Abundance Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster $30Everyone’s talking about Abundance, the new Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson nonfiction bestseller which delves into America’s inability to provide affordable housing, good transportation, and climate solutions. To be fair, there is good reason for the book’s popularity, aside from its high-profile authors and savvy podcast marketing blitz. Abundance is timely, relevant, well-crafted, and has a central argument that levels constructive criticism at some honorable yet onerous liberal policies that hold back the future. Klein and Thompson—a New York Times columnist and staff writer at The Atlantic, respectively—take aim at rules that they argue deprive society of the things it so desperately needs and wants.  The book can arguably be read as a counterweight to “degrowth,” a burgeoning economic theory recently captured in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down. But it’s not all critique. It’s more of a wake-up call to rise to the occasion and let the outcomes that we want—“abundant” affordable housing, clean energy, child care, education, medicine—become a reality. We have to accept that achieving the future anyone reading this review wants necessarily involves easing restrictions on the makers of the future, the authors argue.  Abundance’s thesis is clear: As a society, we’ve become adept at making consumer items—flat-screen TVs, iPhones, alarm clocks—cheaply. However, a conspicuous set of other larger ticket items central to modern living are becoming ever more expensive: Housing prices, for instance, are astronomical in places like San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Abundance examines why.  Rent Is Too Damn High! Klein and Thompson identify two main culprits responsible for our societal woes: Bureaucracy and regulation. The authors explain how our contemporary regulatory environment grew from the early 20th century, when environmentalists thwarted toxic building projects. Groups got very good at blocking projects through legislative and judicial tactics. Today, setting up hurdles to development helps concerned citizens derail projects they don’t want in their backyards. NIMBYISM, the authors say, is the first bottleneck. The second, bigger problem that holds back more new housing is layer after layer of regulation: Environmental regulations, zoning, union labor requirements, community design reviews, accessibility, and so on. Each of these things are sensible and virtuous, and removing any of them is scandalous for liberals. But in combination, the regulations pile up and make it prohibitively expensive to build almost anything in major markets except luxury housing.  By comparison, let’s think about something that is being built very fast in San Francisco right now: Artificial intelligence.  In tech, you don’t need a license to “build” the way an architect or general contractors do. Despite the fact that some people see AI as an existential threat to humanity, there is no significant government regulation targeting AI at federal, state, or local levels. You just build whatever you want, whenever you want. The result is a flood of investment and unfettered innovation.  Now imagine the opposite: If you wanted to design a piece of software, and you needed a professional degree from an accredited university, and you then need to pass licensing exams, pull a permit (which can take many months), then hire only union labor to build your software, and then you must get your project past a community review board—which might decide to block it outright—before you are allowed to post it to the internet. That would stymie progress. Need for Speed This is all to say that our current scenario, which the authors reiterate is there by choice, is an abundance of tech and consumer products, and a dearth of the big stuff that we have become good at blocking and regulating. What Klein and Thompson argue for is not simple supply-side economics where the government simply disappears, but instead an updated liberal agenda that builds. Another book that was released this year worth considering that complements Abundance is Superagency by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato. In Superagency, the authors write at length about the absence of regulation in the tech industry, and describe how AI companies compete against each other on benchmark ratings instead.  For example, emerging AI models are tested against each other for accuracy, toxicity, and other critical quality indicators. Unlike regulations, which are slow to implement and hard to update, competitive benchmarks actually accelerate improvements. Carefully reframed, a similar approach is compelling to think about with reference to innovative teams ready to build more desperately needed affordable housing, among other things. Klein and Thompson argue for a similar approach to take hold in the housing sector. To reinforce a sense of what Americans are actually capable of physically building when incentives are reimagined, the authors describe an encouraging example. In 2024, a gas truck exploded under a bridge on Interstate-95 in Pennsylvania, one of the busiest highways on the East Coast—a major emergency. Governor Josh Shapiro sprang into action. The state government of Pennsylvania prioritized speed as the only thing that mattered and suspended every other regulation, not unlike how Governor Gavin Newsom repealed California environmental protections to spur reconstruction in Los Angeles after the wildfires, which admittedly drew criticism from legal experts.  Normally, building a bridge over a highway takes two or three years from the start of the project through completion. In the total absence of regulations, the I-95 bridge rebuild was completed in 12 days!  A Hard Look in the Mirror One exciting aspect of Abundance is that something like this was written by someone like this. Klein and Thompson are liberal luminaries writing a steely-eyed critique of wheelhouse liberal policies. Their argument is well-reasoned, and reads like a serving of red meat for self-satisfied libertarian carnivores. The authors acknowledge that this is an argument that should find common ground with some conservatives, even if they are not effective messengers to that segment of society.  At a time when Trumpism has so completely burned every bridge to good-faith bipartisan negotiation, Abundance is a stern reality check: Certain policies that have been hallmarks of progressivism are choking our ability to build very important elements of modern life, at precisely the moment when we have to start building lots more stuff. This inability might be related to why the Democratic Party’s favorability is at rock bottom. Throughout the book, and in their innumerable interviews since its release, Klein and Thompson remind us that we have made things scarce by choice. We can use the same power of choice to reset our priorities in the direction of abundance. This shift partially relies on government, but more fundamentally, it requires the liberal body politic to start asking itself what kind of uncomfortable compromises we are willing to live with in order to get building. David Dewane is an architect, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and educator. He is the CXO of geniant, a Chicago-based technology, architecture, and human interaction office. This post contains affiliate links. AN may have a commission if you make a purchase through these links.