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Abundance

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Supply-side liberalism

Klein and Thompson's manifesto for a liberalism that builds. They argue that for fifty years, American liberals, especially in blue states, have prioritized process, litigation, and the prevention of harm over the actual production of what people need: housing, clean energy, infrastructure, scientific progress. The result is self-imposed scarcity. A widely-discussed, internally critical call for progressives to make abundance, not just fair distribution, the centre of their politics.

About the author

Ezra Klein (b. 1984) is a New York Times columnist and podcast host who co-founded Vox; Derek Thompson (b. 1986) is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Both are prominent explanatory journalists; Abundance distils their case for a supply-focused, outcome-oriented liberalism.

Synopsis

The authors set a 'liberalism that builds' against a 'liberalism that blocks.' Zoning rules, environmental review, and proliferating procedural requirements, many enacted with good intentions, have made it ruinously slow and expensive to build homes, transmission lines, and public works in the places liberals govern. Klein and Thompson argue that solving housing costs, climate change, and stagnation requires a politics focused on outcomes and supply: clearing the thicket of vetoes so government can deliver material abundance rather than merely redistribute scarcity.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

Klein and Thompson argue that American liberalism has spent decades perfecting the power to block development and neglecting the power to build, and that the remedy is a politics of abundance focused on outcomes, not process.

The book is an internal critique aimed at liberals themselves: it locates the obstacle to progressive goals not in conservative opposition but in liberalism's own proceduralism, making 'building' rather than 'blocking' the test of a serious politics.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with left critics who argue 'abundance' risks deregulation that benefits developers and corporations over labour and the environment, and with conservatives who doubt that the state which created the bottlenecks can be the one to clear them.

Reading note

Read it as a contemporary, intra-liberal argument — beside Klein's Why We're Polarized and against both degrowth and deregulatory-right framings of the same bottlenecks.

Best paired with

Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized; Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap.

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