Book Review: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

A nice idea that the authors don't take far enough

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is the newest and most anticipated release of a series of books that have recently come out on the topic of improving progressive governance, like Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, Demsas’s On the Housing Crisis, and Appelbaum’s Stuck. Particularly given the authors’ fame, Abundance has triggered a significant debate, much more than the other books in this subgenre.

Abundance exists in the context of a conversation the authors helped start that focuses on maximizing outputs rather than inputs. It goes by several names, like “supply-side liberalism” or “the abundance agenda,”¹ both of which are articles written by Klein and Thompson around the same time. To put it briefly, these ideas argues that progressivism focuses primarily on subsidizing demand for goods that may not be available to the poor or middle class yet is shockingly unconcerned with whether those goods are actually delivered—even worse, many progressive regulatory projects make it harder to actually achieve those goals through undersupply (hence the name) all while patting themselves on the back for providing funding to tackle these initiatives, regardless of those goals are achieved. This idea broke further into the mainstream with

Noah Smith

’s essay on “checkism,” which is the idea that progressives evaluate projects by whether a check is written and not whether the goods are delivered, incentivizing less effective projects over time.

Yet, Abundance doesn’t merely recount this years-long dialog; it adds to it. Firstly, although these various ideas have been floating around, no one has yet put them into the form of a coherent agenda that connects them together in a clear way. You might summarize the Abundance perspective as: “if you promise something, you better deliver it.” But Abundance is also a deeper project that asks its readers to demand something different from government. The typical progressive goal is one of negation: anti-racism, de-growth, no-pollution, and so on. They are positions of scarcity with policy solutions that emphasize redistribution. This leads to what Klein calls “everything bagel liberalism,” a phenomenon whereby progressives are unable to choose between priorities, ultimately stymying progress in all of them.

Abundance wants to redefine the goal of government from stopping problems—again, a scarcity mindset—to pursuing abundance. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but consider someone who believes in “managed retreat,” or the idea that we should simply abandon certain communities for environmental reasons. Managed retreat proponents try to use the government to stop development in places where they believe humans should not live. Abundance would not argue about the most effective way to achieve managed retreat—rather, it disagrees with that goal entirely and argues that it is not actually the progressive position.

The book focuses primarily on the obstacles to built infrastructure, like housing, transportation, and green energy. It divides the book into five chapters, each of which is a core tenet of governance: grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. Each chapter focuses on vignettes which illustrate success or failure in its category (for example, the “invent” chapter focuses mostly on medical innovations like mRNA vaccines). The purpose of these examples is to show how government policies may be intended to help achieve these goals but primarily get in the way by failing to ask what is needed to achieve these goals. So for healthcare, for example, they praise Obamacare for making it easier to get insurance yet criticize progressives for not caring about the fact that government must also incentivize the creation of new treatments for that health insurance to buy in the first place.

One also senses a subtle, resentment-tinged riposte of the commentariat class. When Zephyr Teachout criticizes Klein and Thompson for being confused about what they really want, and Thompson calls out antitrust theory by pointing out that it is a failed model of explaining the world, asking “what’s oligarchy doing for you?” Indeed, it fails to explain why Texas passed SB 15, a bill almost identical to California’s SB 9, almost entirely without discussion. More importantly, the Abundance perspective is, who cares about antitrust? What matters is the number of houses.

The volume is pretty slim. Although it promises a sweeping idea, it reads like a mix of technocratic, somewhat-narrow policy proposals. To some extent, it is because they choose to use vignettes to depict their ideas but don’t expand much beyond the vignettes themselves, leaving the bigger picture thinking as an exercise to the reader. But partly, I think, it comes from a deeper problem.

If this was all the book was, I would have high praise for it.² I still think it can serve a useful purpose in decreasing the derangement that has gripped progressivism. Yet I suspect that it cannot finish the job because it fails to believe in its own idea enough.

Can You Avoid the Non-Progressive Bundle?

In some sense, the book is an attempt to answer the question “Why are so many Californians leaving for Texas?” The sense of frustration is palpable. California, my home (where Klein grew up and lived for several years), is the punching bag of Abundance as much as it might be on Fox News as the authors lament the movement to, of all places, Texas. If you were to read their book with no critical eye, what you think you are walking away with is an answer to this question. What you are actually walking away with is an attempted supply-side answer to the question “why can’t liberals enact their own priorities?”

So what’s the problem? These are not actually the same question. Abundance fears to countenance that terrible possibility that one cannot merely tweak zoning laws and create a liberal utopia, that in fact to make the whole thing work, both from an outcome and political economy perspective, one may have to adopt a much bigger bundle of policies and attitudes that would cut quite counter to their progressive beliefs. Abundance promises a philosophical shift that prioritizes outputs, but the primary content of the book is mostly a series of adjustments to a still fundamentally progressive project. But Texas is not just California with more rational zoning. The bundle of policies people are choosing is much, much broader.

If you look at polls of why people are leaving California, it is not just housing costs. The most important reason people leave is a broader spectrum of the cost of living. Rolled into the idea of cost of living is, implicitly, job opportunities (after all, what does a price mean without an income?) which effectively comes down to business climate. The other top reason cited below cost is crime, which is never addressed in the book.

Let’s take the issue of cost of living. Yes, housing is the most expensive part of any budget, but the cost of living also includes the cost of food, gas, electricity, insurance, and many other goods. It is not just whether the government can build trains. Here, California is abysmal. Californians pay very high costs for food and transportation. Despite producing so much solar power it cannot use it all,³ Californian utility rates are the second-highest in the country. Gas costs are the highest in the country. Food isn’t expensive because of zoning. Neither are utilities.

If you were to take Abundance at face value, you’d think that San Francisco would be flooded with housing if only it would loosen zoning. Yet, this hasn’t happened because there are other frictions in the market. To get abundance, you have to reduce the costs of all the bottlenecks, not just the ones you find politically pallatable, and Klein and Thompson do not seem willing to even consider whether that requires a greater reconsideration of their views. This is all important because the authors’ goals will be unattainable unless the vendors available in the economy are reasonably priced and free to get the job done quickly and well. For example, San Francisco recently passed a law that made the permitting process for office-to-housing conversions easy. So why aren’t they happening? The cost of building is too high to make it profitable. It wasn’t just enough to fix the zoning rules—San Francisco has a separate bundle of progressive policies that stop abundance from happening.⁴ Abundance is very concerned with all the paperwork the government has to go through to build infrastructure, but seems surprisingly incurious about the 420,434 regulations in California that primarily burden the private sector and add to the costs of everyday life. This, too, is part of abundance.

The problem is this: when people think of abundance, they don’t just think about infrastructure. Abundance, yes, means that you can easily find an affordable place to live and take a subway. But it also means that you can afford a car, that you can eat out at a restaurant, and that you can find a well-paying job, and this is also a place where Abundance seems disinterested in breaking from the progressive project. A Hoover Institution analysis found that government and publicly supported sectors grew employment by 316,000 while the regular private sector lost 154,000 jobs. That has nothing to do with zoning laws or building restrictions, but it is indicative of general government restrictions on private industry that results in fewer opportunities for regular people—and opportunity is part of abundance, too. California’s business formation is one of the lowest in the nation. Could it have something to do with the fact that California has the 5th highest state and local tax burden in the country? The states with high employment growth have lower regulatory and tax burdens, and also tend to have laws on the books that Klein and Thompson would find inconvenient, like “right to work” rules.

Generally, Klein and Thompson seem pathologically resistant to accountability, either for people or for ideas. They quote Heidi Marston, the former head of the LA Homeless Services Authority, as saying that if she only had less accountability, she would have been able to spend $1 billion a year more effectively. But is that really believable? Her views on homelessness focus on discredited ideas like housing first while she oversaw one of the worst explosions of homelessness in LA history,⁵ and her entire career has been spent in non-executive roles with no demonstrated background in any area relevant to homelessness. How does the “personnel is policy” group believe the answer is to have less accountability for members of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex⁶ given the results? Similarly, their explanation for why California’s High Speed Rail project’s insane route is an obscure Obama-era funding rule and overzealous environmental authority, but the real reason is political horse trading, some of which was nakedly corrupt. Why don’t they call for any accountability for these decision makers? And even if the technocratic explanations were correct, why does Abundance not call for, at a minimum, a firing?⁷

I praise the get-done attitude of Abundance, and wish I would have seen one more level of belief in their own idea. The authors seem to often take the easy route. For example, they are happy to criticize regulations that YIMBYs dislike, but not ones that are more broadly popular among progressives. You see them clamoring for zoning reductions, but they don’t call for an end to rent control, which also increases housing prices. They’re happy to point out how much of San Francisco is zoned for single family homes, but won’t note that 60% of San Francisco is subject to extremely strict rent control. They also don’t seem Abundance-brained to have ideas progressives wouldn’t care for. One common NIMBY critique of high-rises, for example, is traffic and parking. The Abundance answer to this is “deal with it,” but why not proffer the capital-a Abundance Answer of “build tons of parking structures and subways?” With NEPA and CEQA, Abundance seems primarily concerned with the easy cases, like how NEPA absurdly makes it easier to frack for gas than build solar panels. But what about the actual, social trade-off between production and polution; shouldn’t we at least get a framework for thinking about this? When the rubber hits the road, one wonders, would Klein and Thompson ever, even once, choose to cause the extinction of an endangered fish if it meant building a car plant?

Klein and Thompson are quite clear that they are tackling the topic of abundance from the left—in fact, on Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast, Thompson still calls himself a “tax-and-spend liberal.” Fair enough. But does that mean that they lack conviction to go after their historical political allies, especially when, as Dean Ball put it, many governments now seem to be “in business for [themselves] rather than for [their] citizens?” While they bemoan spurious CEQA lawsuits by NIMBYs, approximately one-third of all CEQA lawsuits come from unions, the single largest group of CEQA abusers, which they use to “greenmail” developers in placing no-bid contracts with union members. This practice receives nary a mention in Abundance. In fact, Abundance doesn’t talk about any supply-side improvements relating to labor, probably because these would mostly impact progressive constituencies. You won’t hear anything about the environmental professor who invented fake endangered species to stop developments he didn’t like or any potential tweaks to the Endangered Species Act—you won’t hear at all about fixing academia’s culture of fraud at all. You’d never know that when Wisconsin fully decertified their teacher’s union it improved public school performance. Aren’t good schools part of abundance? Evidently not, or at least not important enough to make the book.⁸

The most common phrase in the book is some form of “these are all good ideas, but…”⁹ Klein, during the book tour, has described himself as seeking “synthesis” with several ideas. Reading this book, it seems like that is less a goal and more a way of being for him and Thompson. They hang around with the tech set so they’ve know what it’s like for something to work—they’ve seen too much and are too smart to not see that their way isn’t working but they’re incapable of fully abandoning their worldview. They can’t stop synthesizing, meaning that they can’t abandon fully any of their allies regardless of performance. Not even their past selves.

1. Although Thompson gets the credit for bringing the idea of abundance to progressives, the first popularization of the term comes from XPRIZE’s Peter Diamandis, who has been promoting his vision of Abundance360 for over a decade.

2. I love Tyler Cowen’s idea of state capacity libertarianism.

3. California literally produces so much solar power that it has to pay other states to take its electricity to protect the grid.

4. The authors hold up Tahanan, a San Francisco affordable housing complex for the homeless, as a success because it was built for “under” $400,000 per unit. But those units are 260 square feet, meaning that the cost per square foot is around $1500. That is more expensive than the cost to build in nearby Atherton, the wealthiest town in America. How is that a success? While it is true that they mention that developers find the cost of compliance too high, they aren’t willing to consider that California’s cost of labor, materials, and other inputs drives these costs too.

5. In 2021, LA’s homeless situation was so terrible that Marston refused to conduct a homelessness count.

6. San Francisco alone had a giant scandal just last week!

7. While there is much to criticize about Elon Musk’s chaotic management style, his single best management policy is that every decision must be associated with a person, not a department. This not only allows you to ask an actual person why a decision was made but also to quickly identify who is underperforming or making bad decisions and fire them.

8. Perhaps the biggest blind spot in the book is a failure to recognize that services are also part of abundance, both public and private. The authors’ favorite example is Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania rebuilding the I-95 bridge quickly after a collapse, but is this really the best example? Building bridges is a solved problem and a one-off event. The real-life Governor Shapiro tweets about cutting license issuance times, not just rebuilding bridges. Perhaps a more relevant example is cross-state nursing licensure laws, which were suspended during COVID to positive effect, but sadly have been mostly reversed. Surely, the fact that half of Minnesota’s schools have no school nurse is a sort of abundance too, and regulations like these are a major factor in these shortages.

9. Some other phrases that appear repeatedly are “every one of these is a worthy goal” and “each individual decision is rational.” This is what leads to everything bagel liberalism—it’s not just that you need to prioritize but also that sometimes the other ideas are bad.