Abundance (The Book)

 

Ezra Klein is a well known NY Times political columnist and podcaster, originally from California, now based in Brooklyn, and author of Why We're Polarized (2020). Derek Thompson is an Atlantic staff writer and also a podcaster. The two have teamed up to produce Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Abundance is dedicated to what its authors consider a simple idea, but which they and we know to be actually a quite controversial one, that "to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need." They oppose this to a 21st-century American "story of chosen scarcities." Thus agenda transcends the 20th-century political dichotomy between "a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it."

As anyone familiar with the way these issues have come to be framed recognizes, this book is a conversation largely within the progressive left. It expresses "the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern." California, for example, "has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst hosing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona." The authors also highlight the consequent effect ineffective progressive misgovernment in such places has had electorally - in the form of the rise of populist Trumpism.

In their argument for a retrieval of growth politics, the authors take on the misanthropic antigrowth politics that they see as having developed somewhat in tandem with the environmental movement and related quality-of-life concerns in the last 50-60 years.  Back then, the rising anti-growth ideologies sometimes attacked Christianity. Here. the authors rebut that attack. They call degrowth "an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors, hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity's promise of dominion over nature."

The book gos into great detail illustrating the ways in which liberal preoccupations with process have frustrated and stunted the outcomes liberals ought to have been seeking. I live in New York City, a city that once epitomized what America could build. Imagine anyone trying to build the Empire State building in just a year today? Let alone trying to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live here?

But the authors believe that this may be one of those rare periods in our national history, "when the decline of one political order makes space for another." They recall how the New Deal political order arose in the 1930s and then collapsed in the 1970s, to be replaced by the neo-liberal order which has been fracturing under the weight of the Great Recession, the climate crisis, the pandemic, and "our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability." In such times of transition, "ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable."

So is it time for such a retrieved politics of abundance? The authors see the politics of scarcity  in the currently reigning right-wing populism, which "seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy's failed promises." Meanwhile, however, Blue America remains stuck in its own scarcity politics. The authors' argument is that, given the right's abandonment of its many successes (e.g., the Texas housing market, Operation Warp Speed) in order to embrace a politics of scarcity, there may now be room for liberals to embrace the politics of abundance that Republicans have abandoned.

This is a very thoughtful and provocative book. It is hard to contest its data. But diagnosing where we have historically gone wrong is always easier than producing the political solution that may be needed. At present, the left lacks political power, without which little can be accomplished. To acquire power - and to use it effectively in our present predicament - require a kind of liberal "strongman," a liberal anti-Trump, an FDR for the 21st century, who can coalesce a new coalition that can be led to embrace not just more of the same, but a new political order, responsive to the new challenges of the present. Whether the current opposition party can rise to that challenge remains yet to be seen.