Book Review

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance

By Alec Pruchnicki

There are few books that can take credit for starting national movements, but this work might be one of them. The two self-described liberal authors state that “…to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” It’s a very simple basic thesis but with ramifications throughout American society. Its suggestions and criticisms are aimed at people on the political left and cover a wide variety of topics. The implication of their basic thesis is that if we don’t build and invent what we want we just won’t get a better future of abundance but a future of scarcity.

Let’s start with housing. The lack of housing in the country is widespread and severe, but not everywhere. The blue Democratic states have developed housing standards and zoning regulations that have improved housing but made it so much more difficult and expensive to build that massive homelessness is worse in these usually prosperous states. The red Republican states often have non-existent or weak zoning and housing regulations and they have been able to out-build the blue states significantly. The authors go into multiple examples of how regulations and costs have hurt housing, increased homelessness, and led to large migrations of people from the blue to red states.

They point out that, in the short run, these regulations sometimes improve housing stock, sometimes preserve the “character” of neighborhoods, and in themselves are beneficial. But there are just too many and the cumulative effect is simply not enough housing. Also, these same beneficial regulations can be used by opponents of specific projects to delay and maybe kill developments they don’t like. There is also an ominous long-term effect in that the migration to red states increased their representation in the electoral college and at some point soon Democrats might never win presidential elections no matter what the popular vote is.

The solution is easy to see but hard to implement. The multiple regulations, especially for zoning, must be loosened significantly or enough housing just won’t be built. It can be done but people, especially in the blue states, must be willing to lessen these obstacles or just forget about adequate housing or eliminating homelessness.

The long-term goal of controlling global warming and decreasing CO2 emissions is also within reach if we work for it. Windmills, solar panels, and maybe even nuclear power have reached the point where they can often be cheaper than coal, oil, or even natural gas and without the CO2 emissions. But having this technology doesn’t help unless support and distribution systems are built to distribute the energy produced. The usual roadblocks exist with zoning and other regulations and the cumulative effect is that it’s easier to keep the older fossil fuel facilities in place than spend the time and money on building a new network. This has led to the paradox that the red states that are politically opposed to global warming as a concept are sometimes producing more renewable energy than the blue states that support the concept.

Besides building more housing and more national systems, there is also the concept of inventing more. This requires research, and a lot of it. Since WWII, American science has expanded tremendously. The federal government added this with the establishment of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in addition to spurts of research spurred by the space race of the 1960s, and multiple smaller government agencies. All of these required lots of funding and lots of funding was available until recently. Much of the resulting discoveries were also made with government and private enterprise cooperation and made available through the marketplace.

The authors do have some criticism of modern research in that more is done for reproducing and expanding current concepts and finding uses for present technology. They make an argument, that I know from my own research years ago, that investigations into basic discoveries of how nature works are harder to fund than practical research on immediate issues. They say that more is needed for low probability but high impact discoveries which widen our understanding of science and not just fine tune what we already know.

How do we get more building and invention in these, and other fields, so we can have the future we want? The authors have several overriding approaches.

One is to use the power of government. Anti-government rhetoric might sound good in a political speech but the concept that government can’t do anything right and the private sector can do no wrong is incorrect. They give many examples of how progress in building for the future could not have been done without strong government involvement.

Another approach is to value the importance of cities. Getting large numbers of productive creative people together in central locations, whether an entire region like Silicon Valley, or an individual research center, the interaction among researchers has a cumulative effect. They give an example of a random conversation between two biomedical researchers while they were waiting to use a copy machine. It led to their cooperation to produce the mRNA vaccines that saved millions, if not tens of millions, of lives.

But there are ways this progress can be slowed. Government regulations are sometimes essential but also sometimes time consuming, expensive, or even onerous. They give examples of how flexibility with such regulations, though risky, can give spectacular results. And, they are intentionally aiming these complaints at well-meaning liberals.

The book itself is an easy read. The style is simple with much supporting data in the hundreds of foot notes at the end of the book or in the extensive index. A sarcastic aside here or there also lightens the style. Abundance was released in 2025 and President Trump’s actions, along with those of the right wing in general, are only touched on. They believe it is up to the conservatives to do their own self-examination rather than have two liberals do it. Because of that there is sometimes almost a false equivalence between the liberal problems examined in detail and the conservative problems examined minimally.

Will this book start a movement for a politics of results instead of a politics of scarcity? I’ve heard people talk about the “Abundance Movement” but I’m not sure it is off the ground yet. There are lots of ideas in this book and lots of back up stories and data. It’s worth the read.