Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Avid Reader Press (ISBN: 9781668023488) 2025.
Summary: A vision of an American future where we invent and build what’s needed and for government that enables rather than hobbles growth.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson open this book with what seems an idyllic dream in the not too distant 2050’s. Abundant water floods the West because oceans provide desalinated water to our taps, allowing a resurgence of tapped out rivers and the greening of desert cities. Fresh food from local “skyscraper farms” and lab grown meat fill your refrigerator, allowing the re-wilding of land. Miracle drugs manufactured in space extend life. Electric transport has cleaned up the air. Work weeks have shrunk through the use of AI. Homelessness, health, and climate crises are a thing of the past.
I have to admit reading this sounded like an exercise of constructing castles in the air. The authors would disagree. They boil their contention down to this: “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. Our housing shortages, infrastructure woes, energy needs, and technological challenges are not insurmountable. And the answer for them is not “less is more.” Technology is an engine of incredible growth. The vision is one, not of a static, but expanding pie.
What is striking is that Klein and Thompson are two progressives, who write primarily to progressives. While critiquing conservative efforts to hobble government, their critique is far more focused on the ways progressives have hobbled growth and innovation through excessive and labyrinthine regulation. Much of it was well-intentioned to provide for safe housing, a cleaner environment, and more equitable contracting. Environmental litigation hamstrung housing growth in places like California, where it is most needed.
Perhaps the most telling example in the whole book is California’s efforts to build high speed rail, beginning in 1982. As of the writing, none of the 500 mile system is operational while costs balloon. Meanwhile, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high speed rail. The problem is not know how, with the U.S. long a leader in rail transport technology. Rather, the problem has been regulations and the protracted negotiations, environmental reviews, and lawsuits these entailed.
The issue is not that government can’t work. For example, Houston permitted more housing units than San Francisco, the Boston and New York Metro areas combined during a recent year. In Houston, the median home price was $300,000 versus $1.7 million in San Francisco. Houston has land use but no zoning rules whereas the others have layers of regulations and restrictions that make construction processes lengthier and far more expensive. Contractors build fewer housing units. And none of it is affordable.
America has led the world in innovation due to our commitments to basic research. Once again, in more recent years, research has been hamstrung by reporting requirements that stifle many of the most creative. They observed that we haven’t studied the creative process. Not only that, increasingly, we don’t build what we invent, but offshore it. The authors argue that the country that can both invent and build what it invents is destined to be an economic powerhouse.
Finally, they highlight the importance of strategic deployment, citing examples from Kennedy’s moonshot program to Trump’s operation Warp Speed, which produced a vaccine that might normally take ten years in ten months during a global health emergency. It means logical, streamlined processes and the ruthless removal of bottlenecks. They raise the question of AI development and the wisdom of allowing the innovation and implementation infrastructures to be located offshore. Is it such a good idea to contract this out to the Middle East, they ask?
On one hand, Klein and Thompson offer a trenchant critique of the failures of progressives, one of miring growth and innovation in regulative processes. Likewise, they offer a compelling vision of the possible. What I don’t find here are substantive proposals of how to go about removing the regulative barriers to growth apart from dismantling them, as the current administration seems to be doing. I also think they are optimistic about the ability of technology to save us. I find that technology is always doubled edged. The electric future they envision relies, at least in part, on battery and nuclear technology. Both of these carry significant downsides.
I also think the authors are caught in a binary of scarcity versus abundance. A third alternative that I don’t see here is one of “enough.” In a society with obscene extremes of wealth and poverty, it seems we lack a commitment that everyone would have enough–of housing, transport, health care, education, and economic opportunity. We have an abundance in our social, intellectual, and material capital for everyone to have a high standard of enough. The problem is not merely regulatory but structural and spiritual. I fear that without addressing these problems, the vision of these writers is indeed of “castles in the air.”