Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

The UK is the world’s sixth largest economy, and has never had more wealth at its disposal – but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s somehow never enough to go round. People still live in poverty and every town has a food bank. Libraries close. Hospital waiting rooms don’t have enough seats. Councils cut down street trees because they haven’t got enough money to maintain them. As citizens live with the feeling of decline and insufficiency, they find scapegoats for their disatisfaction and vote for those with easy answers.

If this is true in the UK, it’s doubly so in the United States, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson attempt to explore the disconnection between wealth and progress in their book Abundance: How we Build a Better Future. It’s already been a bestseller stateside, as it picks apart the failure to fix housing, infrastructure or clean energy.

The book starts strong with a challenge to move beyond the scarcity mindset that keeps ambitions small. Abundance is possible, and rich countries should be more specific in how that abundance should be expressed – not just growth for growth’s sake, but an abundance of affordable housing, of healthcare, of great public services.

Then the book turns to the things that have held progress back, including bureaucracy and political timidity. The authors look at the historical reasons that Democratic politicians have tied themselves in knots over growth and development. They have often defined themselves by what they oppose. It was “a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money,” they write, where today’s challenges “demand a liberalism that builds.”

One idea that I found interesting is that the first generation of environmental wins now stalls progress for the next generation. The safeguards introduced in the 1970s to protect air and water can be invoked to throttle renewable energy, layering paperwork and legal expense onto every development. They use California’s high speed rail line as a case study, an obviously useful project with broad public and political support that nevertheless remains underfunded and tentative.

Where the book turns to solutions, it begins to feel a little thinner. The answer is growth – of course it is – and this should be stimulated by public investment in science and innovation. There should be targeted deregulation and de-zoning to allow more building, and politicians should talk less about big or small government and be laser focused on effective government. This reminded me of Daniel Suskind’s book on Growth, reviewed here, which drew similar conclusions.

For international readers, it’s worth noting that Abundance does not look beyond the borders of the United States, and the rest of the world doesn’t trouble the book’s theories. There’s no sense of interdependence or mutual benefit, let alone any talk of what the rich might owe the poor in a postcolonial world. Neither is there any sense of justice locally. There’s no analysis of inequality and distribution, no critique of America’s billionaire class. This seems like a major oversight. I understand that American intellectuals are desperate to avoid looking like socialists, but the country is currently an oligarchy and it’s as if the book hasn’t noticed.

The book doesn’t challenge this, and indeed, there’s no attempt to bridge political differences. Klein and Thompson assume, probably rightly, that your average Republican readers will have zero interest in what they have to say. Instead, this feels like a contribution to Democratic soul searching in the post-Biden era. If the future looks more like the vision of Abundance, it’ll get a few things right, but it will leave some huge structural problems unaddressed.

• You can buy Abundance from Earthbound Books
• My book with Katherine Trebeck, The Economics of Arrival, also argues for abundance and the political and social changes necessary to acheive it.