someone a few years ago became my ‘friend’ here on Good Reads and, unlike so many other people who become my ‘friends’ here actually wrote to me. I used to do this as a matter of course – write to people to thank them for their friend requests – it seemed like a normal thing to do, at the time. But I quickly learned – from the lack of replies – that this was anything like a normal thing to do. Whatever ‘friend’ means on this site – actual communication doesn’t seem to be a large part of it. She told me that she was a great fan of Musk - and wanted to know if I was too. I told her I was anything but. She seemed very surprised - perhaps she is less so now. But this attitude that the great and powerful in the US are the answer and that they can do no wrong and that we mere mortals should get out of their way and let them fix things seems to be to be a very American attitude and one that is unlikely to change any time soon.
I didn’t come away from reading this book with a great sense of how the envisioned future discussed here was likely to come about. It did reaffirm my belief that the American empire is in fatal decline and that there is probably nothing that can be done to stop, or even slow, that decline. That half of the voting population could look at a serial sex offender and bankrupt and think he was the answer, does make you wonder what they thought the question was.
Like my friend, I’m quite bored by US politics. This didn’t do very much to persuade me to change my attitude.
March 19, 2025
Intellectually-vacuous garbage. The fact that this got a book deal is offensive.
March 24, 2025
From start to finish this lands as someone writing into Chat GPT “Please update Clintonism.” The so-called “BIG IDEAS” play as technocratic cover for mutations of old policy that has proven faulty again and again. Like Matt Yglesias, who also writes with a similar, purposeful allergy to reality, these guys are excited by the sound of their own voices echoing in the salons of Georgetown condos, while normal folks choke outside.
May 23, 2025
It feels wildly irresponsible to write a book about how regulations have stopped us from thriving without substantively mentioning how corporations have intentionally undermined so many efforts at creating policy that “expands the pie.” The book is also tediously repetitive and pulls from fairly superficial literature and a narrow set of examples. But what did I really expect from a book written by two precocious boys who have never really been experts on any of the things they’re positioning themselves as experts on? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
April 21, 2025
Abundance is not the first "hot take" in book form. 33 years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared the "end of history" and Klein and Thompson seem to suffer from the same hubris. Abundance offers a tired cornucopian vision for the future without respecting the considerable scholarship on the issues it explores. For example, nuclear power is offered as a technological solution to our climate crisis, which economists and historians would find puzzling given the failure of nuclear power to deliver on its promises.Klein and Thompson echo the optimism of the 1950s, or the libertarian futurists staffing think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Thompson and Klein differ from Peter Thiel and Elon Musk's technological optimism in details: Social problems can be solved by bold thinking and gutting regulation to unleash technological potential.
The main failure of abundance is its own laziness. The problems the book explores are not new, but Klein and Thompson betray a shallow understanding of how they emerged and continue. At multiple points in the book, the authors hold out hope that humanity will deploy technology to prevent the 1,5 degrees of warming set as a benchmark by the Paris Climate Agreement. It is telling that the authors seem unaware that we have already passed the warming mark this past year with no sign of technology coming to the rescue. The book was obsolete before it hit bookshelves.
The main failure of abundance is its own laziness. The problems the book explores are not new, but Klein and Thompson betray a shallow understanding of how they emerged and continue. At multiple points in the book, the authors hold out hope that humanity will deploy technology to prevent the 1,5 degrees of warming set as a benchmark by the Paris Climate Agreement. It is telling that the authors seem unaware that we have already passed the warming mark this past year with no sign of technology coming to the rescue. The book was obsolete before it hit bookshelves.
March 26, 2025
I’m writing an abundantly long review here, mainly for myself. I agree with most and disagree with some but all things considered, I really enjoyed reading this book. I would even consider it to be required reading for those of us on the left, although if you use Twitter, listen to podcasts etc., you probably couldn’t avoid it even if you tried lol.
The core thesis is fairly simple: we need to be building more — more affordable housing, more clean energy, and more lifesaving medical technologies. This requires us to address the current impediments in doing so.
"Changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard requires confrontations with whether the systems liberals have built really reflect the ends they've sought".
I liked this quote. We cannot lose sight of what we are actually trying to achieve, which is to build a more prosperous, equitable world for all. Complex environmental reviews and bureaucratic processes before construction are incredibly important, and they sprung up in response to a genuine issue of unrestrained midcentury growth. That said, we should at least do an honest accounting of our current state and understand the tradeoffs involved. If our processes today mean we cannot build enough affordable housing and instead push people to live in encampment tents, can anyone say this is working as intended? This is a genuine “if”, not a rhetorical one, as I’m not well-versed enough in housing policy to know the extent to which this is true.
I thought the clean energy discussion was interesting too. It sounds like we have three options moving forward:
1) “drill baby drill”
2) degrowth
3) more clean energy
Hopefully we can all agree that number one is not the best option lol. Number two has advantages and I think the authors were a bit dismissive of it, but I agree it’s not realistic to put all of our eggs in that basket. It requires long-term behavior change over a time horizon we may not have, given the urgency of the climate crisis, not to mention the fact that much of the country does not view this as a worthwhile goal to pursue. Of course we should continue to persuade people here but we also need to focus on solutions not contingent on this happening.
Re: YIMBY/NIMBY stuff, the main uphill battle will be convincing people with a vested interest in their own houses appreciating to get on board. I sincerely wish those well who take on that fight as it will not be easy.
On the topic of invention, I loved the examples of penicillin, mRNA vaccines etc. The rise of penicillin was a great illustration of how inventing the thing is only one part of the equation — we also need to evaluate it rigorously and produce/distribute it for it to be valuable to society. The book was very techno-optimist and I get that but they should have spent more time explaining how important it is to be intentional in developing new technologies, ensuring they help who they are supposed to help. You can’t wait until after the fact to try and rein things in.
While there are genuine issues with the book, I've been surprised to see the response it's gotten from certain people on the left. Some have offered thoughtful criticism, e.g., that Klein and Thompson should touch more on how these gains would be distributed fairly within society. For example, while we absolutely need to build more housing, solely relying on market-driven housing is almost definitely not sufficient. This could lead to only luxury housing being built, and while this may pull high-income renters away from more affordable options, eventually making more of those units available, we likely need to go further. Investments in better, more efficiently-built public housing and ensuring new construction doesn’t solely benefit the already well-off is important.
However, others have dismissed this book as some kind of centrist, neoliberal manifesto, many of whom doing so while openly admitting they have not read the book lmao. To frame this book as a kind of centrist concession akin to bringing Liz Cheney on the campaign trail does not make sense to me -- it operates on a different dimension. It’s not a question of “should we partner more or less closely with republicans?”. In fact, a lot of the book is predicated on the fact that republicans operate in bad faith and are increasingly relying on scarcity rhetoric, e.g., baseless claims like "these immigrants are coming in and taking your housing!". The question the book asks is “should we build more or not?”, and it’s hard for me to understand how the latter is our path forward. The book advocates for more state capacity, not less, and absolutely does not push the idea that if we only get out of the way of corporations, they’ll do the right thing. This is naive and we have enough evidence by now to know this is not how things will play out. Companies’ goal will always be to maximize profits, so we cannot rely solely on their goodwill and an unencumbered free market. Lastly, the conclusion explicitly describes the rise and fall of the neoliberal order and does not seem to suggest their ideas fitting within its paradigm.
With the latest election results, the democratic party’s popularity at a low, and everything that’s happening right now in our federal government, we cannot afford a lack of self-reflection. The working class has been rapidly moving away from the party at a concerning rate. We can criticize the opposition party all day long, and believe me when I say that would be longer than this review, but we also need a positive vision for the future. The 2024 campaign promise was “we aren’t the other people” and that may have worked in 2020 but it’s clearly not a viable path forward. We need a compelling vision and the one presented here — better and more affordable housing, clean energy, medical advancements etc. — seems like a great contrast to the “us against them” mentality heralded by the opposition. Translating this into a winnable campaign strategy is for someone with more expertise than me but I don’t think it’s impossible. I genuinely do not believe the ideas here are at odds with what AOC and Bernie are saying. If centrist dems feel good about this book and Bhaskar Sunkara from Jacobin says he agrees with 70% of it, that’s good enough for me.
If you’re still here, thank you for taking the time to read all of this.
The core thesis is fairly simple: we need to be building more — more affordable housing, more clean energy, and more lifesaving medical technologies. This requires us to address the current impediments in doing so.
"Changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard requires confrontations with whether the systems liberals have built really reflect the ends they've sought".
I liked this quote. We cannot lose sight of what we are actually trying to achieve, which is to build a more prosperous, equitable world for all. Complex environmental reviews and bureaucratic processes before construction are incredibly important, and they sprung up in response to a genuine issue of unrestrained midcentury growth. That said, we should at least do an honest accounting of our current state and understand the tradeoffs involved. If our processes today mean we cannot build enough affordable housing and instead push people to live in encampment tents, can anyone say this is working as intended? This is a genuine “if”, not a rhetorical one, as I’m not well-versed enough in housing policy to know the extent to which this is true.
I thought the clean energy discussion was interesting too. It sounds like we have three options moving forward:
1) “drill baby drill”
2) degrowth
3) more clean energy
Hopefully we can all agree that number one is not the best option lol. Number two has advantages and I think the authors were a bit dismissive of it, but I agree it’s not realistic to put all of our eggs in that basket. It requires long-term behavior change over a time horizon we may not have, given the urgency of the climate crisis, not to mention the fact that much of the country does not view this as a worthwhile goal to pursue. Of course we should continue to persuade people here but we also need to focus on solutions not contingent on this happening.
Re: YIMBY/NIMBY stuff, the main uphill battle will be convincing people with a vested interest in their own houses appreciating to get on board. I sincerely wish those well who take on that fight as it will not be easy.
On the topic of invention, I loved the examples of penicillin, mRNA vaccines etc. The rise of penicillin was a great illustration of how inventing the thing is only one part of the equation — we also need to evaluate it rigorously and produce/distribute it for it to be valuable to society. The book was very techno-optimist and I get that but they should have spent more time explaining how important it is to be intentional in developing new technologies, ensuring they help who they are supposed to help. You can’t wait until after the fact to try and rein things in.
While there are genuine issues with the book, I've been surprised to see the response it's gotten from certain people on the left. Some have offered thoughtful criticism, e.g., that Klein and Thompson should touch more on how these gains would be distributed fairly within society. For example, while we absolutely need to build more housing, solely relying on market-driven housing is almost definitely not sufficient. This could lead to only luxury housing being built, and while this may pull high-income renters away from more affordable options, eventually making more of those units available, we likely need to go further. Investments in better, more efficiently-built public housing and ensuring new construction doesn’t solely benefit the already well-off is important.
However, others have dismissed this book as some kind of centrist, neoliberal manifesto, many of whom doing so while openly admitting they have not read the book lmao. To frame this book as a kind of centrist concession akin to bringing Liz Cheney on the campaign trail does not make sense to me -- it operates on a different dimension. It’s not a question of “should we partner more or less closely with republicans?”. In fact, a lot of the book is predicated on the fact that republicans operate in bad faith and are increasingly relying on scarcity rhetoric, e.g., baseless claims like "these immigrants are coming in and taking your housing!". The question the book asks is “should we build more or not?”, and it’s hard for me to understand how the latter is our path forward. The book advocates for more state capacity, not less, and absolutely does not push the idea that if we only get out of the way of corporations, they’ll do the right thing. This is naive and we have enough evidence by now to know this is not how things will play out. Companies’ goal will always be to maximize profits, so we cannot rely solely on their goodwill and an unencumbered free market. Lastly, the conclusion explicitly describes the rise and fall of the neoliberal order and does not seem to suggest their ideas fitting within its paradigm.
With the latest election results, the democratic party’s popularity at a low, and everything that’s happening right now in our federal government, we cannot afford a lack of self-reflection. The working class has been rapidly moving away from the party at a concerning rate. We can criticize the opposition party all day long, and believe me when I say that would be longer than this review, but we also need a positive vision for the future. The 2024 campaign promise was “we aren’t the other people” and that may have worked in 2020 but it’s clearly not a viable path forward. We need a compelling vision and the one presented here — better and more affordable housing, clean energy, medical advancements etc. — seems like a great contrast to the “us against them” mentality heralded by the opposition. Translating this into a winnable campaign strategy is for someone with more expertise than me but I don’t think it’s impossible. I genuinely do not believe the ideas here are at odds with what AOC and Bernie are saying. If centrist dems feel good about this book and Bhaskar Sunkara from Jacobin says he agrees with 70% of it, that’s good enough for me.
If you’re still here, thank you for taking the time to read all of this.
February 20, 2025
For a book about political paradigms, this was great. Klein and Thompson set out to paint their theory of abundance across many sectors (housing, immigration, climate change, innovation) at a time when the political right had laid its bets on a message of scarcity and the fear of it. They argue that the government should serve the role of creating abundance where it's needed, but should do so by knowing how to be involved and where to get out of the way.
The authors trace the origins of some of the biggest challenges that our government and politics face today, such as the housing shortage, difficulty in building, climate change and expediting clean energy, immigration and worker shortages, and innovation hampered by bureaucracy and huge price tags. What they find is that the blame can often be laid at the feet of Democrats and liberals because actions taken decades ago to address decades-old problems have morphed into different beasts entirely.
In a very readable and engaging way, they explain how complex parts of our society interface with government and what the challenges are. As a Democrat, I found this to be illuminating and this book gave me more perspective on why Republicans and the conservative right are frustrated with government today. There are many examples of spending too much with too little to show for it. But, the authors argue, it doesn't have to be that way, and in fact we have many examples of the American government achieving incredible things in nimble and innovative ways that benefit society and Americans, and even citizens abroad.
This book gave me a bigger and deeper perspective of the American political landscape today, and helped me better understand how the government functions in certain sectors. There's a lot of room for improvement, but there's also abundant potential and ultimately the book left me feeling hopeful.
Although this is a book that talks a lot about government and politics, it's not just for readers who are Democrat. The authors mostly focus on thoughtful criticism of Democrats, and praise Republicans where praise is due. I would recommend this book to anyone who follows politics and enjoys thoughtful explorations of politics and government. I would especially recommend it to Democrats who feel outraged about the actions of the new administration. This book does not justify their actions, but I do think it helps give perspective to why we might have ended up here. Importantly, it offers a different vision of the future. I would love to think that this book will end up in the right hands of people with the power to implement many of the ideas in this book.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an ARC of this book for review.
The authors trace the origins of some of the biggest challenges that our government and politics face today, such as the housing shortage, difficulty in building, climate change and expediting clean energy, immigration and worker shortages, and innovation hampered by bureaucracy and huge price tags. What they find is that the blame can often be laid at the feet of Democrats and liberals because actions taken decades ago to address decades-old problems have morphed into different beasts entirely.
In a very readable and engaging way, they explain how complex parts of our society interface with government and what the challenges are. As a Democrat, I found this to be illuminating and this book gave me more perspective on why Republicans and the conservative right are frustrated with government today. There are many examples of spending too much with too little to show for it. But, the authors argue, it doesn't have to be that way, and in fact we have many examples of the American government achieving incredible things in nimble and innovative ways that benefit society and Americans, and even citizens abroad.
This book gave me a bigger and deeper perspective of the American political landscape today, and helped me better understand how the government functions in certain sectors. There's a lot of room for improvement, but there's also abundant potential and ultimately the book left me feeling hopeful.
Although this is a book that talks a lot about government and politics, it's not just for readers who are Democrat. The authors mostly focus on thoughtful criticism of Democrats, and praise Republicans where praise is due. I would recommend this book to anyone who follows politics and enjoys thoughtful explorations of politics and government. I would especially recommend it to Democrats who feel outraged about the actions of the new administration. This book does not justify their actions, but I do think it helps give perspective to why we might have ended up here. Importantly, it offers a different vision of the future. I would love to think that this book will end up in the right hands of people with the power to implement many of the ideas in this book.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an ARC of this book for review.
July 18, 2025
DNF. Listened to the audio book up until the very final chapter, and I gave up. Overall a disappointing book from Ezra Klein, who is often labeled as the “voice of the left”. I’m just so over this bullshit moderate crap from the “left”. Perhaps this book finally cemented into my brain that I’m actually just radical in my political views. Sorry not sorry!
The liberal utopia described in this book is not one that I want. I guess I should have known from the title that I wouldn’t like this book, but I think I might be anti-abundance in many ways. Do we really need more crap? Do we need more tech? The beginning of the book describes a utopia in which everyone has their own personal electric car and drones deliver packages to your door and everything is weird and techy. Thanks but no thanks. What if we all lived in beautiful, well organized, dense, green urban centers, where no one needed a personal electric car because everyone biked, walked, or public transit-ed everywhere? A world where I didn’t need a drone to deliver me sh*t within hours of ordering because we reshaped our consumerist society into something healthier for our communities, planet, and souls? I’m so anti-tech at this point, I cannot deal w the tech utopia idealized in this book. Also do these tech lords not realize that you have to mine a bunch of minerals to get all this electric sh*t? I’ll pass on the electric car, thanks.
Ezra Klein and the rest of the moderates are out here describing a utopia that maintains the status quo, plus some extra housing I guess. Thanks but no thanks to this world. I’m looking for some radical change here and this book was dissatisfying to say the least.
Also, the structure of this book makes no sense. It consists of two huge chapters on housing, and two on research? Then the book ends? I have no idea why those two topics were connected and then merged to form a book.
Two stars because instead of one because there’s some great discourse on what’s broken in the US research/grant/academia space, and as a disgruntled and disenchanted grad student that section felt pretty validating (and, a lot of it was true).
Also I’m sorry but I’m just really f*cking sick of rich techy white men spewing their opinions to the world.
The liberal utopia described in this book is not one that I want. I guess I should have known from the title that I wouldn’t like this book, but I think I might be anti-abundance in many ways. Do we really need more crap? Do we need more tech? The beginning of the book describes a utopia in which everyone has their own personal electric car and drones deliver packages to your door and everything is weird and techy. Thanks but no thanks. What if we all lived in beautiful, well organized, dense, green urban centers, where no one needed a personal electric car because everyone biked, walked, or public transit-ed everywhere? A world where I didn’t need a drone to deliver me sh*t within hours of ordering because we reshaped our consumerist society into something healthier for our communities, planet, and souls? I’m so anti-tech at this point, I cannot deal w the tech utopia idealized in this book. Also do these tech lords not realize that you have to mine a bunch of minerals to get all this electric sh*t? I’ll pass on the electric car, thanks.
Ezra Klein and the rest of the moderates are out here describing a utopia that maintains the status quo, plus some extra housing I guess. Thanks but no thanks to this world. I’m looking for some radical change here and this book was dissatisfying to say the least.
Also, the structure of this book makes no sense. It consists of two huge chapters on housing, and two on research? Then the book ends? I have no idea why those two topics were connected and then merged to form a book.
Two stars because instead of one because there’s some great discourse on what’s broken in the US research/grant/academia space, and as a disgruntled and disenchanted grad student that section felt pretty validating (and, a lot of it was true).
Also I’m sorry but I’m just really f*cking sick of rich techy white men spewing their opinions to the world.
March 23, 2025
This book is more of a political manifesto (or as they say in the conclusion 'a new lens through which to see the world) of a certain movement of policy wonks than anything else. It looks at a number of policy areas and asks 'what is considered scarce that should be abundant', calling for a 'liberalism that builds'.
So much of the book is about planning reform (loosening of zoning codes in US cities to resemble something like Houston), limits to environmental impact assessments in construction projects, more ambitious and less formalistic scientific funding (to solve what they call the 'Kariko problem'), a stronger focus on diffusion mechanisms (for deployment of novel tech), and a strong critique of the US style (but I would say globally Western) of 'government by lawyers & lawsuits' and processes, rather than outcomes.
But it is not a detailed political agenda (there are only a handful of specific policy proposals, like an increase in the number of H-1B visas, more frequent use of Advance Market Commitments, especially in pursuing net zero goals, and DARPA-ish program managers for the National Institutes of Health). Most of all, it calls for a reshaping of the government's role as a 'bottleneck detective', that can accept trade offs and expand capacity in critical points that have disproportionate effects.
This book is the core component of a relatively wonkish movement that also includes recent books like 'Why Nothing Works' by Marc Dunkelman, 'On Housing Crisis' by Jerusalem Demsas, or 'Stuck' by Yonni Applebaum that have come out in the past couple months. But it also includes work in the blogosphere, on substacks and in institutes like Institute for Progress. The core message across these - which have already been called in the Anglo-American policy discourse 'the Abundance agenda', is that liberalism has been for the past 40 to 50 years too much focused on stopping things from happening (to protect the rights and privileges of the individuals) than on building things. The best historical analysis on this is in 'Why Nothing Works', but because of Ezra Klein's notoriety and the more accessible way this book is written, I am sure this book will eventually be more impactful.
I really enjoyed the book. It is brief, well written and enjoyable but also challenging towards the status quo across the political spectrum. It also captures experiences of people trying to build something or accelerate progress within the broader public spheres even outside of the United States - so much of the chapter on the necessary reforms of scientific funding in the US and on the process-focused governance culture chimed with my experiences in reforming RDI funding in Slovakia.
So much of the book is about planning reform (loosening of zoning codes in US cities to resemble something like Houston), limits to environmental impact assessments in construction projects, more ambitious and less formalistic scientific funding (to solve what they call the 'Kariko problem'), a stronger focus on diffusion mechanisms (for deployment of novel tech), and a strong critique of the US style (but I would say globally Western) of 'government by lawyers & lawsuits' and processes, rather than outcomes.
But it is not a detailed political agenda (there are only a handful of specific policy proposals, like an increase in the number of H-1B visas, more frequent use of Advance Market Commitments, especially in pursuing net zero goals, and DARPA-ish program managers for the National Institutes of Health). Most of all, it calls for a reshaping of the government's role as a 'bottleneck detective', that can accept trade offs and expand capacity in critical points that have disproportionate effects.
This book is the core component of a relatively wonkish movement that also includes recent books like 'Why Nothing Works' by Marc Dunkelman, 'On Housing Crisis' by Jerusalem Demsas, or 'Stuck' by Yonni Applebaum that have come out in the past couple months. But it also includes work in the blogosphere, on substacks and in institutes like Institute for Progress. The core message across these - which have already been called in the Anglo-American policy discourse 'the Abundance agenda', is that liberalism has been for the past 40 to 50 years too much focused on stopping things from happening (to protect the rights and privileges of the individuals) than on building things. The best historical analysis on this is in 'Why Nothing Works', but because of Ezra Klein's notoriety and the more accessible way this book is written, I am sure this book will eventually be more impactful.
I really enjoyed the book. It is brief, well written and enjoyable but also challenging towards the status quo across the political spectrum. It also captures experiences of people trying to build something or accelerate progress within the broader public spheres even outside of the United States - so much of the chapter on the necessary reforms of scientific funding in the US and on the process-focused governance culture chimed with my experiences in reforming RDI funding in Slovakia.
August 22, 2025
“This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.”
I’m not sure this book has what it will take to achieve that simple idea, but I appreciate both authors intentions.
I really admire Ezra Klein. Especially as a commentator and journalist. I first appreciated his book, “Why We’re Polarized.” If interested, I have included a link to my review below.
So, when I heard he had a new book out, I immediately ordered a copy from my local library in April of this year. It just came through this month (August 2025).
I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t an easy read, especially as I attempted to read this while witnessing before me, my country being toppled down by the current Trump administration and the GOP. Yes, I realize this is my opinion. And, I sadly own it. 😢
Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson profess to consider there is a chance that we could be inspired to think big again despite the demoralizing shape of how this current administration is dismantling the American dream, and, the scientific establishment.
This book talks about the why it all took us to our current place with government under a Trump regime. It also shares how readers can reimagine and manage abundance to include: public investment, technological progress and economic growth. But there is a great disconnect with how Americans view any of this so-called ‘abundance.’
As a reader, I’d like to believe that innovation of scientific breakthroughs in powerful research which beget medical cures and the like and infrastructure advancements for states would be something to celebrate – including what is good for Americans overall. But alas, there is a great divide between innovation and conservatism. And, this is what the authors are trying to tell us.
Still, there are no stand-out answers I could find on how we can come back from the mess this administration is creating with our federal government. The authors have great ideas, and certainly, those ideas are what fueled the Democratic party to dream big and look out for the people. Remember, ‘We the people?’
So, what did I get from this book? Well, maybe I got a good history lesson. And, I did appreciate that. So, where do we go now as a nation of people? How do we move away from the great divide? Might it be an awareness of simply knowing that Trumpism doesn’t bring abundance to the country, and especially the people, after all?
3.5 stars
Why We’re Polarized - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I’m not sure this book has what it will take to achieve that simple idea, but I appreciate both authors intentions.
I really admire Ezra Klein. Especially as a commentator and journalist. I first appreciated his book, “Why We’re Polarized.” If interested, I have included a link to my review below.
So, when I heard he had a new book out, I immediately ordered a copy from my local library in April of this year. It just came through this month (August 2025).
I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t an easy read, especially as I attempted to read this while witnessing before me, my country being toppled down by the current Trump administration and the GOP. Yes, I realize this is my opinion. And, I sadly own it. 😢
Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson profess to consider there is a chance that we could be inspired to think big again despite the demoralizing shape of how this current administration is dismantling the American dream, and, the scientific establishment.
This book talks about the why it all took us to our current place with government under a Trump regime. It also shares how readers can reimagine and manage abundance to include: public investment, technological progress and economic growth. But there is a great disconnect with how Americans view any of this so-called ‘abundance.’
As a reader, I’d like to believe that innovation of scientific breakthroughs in powerful research which beget medical cures and the like and infrastructure advancements for states would be something to celebrate – including what is good for Americans overall. But alas, there is a great divide between innovation and conservatism. And, this is what the authors are trying to tell us.
Still, there are no stand-out answers I could find on how we can come back from the mess this administration is creating with our federal government. The authors have great ideas, and certainly, those ideas are what fueled the Democratic party to dream big and look out for the people. Remember, ‘We the people?’
So, what did I get from this book? Well, maybe I got a good history lesson. And, I did appreciate that. So, where do we go now as a nation of people? How do we move away from the great divide? Might it be an awareness of simply knowing that Trumpism doesn’t bring abundance to the country, and especially the people, after all?
3.5 stars
Why We’re Polarized - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Read
June 7, 2025This is an 80/20 book for me. I could've gotten 80% of the book by reading 20%: the introduction, chapter 1, and chapter 5.
The book opens strong with a philosophical take on how we live in an era with an abundance of goods on the shelves, but a scarcity of what's needed for a good life.
Chapter 1 introduces an interesting hypothesis. City living makes people more productive --> ambitious people move to cities --> city living becomes expensive --> only rich people can afford to live in cities --> cities become more conservative.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present different perspectives for the same argument: we've shifted from an outcome-oriented mindset to a procedure-oriented mindset. In government, the procedural mindset (e.g. most politicians are lawyers by training) makes it impossible to spend government money on either good causes or bad causes. In building, procedures make it impossible to build new housing. In invention, procedures cause scientists to play the game (spending 40% of their time on applying for grants + focusing on safe bets) instead of pursuing high-risk, high-reward research.
I like chapter 5's argument that the eureka moment is a myth -- invention doesn't just change the world overnight. So, invention is just the first step, and making that invention helpful is even more important.
Side note: I've always found books written by multiple authors a bit schizophrenic. This book is the same. It alternates between being philosophical, political, and anecdotal. I like the philosophical bits the most.
The book opens strong with a philosophical take on how we live in an era with an abundance of goods on the shelves, but a scarcity of what's needed for a good life.
Chapter 1 introduces an interesting hypothesis. City living makes people more productive --> ambitious people move to cities --> city living becomes expensive --> only rich people can afford to live in cities --> cities become more conservative.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 present different perspectives for the same argument: we've shifted from an outcome-oriented mindset to a procedure-oriented mindset. In government, the procedural mindset (e.g. most politicians are lawyers by training) makes it impossible to spend government money on either good causes or bad causes. In building, procedures make it impossible to build new housing. In invention, procedures cause scientists to play the game (spending 40% of their time on applying for grants + focusing on safe bets) instead of pursuing high-risk, high-reward research.
I like chapter 5's argument that the eureka moment is a myth -- invention doesn't just change the world overnight. So, invention is just the first step, and making that invention helpful is even more important.
Side note: I've always found books written by multiple authors a bit schizophrenic. This book is the same. It alternates between being philosophical, political, and anecdotal. I like the philosophical bits the most.
January 11, 2026
One classic view is that politics should simply be a tool for redistributing a country’s wealth in the most effective and constructive way for society. Unfortunately, what often happens instead is that politics revolves around maintaining fragile balances of power. There are many wealthy, established interests that want to keep going the way they always have and resist meaningful change. As a result, even though we have the resources and technology to do better, we end up repeating the same patterns.
I think Abundance speaks to this. The book presents several compelling, big-picture ideas, that could improve the world. One suggestion I liked was about reducing regulations, permits, and procedures that slow down useful projects. To do anything, you often need endless authorizations, and too many actors try to control a slice of the process, so facilitating them could have a big impact on society. At the same time, most of them were developed for safety reasons. The problem is that the balance now often seems excessive and counterproductive.
The real challenge is generational and institutional inertia. People and systems that benefited from the current arrangements have strong incentives to keep them as they are. Until we find ways to renew leadership, broaden participation, and direct those incentives toward long-term progress, change will be hard.
I think Abundance speaks to this. The book presents several compelling, big-picture ideas, that could improve the world. One suggestion I liked was about reducing regulations, permits, and procedures that slow down useful projects. To do anything, you often need endless authorizations, and too many actors try to control a slice of the process, so facilitating them could have a big impact on society. At the same time, most of them were developed for safety reasons. The problem is that the balance now often seems excessive and counterproductive.
The real challenge is generational and institutional inertia. People and systems that benefited from the current arrangements have strong incentives to keep them as they are. Until we find ways to renew leadership, broaden participation, and direct those incentives toward long-term progress, change will be hard.
March 18, 2025
Given all of the debate around YIMBY-ism on the left, I was anxious to dive into Klein's argument for new 'abundance'-centered politics. I will admit I had my doubts, being a bit to the left of him and having people I listen to not be his biggest fans.
But I was proven wrong. The book was amazing. I really feel that here Klein so effectively diagnoses the problem with a purely 'redistributionary' and/or litigious model for liberal governance that has surrendered the active role of government and of the executive. And how even when they want to get back to their roots, paperwork and bureaucracy designed with well intent, gets in the way.
Klein here is vastly different than past harbringers of a new regime -- I'm talking about the Third-Way-ers of the 90s and 00s. Unlike them, he thinks the government should lean in, not lean out. His paper is littered with New-Deal references, Keynes, and more. This is a manifesto for a 21st century liberal/progressive who wants to harness technology for good via the government, rather than taking the false dilemma of 'degrowth or bust'. And I feel that even when he critiques the choices if liberals from the past decades, he takes the time in understanding why they did what they did, which I think is indicative of a degree of journalistic care. Even those skeptical of him would do good to read the book. It is amazing. And hopefully just a bit of what is to come from this burgeoning school of thought.
P.S: I want to add that I don’t view this lens as a singular way to go about the political moment — it couples nicely with other views. But i view it as a fundamental one.
But I was proven wrong. The book was amazing. I really feel that here Klein so effectively diagnoses the problem with a purely 'redistributionary' and/or litigious model for liberal governance that has surrendered the active role of government and of the executive. And how even when they want to get back to their roots, paperwork and bureaucracy designed with well intent, gets in the way.
Klein here is vastly different than past harbringers of a new regime -- I'm talking about the Third-Way-ers of the 90s and 00s. Unlike them, he thinks the government should lean in, not lean out. His paper is littered with New-Deal references, Keynes, and more. This is a manifesto for a 21st century liberal/progressive who wants to harness technology for good via the government, rather than taking the false dilemma of 'degrowth or bust'. And I feel that even when he critiques the choices if liberals from the past decades, he takes the time in understanding why they did what they did, which I think is indicative of a degree of journalistic care. Even those skeptical of him would do good to read the book. It is amazing. And hopefully just a bit of what is to come from this burgeoning school of thought.
P.S: I want to add that I don’t view this lens as a singular way to go about the political moment — it couples nicely with other views. But i view it as a fundamental one.
April 4, 2025
Neoliberal slop that deliberately sidesteps the wealth inequality that is increasingly crushing in America. If the grand plan of the Democratic party is to "eliminate red tape," we are so unbelievably cooked. It's especially funny that this comes out at the same time that Sanders is selling thousands of tickets in different cities, speaking on the effect Oligarchy has on this country.
May 10, 2025
(2.5) first, I thought I’d stumbled into an episode of Star Trek…
“so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill. The year is 2050….
You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away…
As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular meat facilities, which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and rib eye steaks…
Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth,..
Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty..
Modern jetliners now routinely reach Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air….”
All of this pie in the sky techno belief then pivots,
“We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects.”
Much of the next 200 pages is Ezra clamoring how we need to act with great celerity bc global warmings coming to eat us all…half the country believes global warming is a grift and 90% when asked how much money they’d give up for climate change top out at about $10. And then there’s the fact that China and India are building coal plants as fast as they can and well Ezra seems a tad disconnected from reality.
Then he gets something’s right…
“America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government….
The notion that the US government cannot solve America’s problems was not unilaterally produced by Reagan and the GOP. It was coproduced by both parties and reinforced by their leaders.”
“Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.…
But that cannot be said for housing and education and medicine.”
Later, he will point out that Houston has no zoning laws and does a far better job at housing than places like so in rich San Francisco…additionally, the govts intrusion into college loans alone is enough to get folks to swear off govt aid—hand out college loans like candy so everyone goes, curriculum is watered down to make subjects passable for the hoi polloi, and then saddle these folks with huge debt for a degree they can’t use and a loan sized magnified by decades of near free money.
“California’s decision to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars after 2035 would be unthinkable without the rapid advances in battery technology.”
Did California DECIDE to ban gas cars. Or was it mandated from on high? Anyone want to bet if Californians voted they’d have voted for the ban?
“This book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change.”
This quote just to prove I’m not mischaracterizing Ezra’s intent.
“What America had was open—often stolen—land.”
Ezra’s version of a land acknowledgment…just by way of clarification…the land’s were conquered.
“Those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world,”
No one destroyed anything, least of all capitalism. Capitalism stopped the world from being nasty, brutish, and short. People voted for capitalism by exchanging goods and services…liberty’s a bitch.
“In the case of evolution, the victory is yet only partial. We do not have decades or centuries to convince the world to act on climate change.”
First, I’m not sure what evolution’s partial victory even means. The boogeyman of Christian fundamentalism I guess that’s been dead since Jerry Falwell and the moral majority died.
But here’s the practical difference between evolution and climate change. Evolution isn’t demanding the govt tax my energy, and create huge infrastructure boondoggles that politicians can grift over.
“There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.”
And Star Trek returns…humans are omnivores eating meat is…what’s the word? Woven into our evolutionary makeup…snark…and btw didn't that company that was selling the fake meat at Burger King go out of business? Darn the folks don’t know what’s best for them..
Ezra likes Star Trek…
“While we were writing this book, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory generated more energy than they used in a test of laser-ignited nuclear fusion.”
Violates the primary structure of the universe..entropy
“A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. 37 And we need to do it fast.”
There’s a great video of AOC sitting in a high speed rail car in the future talking just this kind of nonsense.
Ezra takes pains to show how dysfunctional govt enterprise is with samples like california’s high speed rail, but he somehow imagines we can make enough solar panels the size of Texas..
“A 2016 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at five major transmission projects with projected completion dates of 2021. Only one of them has been completed. Construction hasn’t even begun on the other four.”
Hello, Ezra, do you always argue the opposite of the facts you yourself present?
On the Cali HSR
“The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco system.”
So again, humans don’t care about global warming and there are 2nd and 3rd worlders who want to industrialize fast, they want to keep their gas cars and still eat meat, and the present govt systems are sclerotic…but there’s these other people and systems that can make Ezra’s fairly tale happen…perhaps he should hope for a lil climate changing tornado to drop him off in Oz.
“China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”
Oh, the irony, sure China’s a dictatorship living off the tens of millions it starved and shot to death in the last century…but to do one better than Mussolini, the trains run on time…and they run fast!
“Since 1960, federal government spending has risen more than fivefold—and yes, that’s accounting for inflation.”
And how’s that going?
“At the EDD, the core technological layer was called the single client database, which runs on an IBM mainframe from the ’80s.
Parts of it are written in a programming language called COBOL, which dates back to 1959.
EDD had been working on a modernization contract for ten years that it was theoretically just weeks away from awarding.
The sedimentary chaos at the EDD was not at all unusual”
There’s two Ezra’s..one who dispassionately spells out govt failures, and the other who thinks these same stifled mediocrities can do great things…reminds me of E.Germany and Hungary in the 50s…now that the Nazis are dead we can achieve real socialism, and we’ve got the Soviets to help…wunderbar!
On Covid vax:
“Unlike most behavioral interventions, the vaccines were immediately and obviously effective at reducing mortality for adults in every age cohort and in every country…“Every study testified to their effectiveness at reducing severe illness, especially for the elderly.”
The studies I’ve seen continue to diminish the vaccine…Alex berenson wrote it best, “the vaccine was a mild therapeutic with a limited window of viability”
Perhaps some of the oldest were saved long enough to die three months later from some opportunistic infection, but there’s no earthly reason a healthy person under fifty needed to take the vax.
“In the 1930s, there were just 80,000 professors across all US universities; 34 today there are more than 1.5 million.”
The govt subsidizes something you get more of it. Ezra doesn’t mention that almost all of the phd thesis are never referenced, that the social sciences have a huge replication crisis—they report results no one can confirm. This is now even true in the sciences. Investigators claim about half of science papers report findings that can’t be confirmed..
Ezra makes a point but fails to see it through. He argues that FDRs new deal was basically a sales pitch to steer folks away from communism ‘was a competition over whose philosophy of government would produce the best outcomes for people. Eisenhower needed to prove…”
Yes, I’ve long argued we only got the new deal bc capitalism was looking like the boring girl in the second hand dress and communism was the hot red head who had money for beer and dancing. Of course, the red head murdered you and the boring girl turned out to be headstrong and mercurial but she was pretty good in the sack and you ended up living a pretty damn nice life…
My long way around this point is we never needed the huge govt FDR ushered in. We had depressions before and the normal economic cycle brought back better times. The wisest course of action would’ve been to repeal this new huge state as it became clear communism was a murderous con job, but alas…as Eisenhower warned…establishments like the military industrial complex had taken root.
“Clinton did what Reagan had only promised to do and slashed the federal budget”
No one has cut the federal budget since Coolidge was president a century ago. Clinton, like Reagan, briefly cut the budget’s planned increase.
Beating the proverbial dead govt horse
“The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $ 7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.”
How the govt that produced the above is suddenly pivoting to enterprising greatness is baffling…something tells me the gen Zers aren’t the folks that will usher in a brave new world.(of course if you’ve read Huxley you know Gen Z are his prophesized new world: porn, drugs, gambling, video games are right in huxley’s strike zone)
“so did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might unleash…
Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place.”
Hard not to guffaw here. Quoting Marx that capitalism missed on creating some wonderful stuff…oh what stuff was missed? The gulag? The KGB? The Trabant? Lenin’s mummified corpse?
Let’s end with glimmers of Ezra looking dispassionately at the facts
“Stories we once saw as exceptions to the rule of well-functioning government—a public works project that went over budget and remained unfinished; an absurd price tag on a public toilet; the explosion of homelessness in blue cities; the profusion of lawsuits against even well-meaning infrastructure projects; the loss of manufacturing leadership in core technologies; the absence of an agenda that harnesses invention to social purpose—now seems frighteningly close to the norm”
Why this book and its authors are touted as minds of importance is a mystery. The best I can say about them is they’re about a decade behind folks like shellenberger and Taibbi—-guys on the Left who were honest that the facts weren’t squaring with their vision…and changed their minds.
“so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill. The year is 2050….
You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away…
As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular meat facilities, which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and rib eye steaks…
Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth,..
Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty..
Modern jetliners now routinely reach Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air….”
All of this pie in the sky techno belief then pivots,
“We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects.”
Much of the next 200 pages is Ezra clamoring how we need to act with great celerity bc global warmings coming to eat us all…half the country believes global warming is a grift and 90% when asked how much money they’d give up for climate change top out at about $10. And then there’s the fact that China and India are building coal plants as fast as they can and well Ezra seems a tad disconnected from reality.
Then he gets something’s right…
“America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government….
The notion that the US government cannot solve America’s problems was not unilaterally produced by Reagan and the GOP. It was coproduced by both parties and reinforced by their leaders.”
“Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.…
But that cannot be said for housing and education and medicine.”
Later, he will point out that Houston has no zoning laws and does a far better job at housing than places like so in rich San Francisco…additionally, the govts intrusion into college loans alone is enough to get folks to swear off govt aid—hand out college loans like candy so everyone goes, curriculum is watered down to make subjects passable for the hoi polloi, and then saddle these folks with huge debt for a degree they can’t use and a loan sized magnified by decades of near free money.
“California’s decision to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars after 2035 would be unthinkable without the rapid advances in battery technology.”
Did California DECIDE to ban gas cars. Or was it mandated from on high? Anyone want to bet if Californians voted they’d have voted for the ban?
“This book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change.”
This quote just to prove I’m not mischaracterizing Ezra’s intent.
“What America had was open—often stolen—land.”
Ezra’s version of a land acknowledgment…just by way of clarification…the land’s were conquered.
“Those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world,”
No one destroyed anything, least of all capitalism. Capitalism stopped the world from being nasty, brutish, and short. People voted for capitalism by exchanging goods and services…liberty’s a bitch.
“In the case of evolution, the victory is yet only partial. We do not have decades or centuries to convince the world to act on climate change.”
First, I’m not sure what evolution’s partial victory even means. The boogeyman of Christian fundamentalism I guess that’s been dead since Jerry Falwell and the moral majority died.
But here’s the practical difference between evolution and climate change. Evolution isn’t demanding the govt tax my energy, and create huge infrastructure boondoggles that politicians can grift over.
“There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food.”
And Star Trek returns…humans are omnivores eating meat is…what’s the word? Woven into our evolutionary makeup…snark…and btw didn't that company that was selling the fake meat at Burger King go out of business? Darn the folks don’t know what’s best for them..
Ezra likes Star Trek…
“While we were writing this book, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory generated more energy than they used in a test of laser-ignited nuclear fusion.”
Violates the primary structure of the universe..entropy
“A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. 37 And we need to do it fast.”
There’s a great video of AOC sitting in a high speed rail car in the future talking just this kind of nonsense.
Ezra takes pains to show how dysfunctional govt enterprise is with samples like california’s high speed rail, but he somehow imagines we can make enough solar panels the size of Texas..
“A 2016 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at five major transmission projects with projected completion dates of 2021. Only one of them has been completed. Construction hasn’t even begun on the other four.”
Hello, Ezra, do you always argue the opposite of the facts you yourself present?
On the Cali HSR
“The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles–to–San Francisco system.”
So again, humans don’t care about global warming and there are 2nd and 3rd worlders who want to industrialize fast, they want to keep their gas cars and still eat meat, and the present govt systems are sclerotic…but there’s these other people and systems that can make Ezra’s fairly tale happen…perhaps he should hope for a lil climate changing tornado to drop him off in Oz.
“China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”
Oh, the irony, sure China’s a dictatorship living off the tens of millions it starved and shot to death in the last century…but to do one better than Mussolini, the trains run on time…and they run fast!
“Since 1960, federal government spending has risen more than fivefold—and yes, that’s accounting for inflation.”
And how’s that going?
“At the EDD, the core technological layer was called the single client database, which runs on an IBM mainframe from the ’80s.
Parts of it are written in a programming language called COBOL, which dates back to 1959.
EDD had been working on a modernization contract for ten years that it was theoretically just weeks away from awarding.
The sedimentary chaos at the EDD was not at all unusual”
There’s two Ezra’s..one who dispassionately spells out govt failures, and the other who thinks these same stifled mediocrities can do great things…reminds me of E.Germany and Hungary in the 50s…now that the Nazis are dead we can achieve real socialism, and we’ve got the Soviets to help…wunderbar!
On Covid vax:
“Unlike most behavioral interventions, the vaccines were immediately and obviously effective at reducing mortality for adults in every age cohort and in every country…“Every study testified to their effectiveness at reducing severe illness, especially for the elderly.”
The studies I’ve seen continue to diminish the vaccine…Alex berenson wrote it best, “the vaccine was a mild therapeutic with a limited window of viability”
Perhaps some of the oldest were saved long enough to die three months later from some opportunistic infection, but there’s no earthly reason a healthy person under fifty needed to take the vax.
“In the 1930s, there were just 80,000 professors across all US universities; 34 today there are more than 1.5 million.”
The govt subsidizes something you get more of it. Ezra doesn’t mention that almost all of the phd thesis are never referenced, that the social sciences have a huge replication crisis—they report results no one can confirm. This is now even true in the sciences. Investigators claim about half of science papers report findings that can’t be confirmed..
Ezra makes a point but fails to see it through. He argues that FDRs new deal was basically a sales pitch to steer folks away from communism ‘was a competition over whose philosophy of government would produce the best outcomes for people. Eisenhower needed to prove…”
Yes, I’ve long argued we only got the new deal bc capitalism was looking like the boring girl in the second hand dress and communism was the hot red head who had money for beer and dancing. Of course, the red head murdered you and the boring girl turned out to be headstrong and mercurial but she was pretty good in the sack and you ended up living a pretty damn nice life…
My long way around this point is we never needed the huge govt FDR ushered in. We had depressions before and the normal economic cycle brought back better times. The wisest course of action would’ve been to repeal this new huge state as it became clear communism was a murderous con job, but alas…as Eisenhower warned…establishments like the military industrial complex had taken root.
“Clinton did what Reagan had only promised to do and slashed the federal budget”
No one has cut the federal budget since Coolidge was president a century ago. Clinton, like Reagan, briefly cut the budget’s planned increase.
Beating the proverbial dead govt horse
“The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $ 7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.”
How the govt that produced the above is suddenly pivoting to enterprising greatness is baffling…something tells me the gen Zers aren’t the folks that will usher in a brave new world.(of course if you’ve read Huxley you know Gen Z are his prophesized new world: porn, drugs, gambling, video games are right in huxley’s strike zone)
“so did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might unleash…
Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place.”
Hard not to guffaw here. Quoting Marx that capitalism missed on creating some wonderful stuff…oh what stuff was missed? The gulag? The KGB? The Trabant? Lenin’s mummified corpse?
Let’s end with glimmers of Ezra looking dispassionately at the facts
“Stories we once saw as exceptions to the rule of well-functioning government—a public works project that went over budget and remained unfinished; an absurd price tag on a public toilet; the explosion of homelessness in blue cities; the profusion of lawsuits against even well-meaning infrastructure projects; the loss of manufacturing leadership in core technologies; the absence of an agenda that harnesses invention to social purpose—now seems frighteningly close to the norm”
Why this book and its authors are touted as minds of importance is a mystery. The best I can say about them is they’re about a decade behind folks like shellenberger and Taibbi—-guys on the Left who were honest that the facts weren’t squaring with their vision…and changed their minds.
June 27, 2025
I’ve started venturing more into fiction books during my walks, but I 100% acknowledge the only way I will ever read “smart” things is by listening to them so selections like this remain firmly at the top of my TBR. I will also admit there is zero chance I would have been able to slog through Abundance on paper, because it is FULL of stats and facts and figures that would have put me to sleep. And like so many “this is what is wrong with the world” type of books, there aren’t a whole lot of solutions offered to the world’s current problems. That being said, it did point out things CAN be done and can be done efficiently . . . . if there is a global pandemic afoot (fast tracking the vaccines – while also pointing out the research required to do so was one that pretty much received no funding).
I also liked that right away the authors declare they are writing directly to their audience – which would be the left. I make it a point to try and not talk politics, but it is insufferable to read (both nonfiction and fiction) that beats a dead horse over explaining issues to people who would never even pick up the book to begin with. I also appreciated the zero effs given approach to talking to the intended audience and pointing out if the left truly has all of the solutions, then why is California – where not a single Republican holds statewide office and has the fourth largest economy in the entire world – one that also has the highest homeless and pollution rates? And to mention pollution – all of the current virtue signalling surrounding AI technology while cement is one of the largest contributors to the environment is another pretty in-your-face undeniable fact. If you like nonfiction and a laymen’s history of how bureaucracy is pretty much the culprit behind nothing ever getting done, this might be for you.
I also liked that right away the authors declare they are writing directly to their audience – which would be the left. I make it a point to try and not talk politics, but it is insufferable to read (both nonfiction and fiction) that beats a dead horse over explaining issues to people who would never even pick up the book to begin with. I also appreciated the zero effs given approach to talking to the intended audience and pointing out if the left truly has all of the solutions, then why is California – where not a single Republican holds statewide office and has the fourth largest economy in the entire world – one that also has the highest homeless and pollution rates? And to mention pollution – all of the current virtue signalling surrounding AI technology while cement is one of the largest contributors to the environment is another pretty in-your-face undeniable fact. If you like nonfiction and a laymen’s history of how bureaucracy is pretty much the culprit behind nothing ever getting done, this might be for you.
August 24, 2025
3.5 stars, rounded up
Abundance was an enjoyable and thought provoking read but nothing here really felt new to me. Most of the big themes about tech and the future I’d already seen elsewhere so it didn’t add a lot of fresh value.
The part that really stuck with me was the story about the Penn mRNA researcher who was written off for most of her career but ended up being crucial to the vaccines we all know about today. That was both frustrating and inspiring and easily my favorite section.
Overall I liked it, it reads well and gives an optimistic look at where we’re headed, but if you’ve been following these conversations already you probably won’t find anything groundbreaking.
Abundance was an enjoyable and thought provoking read but nothing here really felt new to me. Most of the big themes about tech and the future I’d already seen elsewhere so it didn’t add a lot of fresh value.
The part that really stuck with me was the story about the Penn mRNA researcher who was written off for most of her career but ended up being crucial to the vaccines we all know about today. That was both frustrating and inspiring and easily my favorite section.
Overall I liked it, it reads well and gives an optimistic look at where we’re headed, but if you’ve been following these conversations already you probably won’t find anything groundbreaking.
March 22, 2025
Infuriating and hopeful in equal measure.
September 13, 2025
I didn't get the hype
April 6, 2025
Ezra Klein is an American journalist I like and trust. I followed Klein’s podcast until November 2024 when I had to cut myself off Internet to preserve my sanity. These days I don’t seek political books, but Abundance is an exception. I read it amid mass federal layoffs, funding cuts, attack on science, ICE raids, measles outbreaks and the stock market crash. This book is not about the criticism of American Right, but how American Left/Liberals/Progressives need to change. I get what the two authors are saying: the mentality of scarcity leads nowhere; liberals and progressives have lost sight of the better future they hope for because they try to achieve everything everywhere all at once; too many outdated regulations and too little progress; Democrats focus too much on redistribution and forget how to build, how to increase supply, and let Republicans lead them astray, etc..etc…
They are probably correct. And yet, I still think the major question today is not what the American Left has done wrong, but why the American Right has become so dangerous. The two (I think) direct causes: the Citizen United vs FEC ruling and the unchecked, corporate controlled media like Fox News and Newsmax.
They are probably correct. And yet, I still think the major question today is not what the American Left has done wrong, but why the American Right has become so dangerous. The two (I think) direct causes: the Citizen United vs FEC ruling and the unchecked, corporate controlled media like Fox News and Newsmax.
March 24, 2025
I was excited about this book after reading Klein’s *Why We’re Polarized* and hearing his introduction of *Abundance* on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. I was disappointed to find that the spiel was more exciting to me than the book itself.
Some parts of this book were excellent and would have been deserving of five stars on their own. Klein and Thompson explored the flaws of the Democratic Party, a callout by liberals for liberals to point out the failures and shortcomings of the execution of democratic policy. I never expected myself to be so enthralled by urban planning, something I have never had an interest in, but Klein managed to make it feel exciting and important. However, other chapters were a bit of a letdown, just a dry retelling of facts, many of which did not seem to be in the author’s wheelhouse — many parts of the book felt unexciting, did not seem to bring anything new to the conversation, and only focused on one or two specific cities.
Overall, I felt that while the book as a whole was alright, some parts were great. The ideas are fairy new and much needed.
Some parts of this book were excellent and would have been deserving of five stars on their own. Klein and Thompson explored the flaws of the Democratic Party, a callout by liberals for liberals to point out the failures and shortcomings of the execution of democratic policy. I never expected myself to be so enthralled by urban planning, something I have never had an interest in, but Klein managed to make it feel exciting and important. However, other chapters were a bit of a letdown, just a dry retelling of facts, many of which did not seem to be in the author’s wheelhouse — many parts of the book felt unexciting, did not seem to bring anything new to the conversation, and only focused on one or two specific cities.
Overall, I felt that while the book as a whole was alright, some parts were great. The ideas are fairy new and much needed.
Read
January 6, 2026braiding sweetgrass but for tech
April 15, 2025
Informative and interesting perspective on infrastructure, health, AI, science, etc in the states. I really enjoy reading or listening to anything Ezra Klein has to offer.
May 13, 2025
Abundoza
How would you feel about an America with 10 Elon Musks, 50 Jeff Bezoses, 100 Great Recessions, 10,000 different AI Companies with their own unique model and chatbot. 1 million corporate landlords. 100 million 600 sq ft luxury apartments l, and 1 billion bullshit and gig jobs. If any of this sounds bad to you it’s because you love poverty and hate the prosperity gospel of abundance. An abundance of neoliberalism is what we need to solve our problems, redistributurion and healthcare get passing mentions, but pale in comparison to what is making life bad for you which is regulations and environmental protection.
These guys were probably so mad Kevin Schultz beat them to the book title “Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals)”.
“It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead” (p134). Incredible to equate wanting redistribution with not wanting “new ideas” but that’s the type of analysis you’re getting here. This is (basically) an effective altruism line of thought. Imagine how much good Sam Bankman Fried will do for the world if he first accrues a trillion dollars then gives it away.
“he (Elon Musk) is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together” (p136) actually made my jaw drop lol.
There’s a quote in the book that democrats have spent decades fighting for universal insurance (with no citation obviously).
One good thing about abundance was it teaches you to have an abundance of days. If you get up, read the book for an hour, go about your day for fifteen hours, and then read the book for an hour before bed it will easily feel like three days have passed. Stack that up over a week I’m kicking your ass. Stack that up over a year you’re finished.
I was reading this at the same time I was reading David Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism. Harvey’s critique of the situation we find ourselves in is that neoliberalism is a creation of the wealthy following the social democratic gains of the 50s and 60s, centered around re-entrenching the power of the upper class through the rights of private property and the right of the rich to receive a return on capital, and both of those rights supersede the problems with society created by this upward transfer of wealth. This book bravely asks, what if our problems are completely disconnected from neoliberalism and just live in a vacuum.
The best point this book makes is that homeowners are all basically individual mini hitlers. The critiques are fine, obvious stuff (why have liberals failed to solve the housing crisis or climate crisis or whatever). The solutions are surprisingly light or almost absent and to the extent there really is any is awesomely stupid. Most of the book is like “look here’s a very nuanced issue, and we will tell you a partial history of how we ended up here that almost never mentions income inequality, property rights, corporate power, or the rich people who benefit from things being bad. None of those people have anything to do with it. Now the Sierra Club and Ralph Nader on the other hand…”
Hilarious intro where it’s like the left has become obsessed with subsidizing expensive things like housing and childcare and healthcare, which can actually cause Cost Disease Socialism, where if you’re focused on demand and not supply, subsidizing demand drives up cost. Setting aside cost disease socialism is a concept from a think tank named after a Reagan advisor, it somehow managed to talk about healthcare and “productivity” without mentioning Medicare for all. It’s like “we need society to be more productive to achieve abundizo” and ignores that a program like Medicare for all would save healthcare spending (most developed nations spend about 12% of GDP on healthcare while the US is at 18%) and that Medicare for all would free up a million or two workers who currently process claims and work on what healthcare would and wouldn’t cover (in fact something Mayor Pete and his scarcity mindset attacked Bernie Sanders for wanting to make a million people lose their jobs). But if you wanted to achieve better healthcare outcomes, and increase productivity, doesn’t this seem like some really low hanging fruit? Instead, they just pretend like the ACA is the left position and then attack that as if the reason the ACA is the way it is is because it’s idealistic leftism and not because it was repeatedly whittled down by centrist democrats to the point it just became a handout to insurance companies and optional Medicaid expansion for states. Also their solution to transitioning from gas ovens, gas furnaces, etc. is advertising and subsidies. And that’s like their best idea.
The funny thing about cost disease socialism is they frame it as a concept of supply and demand. If you subsidize demand but don’t increase supply, the price will rise because now more money is chasing the same amount of goods. But they ignore a model like Ontario where they raise taxes a small amount and then provide child care to people at a low fee (I think it’s like $20 with a goal of $10). But any solution outside of the market is not worth mentioning because it doesn’t create an abundance of private profits.
This is just kind of a microcosm of the lack of understanding (or lack of critical thinking of the authors) that underlies this book.
Theres an incredible one liner in the book that’s like “AI will make the work week shorter by helping people do their work. And since AI is a society wide achievement we’ll all get the benefits from it and there won’t be mass layoffs or a mass reduction in wages” and they just paper over all of that in like 2 sentences. Like they just wish cast the best possible scenario for AI, do not explain how we will go from private ownership to public benefit just a “it will happen”.
They argue against kind of a straw man version of degrowth, and argue any climate policy aimed at degrowth will lead to a right wing drilling authoritarian (with hilariously no mention of how Obama or Biden led to Trump even though they drilled like hell. Turns out oil growth also doesn’t prevent fascism), and talk about center lefts parties failed visions on climate. They present part of the argument earnestly, that degrowthers argue for less military spending, less fast fashion, less factory farming, etc. but they don’t really ever mention redistribution as a way to insulate against degrowth, that’s just totally absent. They totally ignore that a big part of degrowth is that included in GDP are a lot of things we don’t need or that make money and hurt people, and we can get rid of a lot of that without harming people. Also the tradeoff that with degrowth people will have more free time is totally absent, even though it’s taken as a given AI will do that earlier in the book. They present this as a fool’s errand, before launching off on their own plan that is for some reason “way more realistic”.
They talk about how American Liberalism for the last few decades has largely focused on tax code and regulatory side, expanding social benefits to match Denmark’s and it’s like what fucking planet are these people living on? Clinton made a huge cut the social safety net, Carter made the biggest cut to social security, Obama and Clinton both tried to privatize social security, and Biden’s living legacy outside of abetting genocide in Gaza will be he ended all of the COVID safety net (EITC lapsed, 23 million kicked of Medicaid that was expanded during the pandemic, enhanced unemployment went away, no minimum wage increase). We don’t have a federal PTO minimum or maternity/paternity leave minimum. Democrats have not only failed to achieve these “easy things” that amount to tax code and regulation, they have often rolled them back!
Even at the state level Gavin Newsom blocked $35 caps on insulin! Half of the Dems in the California legislature voted for a state Medicare for all. Moderate NY State dems caucused with the republicans for a few years when Cuomo was governor. Never mentioned as a stumbling block to progressive goals.
It posits the democrats moved away from the production oriented new deal and towards things like environmentalism in the 60s and 70s due to environmental disaster the new deal policies caused and that we need to return to a liberalism that builds. I would argue the red scare and the push away from the bold progressive policies of the new deal are what focused the Democratic Party on regulation (there’s also no reason they couldn’t regulate the environment and do industrial policy at the same time) but any analysis of the rightward movement of the Democratic Party is completely absent.
They talk about the red tape around using government money for things that you wouldn’t always have with private money. They bemoan how if you want to build public housing for the homeless near a freeway and you’re taking government money the government you have to put an air purifier in the building, and that demanding these air purifiers is slowing builds and people would much rather live in a building without an air purifier than a tent. And while that is true, they’re behaving like this isn’t the richest country in the history of the world and can absolutely provide that but choose not to. It’s just interesting they look at a very obvious problem, and the solution is the pesky government thinks the homeless need damn clean air and a home instead of just a home. It’s the stuff like this where the book really falls flat, blaming these small regulations as why we have homelessness instead of the rightward shift among democrats and the the lack of political will on their part to do rent control or provide mass public housing or anything like that. The reason democrats have not solved the climate crisis or the homelessness crisis or the cost of living crisis is because they fundamentally have no interest in doing so and underfund and put up red tape around it, not because they’re trying hard but running into regulations. Their solution is always to deregulate, not to overhaul how we allocate or distribute.
This book does also situate itself as a path to fully automated space neoliberalism but then spends a majority of the time complaining about a handful of cities in California.
They also act like all of these regulations were all written in good faith by noble politicians trying their best. Housing section neglects that progressives typically are pro up zoning and centrists typically kill it to protect existing monied interests (like landlords).
The NIH chapter is also funny cause they totally neglect that the democratic congressmen whining about spurious NIH funding and costing taxpayer dollars are definitely centrists. There’s nothing in here on the dynamics inside the Democratic Party, nothing about how most of their critiques start around the time the democrats start shifting right which is something they obviously support. Treating the NIH like DARPA makes sense (less paperwork, less strings attached) but the reason the NIH can’t operate like DARPA is basically no congresspeople see defense spending as waste where a lot see NIH spending as waste if it doesn’t have a direct easy application. And this is a “left vs right” problem but the right and centrist democrats are on the demonizing perceived waste side, which they kind of ignore the dynamic of. For “wonks” there sure are a lot of convenient things they like to leave out (namely the politicians they support are mostly at issue with the problems of the Democratic Party).
It’s also unclear why Austin is a success story instead of say Vienna or China. No mention of the Real Page price fixing scandal. No talk of realtors just pulling apartments off renting sites during COVID in NYC cause they didn’t want to lower rental prices. No talk of how inelastic demand is for housing, and even with added supply if corporate landlords have enough power they will just move affordable housing off market, act as a cartel to keep rents high, or any other thing along those lines. I’m also not sure if they even mentioned section 8 housing.
Austin Housing link: https://decibelatx.org/business/whos-...
“But groups that work with lower income residents say families are struggling with a very tight housing market. Jazmin Rivera is a tenant outreach specialist with BASTA, a tenants rights organization. She says they are not seeing rents drop.
“I would say the biggest thing has been rent increases,” Rivera says. “We do have a lot of folks that are saying there's no affordable housing or there's no housing I could find that's within my range that I can afford right now. And so they're definitely moving to the outskirts of Austin.”
Experts say part of the disconnect is that much of the new housing is aimed at high-income earners. Nationwide, 89% of new apartments built in the last couple of years were considered ‘high-end,’ aimed at upper-middle and high-income renters. They’re also the groups getting deals on rent. One report showed that in Texas cities, luxury apartments saw bigger price drops than middle-tier rentals. Awais Azhar is the deputy director of HousingWorks Austin, and he says those kinds of apartments are inaccessible to many families”
Also, while they talk about building $400k a unit 400sq ft prefab apartments for San Francisco and NYC, a very similar strategy is failing in Toronto (a much more analogous city to NYC or SF) https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/real-...
“”We have about one full year’s inventory and that seems to continue up and up and up in terms of listings. There’s really no sign that it’s going to level off or that there’s going to be any reduction in the near term.”Butler said there’s been “severe overbuilding” in the Toronto condo market for a number of years, specifically when it comes to smaller units. “The tiniest of tiny condos,” Butler said. “It’s weird that in a country like Canada where there’s been a consistent housing crisis for the last 10 years that if you build a very bad product, people won’t take it, it’s as simple as that.”Butler said many of the unsold condos on the market today are ones designed for investors or real estate speculators and are not practical for most families.”
How would you feel about an America with 10 Elon Musks, 50 Jeff Bezoses, 100 Great Recessions, 10,000 different AI Companies with their own unique model and chatbot. 1 million corporate landlords. 100 million 600 sq ft luxury apartments l, and 1 billion bullshit and gig jobs. If any of this sounds bad to you it’s because you love poverty and hate the prosperity gospel of abundance. An abundance of neoliberalism is what we need to solve our problems, redistributurion and healthcare get passing mentions, but pale in comparison to what is making life bad for you which is regulations and environmental protection.
These guys were probably so mad Kevin Schultz beat them to the book title “Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals)”.
“It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead” (p134). Incredible to equate wanting redistribution with not wanting “new ideas” but that’s the type of analysis you’re getting here. This is (basically) an effective altruism line of thought. Imagine how much good Sam Bankman Fried will do for the world if he first accrues a trillion dollars then gives it away.
“he (Elon Musk) is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together” (p136) actually made my jaw drop lol.
There’s a quote in the book that democrats have spent decades fighting for universal insurance (with no citation obviously).
One good thing about abundance was it teaches you to have an abundance of days. If you get up, read the book for an hour, go about your day for fifteen hours, and then read the book for an hour before bed it will easily feel like three days have passed. Stack that up over a week I’m kicking your ass. Stack that up over a year you’re finished.
I was reading this at the same time I was reading David Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism. Harvey’s critique of the situation we find ourselves in is that neoliberalism is a creation of the wealthy following the social democratic gains of the 50s and 60s, centered around re-entrenching the power of the upper class through the rights of private property and the right of the rich to receive a return on capital, and both of those rights supersede the problems with society created by this upward transfer of wealth. This book bravely asks, what if our problems are completely disconnected from neoliberalism and just live in a vacuum.
The best point this book makes is that homeowners are all basically individual mini hitlers. The critiques are fine, obvious stuff (why have liberals failed to solve the housing crisis or climate crisis or whatever). The solutions are surprisingly light or almost absent and to the extent there really is any is awesomely stupid. Most of the book is like “look here’s a very nuanced issue, and we will tell you a partial history of how we ended up here that almost never mentions income inequality, property rights, corporate power, or the rich people who benefit from things being bad. None of those people have anything to do with it. Now the Sierra Club and Ralph Nader on the other hand…”
Hilarious intro where it’s like the left has become obsessed with subsidizing expensive things like housing and childcare and healthcare, which can actually cause Cost Disease Socialism, where if you’re focused on demand and not supply, subsidizing demand drives up cost. Setting aside cost disease socialism is a concept from a think tank named after a Reagan advisor, it somehow managed to talk about healthcare and “productivity” without mentioning Medicare for all. It’s like “we need society to be more productive to achieve abundizo” and ignores that a program like Medicare for all would save healthcare spending (most developed nations spend about 12% of GDP on healthcare while the US is at 18%) and that Medicare for all would free up a million or two workers who currently process claims and work on what healthcare would and wouldn’t cover (in fact something Mayor Pete and his scarcity mindset attacked Bernie Sanders for wanting to make a million people lose their jobs). But if you wanted to achieve better healthcare outcomes, and increase productivity, doesn’t this seem like some really low hanging fruit? Instead, they just pretend like the ACA is the left position and then attack that as if the reason the ACA is the way it is is because it’s idealistic leftism and not because it was repeatedly whittled down by centrist democrats to the point it just became a handout to insurance companies and optional Medicaid expansion for states. Also their solution to transitioning from gas ovens, gas furnaces, etc. is advertising and subsidies. And that’s like their best idea.
The funny thing about cost disease socialism is they frame it as a concept of supply and demand. If you subsidize demand but don’t increase supply, the price will rise because now more money is chasing the same amount of goods. But they ignore a model like Ontario where they raise taxes a small amount and then provide child care to people at a low fee (I think it’s like $20 with a goal of $10). But any solution outside of the market is not worth mentioning because it doesn’t create an abundance of private profits.
This is just kind of a microcosm of the lack of understanding (or lack of critical thinking of the authors) that underlies this book.
Theres an incredible one liner in the book that’s like “AI will make the work week shorter by helping people do their work. And since AI is a society wide achievement we’ll all get the benefits from it and there won’t be mass layoffs or a mass reduction in wages” and they just paper over all of that in like 2 sentences. Like they just wish cast the best possible scenario for AI, do not explain how we will go from private ownership to public benefit just a “it will happen”.
They argue against kind of a straw man version of degrowth, and argue any climate policy aimed at degrowth will lead to a right wing drilling authoritarian (with hilariously no mention of how Obama or Biden led to Trump even though they drilled like hell. Turns out oil growth also doesn’t prevent fascism), and talk about center lefts parties failed visions on climate. They present part of the argument earnestly, that degrowthers argue for less military spending, less fast fashion, less factory farming, etc. but they don’t really ever mention redistribution as a way to insulate against degrowth, that’s just totally absent. They totally ignore that a big part of degrowth is that included in GDP are a lot of things we don’t need or that make money and hurt people, and we can get rid of a lot of that without harming people. Also the tradeoff that with degrowth people will have more free time is totally absent, even though it’s taken as a given AI will do that earlier in the book. They present this as a fool’s errand, before launching off on their own plan that is for some reason “way more realistic”.
They talk about how American Liberalism for the last few decades has largely focused on tax code and regulatory side, expanding social benefits to match Denmark’s and it’s like what fucking planet are these people living on? Clinton made a huge cut the social safety net, Carter made the biggest cut to social security, Obama and Clinton both tried to privatize social security, and Biden’s living legacy outside of abetting genocide in Gaza will be he ended all of the COVID safety net (EITC lapsed, 23 million kicked of Medicaid that was expanded during the pandemic, enhanced unemployment went away, no minimum wage increase). We don’t have a federal PTO minimum or maternity/paternity leave minimum. Democrats have not only failed to achieve these “easy things” that amount to tax code and regulation, they have often rolled them back!
Even at the state level Gavin Newsom blocked $35 caps on insulin! Half of the Dems in the California legislature voted for a state Medicare for all. Moderate NY State dems caucused with the republicans for a few years when Cuomo was governor. Never mentioned as a stumbling block to progressive goals.
It posits the democrats moved away from the production oriented new deal and towards things like environmentalism in the 60s and 70s due to environmental disaster the new deal policies caused and that we need to return to a liberalism that builds. I would argue the red scare and the push away from the bold progressive policies of the new deal are what focused the Democratic Party on regulation (there’s also no reason they couldn’t regulate the environment and do industrial policy at the same time) but any analysis of the rightward movement of the Democratic Party is completely absent.
They talk about the red tape around using government money for things that you wouldn’t always have with private money. They bemoan how if you want to build public housing for the homeless near a freeway and you’re taking government money the government you have to put an air purifier in the building, and that demanding these air purifiers is slowing builds and people would much rather live in a building without an air purifier than a tent. And while that is true, they’re behaving like this isn’t the richest country in the history of the world and can absolutely provide that but choose not to. It’s just interesting they look at a very obvious problem, and the solution is the pesky government thinks the homeless need damn clean air and a home instead of just a home. It’s the stuff like this where the book really falls flat, blaming these small regulations as why we have homelessness instead of the rightward shift among democrats and the the lack of political will on their part to do rent control or provide mass public housing or anything like that. The reason democrats have not solved the climate crisis or the homelessness crisis or the cost of living crisis is because they fundamentally have no interest in doing so and underfund and put up red tape around it, not because they’re trying hard but running into regulations. Their solution is always to deregulate, not to overhaul how we allocate or distribute.
This book does also situate itself as a path to fully automated space neoliberalism but then spends a majority of the time complaining about a handful of cities in California.
They also act like all of these regulations were all written in good faith by noble politicians trying their best. Housing section neglects that progressives typically are pro up zoning and centrists typically kill it to protect existing monied interests (like landlords).
The NIH chapter is also funny cause they totally neglect that the democratic congressmen whining about spurious NIH funding and costing taxpayer dollars are definitely centrists. There’s nothing in here on the dynamics inside the Democratic Party, nothing about how most of their critiques start around the time the democrats start shifting right which is something they obviously support. Treating the NIH like DARPA makes sense (less paperwork, less strings attached) but the reason the NIH can’t operate like DARPA is basically no congresspeople see defense spending as waste where a lot see NIH spending as waste if it doesn’t have a direct easy application. And this is a “left vs right” problem but the right and centrist democrats are on the demonizing perceived waste side, which they kind of ignore the dynamic of. For “wonks” there sure are a lot of convenient things they like to leave out (namely the politicians they support are mostly at issue with the problems of the Democratic Party).
It’s also unclear why Austin is a success story instead of say Vienna or China. No mention of the Real Page price fixing scandal. No talk of realtors just pulling apartments off renting sites during COVID in NYC cause they didn’t want to lower rental prices. No talk of how inelastic demand is for housing, and even with added supply if corporate landlords have enough power they will just move affordable housing off market, act as a cartel to keep rents high, or any other thing along those lines. I’m also not sure if they even mentioned section 8 housing.
Austin Housing link: https://decibelatx.org/business/whos-...
“But groups that work with lower income residents say families are struggling with a very tight housing market. Jazmin Rivera is a tenant outreach specialist with BASTA, a tenants rights organization. She says they are not seeing rents drop.
“I would say the biggest thing has been rent increases,” Rivera says. “We do have a lot of folks that are saying there's no affordable housing or there's no housing I could find that's within my range that I can afford right now. And so they're definitely moving to the outskirts of Austin.”
Experts say part of the disconnect is that much of the new housing is aimed at high-income earners. Nationwide, 89% of new apartments built in the last couple of years were considered ‘high-end,’ aimed at upper-middle and high-income renters. They’re also the groups getting deals on rent. One report showed that in Texas cities, luxury apartments saw bigger price drops than middle-tier rentals. Awais Azhar is the deputy director of HousingWorks Austin, and he says those kinds of apartments are inaccessible to many families”
Also, while they talk about building $400k a unit 400sq ft prefab apartments for San Francisco and NYC, a very similar strategy is failing in Toronto (a much more analogous city to NYC or SF) https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/real-...
“”We have about one full year’s inventory and that seems to continue up and up and up in terms of listings. There’s really no sign that it’s going to level off or that there’s going to be any reduction in the near term.”Butler said there’s been “severe overbuilding” in the Toronto condo market for a number of years, specifically when it comes to smaller units. “The tiniest of tiny condos,” Butler said. “It’s weird that in a country like Canada where there’s been a consistent housing crisis for the last 10 years that if you build a very bad product, people won’t take it, it’s as simple as that.”Butler said many of the unsold condos on the market today are ones designed for investors or real estate speculators and are not practical for most families.”
July 1, 2025
The following excerpt from the book provides a succinct summary of the problem addressed by this book, that of surpassing the conservative/liberal divide to achieve the changes required to evolve into a future of abundance instead of scarcity.
Thus many red States have constructed more alternative power and transmission improvements than most blue States even though their politicians lack concern about carbon neutrality. Many blue States have the greatest housing shortages and the highest unhoused population rates even though their politicians claim to be very concerned about low income housing. A case in point, Houston which has no zoning laws has the one of the lowest per capita unhoused population rates of any major city in the United States. (Google search indicates that Atlanta has a lower rate.)
The authors of this book are calling for our nation to switch from politics controlled by scarcity and instead evolve into a politics of abundance. This can be done if we begin to ask the correct questions and then find their solutions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/a...
We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. Liberals speak as if they believe in government then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government small government divide is often more a sentiment than substance. Neither side focuses on what scholars call state capacity — the capacity of state government to achieve its goals.The message of this book is directed primarily at political liberals challenging them to practice what they preach. The authors are saying that liberal politics has made it impossible to make meaningful progress on existential problems of our time—problems such as housing shortage, achieving carbon neutrality to avoid climate catastrophe, facilitating scientific research and progress, and construction of high speed rail. It's true that many conservatives show minimal concern for many of these issues, but liberals have made themselves even more of an obstacle by creating endless bureaucratic roadblocks.
Thus many red States have constructed more alternative power and transmission improvements than most blue States even though their politicians lack concern about carbon neutrality. Many blue States have the greatest housing shortages and the highest unhoused population rates even though their politicians claim to be very concerned about low income housing. A case in point, Houston which has no zoning laws has the one of the lowest per capita unhoused population rates of any major city in the United States. (Google search indicates that Atlanta has a lower rate.)
The authors of this book are calling for our nation to switch from politics controlled by scarcity and instead evolve into a politics of abundance. This can be done if we begin to ask the correct questions and then find their solutions.
… we face an existential binary for our own time, abundance or scarcity? Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation, can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt:Here's a link to an article from The Atlantic saying red and purple states are trending in the same direction as costal red states regarding codes and laws which restrict construction of housing:
• If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not?
• If there's not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not?
• If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it?
• If the rate of scientific progress is slowing, how can we help scientists do their best work?
• If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/a...
April 23, 2025
An astonishingly shallow accumulation of superficial political “observations” without any meaningful systemic or root cause analysis. From what I can tell, no new ideas nor new syntheses was provided.
November 24, 2025
See, I feel sometimes that Ezra Klein has too much clout so I really wanted to write a scathing review about the shortcomings of this book to be fun and contrarian. I regret to inform you, however, that this book is good and worth reading.
The two ideas animating the book are simple: first, that growth and progress are good, and second, that we need government that is better at delivering growth and progress. Both are compelling and well-executed.
The idea that growth and progress are good seems benign and uncontroversial, but it may be the more interesting part of this book. It feels like a departure from the politics in which I came of age. That was a politics of redistribution and reparation, a politics that was skeptical of the state and critical of the hierarchies it protects, a politics that privileged the turn to community over institutional intervention. In its place, K+T propose a politics that goes big. A politics that looks to use the massive power of the government to drive innovation and construction on such a scale that it unlocks fundamentally new ways of living (think endless renewable energy, wearable technology that can diagnose any ailment, lab grown meat at scale).
I do not wish to discount the wisdom or substance of the former type of politics. But I found the case for ambition about what we can achieve together — the case that we can leverage the power of government to make big things happen fast — compelling and energizing. It made me feel hopeful about politics and about society. And insofar as politics is both a description of the world as it is and the project of offering a compelling vision of what it could be, K+T’s vision makes for excellent politics.
The second part of the dual-thesis K+T present is that we need to change the rules such that government isn’t a system that stands in the way of building stuff and making progress, but works to push it forward. As K+T talk about the Byzantine bureaucracy of construction approvals for new housing, or the endless reporting we require of government-funded scientists, you can’t help but think my god, all of these layers and rules and processes are crazy! Just trust people to do the thing we all agree needs to be done! We need to cut red tape, shorten approval timelines, quit pushing paper around.
But then, this is the perennial struggle of democratic government. How do you balance different peoples’ interests? How do you weigh different harms? What is the right balance between an effective state and one that is responsive to its citizens’ individual preferences and interests? On the one hand you have China, which can build, but is autocratic. On the other, I guess, you have the US which can’t build, but lets citizens sue their government if they are displeased by its given project. K+T are effective in making the case that the US has moved too far in the direction of holding the government accountable. But they don’t really touch on the deeper question of how you should balance these two things, or how you should weigh them.
The other day, Anna and I were on a bike ride and a guy with cool granola vibes stopped us and asked if we wanted to sign a petition against Doug Ford’s bill 5, which would let the government establish special economic zones where environmental laws and approval processes could be vastly curtailed. My Abundance-pilled brain went: this is to develop the ring of fire. Mining critical minerals is going to make Ontario richer, and those minerals are also essential for adopting clean technology. It’s good to be able to do that faster.
But then the guy asked: do you really trust Doug Ford to adequately account for the rights and interests of indigenous communities? Do you trust him to be take seriously our responsibility to protect endangered species? To account for the environmental implications of critical minerals projects?
And the answer is, I don’t. I still didn’t sign the petition. I’m still not sure whether that was the right choice.
Anyways, politics is hard and messy and full of both ideological and technical questions. It is both our responsibility and privilege to be able to think through them. This book provides excellent fodder for doing so.
The two ideas animating the book are simple: first, that growth and progress are good, and second, that we need government that is better at delivering growth and progress. Both are compelling and well-executed.
The idea that growth and progress are good seems benign and uncontroversial, but it may be the more interesting part of this book. It feels like a departure from the politics in which I came of age. That was a politics of redistribution and reparation, a politics that was skeptical of the state and critical of the hierarchies it protects, a politics that privileged the turn to community over institutional intervention. In its place, K+T propose a politics that goes big. A politics that looks to use the massive power of the government to drive innovation and construction on such a scale that it unlocks fundamentally new ways of living (think endless renewable energy, wearable technology that can diagnose any ailment, lab grown meat at scale).
I do not wish to discount the wisdom or substance of the former type of politics. But I found the case for ambition about what we can achieve together — the case that we can leverage the power of government to make big things happen fast — compelling and energizing. It made me feel hopeful about politics and about society. And insofar as politics is both a description of the world as it is and the project of offering a compelling vision of what it could be, K+T’s vision makes for excellent politics.
The second part of the dual-thesis K+T present is that we need to change the rules such that government isn’t a system that stands in the way of building stuff and making progress, but works to push it forward. As K+T talk about the Byzantine bureaucracy of construction approvals for new housing, or the endless reporting we require of government-funded scientists, you can’t help but think my god, all of these layers and rules and processes are crazy! Just trust people to do the thing we all agree needs to be done! We need to cut red tape, shorten approval timelines, quit pushing paper around.
But then, this is the perennial struggle of democratic government. How do you balance different peoples’ interests? How do you weigh different harms? What is the right balance between an effective state and one that is responsive to its citizens’ individual preferences and interests? On the one hand you have China, which can build, but is autocratic. On the other, I guess, you have the US which can’t build, but lets citizens sue their government if they are displeased by its given project. K+T are effective in making the case that the US has moved too far in the direction of holding the government accountable. But they don’t really touch on the deeper question of how you should balance these two things, or how you should weigh them.
The other day, Anna and I were on a bike ride and a guy with cool granola vibes stopped us and asked if we wanted to sign a petition against Doug Ford’s bill 5, which would let the government establish special economic zones where environmental laws and approval processes could be vastly curtailed. My Abundance-pilled brain went: this is to develop the ring of fire. Mining critical minerals is going to make Ontario richer, and those minerals are also essential for adopting clean technology. It’s good to be able to do that faster.
But then the guy asked: do you really trust Doug Ford to adequately account for the rights and interests of indigenous communities? Do you trust him to be take seriously our responsibility to protect endangered species? To account for the environmental implications of critical minerals projects?
And the answer is, I don’t. I still didn’t sign the petition. I’m still not sure whether that was the right choice.
Anyways, politics is hard and messy and full of both ideological and technical questions. It is both our responsibility and privilege to be able to think through them. This book provides excellent fodder for doing so.
March 21, 2025
Some ideas are so correct that I don’t just want people to champion policies around them, I want them to be so widely accepted that they become part of the background noise of politics. I feel that way about this book.
For decades, we took it for granted that we would zone cities in a way that prioritizes neighborhood character over making sure everyone could afford a home. People might have debated specific zoning rules, but it was taken for granted that zoning would exist and that its purpose was to prevent the building of new homes. That created the housing crisis of today, prevented young adults from moving to the next stage of life, and locked millions of people out of a better life because they couldn’t move to where the jobs were.
The abundance lens flips that. Cities should be building enough homes so that people who want to live there can afford to do so. Everything else is secondary.
It is not just housing. On issues like healthcare, green energy, scientific research, and the implementation of government programs, policy has been so oriented around preventing what could go wrong that we stopped trying to build and grow. It is really amazing how much these seemingly distinct issues rhyme with each other, and the book is great at illustrating how things like regulations that protect minority interests, procedural constraints on the government doing its job, and excessive risk aversion cause problems again and again.
It is too bad that this book has been swept into the whirlpool of discourse about how Democrats can win in 2028. It could be helpful—it has a cohesive and optimistic vision and good ideas about issues that people care about—but it is a policy book not a political one. There is so much that Democrats need to learn from this book on the policy level and embracing or dismissing it on the merits of its politics is the easy way out of those tough conversations. And as much as the book is a liberal critique of other liberals, abundance and state capacity are a useful lens for Republicans too.
The book is only 222 pages and doesn’t make a list of policy prescriptions, so this has to just be the start of the conversation. But it is really heartening to see how much attention this book is getting and how much debate it is generating.
For decades, we took it for granted that we would zone cities in a way that prioritizes neighborhood character over making sure everyone could afford a home. People might have debated specific zoning rules, but it was taken for granted that zoning would exist and that its purpose was to prevent the building of new homes. That created the housing crisis of today, prevented young adults from moving to the next stage of life, and locked millions of people out of a better life because they couldn’t move to where the jobs were.
The abundance lens flips that. Cities should be building enough homes so that people who want to live there can afford to do so. Everything else is secondary.
It is not just housing. On issues like healthcare, green energy, scientific research, and the implementation of government programs, policy has been so oriented around preventing what could go wrong that we stopped trying to build and grow. It is really amazing how much these seemingly distinct issues rhyme with each other, and the book is great at illustrating how things like regulations that protect minority interests, procedural constraints on the government doing its job, and excessive risk aversion cause problems again and again.
It is too bad that this book has been swept into the whirlpool of discourse about how Democrats can win in 2028. It could be helpful—it has a cohesive and optimistic vision and good ideas about issues that people care about—but it is a policy book not a political one. There is so much that Democrats need to learn from this book on the policy level and embracing or dismissing it on the merits of its politics is the easy way out of those tough conversations. And as much as the book is a liberal critique of other liberals, abundance and state capacity are a useful lens for Republicans too.
The book is only 222 pages and doesn’t make a list of policy prescriptions, so this has to just be the start of the conversation. But it is really heartening to see how much attention this book is getting and how much debate it is generating.
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