Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025. $30.00. 304 pp.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance became an immediate object of both intense admiration and blistering scorn. The book was published in the months following the 2024 presidential election, a contest whose outcome was so disastrous for Democrats that it called into question their party’s viability as an ongoing organizer of political coalitions. Klein and Thompson are two of the most successful journalists of their generation at two of the most prestigious institutions in American media—the New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively. They claim to have some solutions for the liberals’ electoral woes. But whether their establishment credentials lend credibility to those proposals—or prima facie undermine them—depends a lot on who is reading.
That Abundance has been read primarily as a book about what to do in response to Democrats’ diminishing electoral prospects is something of an accident. Although the book’s publication was timed for the election, it was clearly meant—at least originally—for the early months of a second Democratic administration. In that hypothetical version of historical events, Abundance would have set the agenda for Bidenomics 2.0.
Klein and Thompson, however, frame the book neither as a policy manual nor an electoral strategy. They have something more ambitious in mind: a manifesto or a political philosophy for the next generation of the political left. In other words, Abundance intervenes in a debate that has intensified among leftists and liberals over the last decade about the rise of neoliberalism and the shape of what is awkwardly but nevertheless commonly called (at least among certain DC insiders) post-neoliberalism. In short, the book seeks to address two intertwined questions: What has gone wrong in American politics and governance? And what should be done to fix it?
In trying to make sense of these big-picture questions, Klein and Thompson weave together some concepts that are familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the ideas that have been circulating in the political culture in recent years. One is historian Gary Gerstle’s idea of political orders. In his recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, he argued that the political order of the New Deal (its institutional stability, ideological durability, and its bipartisan consensus) that dominated between the 1930s and 1970s was supplanted by the new political order of Neoliberalism that arose in the 1970s and declined in the last decade. According to Gerstle, we’re currently living in some sort of interregnum between political orders. Hence the apparent need for ambitious books like Abundance to propose ideas that will be baked into the subsequent political order.
It is sometimes a strange experience reading Klein and Thompson because for all their journalistic skill at digging into the weeds of regulations and court cases and the machinations of public policy (more about those things in a minute), their capacity for reckoning with the big questions of political culture and political orders is vanishingly small. Take, for example, their explanation for why neoliberalism rose to dominance in the first place: “A change in values took hold.” Or their definition of neoliberalism: “A new kind of individualism was ascendant.” Such flat descriptions would have us believe that inert ideas somehow act in the world. “By the 1970s, Washington was a changed place.” Stuff happens.
Another is the idea that Americans can’t build anything anymore. This thesis has done more to shape the political right in recent years than perhaps any other single idea. It was venture capitalist Peter Thiel who argued in his 2011 essay for National Review, “The End of the Future,” that we have been experiencing a great stagnation since the 1970s and big breakthrough innovations are fewer and farther between. We were promised flying cars and all we got was social media.
Klein and Thompson join other journalists on the left, such as Yoni Appelbaum (in his 2025 book Stuck) and Marc Dunkelman (in his book Why Nothing Works, also published this year) in bemoaning the decline of progress and the apparent failure of the United States to accomplish ambitious projects any longer. At first glance, their arguments dovetail with Thiel’s, but whereas Thiel is concerned with things like world-changing inventions and industrial capacity, Klein and Thompson and their confrères are focused on such things as housing, high-speed rail and other public infrastructures, the energy grid, and a general transition to green technologies.
They have powerful vignettes to show that we have entered an era of scarcity. There’s the story, for example, of California’s high-speed rail debacle. It began as a 1982 study and became an ambitious voter-approved $33-billion project in 2008, with promises of completion by 2020. As of last year, however, costs have ballooned to $35 billion for a scaled-down segment between two agricultural towns—and it won’t be completed until sometime in the next decade. They also offer compelling statistics. For instance, the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year, but since 2007 California has never permitted more than 150,000 homes per year. Or the fact that a construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, even as economy-wide productivity rose by 290 percent during those decades. Or the fact that it costs about $609 million to build a kilometer of rail in the US compared to $384 million in Germany, $295 million in Canada, and $267 million in Japan.
They advance the argument that if the left is going to have a shot at leading the green energy transition to success and if America is going to build ambitious public projects again, something must change. At each stage of governance, whether local, state, or federal, there is something different standing in the way of the abundance they advocate for. Taken together, the collective roadblock could be described as regulation.
As Klein and Thompson point out, many of the regulations passed in the 1960s and 1970s such as the Endangered Species Act or the National Historic Preservation Act and the sort of rules that were put in place in administrations such as the federal Department of Transportation or state-level departments of environmental quality have made public projects prohibitively expensive and slow. They argue that many such rules were put in place to empower activists to protect disadvantaged communities or the environment—causes that the political left rallied around. Now they are being used to undermine public projects that today’s political left wishes to advance, such as better housing affordability and public transportation. The fact that it is apparently just as easy to obstruct the construction of an oil refinery as a wind farm is a powerful object lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.
As a study of such unintended consequences, Abundance excels. Where Klein and Thompson go astray, however, is in making too much of their conclusions. They seem to suppose that the key to the success of the political left in the next generation and the essential building block of a new political order that will replace neoliberalism is reforming the permitting process. To be sure, some kind of deregulation appears to be necessary to dislodge the worst sorts of NIMBYism and other forms of obstruction. But as a purported political philosophy, it strains credulity.
I should stop to say that perhaps this assessment is not entirely fair. Klein and Thompson might, in fact, reply to such a critique by saying that the point of the book is not that permitting reform will solve the problems of the Democratic Party or, indeed, of the US in the twenty-first century. The point is that liberals ought to rally around big public projects. Instead of being fearful of the costs and risks of industrial expansion, they need to become the party of abundance. They need a “change in values.”
What of those values? In the introduction and conclusion, Klein and Thompson make much of historian David M. Potter’s 1954 book People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. This book, which Klein and Thompson call an “inspiration,” argued that the American character had been transformed by the rise of industrial manufacturing and sudden expansion of consumer capitalism in the twentieth century. The American people were no longer a people imprinted with the character and habits and values of producers; now they were consumers. As a description of historical change, Potter was not entirely incorrect. The US had in many ways left its manufacturing and farming heritage behind to become what one historian calls a “consumer’s republic.”
But it is the normative vision of abundance extolled by Potter and so blithely celebrated by Klein and Thompson that deserves scrutiny. In Potter’s view, abundance was represented by whatever the new giant corporations could produce for consumers. It was purely simplistic; entirely materialistic. As the historian Jackson Lears puts it when explaining Potter’s argument, Americans were “a people of plenty because they had lots of stuff. Their relation to things was unproblematic: They liked things and wanted more.” And preferably more things that could be used and thrown away.
Presumably Klein and Thompson would not be so celebratory of the disposability of consumer capitalism as Potter. But there is very little reason to believe that their vision of abundance—and therefore their vision of a political culture that can lead us into the next several decades—is any less materialistic. The book opens with a futuristic scene set in 2050 that invites the reader on a tour of the wonders of a green-energy future that might one day be ours: of desalinated water flowing through the tap, of Phoenix and Las Vegas “erupting in green foliage,” of fresh fruits and vegetables grown in “skyscraper farms” with banks of LED lights and synthetic meat mass-produced by automated manufacturers, of cheap and widely available medicines, of online orders delivered by drones, of jetliners that “routinely reach Mach 2.” It’s a world that has left behind the “barbarism” of carbon fuels and has solved the homelessness crisis and poverty and addiction and the climate crisis and apparently just about every other problem. How all those problems are solved is not made clear. What is made clear, however, is that in the minds of Klein and Thompson, the central problems in American social life and the things that we hold most dear—the things that have the power to unite and sustain us—are essentially material.
Perhaps lurking beneath this reductionistic account of abundance is some kind of category error—a mistake about what it means to be a human being and to flourish. The fact that this vision of 2050 is so antiseptic and boring suggests something spiritually bankrupt about it. But Klein and Thompson are pragmatic policy wonks. What’s more, they are at heart technocratic men, so perhaps they are not overly bothered by such things. Yet even if we accept their materialism and join them in neglecting deeper questions of meaning and belonging, their thesis still struggles for this reason: Their ideal of abundance lacks the very solidarity and higher meaning that are necessary to bring people together for common projects. There is little reason to think that technocratic fixes and materialistic abundance will overcome the nihilism and apathy that so thoroughly dominate our political culture.