Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $30)
America desperately needs a cross-coalitional movement focused on innovation and building. Without such an ecumenical push for progress—neither left-wing nor right-wing, but what I call “up-wing”—we will see no Age of AI and no Clean Energy Revolution. Those are the stakes, and they’re civilizational.
Great news, then, that left-of-center journalists Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic have written Abundance, a book urging Democrats, liberals, and progressives to abandon their decades-long embrace of scarcity politics and policy. Klein and Thompson argue that progressives have become diehard defenders of dysfunctional systems and regulatory bottlenecks.
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Their examples from liberal strongholds are damning. San Francisco requires 523 days for housing construction approval and another 605 days for building permits. California’s high-speed rail, originally budgeted at $33 billion and scheduled for completion by 2020, remains unfinished, with costs ballooning.
In Klein and Thompson’s view, an “abundance agenda” would enable “a liberalism that builds” instead of one focused on the writing of “new rules and the moving about of money.” Abundance politics would marry progressive concern for working people with pragmatic institutional reform to deliver more affordable housing in high-wage cities and clean-energy infrastructure across the country.
As some reviewers have pointed out, Abundance is the center-left version of my center-right book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, published in 2023. Both identify how a thicket of procedural requirements, environmental reviews, and litigation opportunities—most, like the National Environmental Policy Act, dating from the 1970s—has paralyzed American dynamism. As far as policy solutions go, neither book provides a lengthy list of agenda items. But some overlap exists where specific ideas are offered, such as reforming land-use regulations and environmental reviews.
Abundance charts a cautious path of incremental, technocratic reform. It’s less ambitious than the transformative, market-driven reinvention that we need—think building a lunar colony, doubling national R&D spending, or scrapping outdated 1970s-era regulations like NEPA. Still, its pragmatism may appeal to moderate Democratic policymakers, especially those looking to steer the party in a new direction after the disastrous 2024 election. I see Klein and Thompson as pro-progress, up-wing allies. As I noted in The Conservative Futurist, the “rise of the abundance left” is a welcome tailwind for progress.
A few quibbles, though. First, Abundance lacks historical perspective on America’s diminished capacity to build. Klein and Thompson contend that legitimate environmental concerns of the 1970s spawned a regulatory apparatus that has exceeded its utility, now impeding pandemic responses and climate initiatives alike. That breezy narrative, however, glosses over crucial history.
Regulatory drawbacks manifested almost immediately. NEPA and the Endangered Species Act led to much publicized (and mocked) delays in the construction of Tennessee’s Tellico dam after the 1973 discovery of the tiny snail darter fish. Similar impediments delayed the trans-Alaska pipeline. Both were big news at the time. By 1981, the Congressional Budget Office had already identified the “regulatory proliferation” of 1969–1972 as a potential culprit for the nation’s productivity slowdown.
This needed context illuminates Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory platform—remarkably similar to what Klein and Thompson now advocate. Yet rather than acknowledging this precedent, or examining how earlier reforms might have averted today’s paralysis, they merely censure Reagan for cutting solar research funding.
Second, there’s a missing explanation for the decades of scarcity-driven policy on the left. Economist Bruce Yandle’s “Baptist and bootlegger” framework describes how moral crusaders (“Baptists”) unwittingly provide cover for self-interested parties (“bootleggers”) when supporting regulations. In this case, well-meaning environmentalists and health advocates enabled incumbent firms, NIMBYs, and regulatory professionals.
This alliance helped cause today’s regulatory sclerosis. It now threatens a repeat with artificial intelligence. AI “safety” advocates risk unwittingly freezing out innovators, while, at the same time, advancing the interests of technology behemoths with the resources to navigate compliance regimes. Even the most principled regulatory frameworks get warped by misaligned incentives over time.
Finally, I wish Klein and Thompson had been tougher on labor unions, a key Democratic interest group. They note that Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s successful 12-day emergency rebuild of the collapsed I-95 bridge used union labor. But they ignore a story—now a classic in the “Why can’t we build” genre—that shows how problematic unions can be. In a 2017 New York Times essay, “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth,” Klein’s colleague Brian M. Rosenthal documented how New York subway construction costs ballooned to billions of dollars per mile of track. A key cause was the politically powerful transit unions, which drove up costs through mandatory overstaffing and sky-high overtime wages.
The extractive interest-group politics of the Left are every bit as much a barrier to abundance as byzantine permitting rules. The “Abundance Bros,” as some leftist critics now mock Klein and Thompson, are going to need an abundance of help from the pro-growth Right to achieve their vision. Maybe the next book we can all write together: Up Wing: How to Rise Above America’s Left-Right Politics of Scarcity and Stagnation.
Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
