Book Review: Abundance
Klein & Thompson’s new book has started a conversation, but the abundance agenda won’t go far without an advocacy plan or acknowledgment of the right’s hostility to it.
Pregame: Corporate sponsors have withdrawn their support of Pride St. Louis this year, putting the event in jeopardy. Please consider a donation today. More details in the postgame.
Despite the name, Abundance left me feeling empty. Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein have two of the better podcasts out there, so I’ve been looking forward to this crossover event for some time. (Even putting aside my post-election beef with Ezra.) The book provides useful historical context on why it’s gotten harder to build things in America. But like watching a Ted Talk on a familiar subject, Abundance felt a little reductive, afraid to confront some of the ugly political realities that prevent abundance.
There are plenty of agreeable themes in the book: Democrats need to get much better at building infrastructure like housing, transportation, and clean energy. It’s also a big problem for Democrats’ national message that New York and California, two liberal bastions, are having such a hard time governing. And it’s true that lefty groups can purity test issues in ways that hinder the rare opportunities for bipartisan cooperation. But the solutions offered are just too basic to really be considered a new lens for liberal politics.
This is really two short books massaged into one. Part 1 is Ezra Klein’s slog through the worst of what California has to offer, like some shadow-Beach Boys medley. I don’t know enough about Cali to opine on it, but the housing, homelessness, and transportation failures there sound very disappointing. I just don’t know how much to extract the lessons from that to the rest of the country. There is affordable housing in most American cities (nearly all run by Democrats), in both blue and red states. I almost bought a house in St. Louis for $50,000. Even in New York City middle class folks can afford a home on Staten Island, where I live a free ferry ride from downtown. Travel to places as different as Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Austin, and you’ll find exciting new neighborhoods with ample housing and cosmopolitan experiences popping up.
One of Klein’s main policy prescriptions is zoning law reform.1 I wonder if he has ever sat through a community board meeting, because overcoming NIMBYism isn’t just a liberal project. At the local level, it’s hard to think of any issue that has a more universal, cross-ideological appeal than “not in my backyard.” Every community complains that it is overburdened, and flexes defensively against infrastructure needed for the common good, let alone apartment buildings.
That said, look at this voting map for the modest “City of Yes” housing/zoning plan New York City passed last year. Despite their deep antipathy to the mayor pushing the plan, most liberal council members voted yes, while moderate Democrats and Republicans pushed for carve-outs and voted no.
The path to widespread zoning reform would be incredibly challenging, and for tough advocacy campaigns to succeed, it helps to have a committed base. In this case that would be groups pushing for affordable housing, who are often led by working class people of color. I don’t see any inclusion of them in the book or the book tour events.
Like California, New York is hemorrhaging people, and building more housing would help. But we also struggle with poor political leadership and incredibly high taxes.2 New York City being run the past few years by Mayor Adams is also bringing up nostalgia for Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio, who, while seemingly quite different from each other, both relied heavily on impressive, liberal technocrats to run the most important parts of their government. If we want an abundance agenda, we need to have great people in government, and it helps a lot to have people in the executive office talented people want to work for. The times national Democrats really got stuff done, the New Deal and Great Society, those administrations were stacked with brilliant talent, taking direction from inspirational leaders. I hope the next mayoral election in New York City offers us a chance to turn things around and usher in a new generation of public sector leaders.
When it comes to energy reform, I’m actually aligned with the Abundance agenda. Our organization, Dream.Org, was one of the few progressive groups to push hard for permitting reform, a bipartisan effort from 2022-2024 to create more transmission lines for clean energy. There is no serious debate that this is necessary if we want to transition away from a fossil fuel-based economy. The problem is that politics requires unpleasant trade-offs, and most climate groups weren’t willing to make a deal that gave Republicans some of what they wanted. (That looks pretty foolish in hindsight.) What’s weird about Abundance, though, is its omission that while environmental groups were opposed, Democratic elected officials from the White House on down largely got on board, with most Democratic Senators supporting the key vote on the Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform legislation. Guess who didn’t play ball? MAGA Republicans in the House. It feels weird not to mention what killed permitting reform in a chapter that pushes hard for Democrats to embrace the issue.
Then Thompson takes over for Part 2 of Abundance. Thompson is an infectious writer, as readers of his Atlantic articles and Hitmakers will attest. The exploration of what makes inventions take hold (adoption and implementation with resources behind them) was a useful reminder that “eureka moments” don’t by themselves drive history. Where Thompson struggles is what my high school English teacher would label “PV” - passive voice.
Was “America” slow to take up solar, or was there a concerted effort from the oil and gas industries and their political allies to discredit and hamstring it? When it comes to our shortage of primary care doctors, has “Washington” limited funding for medical residents, or have conservative Republicans aggressively attacked spending on Medicare, Medicaid and the VA, which fund medical residencies? If recruiting high-skilled immigrants is the “secret ingredient” to America’s success in innovation, has “the US quietly made it harder” for immigrants to come here, or have nativists who run the Republican Party very loudly made it harder?
The mRNA vaccine is one of the stars of Thompson’s section, to the point that he names the lack of support for its discovery the “Kariko Problem,” Gladwell-style. It’s a compelling story about how an unlikely scientific theory by Katalin Kariko was overlooked until it saved millions of people during COVID. Guess what DOGE is doing right now? Pressing “Control-F” on NIH grants hunting for mRNA studies so they can cancel them due to literally insane conspiracy theories about how dangerous they are. Likewise, if NIH grants aren’t producing results like they used to, is the bigger issue with Democrats demanding too much paperwork, or Republicans who want to burn it to the ground and salt the quads on university campuses so scientific research can never happen again? If “pull funding” (the concept of financially incentivizing outcomes, which I support and have tried on a much smaller scale) gets better results, does Thompson know that for the past decade almost any idea that costs new money is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill due to Republican opposition?
If this was just a Derek Thompson book, I could forgive this. He’s not a partisan street fighter, and his mass audience podcast skirts around American politics cautiously. But this is also an Ezra Klein book. What’s the message for the intended liberal audience if you’re blaming “Washington” for issues that clearly have a villain, and you’re afraid to name that villain? Thompson is an entertaining intellectual, and there’s value to that, but people who work on this stuff every day have a right to ask why serious issues like corporate power and structural inequality weren’t addressed in a book about abundance.
These kinds of political/policy books are often good at naming problems, weak on solutions, and nonexistent on the path to get there, and that’s how Abundance lands for me. Ultimately, Abundance is like the late 80s Dylan and the Dead album, an interesting collab that didn’t showcase either contributor at their best. So why am I taking the trouble to be the 100th person to review it?
First, Democrats looking for a way out of the wilderness are looking for a winning message. The Abundance lens isn’t useful unless it moves the people who would benefit the most, and that takes organizing to move beyond its very online, white, millennial, coastal base of adherents. If Klein, Thompson, and their allies want to build more housing, better transportation, and strong energy grids, they’ll need buy-in from advocates who know how to win. If that happened, these issues would be useful for the new party leaders to talk about.
Second, these ideas are backed by important funders, like the Arnold Foundation and Stand Together, so the discourse will continue beyond the book tour.3 I’ve worked with both on bipartisan justice reform, believe in their good intentions, and do not think, as some of Abundance’s more hostile reviewers do, that collaboration with them means this book is a clarion call for mass deregulation. Understand, though, that punching hippies as the culprit for our lack of abundance while this administration is nihilistically destroying state capacity won’t land well with the left. Common ground is possible here, that kind of broad coalition is just hard to build, especially with so much of the advocacy community operating from a place of scarcity. But that’s another article, perhaps another book.
Postgame: I have a lot of love for St. Louis from the four months I spent there in 2018 helping launch the Close the Workhouse campaign, which successfully closed one of the country’s most notorious jails. It’s a city rich in culture and history, but stretched at all levels when it comes to resources. This year Anheuser-Busch, the hometown brewer of Bud Light and other brands, withdrew its support after 30 years of sponsorship, with other corporate sponsors withdrawing or reducing as well. This is unacceptable.
Pride St. Louis is a particularly important Pride, because once you get southwest of Chicago, there aren’t a lot of welcoming cities. People come from as far as Oklahoma, Arkansas and Iowa to participate. At a time when this administration is giving prejudice the green light, we need to show solidarity with people across the country who need our support, particularly those of us in New York with means. Please consider a $45 dollar donation for Pride St. Louis’ 45 anniversary, or more if you can.
Klein has only ever lived in the Bay Area, New York, and DC, which actually colors much of this book.
I’m unconvinced that New Yorkers are getting services worthy of the $256 billion in the state budget or $112 billion in the city budget. For that much money we should be getting some relief on the most important issue driving out young families, which is childcare. Lowering taxes and improving services is another way to keep New Yorkers from fleeing for balmier, low-tax states like Florida.
In full disclosure, my organization has received funding from Arnold on other issues.