“Abundance” Is Not the Answer

Christopher F. Jones disagrees with large portions of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance”—in particular, the notion that we can “build” ourselves out of our national problems using technology.

By Christopher F. JonesJuly 20, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Politics

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson think is wrong with the United States, you need look no further than California’s failed attempts to build high-speed rail. Since 1982, the state has been trying to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco with trains capable of traveling more than 200 miles per hour. Despite broad public support, decades of planning, countless studies, and tens of billions of dollars spent, hardly any tracks have been laid and the project may never come to fruition. How can the wealthiest and most technologically advanced state in the world’s leading superpower nation be so utterly inept? Why can it not do what China, Japan, and many European countries do—and do it better, faster, and more cheaply?

In their new book Abundance, Klein and Thompson argue that this failure illustrates a fundamental problem with the US: it has lost its ability to build. The nation once regarded as the global leader in railroads, highways, homes, and scientific breakthroughs has, according to the authors, struggled in the last half century to build necessary infrastructure. Urban housing is being developed at a fraction of the rate of population growth; the pace of new green energy projects is too slow to address climate change. Scientific discoveries are not delivering enough value.

Why is it so hard to build in the United States? Over the last 50 years, a set of regulations and procedural obstacles pioneered primarily by those on the left have, in Klein and Thompson’s view, gone from asset to liability. Environmental review processes cost millions of dollars and slow projects by years. Requirements to use union workers on public projects decrease the number of bids and increase costs. Urban zoning policies give almost anyone the right to challenge a project, empowering NIMBY groups to thwart developments, even when their interests run counter to the common good. Would-be builders spend too much time writing reports and attending meetings and too little getting things done. “Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions,” they conclude, “have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.”

The contrasts between the United States and other countries—and between red states with fewer regulations and blue states with more stringent ones—point to just how much government policy matters. It costs more than $600 million per kilometer of rail in the US versus under $400 million in Germany and less than $300 million in Japan and Canada, even though those nations have robust environmental policies. Despite acute housing shortages in San Francisco and Los Angeles, these cities in California only permitted 2.5 homes per 1,000 residents in 2022, whereas Austin, Texas, granted 18. Such facts lead the authors to conclude that progress is crippled by friction: projects require far too many layers of review, which in turn require umpteen permits and reports.

For Klein and Thompson, it follows that the government needs to figure out how to accelerate projects rather than stymie them. Neither liberals nor conservatives are on board with this view at present, which is why the authors see their book as offering a new path forward and a challenge to both parties. Conservatives are apt to focus almost exclusively on the failures of government, and thus not on the state as a custodian of the future. Liberals, by contrast, too zealously embrace the procedural aspects of state bureaucracy such as federal review, citizen oversight, and legal challenges, which creates bottlenecks, which at least in part account for what the authors call “the pathologies of the broad left.” Klein and Thompson want to replace such pathologies with “a liberalism that builds.” Only a nimble and proactive government, they say, can deliver on the “abundance” of their title: affordable housing, clean energy, and innovative science.

¤

There is much to admire in this book. Klein and Thompson have decades of combined experience in observing and reporting on the nation’s politics. Their aims and concerns are also laudable: they are worried about climate change and believe that it is impossible under the current regulatory regime to build enough clean energy infrastructure to avert catastrophe. They lament the oversupply of cheap consumer goods and undersupply of public goods needed for a good future. They are sympathetic to the hardworking people who are trying to build public housing and clean energy infrastructure or who are making scientific discoveries but are forced to spend more time writing reports and addressing red tape than making the world a better place. Surely, they argue, a better system is possible.

These are reasonable points that deserve further discussion. The greatest strength of Klein and Thompson’s book is in how clearly they bring these issues to the reader’s attention. But what about their solution? Is “abundance” the answer to what ails America?

The verdict is mixed—in part because a new vision of governance is not the same thing as a set of policy tweaks. On one level, abundance policies can be understood as technocratic fixes to overcome public-sector inefficiencies. This is the type of in-the-weeds policymaking work that trims red tape and gives state agencies more authority to build things in the public interest. However, Klein and Thompson are not particularly interested in policy specifics. Their much broader hope is that an abundance agenda can be an overarching framework for a new political order. But their abundance agenda includes too little and leaves out too much to be the basis of a broad political coalition.

Let’s start with a limited view of abundance as a policy agenda to build better by avoiding layers of review, overly long permitting processes, burdensome reporting requirements, and so on. That these inefficiencies should be corrected is all well and good in theory, but what would corrections look like in practice? The reader does not really know, because Klein and Thompson explicitly avoid getting into the weeds by claiming that they are offering “a lens” to think about problems rather than “a list” of recommendations.

Consider railroads. They cite Americans’ construction of a transcontinental railroad in less than a decade during the 1860s as an instance of how the nation used to be able to build. But what they don’t say: This technological progress came at immense cost by way of hundreds of dead workers, tens of thousands of exploited Chinese laborers, wide swaths of lands stolen from Native Americans, and staggering amounts of financial manipulation that enriched robber barons while leaving others destitute. How do we recreate the benefits of railroads while avoiding such harm?

Another rub: their environmental assumptions. Klein and Thompson echo the claims of ecomodernists who believe that we can solve all our environmental problems through technological innovation and economic growth. Dubbed solutionists, ecomodernists assume a world of infinite renewable energy, which means we can have it all—abundant food, medicine, travel, and wildlife. This Pollyannaish vision ignores the messy realities on the ground, such as the massive environmental costs that accrue from mining, manufacturing, and disposing of the materials necessary for generating so-called clean energy. It’s an unrealistic vision that fails to engage with hard choices.

Klein and Thompson don’t want to dwell on such uncomfortable details. Again, they are after the Big Picture crises of American politics, not the nuts and bolts of bureaucracy. They want to fix American democracy with a vision of government as a builder par excellence. This vision, they believe, would constitute nothing less than a platform for a new political order.

A “political order” is a long-term alignment of the political system around an agenda that draws cross-partisan support. It operates on the order of decades, not election cycles. The historian Gary Gerstle developed this idea over the last few decades by analyzing the two orders that dominated the last century. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Americans lived in the New Deal order, which was characterized by widespread belief in the pivotal role of government in securing a good life for average citizens. Forged from the depths of the Great Depression, this order was strengthened during the Cold War and the fight with communism: the United States needed to show on a world stage that capitalism improved the lives of its citizens. This mandate was so compelling that Democrats and Republicans worked together to implement and expand a social safety net for vulnerable citizens. In the 1970s, however, stagflation and dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War helped bring that order to an end and ushered in its stead a neoliberal political order. Most famously associated with Reagan’s attack on government and regulation, it promulgated individual freedom and economic growth—not state intervention—as the avenue to better lives.

The power of a political order can be discerned when political figures espouse policies typically associated with their opponents. The New Deal order’s commitment to protecting citizens was so widely shared that both Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon significantly increased the power of the federal government: the former expanded welfare programs, and the latter signed into law the nation’s strongest environmental laws. The commitment to trimming government intervention and incentivizing individuals was sufficiently powerful in the neoliberal order that Bill Clinton enacted welfare reform and Barack Obama implemented free trade policies.

Klein and Thompson are correct that the neoliberal political order is now fracturing under pressure from both the Left and the Right. What will replace it is one of the most important questions of our time. Trump’s popularity stems from offering a clear answer: America First and exclusionary nationalist policies. The Democratic Party and American Left have, by contrast, struggled to offer anything as coherent or compelling to voters. An abundance agenda, the authors hope, can fill this void. They tout it as having a “bigness” that will deliver “more of what matters,” and as being capable of changing “not just our politics, but our national character.”

Unfortunately, the abundance agenda is unlikely to achieve such an ambitious goal. It offers a vision of the public good that may excite Washington insiders and progressive elites, which is why Klein and Thompson have been invited to meet with Democratic representatives to discuss their ideas, but it fails to recognize the deep dissatisfactions of millions of Americans. The scarce resource in their book is imagination about what a better life looks like for people outside their technocratic orbit.

A core limitation of this book is that it expects too much of technology. “[T]echnology is at the heart of progress, and always has been,” they confidently assert, which is why they see a tight link between building more and having better lives. “We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction,” they declare in a manner that evokes the idealistic refrain in the 1989 film Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come.”

But what does the abundance agenda look like in the Iowa cornfields where Kevin Costner’s character built a baseball field? Uninspiring and alienating. In Klein and Thompson’s dream future, vertical urban farm towers and lab-manufactured meat will free cities from needing anything from the countryside, allowing farmland to be rewilded. “Cities are where wealth is created,” they assert, citing statistics that residents of cities with more than a million people are 50 percent more productive than those in smaller cities. Moreover, they note that children raised in large cities have a greater shot at upward mobility than those in smaller cities or the countryside. Convinced that urban centers are the best place to live, they ask how we can build enough housing to make it affordable for rural citizens, whom they assume will flock there once they can afford it.

The implicit message to those outside cities is clear: rural areas are to be abandoned, not invested in. But the fact is that many people prefer rural life and do not want to move to cities. Some want to live near family members who share roots in locations that stretch back across generations. They may want to be closer to nature and live a less hectic pace of life. Others wish to keep farming. Many hope for economic opportunities within rural areas that might extend beyond covering their fields in solar panels and wind farms. These are legitimate ambitions. Yet little in the abundance agenda recognizes such aspirations, which is surely connected to why the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging support in rural areas. You cannot build a broad political coalition that ignores rural America, and you cannot rely on building things as the primary approach to rural revival.

Just as Klein and Thompson have little to say about rural areas, they are remarkably mum about income inequality and the shrinking of the American middle class. For the last 50 years, and the past 20 years in particular, the American economy has been characterized by stagnation and decline for 80 percent of the population and enormous gains for the top quintile and for the top one perecent in particular. Fewer and fewer Americans are sharing in the country’s economic bounty. Many citizens feel the system is not working for them, and so they are moving away from the mainstream of both political parties. It should be no surprise that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders draw much larger crowds than Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer. While Trump and Sanders offer different answers (immigrants and government corruption versus wealthy exploiters), they both speak to the prevailing zeitgeist (i.e., the system is rigged against the ordinary citizen).

The abundance agenda has too little to say about how to redress these realities. Sure, building more urban homes may give a segment of the American population better access to upward mobility, but even an ambitious plan of building three million homes will provide that opportunity to no more than seven or eight million people—little more than two percent of the population. Sponsoring more building projects may create good jobs, but, as Klein and Thompson note, requirements to use union labor will increase costs and lower the number of potential bids. Thus, we can’t be sure these new projects would actually bolster the middle class. And what about the power of wealthy oligarchs? Klein and Thompson spend almost no time discussing redistribution. Instead, they simply wave it away as insufficient. Nor do they analyze how the vast gaps between the haves and have-nots undermine the social fabric. We cannot build our way out of such problems with technology. A new political order requires a much more expansive understanding of the depth of the United States’ political crises. It also requires an appeal to a much broader segment of the population.

¤

“Can we solve our problems with supply?” Klein and Thompson ask in their conclusion. Their answer is yes. But this is because they believe that “our problems” can be solved with a relatively narrow set of technocratic tweaks to government systems. Would the world be a better place if zoning laws, clean energy permitting, and scientific funding were improved? I expect so. And if Klein and Thompson’s aim is to force liberals to accept their portion of responsibility for the challenges facing the nation, then this book is a useful provocation, even if it lacks details about how to reconcile the public good with reduced red tape.

But to expect these changes to be the basis of a new political order is to overstate what technology can accomplish and to ignore the fundamental political divides fracturing the US today. “Building better” does not address skyrocketing income inequality. It ignores rural America. It says almost nothing about immigration or education, and not enough about the healthcare costs that overwhelm many families. Ultimately, Klein and Thompson offer a vision of the United States’ problems that speaks mostly to the political concerns of urban elites and political donors—and not to the vast majority of American citizens.