I read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on May 16, 2025

This book has gotten a lot of attention in my circles.

Abundance is essentially an ideology of:

• A powerful government that does a lot of funding of welfare and safety-net systems as well as funding scientific and technology endeavors like NASA or DARPA.
• Fixing housing production from all angles, including the YIMBY viewpoint that restrictive zoning and selfish homeowners who protest all new developments are major causes of the housing crisis.
• Accelerating tech and especially climate tech by increasing government funding and fixing some overzealous regulations, like CEQA, which ironically are used to block decarbonization rather than support it.

In short, reading this book reminds me of my experience on Twitter around 2020: a lot of the same ideas that were bouncing around YIMBY-tech-adjacent circles are here. I liked them then and I like them now.

It's not as bad as people say it is. It isn't just about deregulation, or even mainly about deregulation. It's definitely not endorsing neoliberalism, to the degree that that can be defined. And it isn't blindly deregulatory: Klein and Thompson only explicitly call for the reforms of the most obvious low-hanging-fruit laws, like CEQA and single-family zoning.

I think the weaknesses in some leftist circles that Klein identifies are real, and watching his interview with Sam Seder confirmed that: Sam, who I otherwise really like, is so reluctant to admit any NIMBY power, preferring to collapse everything into "moneyed interests." Other critiques attempt to lump the book in with the Koch brothers using the thinnest evidence. The idea that maybe a particular regulation is bad and that homeowners, not just Blackstone, can be villains too, produces some ugly knee-jerk responses from across the left spectrum.

But it's not nearly as good as it should be. Despite what Klein says, this is not a political book. It does not grapple with how any of these ideas can be successfully "sold" to the public, how they can be turned into a spirit that appeals to median voters. It's a book by and policy wonks, and I fear that too many of its readers are already familiar with all the talking points.

Abundance might be a good rallying cry, a little goofy though, but there isn't much else in here that tells us how this could work, politically. Concidentally, the NYC Mayoral Forum was on last night and I watched that between sessions reading this book. My favored candidate Zohran Mamdani, made the pitch for city-run grocery stores, and it was compelling. It's a hard thing to pitch: even though I like the idea, but it's pretty far outside the norm. And he defended it pretty well! The technique was something like:

• The city already subsidizes grocery stores
• It doesn't require that those stores take food stamps or WINC
• A trial program to run grocery stores would cost less than the existing subsidy
• He's confident that those pilot stores, one per borough, would demonstrate to people that the government can do it

That seems good: plan that sounds both audacious and possible and has a clear route to proving itself to voters. Abundance could have used more of this.

It was a very quick read, and it was fine. My existing biases were confirmed. Unfortunately, it's a book about a lot of stuff that's correct but not popular. Stuff that would work if implemented but is dragged down by political baggage. I wish it showed a path out of that, but it didn't.