“Abundance” Thinkers Asked Many of the Right Questions in 2021. Are We Going to Like the Answers in 2025 (and 2050)?

This week, one of the most awaited public policy books in years hits shelves. Titled simply Abundance, the book brings together themes developed in New York Times and Atlantic magazine writing since at least 2021 by longtime political journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Their target: what they call an “ideological conspiracy” and “ideological collusion” between “a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it,” which in turns creates a scarcity of the things people need to live full lives. Their solution: a supply-side political movement “counterforce” that, more than attaining any particular policy change or another, constitutes a new “political order” that rivals the dominance of the New Deal or neoliberalism.

It’s a bold claim and a big swing. Let’s start with what they get right, before moving on to questions they leave on the table, and questions the book sparks—including how binding we think the coalitional constraints they worry about really are.

Catnip on Thorny Policy Problems

The authors are among the world’s best at what they do. They offer up appointment reading and listening: If you aren’t engaging with their ideas, you will be left in the dark in many policy discussions up and down the Acela Corridor and would-be California High-Speed Rail line (if we could ever get it built). Indeed, even before Abundance was officially published, it was widely reviewed.

Among the many worthy questions the book poses: Are liberals being hypocritical when they plant yard signs that say things like “In our home, immigrants and refugees are welcome,” and then support zoning restrictions that block the construction of new homes in their neighborhoods? Should they embrace Operation Warp Speed as an example of effective industrial policy, even though it was Trump’s baby? Overall, do American elites have a “procedure fetish” (in legal scholar Nicholas Bagley’s memorable turn of phrase), with too much focus on the right process rather than the right outcomes? Any of these propositions would rightly elicit head nods—or depending on the venue, finger snaps.

It’s not just that the authors ask many of the right questions; they also provide powerful synthesis of reporting and academic research. For instance, chapters 1, 2, and 3 (appealingly titled “Grow,” “Build,” and “Govern”) draw most on Klein’s work. These offer readers a history of California’s postwar housing boom and bust that ended with a homelessness epidemic, a stocktaking of the daunting spatial requirements needed to “electrify everything” to save the climate, and a broadside against the clunky and outdated computer programming languages that government agencies use to disburse benefits. Chapters 4 and 5 (“Invent” and “Deploy”) pull from Thompson’s work, and canvass technological miracles ranging from Edison’s labs to mRNA vaccine research. It shows that—however much we think of technology as a private sector phenomenon—it is never far from the touch of government. We see that in the relay race of R&D-to-commercialization subsidies that gave the world super cheap solar panels, or the possibility of using a tool like advance market commitments to encourage the next generation of low-carbon cement. These chapters draw on important work by academics such as Raj Chetty, Jesse Jenkins, Jennifer Pahlka, Erica Fuchs, Gregory Nemet, and many more besides.

Building Without Power

An essay collection on these questions would form a welcome addition to any wonk’s bookshelf. It would be, however, a bit dry, and the authors are aiming higher: a meta diagnosis of American malaise. But Abundance has two shortcomings—one they freely own, another they don’t—that will alienate many readers who are hungry for a left-wing alternative to right-wing supply-side thinking.

First, the flaw they own. In their conclusion, Klein and Thompson concede that they are not offering “a set of policy solutions.” Yet most of the problems they identify could be fixed with policy, whether that is expanding the number of fellowships for early career scientists, rezoning to allow shared boardinghouses for unmarried workers, expanding the remit of DARPA to biopharma, or unleashing the Defense Production Act to preempt private or sub-federal interests blocking clean energy. Indeed, part of the value of the turn to industrial policy in the US is that it allows policymakers to disrupt veto points by moving decision-making from the local to the state level, and the state to the national level—a point made by economist Paul Krugman on Klein’s podcast.

This leads to the second problem: the absence of a theory of how the Left could or would build the power that would be necessary to deliver supply-side gains, while easing the economic transition cost that hurts the old while it helps the new. This critique was aired extensively (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) in the years before the book’s publication.

Take organized labor. Reams of evidence show unions are one of the best tools we have to lessen income inequality, improve voter turnout, support progressive candidates, train students on how to be better organizers, unblock climate progress, ensure climate progress is pro-growth, help energy developers get permits from planning bodies, and reform permitting rules. On the other hand, the decline of unions in the neoliberal era has been a major factor behind pushing working-class voters to the right. There’s a reason that class politics has been central to the Left’s political project for centuries: The labor movement provides strength in numbers, and ties people together on the basis of fundamental material interests in a way that passing enthusiasm for the pace of invention would not (for most people).

The Biden administration put labor at the core of its industrial strategy, with sixfold more generous tax credits for projects that pay prevailing wages, 20 percent preference for energy grant seekers that have collective bargaining agreements or other union and community engagement, and symbolic support for unions through being the first president to walk a picket line. If one agrees in principle with progressive values (as Klein and Thompson repeatedly say they do), but also worries about using regulatory fiat rather than allowing firms to choose what level of union engagement to pursue (the authors dismiss the use of too many requirements as “everything-bagel liberalism”), then Biden’s mix of nudges and noodges seems designed for you.

And yet, the role of labor is ambiguous in the abundance imagination. On the one hand, the book treats unions warily, painting their demands to be paid prevailing wages or be included in construction projects as an obstacle rather than opportunity to build power and higher-quality projects. On the other hand, one of the few heroes of the book is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who rebuilt a collapsed section of I-95 in a record 12 days. The authors note “he chose to use union labor but to gore a lot of other interests and processes” (emphasis added), such as requirements for environmental impact assessments or multiple bids for contracts. Elsewhere, Klein seems to support the idea of tripartite (labor, management, state) corporatism, but thinks actually existing US unions often drag down the progressive cause. Still elsewhere, abundance enthusiasts call for “a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions,” disregarding the policy views of manufacturing unions on the future of their industry, deriding labor standards in trade policy as creating “high-paid make-work jobs,” and creating a “party within the party” faction like the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1980s (which helped distance the party from unions and other progressive groups).

This is an area I’d like to see abundance thinkers reflect on: What is the role of unions in their political project? Is moving toward a better pro-union equilibrium (like corporatism) the goal? If so, how can public policy help us get there? On the way there, what should working people make of the abundance movement’s desire for politicians to constantly rhetorically signal their awareness of the trade-offs involved in working in coalition with unions (or what I’ve called “trade-off primacy”)?

Indeed, the abundance project is centered on a generalized skepticism of coalitions: They deride these as a “machine” that “gave everyone a bit of what they wanted” that needs to be split. But what normative or strategic basis do we have for deciding who to vote off of Survivor Island? For all the supposed complexity of Biden’s industrial strategy, he was more than willing to break with solar panel manufacturers, anti–fossil fuel groups, or state permitting authorities when they got in the way of legislating and building. Indeed, a major function of what political scientist Pepper Culpepper calls the “quiet politics” of implementation and bureaucracy is to resolve problems that politicians can’t easily resolve in public. Sometimes Klein and Thompson’s splittist entreaties seem like a recipe for shrinking coalitions when you most need them (in the ideation, legislation, and request for proposals stage), rather than a fair assessment of the “quiet politics” of the ex post implementation and proposal-granting process, where interagency processes, bureaucrats, and OIRA regulatory review have all sorts of means of disappearing inconvenient coalitional concerns. (That said, I am in total agreement with their concern that those voices can un-disappear themselves when it comes to the courts, and I’d love to join a movement that sought to replace a lot of what courts do on the back end with what corporatism can do on the front end—I just have my doubts of whether the authors’ approach to coalitions gets us from A to B.)

But ultimately, the power I’d like the authors to most reflect on is their own. In a fragmented media landscape where local journalism has shriveled to nonexistence, legacy platforms like Klein and Thompson’s serve as indispensable means of educating the public on complicated policy questions. In part because of their concern with building stuff in the real world, writers in the greater Abundance Cinematic Universe were among the only voices explaining policies like the Inflation Reduction Act to the public. History is likely to judge Klein’s sharp-elbowed dismissal of Biden’s labor-forward industrial policy as second only in real-world impact to his essays calling on Biden to step out of the 2024 race for reelection.

Holding one’s own side to account has a noble tradition in liberalism. But it carries the weight it does because the norm is that one does so reluctantly and on the basis of unambiguous evidence or moral objections, as these criticisms are inevitably weaponized by bad-faith opponents who want to see your shared project fail. This was a central point made by Gene Sperling, who advised Clinton, Obama, and then Biden, about interventions by Jason Furman, another prominent Biden critic who worked for both Clinton and Obama. Now, Klein and Thompson might reasonably protest that, as journalists, they are positionally distinct from a former Democratic appointee. But Abundance is even clearer than Furman in that it is calling for a new political movement, and is explicit that it wants to plant its flag on the Left—sprinkling asides throughout such as, “Our sympathies there lie with the left,” “We are both liberals in the American tradition,” “We don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right,” and the Right “does not share our goals.”

Ultimately, Abundance is neither a particularly reluctant nor empirically based broadside. They use loaded words like conspiracy and collusion (whose dictionary and legal definitions suggest secret coordinated intent to harm third parties), when more precise and less inflammatory characterizations are available. It vastly exaggerates the appeal of fringe ideas like degrowth, which only matter if the powerful players they describe, like Gavin Newsom or Gina Raimondo, subscribe to it (they don’t). Klein’s columns predicted (in claims mostly reproduced here) that Biden’s encouragement of domestic supply chains and promotion of female labor force participation could or would be fatal to build-out, before more than a sliver of Inflation Reduction Act or CHIPS Act funds had gone out the door or the implementing regulations were even finalized. By the time the chips and energy programs were oversubscribed and the US hit record-breaking manufacturing construction numbers in 2024 (with outsize benefits going to poorer and fossil-dependent communities), the reputational damage to the project was done. That is not to say that there were not embarrassments such as the failure to quickly build electric vehicle charging infrastructure, which they cite. But by singling out the sore spots without adequate context or inclusion of the bright spots, the picture is unfairly skewed.

Now, for better or worse, America is going to get a real-time experiment in what it looks like to take a wrecking ball to guardrails and whatever was left of the New Deal coalition. When we hit the imagined year 2050 that colorfully opens Abundance’s introduction, will Klein and Thompson like what they see?

If you ask Eleanor

“It is easy today, when everyone has come to understand the value of a higher standard of living and of a public which looks upon this broad foundation as a safeguard to national prosperity, to forget the long years of struggle of organized labor. Even now we are apt to ignore the fact that without organized labor the unorganized groups would slide back quickly to poor conditions, which would hurt the prosperity of the nation.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (September 6, 1954)