“When the spell of a political order breaks, ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable,” Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson observe in their new book, Abundance. This might be happening at our current moment. A “new political order” is in the making, Klein and Thompson argue. They also aim to provide a vision that can revive liberalism in the United States.
The book has made a huge splash; myriad reviews came out right after its publication and the book is now topping bestseller lists. This reflects the prominence of the authors, but it also shows the book is filling an important void. At a time when distinguished scholars are “wondering whether fascism is resurgent on American soil,” as the authors observe, liberals need a “clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present.” And to be successful, this vision must deliver: “A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the success of your own.”
The question is whether Abundance succeeds on its own terms: whether it provides a “clearly articulated vision of the future” that is sufficiently different from the policy playbook of the pre-Trump status quo; whether it provides ideas that can capitalize on the opening that the chaos and horror we are living through has created; and whether it can contribute to ushering in a new political order, as the authors promise. What is needed at this moment of constitutional crisis is an anti-fascist economics—an economics that helps build an escape route from the slippery slope into fascism.
Klein and Thompson’s analysis of the failure of the pre-Trump policy playbook boils down to an unproductive division of labor between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans have been focused on the supply side, which they saw as sufficiently addressed if markets were unfettered. Democrats, on the other hand, have emphasized redistribution and relied on demand side policies like cash transfers and the Affordable Care Act, while assuming the market will ensure that this demand creates its own supply. In other words, leaving supply to the market was a bipartisan consensus. The result was an abundant supply of consumer goods and a scarcity of public goods and infrastructure development.
To the extent there was abundance, it was the result of China’s cheap manufacturing at scale of products designed, branded and marketed by powerful multinational companies predominantly headquartered in the United States. But America unlearned how to build as a result, and domestic infrastructure and essential services then ended up undersupplied and overpriced. In place of this scarcity, the authors advocate for a new abundance agenda: “Abundance, as we define it, is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.” This means abundance in “the building blocks of the future,” which they say are “Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health.” And this abundance is meant to be green and fueled by innovation.
Once abundance is achieved, we no longer need to worry too much about redistribution, the argument seems to go. The first pages of the book lay out the abundance vision from the perspective of the lived experience of everyday life. It reads like a rich suburb gone green. Markers for the single-family home setting include, for example, solar panels just a “few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof” and a drone that “pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird.” The fridge is full and stocked with fresh vegetables. People are well off. The upper-middle class experience that might well reflect the authors’ lives is available to everyone but without anyone having to give up what they have. Who could possibly object to this green American dream? It is a utopia that the authors explicitly embrace as such: “Our era features too little utopian thinking,” they mourn.
But what is the relationship between this vision and democracy? Imagine you are a member of the two-thirds of U.S. workers who work in the local service economy—a statistic cited by the authors—who get up every morning to clean houses, cut hair, apply cosmetic treatments, service appliances, drive for Uber, manage medical appointments, or answer angry customer requests. Who has the most money to spend on these services? Those who have much more than you. You are constantly confronted with people who are living in abundance, who have fridges stacked with fresh produce, who drive silent e-vehicles, who overlook green lawns. From where you sit, the problem is not that there is not enough material wealth around but that you are shut out; that after working long hours, juggling care work and several jobs, you are still living in scarcity while others are dwelling in abundance.
This is the vantage of most people. To build a new political order, Democrats must win back the large numbers of working people who stayed home in the last election and win over the losers of Trump’s shock therapy. Will they be mobilized around a happy go lucky vision of green abundance where all distributional and power conflicts have disappeared? I doubt it.
Kamala Harris tried to run on an “opportunity economy”—a similarly vague and harmonious concept that brushes over the absurd levels of inequality that shape the present-day United States. It did not go well. The campaign ad that performed best in focus groups but was hardly ever aired directly addressed the power imbalance that ordinary Americans experience every day: Harris promised to “crack down on landlords who are charging too much” and “going after price gougers.” Tens of thousands of people are gathering (including in deep red states) to join Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders on their Fighting Oligarchy tour. People are angry after having faced scarcity amid plenty for too long. Rebuilding democratic power requires addressing the enormous economic power imbalances that have accumulated over decades. But the vision outlined in Abundance mostly neglects questions of power and redistribution.
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that a new focus on economic supply is needed to address the mounting challenges of climate change mitigation, greening energy systems, building out public transportation, overcoming the housing shortage in major cities, and more generally providing what we might want to call “essentials.” Taking office amid the pandemic, the Biden administration recognized as much. If one had to develop a shorthand formula for Bidenomics, “building out upstream essentials through fiscal policy” is a strong contender. This did create a fast recovery, a strong job market, and an uptick in manufacturing investment. But it ultimately failed electorally, not least because of the cost of living crisis deepened by inflation.
Biden rejected Reaganite trickle-down economics but settled on another kind of trickle down: fixing things in the far reaches of supply chains in hopes the benefits will eventually reach ordinary people. But for most people, it mostly remains obscure what the government is doing for them, even if billboards are set up to remind them of a bipartisan infrastructure act.
The question then is whether the Abundance lens will bring a more successful supply-side progressivism? One key issue Biden’s agenda ran into was the pace of building. The focal point of Abundance in speeding up building is legal “blockages” that accumulated in decades of legal action and allow vested interests to slow or halt the build-out of infrastructure and the expansion of housing supply. The authors’ prime examples are zoning laws and, ironically, environmental protections that they say stand in the way of building green infrastructure.
A key case study to illustrate this regulatory paradox—where environmental reviews and multilayered regulatory frameworks slow building environmentally friendly means of transportation—is the failed attempt to build high-speed rail in California. It opens the possibility for organized groups to intervene at every stage and block progress, Klein and Thompson argue. In their view, it is the thing that sets China and California apart: “This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”
I cannot speak to the Californian case, although Ben Beachy’s analysis of the general impact of regulations on building strikes me as apt. Beachy, one of Biden’s coordinators of green industrial policy (a concept completely absent from Abundance), recently posted on X: “Some rules thwart building & undermine public interests (exclusionary zoning)[;] some slow building but support public interests (environmental reviews)[;] some don’t impact building & support public interests (childcare incentives)[;] some boost our ability to build (antitrust).” If this kind of nuance is dropped and all regulations are seen as blockage or anti-abundance, that risks playing into the hands of DOGE-style deregulation.
In fact, Elon Musk has already praised Jon Stewart’s Abundance-focused interview with Klein, writing on X: “This shows why a regulatory overhaul is necessary. The burden of mountains of regulation is why the high speed rail can’t get down in California.” Klein and Thompson seem to be envisioning a surgical kind of deregulation. Yet there is a question of how much regulation, let alone state capacity to enforce it, will be left after Musk and his successors under Trump will have swung their chainsaws around for four years.
Having researched China’s market reforms for many years, I can say that it’s baffling to argue China’s success in building out critical infrastructure is simply a result of a combination of power abuses and the absence of regulations and “debating with judges.” There are many countries in the world that have authoritarian governments and loose environmental and building regulations. None of them has managed to build high-speed rail at breakneck speed.
In fact, a quick search on the internet is enough to find a detailed study by the World Bank on how China managed to build its high-speed rail so quickly and efficiently. Among the key factors are: a 15-year plan that lays out long-term goals and was followed up with five-year plans to specify construction projects and revise goals based on past progress (these have all been upward revisions); special-purpose construction and management companies that are joint ventures between central and provincial governments; coordination among rail manufacturers, research institutions, and engineering centers; managers with clear responsibility and significant performance-based compensation that incentivizes them to stay for whole projects; a high degree of standardization in design and procedures; and a steady stream of projects to enable the creation of a “capable, competitive supply industry.”
If one tried to translate the Chinese experience into the American institutional context, one arrives at something closer to the “multi-solving, whole of government approach to planning and coordination” recommended for solar development in a recent study from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Institute. It argues that what is needed is “multi-scalar land-use and site planning”; “coordinating between federal, state, Tribal, and local governments”; and the creation of “public and nonprofit solar deployment companies.”
Rather than trying to overrule vested interests through deregulation and enable implementation through top-down government action or uncoordinated private companies, the authors of the study insist that “embedding community, worker, and environmental benefits” can help to build trust and advance building projects. Whatever the precise merits of this embedding approach may be for the pace of build-out, it is better suited to win back support for a green agenda after years of climate change denial spearheaded by the White House compared to an Abundance agenda, which the authors themselves describe as being “painful.”
Klein and Thompson are right that this is the time for big new thinking and to recenter progressive politics on making essentials affordable. But ultimately their utopia remains too far removed from the real struggles of ordinary people and their policy prescriptions too limited to live up to the challenges we currently face. And so, the book misses the moment. At best, the flurry of reviews has unleashed the debate over real economic policy alternatives that can serve to win back power for democracy. At worst, the book could end up a massive distraction for policy thinkers who have an urgent task that this book does not solve.
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