Book review: Abundance
Abundance wants to win the left. I want it to win the country.
I.
Every great political movement is built around a story of the future. Today, progressives are struggling to tell one.
The Democrats’ loss in 2024 devastated the party, as they bled support across the very groups they have historically counted on. You’d think that after some post-election clarity, the DNC’s Winter Meeting in February would have shown some cohesion. But no: nobody could agree on a single, forward-looking agenda. The Democratic Party’s factions resemble rival clients fighting for a shrinking pool of attention.
Of course, coalitions are always messy — that’s politics! But past eras had their rallying cries — the 1930s-50s’ New Deal faith in government, the 1960s’ calls for civil rights, the 1970s’ embrace of consumer and environmental protection, the 1990s’ belief in globalism. In contrast, today’s Democratic coalition feels hopelessly lost. What is the lens through which we diagnose and treat our societal ills? In the 2010s, the story was one of social justice and redistribution. But with the broad rightward shift across the entire population, that story for the Democrats is decidedly over. The question is what comes next.
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, offers an answer: a new progressive story rooted not in distributing scarcity, but in creating abundance. A politics focused on building — more housing, more energy, more infrastructure, more opportunity in general.
Traditionally, liberals have sought to give people more by stimulating demand: increasing purchasing power through fiscal transfers, subsidies, and safety nets. That was Obama’s entire presidency, with his stimulus after the Great Recession and the Affordable Care Act. Klein and Thompson argue for a different lens: we need to expand supply, to actually build again rather than lining people’s pockets with money to spend on a stagnant set of goods and services. “Supply-side” has been a bit of a dirty word in left-leaning circles, but Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are trying to transform it into a new unifying force for progressives.
II.
Importantly, Klein and Thompson aren’t writing a bipartisan manifesto. Abundance is a direct plea to their own political coalition — the Democratic Party and the broader progressive movement — to adopt a new mindset rooted in growth. In that sense, it is a bold and necessary message.
Yet in speaking only to liberals, Abundance misses a deeper opportunity to forge a broader political realignment around building. And by grounding its moral urgency almost entirely in climate change, it risks reducing abundance to just another special-interest crusade. These aren’t minor critiques; Abundance, for all its strengths, imagines too narrow a road forward, and I’ll come back to this later.
For now, it’s important to understand the landscape Klein and Thompson are trying to reshape. They are not writing in a vacuum. Their argument taps into a broader shift I think is happening across American politics along two major axes.
The first is the divide between abundance and scarcity mindsets.
Those with an abundance mindset believe the future can be more prosperous, more dynamic, and more expansive than the present — if we act to build it.
Those with a scarcity mindset see a world of limits: finite resources, fragile ecosystems, declining institutions. They believe society must focus on restraint, protection, and redistribution.
The second axis is the more familiar division between liberal and conservative instincts, but refracted through new questions.
Liberals, at least in the world Abundance envisions, tend to favor a more active state: public investment, coordination, and deliberate institution-building.
Conservatives, even those committed to abundance, tend to favor markets, entrepreneurs, and decentralized innovation over state-led planning.
Layered together, these two axes produce a far more revealing map of the current political moment than the traditional left-right spectrum. One way to visualize this is through a simple 2x2, with many of today’s policy proposals mapped onto it:
Here’s what these quadrants believe.
Abundance Liberals (“state-builders”) (e.g., Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson): After streamlining procedure, government must actively invest, coordinate, and build.
Abundance Conservatives (“techno-optimist”) (e.g., Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel): After streamlining procedure, private entrepreneurs and markets will drive abundance. Government’s primary task is not to lead construction, but to stop obstructing it.
Scarcity Liberals (“de-growthers”) (e.g., Greta Thunberg, AOC): Focus on restraint and redistribution of a stagnant or shrinking pie, prioritizing environmental protection and social equity even at the expense of material expansion.
Scarcity Conservatives (“nationalists”) (e.g., JD Vance, Tucker Carlson): Defend a shrinking pie, often through protectionism, cultural preservation, and skepticism of globalization. Importantly, scarcity conservatives frame decline in cultural terms more than purely material ones.
Both liberals and conservatives are increasingly grappling with the question of how to build again, with Klein and Thompson focusing squarely on the former. But if the authors are now asking the progressive movement to rally around abundance, they first explain and help us understand why it lost sight of that goal in the first place.
III.
Democrats have spent the past 50 years gradually trading outcomes for process. The party that once rallied Americans around big, tangible achievements — creating Medicare, landing on the Moon — has increasingly turned inward, prioritizing procedures and stakeholder management over actual visible results. They believed that rigorous process would automatically produce justice, but this has, ironically, undermined our very ability to deliver it.
This shift didn’t happen by accident. After the postwar building boom of the 1940s and 1950s — an era that gave us highways, airports, dams, suburbs, and cities, often built with disregard for local communities, the environment, or basic justice — a backlash emerged, led by environmentalists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader. New laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and expansions of administrative law were designed to place guardrails around what we built and how quickly. It was a moral achievement, forcing the government and the private sector to ask who it harmed, not just what it built.
This moral achievement has metastasized into institutional failure. Consider this: in New York, it cost $4.5 billion to build just 1.8 miles of subway track over 10+ years — the most expensive subway project on Earth. Solar and wind farms that could power millions of homes are delayed by 7+ years — not because the technology doesn’t work, but because paperwork, permitting fights, and lawsuits make building almost impossible. In San Francisco, it can take 5+ years and hundreds of separate approvals just to add a few dozen units of affordable housing. Meanwhile, tens of thousands sleep on the streets. We have created a system where saying no is easier than saying yes, where doing nothing is safer than doing something, and where preserving the status quo is treated as nobler than building the future.
In reading Abundance, I see two common threads that run through most of these problems. First, the procedural state empowers small but entrenched interests to block the future. Those who already have what they want — a house in a good school district, a quiet suburban street, a beach free of wind turbines — use environmental lawsuits, zoning boards, and permitting hearings to pull the ladder up behind them. Frustratingly, the entrenched groups don’t need to represent a majority; they only need the right to slow, sue, and stall — rights which now have been enshrined by law. As a result, a small minority can strangle the needs of a much larger, and often younger, public that is locked out of housing, clean energy, and opportunity. Today, it only takes a minority to stop progress, but a supermajority to create it.
The second thread is internal to the government: the public sector has buried itself, and the stakeholders that interface with it, under a mountain of paperwork. For example, scientists applying for NIH grants now spend nearly half their time not on research, but on compliance paperwork — navigating a maze of forms, audits, and regulations that grow every year.
IV.
If Abundance is a call to rebuild liberalism around growth, it’s worth noting that liberals aren’t alone in rediscovering the appeal of abundance. For the first time in generations, some liberals and conservatives are converging emotionally around the idea that we must build. Abundance liberals and abundance conservatives seem to want the same thing: more housing, more growth, more dynamism. Both diagnose America’s malaise as a crisis of stagnation. Both advocate for streamlining permitting, accelerating infrastructure projects, and reimagining the country as a place that builds again. But beneath this surface agreement lies a fundamental divide: whom do they trust to make it happen?
Abundance conservatives largely believe that the private sector, once unshackled from government barriers, will naturally drive progress. To them, the central task is to shrink the bureaucratic state, eliminate procedural delays, and let capital, entrepreneurs, and markets fill the gap. In this view, abundance is the default, and government is the bottleneck.
Abundance liberals, by contrast, argue that the state must play an active role in shaping what and how we build. As detailed in the previous section, it’s true that Klein and Thompson have a negative view of government (i.e., too much procedure), but they also have a positive view, too. Abundance requires competent, capable government — not just to clear away bad procedures, but also to build public goods and fund innovation.
The immediate response from the right is that the government can’t pick winners. But Klein and Thompson aren’t arguing that government can or should pick winners perfectly. It’s about government investing where the private sector won’t. Markets are excellent at scaling known products and serving immediate demand. Venture capitalists fund products that can go-to-market and become billion-dollar companies in ~7 years. But markets are less suited to solving collective action problems, funding basic research without clear commercial paths, or coordinating complex, public goods infrastructure. Without state intervention, many foundational breakthroughs — the internet, GPS, biotechnology, touchscreens — would have languished in the valley of death between scientific discovery and private profitability.
This role is not theoretical. The authors’ strongest example here is Trump’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS), an extraordinary case of the federal government actively shaping a market under extreme uncertainty. Launched in May 2020, OWS committed over $18 billion to accelerate COVID vaccine development, manufacturing, and distribution. Crucially, it didn’t simply pick one winner. It made parallel bets on multiple vaccine platforms — mRNA, viral vector, protein subunit — ensuring that even if some failed, others could succeed. OWS dramatically reduced risk for private companies: the government paid for clinical trials, scaled manufacturing facilities before final regulatory approvals, and signed purchase agreements in advance. By guaranteeing a market and absorbing early-stage financial risk, the state enabled pharmaceutical companies to move at speeds that would have been impossible under normal market conditions, where private investors would have waited for proof of safety and efficacy before committing billions.
The results were historic. In less than a year, the U.S. authorized and deployed multiple safe and effective vaccines, a process that normally would have taken 5-10 years. Without strategic state action — not just deregulation, but proactive investment and guaranteed demand — it’s unlikely that mass vaccination would have happened remotely as quickly.
V.
Abundance is a strong articulation of how to break the gridlock and get America building again. But for all its strengths, it ultimately feels too small for the moment it seeks to address.
First, it is aimed exclusively at liberals. The authors argue that the Democratic Party needs a new organizing force to win elections, and they’re absolutely right. But in tailoring the book to liberals, Klein and Thompson miss the deeper opportunity: to establish a new political order — one that both parties orient themselves around.
What makes such an “order” possible is when both parties come to share certain baseline assumptions about the future direction of our country. To quote Gary Gerstle:
A political order is a way of rethinking political time. It arises when a political party wins not just one election but several, and develops an enduring appeal in American politics. A political order must be undergirded by a program of political economy that can plausibly claim to promote prosperity and opportunity and connect that program to a vision of the good life that appeals to voters.
A mark of a political order’s success is when it compels the opposition party—the Republicans during the New Deal order, the Democrats during the neoliberal order—to accept the dominant party’s political economy and vision of the good life as its own.
Today, we’re seeing early sparks of this. Both parties, despite their stark ideological differences, are waking up to the threat of China’s industrial might, shrinking away from neoliberalism, and thinking about ways we can increase the speed and scale of what we build at home.
Trump is aggressively promoting on-shoring, pushing companies like Foxconn forward on their plans to build domestic manufacturing plants. He also ordered his cabinet to prepare a plan for the creation of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund — a bipartisan idea the Biden administration had quietly explored as well — which would enable the government to directly invest in and capture the upside of America’s growth. Say what you will about the execution of his DOGE, but the intention is right there in the name: to make the federal government more efficient. Action on the federal level has now cascaded into the states, with 26 states (mostly red but also some blue) now having their own state DOGEs. Biden, for his part, leaned more heavily on direct federal investment through the CHIPS Act (semiconductors), the Inflation Reduction Act (climate technologies), and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (physical infrastructure). He also used the Defense Production Act to direct investment into critical sectors like electric vehicle battery materials and medical supplies.
Taken together, these policies represent the stirring signs of both parties beginning to converge on a complementary vision of abundance.
In this light, Abundance feels strangely narrow. The fact that conservatives are talking seriously about permitting reform, state capacity, and building again is not a footnote — it’s an opening. Abundance chooses not to step through it.
A charitable read is that Klein and Thompson are making a strategic choice: first persuade the Democratic Party, and then, if abundance proves electorally successful, Republicans will adapt to it. And that’s not a crazy theory. As Gerstle suggests, political orders begin when one party starts winning elections, and then the other party falls in line. Besides, maybe things are too polarized right now for meaningful outreach across the aisle. Better to let election wins speak for themselves.
But this one-party approach feels too slow, and too passive, for the urgency of the moment. The ground is already shifting. There’s a chance to shape a genuine cross-partisan order in real time, not just in retrospect. A more ambitious Abundance would have engaged both sides — not by diluting its goals, but by recognizing that this moment of convergence, however messy and fragile, is part of an opportunity for more intentional collaboration. Am I being too idealistic?
For their part, the authors explicitly choose not to engage conservatives because Abundance is so heavily motivated by climate change. Given the hostility from the right to climate change, Klein and Thompson think it’s a “folly to expect a [conservative] coalition that does not share our [climate] goals to do the work to achieve them.” In other words, if we disagree on the ends, why even try to convince them on the means?
This leads into my second critique of Abundance, which is that it leans too heavily on climate change as its ultimate justification. It’s easy to see why: among liberals, climate remains one of the last widely agreed-upon cause worth rallying around. So if the abundance liberals can convince the scarcity liberals on how to solve climate, maybe that’s how we unite the Democratic Party around abundance!
The problem is that this framing shrinks abundance into just another special-interest crusade. The abundance agenda should not need an external emergency to justify itself. To me, the deeper, more charismatic promise of abundance is that building is good in itself: that human flourishing requires growth, speed, creativity, and risk. Climate is a reason to build. But it shouldn’t be the only reason. When abundance is framed solely through the lens of carbon reduction, it risks losing its emotional power.
Abundance isn’t just a Democratic strategy or a climate fix. It can be something bigger: a shared ethic of building that transcends party lines and reorients the American project around growth, dynamism, and public purpose. If there’s a political order waiting to be born, this might just be its foundation.