Abundance: What Progress Takes

From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget--if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades--because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next gener-ation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre-serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

Ezra Klein is a columnist at TheNew York Times, where he hosts The Ezra Klein Show. Previously, he was the cofounder, editor in chief, and then editor at large at Vox; a columnist and editor at the Washington Post; a political analyst at MSNBC; and a contributor to Bloomberg. He is the author of Why We’re Polarized, a New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s top books of 2022.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he has worked for the last fourteen years. Writing on economics, technology, and society, he is known for breaking down complicated trends in simple and fun language and for coining terms that become part of the national discourse. In the first half of 2022--the same year he published his popular ＂abundance agenda＂ thesis and launched his series on progress--he was the most-read writer at The Atlantic. A news analyst with NPR, Derek appears weekly on the national news show ＂Here and Now＂ and is a contributor to CBS News. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers.