Reviewing Abundance (May 2025)

In this 2025 collaboration between Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thomson (The Atlantic), the liberal Left has hit on a compromise with the pro-business Right. The authors concur that for too long liberals (in the U.S., liberals are positioned on the left side of the political spectrum) have had commendable ideals, but they have also created their own roadblocks that often prevent those ideals from being transformed into productive outcomes. In Abundance, the authors attempt to show their fellow liberals where it all went wrong. This is, therefore, not a critique of the creeping authoritarianism in America, but rather a self-examination of where the liberal alternative has failed to be a viable competitor in the national debate. They begin with the housing problems in America, where the American dream of home ownership has become increasingly elusive, the euphoric subprime solution blew up and ended the dream for many, and the American nightmare of homelessness has become a commonplace symbol of the collapse of social justice in American politics.

In the concluding chapter, the authors recap the purpose of their book—to provoke a critical evaluation of the Left’s often misguided emphasis on process at the expense of delivering results. They believe the problems associated with population growth and the economy’s inability to keep pace require answering and acting on difficult, yet very basic questions:

If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is 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?

The chapters sketching out their proposal are simply labeled: Build, Govern, Invent and Deploy. Build more homes so that people can live in cities, find employment, raise families and build communities where face-to-face interpersonal and professional life can restore the synergy of people living and working together instead of relying on the technologies of communication from a distance. The chief obstacle: the excess of laws and rules that have grown up like weeds choking the building supply. The key word is ‘excess’ and, in their view, the greatest offender is the body of zoning ordinances established at the municipal level, not the state or federal level. Their most contentious argument is that those who espouse liberalism in national and state-level politics often express conservative views when it comes to who and what to allow into their neighbourhoods. Maybe there are legitimate environmental, public safety, infrastructure and congestion issues associated with building high-rise apartment buildings in communities zoned for single-family dwellings, but the real, and often unstated, objection to affordable housing is that ‘we’ don’t want those people in our neighbourhood and certainly not in those numbers. And the objection to building a power plant in the neighbourhood, for example, is much the same: build it somewhere else so that not as many people (including us, of course) are affected by the downsides of hosting an electricity generating facility. This is the paradox of NIMBY liberalism. For Republicans, there is no paradox; they don’t even pretend to care about the bottom socioeconomic percentiles.

As a side note, it might be worth considering that the house-poor are not uniformly enamoured with the prospect of being consigned to a lifetime of vertical housing. Politicians routinely say that it just isn’t feasible for everyone to expect, at minimum, a single-family dwelling even if it’s only on a postage stamp-sized plot of green grass. Apparently, ever-higher apartment towers are more feasible, bringing to mind the miles-high towers of science fiction. Why shouldn’t it be an urgent matter to find a way out of the economic segregation of vertical housing? And maybe cities aren’t the answer for where to put people. Not everyone enjoys being armpit to armpit with the rest of the world. When wealth permits it, people do cherish a place to get away to. An apartment on the 150^th floor might not be that place for everyone.

According to the authors, “The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.” This leads to the next chapter on Governance. The regulatory state was ushered in to control industry’s wanton neglect of the environment, safety and workers. Ironically, with respect to the environment, it was Richard Nixon, a Republican, who asked rhetorically, “The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?” In addition to regulatory supervision, Ralph Nader led the fight in the courts to challenge corporate America on consumer safety and environmental pollution. As a result of legislation, regulation and judicial oversight, the authors report that “Between 1970 and 2020, the combined emissions of the six most common pollutants—which include lead, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide—dropped by roughly 80 percent. New cars, SUVs, and trucks that run on gas today are more than 99 percent cleaner than in 1970.”

However, the regulatory state can be a double-edged sword as the authors remind us, bringing us back to the 21^st century. “[T]hose same laws and processes [are] available for anyone else to use, too. You can bog clean energy projects down in environmental reviews. You can use a process meant to stop the government from building a highway through your town to keep a nonprofit developer from building affordable housing down the block.” Referring to Republican opposition, they write “It was as if the right had studied the tactics of Nader’s Raiders and adopted them for their own purposes.” And NIMBYism, it turns out, is not just opposed to the ‘dirty energy’ of oil pipelines and electric transmission lines running through their communities; NIMBYists also object to and resist the location of nearby large-scale clean energy projects, e.g., energy farms of wind turbines and solar panels.

Next, the authors turn their attention to scientific invention and the equally important deployment of new scientific discoveries—both stages being essential for sustained economic growth. The authors argue that science must be backed by government investment as the private sector is unwilling to assume large projects with uncertain timelines and ‘unforecastable’ profits. The size, complexity, duration and riskiness of grand science projects, therefore, becomes the business of government. They cite the Apollo space program as a classic example and then proceed to a more general assessment, noting that “When you use an iPhone, you are playing with a technology that bundles silicon chips, the internet, GPS, voice-recognition software, and multi-touch technology, which were in part funded by the Defense Department, NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other government entities.” In other words, government does much of the upfront research that the corporate world is then able to use (for free) to generate profits. Under the present administration, this model is under attack from the ‘efficiency experts’, who incidentally have themselves profited immensely from government research. And then there are the subsidies, tax breaks and the entire communication and transportation infrastructure that undergirds modern American commerce—all paid for by the American taxpayer. This sort of big government does not offend Republicans, who often counter that government assistance to business ultimately enables the private sector to perform the public service of creating jobs. This, as if to say, that businessmen are benevolent and are not always on the lookout for lower-cost input alternatives to labour when and where possible.

Where the authors challenge government to do more—much more—is in extending theoretical scientific knowledge to commercial applications. They note that the lead role played by American scientists in nuclear and solar energy and lithium batteries was not followed up by ambitious innovation to transform scientific understanding into applied science. As a result, technological applications developed by European and Asian countries have surpassed the U.S. They conclude that

Politics should take technology more seriously. Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create. The fundamental link between the two is not at the core of the Democratic or the Republican agenda. Instead, we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.

Thus, both agendas miss the larger point, which is that “[Government] needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.” The obsession with process is characteristic of Democratic programs, while a ‘stated’ aversion to government intervention is foundational for Republicans. In neither case are the parties ready to assume the responsibility of creating what the authors suggest might be termed the ‘entrepreneurial state’—this being an American answer to Chinese state capitalism.

Whether this new ‘state’ will be autocratic, plutocratic or democratic (with blemishes) seems to be an open question. The Chinese system has recently demonstrated great economic success in an autocratic society. An American system of autocratic government might be less centralized owing to its federal structure of government, but the verdict is still out on how America’s recent turn to authoritarian presidentialism will evolve, especially in the near term. Cynics from the Left might consider Abundance to represent a refurbished political economy for the upper middle class that is nevertheless ideologically repelled by the MAGA movement. They might ask whether we are simply getting more of Ronald Reagan's trickle-down social order repackaged for liberal consumption. From the Right, the criticism might conjure up images of Soviet state planning—presumably this group would be more amenable to post-Soviet Russian ‘kleptocapitalism.’ And so, grudging support from the highest socioeconomic percentiles might be forthcoming if the income/wealth gap is not threatened by socialized redistribution and as the opportunities for self-enrichment become more apparent.