Abundance
What Progress Takes
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4.5 • 104 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“A terrific book...Powerful and persuasive.” —Fareed Zakaria
“Spectacular…Offers a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward…Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination.” —David Brooks, The New York Times
From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.
To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.
Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this probing treatise, New York Times columnist Klein (Why We're Polarized) and Atlantic staff writer Thompson (Hit Makers) explore the legislative bottlenecks hampering progress on housing, infrastructure, and clean energy, among other pressing issues. Zooming in on San Francisco to explore the nation's housing crisis, the authors explain how onerous zoning restrictions limiting the number of units developers can build per lot constrain housing supply growth, while a law requiring the government to prioritize small businesses when granting contracts means developers must wait until one of the few qualifying companies has availability. Effective governance necessitates cutting through red tape when it proves overly prohibitive, Klein and Thompson contend, citing how Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro restored a collapsed section of I-95 in 12 days, instead of the many months initially expected, by issuing a declaration of emergency that enabled the state to waive such time-consuming requirements as a bidding process and environmental impact statement. Elsewhere, the authors lament how caps on H-1B visas are limiting immigration of the highly skilled foreign scientists and mathematicians who have historically helped drive American innovation. Klein and Thompson are, by their own admission, more interested in diagnosing problems than outlining solutions, and while this feels like a bit of a cop-out, the remarkably unstuffy discussions offer as lucid an explanation of contemporary legislative quandaries as readers are likely to find. Policy wonks will rejoice.
Customer Reviews
Come for the policy discussion, stay for the history
There was more in the book than I expected in the way of historical examples of success and failure. I found it very interesting, engaging, and thought provoking.
Futurism
I loved this book. It shows part of the story of the great search for a more perfect union in America and identifies several key challenges we now face as we choose between a future of goodness in the world and yet another disappointment by a once promising civilization in history.