Book

Abundance (book)

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 2025

Abundance

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

Abundance is a 2025 book by Ezra Klein, a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times, and Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic. It argues that many of American liberalism’s central goals — affordable housing, clean energy, faster drug and vaccine development, functioning public transit — are blocked less by insufficient funding or political will than by self-imposed constraints on supply: decades of procedural and legal accretion (zoning, environmental review, permitting, public-comment requirements) that make it slow and expensive to build almost anything. The authors call this failure mode ‘everything-bagel liberalism’ — a tendency to load every project with so many simultaneous social goals (union labour, minority contracting quotas, environmental review, local approval) that the original goal collapses under its own procedural weight. Their proposed corrective, ‘supply-side liberalism’ or ‘abundance’, asks government to focus on the material capacity to produce enough of the things people need, treating scarcity itself — not merely its unequal distribution — as the problem to be solved. The book has become a touchstone for a broader argument, running alongside the ‘state capacity’ literature, about why rich democracies with the money and the will to build often cannot.

In the wiki

  • Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda — Klein, on tour for the book, defends its argument against Tyler Cowen’s sharpest objections: that abundance is an elite project which evades the problem of democratic voice, that its healthcare logic implies single-payer medicine, and that its state-capacity claims cannot survive contact with fertility decline, military readiness, or the DOGE-era disruption of the federal bureaucracy. Klein volunteers the book’s own weakest point — that citizen-participation mechanisms such as planning hearings are structurally unrepresentative, since the people who show up to block a project are never the people who would live in it — and coins, via Steve Teles, the term ‘dark abundance’ for removing state friction by imperious rather than voice-preserving means.

See also