Abundance: A Liberalism that Builds Houses — And Government
The Abundance Movement's Misplaced Trust in an Empowered Civil Service
Like many people, I read and enjoyed Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in early 2025. I also appreciated two other books that deserve to be read alongside it, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works and Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck. There is much to celebrate in each of these books, and much to gain if policymakers put some of the authors’ proposals into action.
There’s a pervasive narrative, however, that Klein, Thompson, and other Abundance-adjacent authors are somehow foes of progressivism: that their identification with the left is only skin deep. This is not a thesis that could survive actually reading their books.
In a departure from this Substack’s normal focus on state and local tax policy (mostly because I’ve been too busy to produce any new content), I am exercising a point of personal privilege in sharing an essay I wrote shortly after Abundance’s release, critiquing the authors’ confidence in bureaucracy and comfort with central planning. Even though the books have been out for quite some time, the critique still seems timely, because debates about the purpose and direction of the Abundance Movement, and about the degree to which their vision requires intensive governmental coordination, remain quite active.
I hasten to emphasize that this critique does not capture my full views of any of these books, which I regard as a valuable contribution to the policy debate, and which have the potential to yield meaningful policy improvements. But it is a critique of what I regard as a misplaced trust, and a rejoinder to those who have concluded that Klein et al. are merely agents of the political right.
I recognize the risks of using this Substack to opine on topics outside my area, and I’ll return to tax policy next time. For now, thank you for your indulgence.
Abundance: A Liberalism that Builds Houses — And Government
The only time the phrase “rising tide” appears in Abundance, the eponymous 2025 book behind a growing center-left movement, it refers to the fear that a “rising tide of bureaucracy could drown the work of science.” But while Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson never resort to the now-familiar aphorism that a rising tide lifts all boats, it neatly describes their core intuition: that progressive ambitions can never be realized through the better redistribution of existing resources, and that only supply-side progressivism can produce the abundance from which those aims can be satisfied. The insight is not new, or if so, it is only the newness of the New Deal, with its relentless pursuit of more: more housing, more energy (cleaner this time), more health care, and more technological progress.
But whereas today, a “rising tide” conjures up Ronald Reagan’s optimistic hopes for supply-side conservatism, with market-driven economic growth creating better conditions for all, the authors of Abundance would have more affinity for the way the phrase was first employed by John F. Kennedy in defense of large-scale public works projects like Arkansas’ Greers Ferry Dam, with the government’s expenditures constituting “an investment by the people of the United States in the United States.”
This is the confident, empowered liberalism — a “liberalism that builds” — to which Klein and Thompson beckon us to return. It is the unfettered “Hamiltonian” liberalism defended by Marc Dunkelman in another 2025 book, Why Nothing Works, as against a mincing Jeffersonian liberalism that, fearful of concentrated power in any form, has shackled government with endless reviews and a proliferation of democratic vetoes. Theirs is the progressivism of the Works Progress Administration, the Grand Coulee Dam, and the Tennessee Valley Authority — and, potentially, a progressivism sufficiently single-minded to allow the Tennessee Valley Authority’s expansive economic development plans take precedence over the snail darter.
The upshot of this is that Klein, Thompson, and their abundance-minded fellow travelers, while caustic in their critique of many specific regulations, are far from champions of deregulation and market forces. While they acknowledge the essential role of private enterprise in delivering on housing, energy, and other supply-constrained sectors, and favor a rollback of regulations in these sectors that make it harder to deliver on key progressive outcomes, they have little confidence in the private sector’s broader ability to deliver on their progressive supply-side vision. The problem with regulations, by their reckoning, is not that they represent a government intrusion in the market, but rather that they represent a democratic intrusion on the power of a strong central government to act in service of key national priorities.
To be sure, Klein and Thompson, Dunkelman, and Stuck author Yoni Appelbaum (whose book also dovetails with the progressive abundance agenda) all want to avoid the extreme embodied in the villainous figure of Robert Moses. We can be sure of this because they all say so multiple times. What is less certain is how they would guard against such imperious heavy-handedness beyond a curiously placed trust in the same bureaucrats responsible for today’s sclerotic interest group progressivism, who are frequently more than willing to subordinate their own broader ideals to the many competing demands of modern progressivism. Klein and Thompson pin their hopes on the notion that, unburdened by administrative reviews and democratic vetoes, government can act boldly in service of the public interest rather than schizophrenically in service to the bureaucracy’s many clients.
As if government was notable for its purity of both vision and execution until the adoption of the Administrative Procedure Act, and bureaucrats never pursued narrow sectional objectives until Nader’s Raiders struck a blow to their power.
Abundance consists of five chapters that read like headings on a campaign platform (which is basically the point): Grow, Build, Govern, Invent, and Deploy. Progressive critics of the abundance agenda get bogged down on “grow,” “build,” and “govern,” which repudiate not only far left degrowtherism but also the rise of a citizen voice progressivism with more expertise in constructing hurdles than housing. They decry “procedure-fetish liberalism” that throttles innovation and growth, highlighting labyrinthine permitting and environmental review processes that stand in the way of housing construction, mass transit, and clean energy projects. They question systems under which government-funded scientists spend more time on paperwork than on research, and which can treat regulatory compliance as a higher ambition than delivering on the intended project. They identify scarcity as the enemy, and think that redistribution will be easier (and somewhat less necessary) if greater abundance is achieved.
In this, they find common cause with the center-right, which regards the book’s (and movement’s) diagnosis of government sclerosis as a belated dawning of the obvious. It is possible, at this point, to regard the book’s occasional jabs at Ronald Reagan, its chastisement of right-wing climate change denialism, and its half-hearted efforts to lay some of the blame for governmental dysfunction at the feet of limited government conservatives, as little more than signaling to assure progressive readers that the authors share their values, despite adopting some of the language of conservative critics.
By the time Klein and Thompson begin championing “focused state capacity,” however, it’s conservatives who are squirming. This isn’t “state capacity libertarianism.” And it isn’t just the notion that if the government is going to do something, it might as well do it well. Instead, this is a full-throated, if never fully defended, paean for the administrative state writ large.
In their telling, Bill Clinton emerges as a sort of villain, playing an inverted Eisenhower to Reagan’s mirror FDR, slamming the door on the era of big government when he should have been reenergizing it. The authors portray centralized authority and collective action as solutions to problems created by a devolution of authority to markets, citizens, and litigation.
They want to eliminate bottlenecks, some of which are caused by government — occasionally acknowledged as such, as with NEPA, and other times ellided, as when the authors treat Operation Warp Speed’s bureaucratic fast-tracking as government in action rather than a lifting of typical governmental roadblocks — but don’t regard government agenda-setting as possessing the likelihood of creating new bottlenecks, for instance by committing the country to a specific approach to achieving clean energy goals and thus foreclosing new and better options that might emerge from market innovation.
They dismiss concerns about governments picking winners and losers by noting that government has picked its share of winners, ARPAnet, the penicillin rollout, and the space program among them. Yet in this they seem to have forgotten the many times that governments have backed losers, some documented earlier in the book, or convinced themselves that these malinvestments wouldn’t happen if governmental authority were strengthened. (What would the internet look like today if it had remained a government-run project, and had Clinton not decided to leave it almost entirely free of regulation and oversight?)
They make a case for curtailing regulatory comment periods, limiting the ability to litigate government decisions, strengthening eminent domain powers, and simplifying procurement processes, all of which they view as impediments to decisive action.
It’s true, of course, that government procurement processes are often wildly inefficient, partly due to weak incentive structures, partly due to vendor preference programs and set-asides, and partly because the one-size-fits-all approach designed to root out graft and price insensitivity is itself insensitive to time and financial constraints imposed by putting everything out to bid. In the business world, private actors driven by the profit motive can enter into contracts more quickly, relying on past relationships or weighing the costs and benefits of running a small procurement through a competitive bidding process.
But in government, what is the alternative? Businesses have the profit motive. Absent clear rules about procurement, what prevents bureaucrats — from laziness, indifference, inattentiveness, bias, or graft — from awarding contracts at inflated prices for substandard work?
A market-oriented solution might be to contract at a higher level, awarding contracts for fulfilling large commitments (which can be monitored by government employees) while letting the primary vendor handle sub-vendor arrangements. The Abundance solution, seemingly, is to loosen the controls on government contracting and hope for the best.
The authors praise Biden for his embrace of abundance politics in the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, while acknowledging that subsidies for computer chips and funding for clean energy projects were larded with some of the everything-bagel liberalism they otherwise deplore, with, presumably, a real chance of failing as badly as some of the Obama administration’s never-quite-shovel-ready projects. But one supposes it’s only because the administration was too weak, and that if it weren’t for citizen vetoes (or, perhaps, Congress?), the whole project would have been carried out by some hard-charging latter-day Harry Hopkins.
Yet policy outcomes are biased toward small privileged groups in more centralized regimes just as much as under more democratic ones. Abundance liberals worry about democratic veto points, like the ability of local NIMBYs to block a housing development or snarl a rail project in years of litigation, but are much less chary of the risk of rent-seeking and regulatory capture in a less transparent or democratic system. Log-rolling and minority vetoes exist in empowered governments just as in more accountable ones. The Calculus of Consent was written before Nader or NEPA, and interest-group liberalism, under which policy arenas are parceled out to clienteles, was one of the evils that the Jeffersonian mode was intended to uproot.
(At Alex Tabarrok’s urging, Ezra Klein read Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations. Had he followed it up with The Logic of Collective Action, perhaps Abundance would have been a better book.)
The Abundance authors (and with them, large swaths of the Abundance movement) set out to solve the problems of contemporary progressivism by reverting to the older progressivism that it supplanted. In doing so, they rely too much not only on the good intentions but the good judgment of those in power. They discount the importance of the price discovery mechanism, seemingly unimpressed by the way in which prices embed valuable information. They seem unfazed by the possibility that government planning will be too lumbering or will choose the wrong channels of investment. They laud the power of China’s authoritarian government to get things done, but fail to note how much of what China builds goes to waste, or how poor China’s return on industrial subsidies has been in recent years. They even cheekily paraphrase Karl Marx to the effect that the profit motive punishes innovation.
Klein and Thompson lean into Dunkelman’s call for progressivism to embrace its Hamiltonian ethos, but both they and Dunkelman fail to grapple with the challenge of balancing the risks of corruption, administrative fiat, regulatory capture, and inflexible top-down solutions against their understandable desire to eliminate endless review, lengthy contracting and approval processes, and stakeholder vetoes. In Dunkelman’s thinking, Ralph Nader, Jane Jacobs, and Jimmy Carter ushered in a Jeffersonian liberalism that was so skeptical of size and power that it undercut its own ability to get anything done. That may well be. But the Abundance solution, perhaps surprisingly for a book so aware of the ways that ill-conceived government policies have blocked housing and energy projects that private investors were willing to deliver, places considerable confidence in central planning.
Perhaps Jane Jacobs’ form of localism cannot lead to abundance. (Jacobs herself possessed something of the dualism that bedevils Klein and Thompson’s analysis: as Appelbaum notes in Stuck, she helped stem the tide of command-and-control urban renewal in part by highlighting the vitality of organic mixed-used communities, but then dedicated her attention to using zoning to freeze the “character” of these previously vibrant communities just as they were when she discovered them.) And while Klein is on a journey of discovery of thinkers long known and appreciated by the right, it’s no surprise that he’s not quite ready to embrace, say, F.A. Hayek or even Eleanor Ostrom. But perhaps he could lend an ear to a fellow progressive, James C. Scott, who has dedicated his career to documenting how empowered governments, in the name of legibility to themselves, bulldoze over organic solutions with all the confidence of a Robert Moses.
When it takes longer to repair an escalator at D.C. Metro stations than to construct the Empire State Building in its entirety, blame can’t be placed on NEPA, historic designations, or litigation, as abused as each of those things might be. That’s just government operating at the speed of government. And when governments announce new affordable housing initiatives but pair them with environmental justice plans, union labor and prevailing wage requirements, minority hiring incentives, and developer proffers, that’s not the fault of any existing law either, nor is it likely to become less frequent if bureaucrats were granted greater autonomy.
The authors rightly believe that decline is a policy choice, and, conversely, so is building. Yet they do not seem entirely aware of the impetus for past degrowth policies. Schumpeter famously saw socialism following capitalism not as a dialectical synthesis but due to a lethargy produced by capitalism’s material prosperity: society embraces the belief that abundance had been attained, and it remains only to parcel it out. This was essentially J.K. Galbraith’s thesis, too, in The Affluent Society: that a sufficiently rich society can and should care less about stoking the engines of greater prosperity, and more about what is done with it. The result of that mindset, of course, is the sluggish, low-growth society Abundance liberals want to reinvigorate.
Abundance isn’t The Affluent Society. Galbraith believed that scarcity had been vanquished, at least within tolerable margins, and that redistribution was paramount. Klein, Thompson, and the rest of the Abundance set believe that artificial scarcity has reared its head, and that beating it back will solve more problems than focusing primarily on redistribution. But with their faith in government-led investments and a certain form of industrial policy as the drivers of the desired growth in key sectors, they have only half the picture.
Ultimately, the book, and some parts of the movement it has spawned, evinces very little confidence that markets can deliver on abundance. The authors’ interlocutors on the right, meanwhile, would doubt that political actors could make good on promises of abundance without unleashing markets. In The Conservative Futurist, published a year prior to Abundance, James Pethokoukis highlighted the research of economists John Dawson and John Seater, who estimate that changes of regulation beginning in the 1970s reduced total factor productivity growth by as much as 2 percent per year, causing the slowdown that Klein and Thompson wish to reverse. Undoubtedly the Abundance authors would find much to agree with here, but whereas Dawson and Seater (and Pethokoukis) envision the market filling the void after regulations are rolled back, the Abundance take is that, in many sectors, government would guide the investments it previously regulated. The change would be in power and mindset, with bureaucrats now focused on building rather than blocking.
Klein and Thompson demonstrate an almost naive trust that civil servants, insulated from external pressure, will somehow be more responsive to what people really demand than markets would be, and that top-down control can work provided the Jeffersonian constraints are removed and Hamiltonians are installed in positions of authority. They recognize that the market will provide houses if the government gets out of the way, but seem skeptical that government regulation or resource allocation is an impediment elsewhere, instead favoring an enhanced role for government intervention.
If Abundance convinces progressive lawmakers to reform NEPA, rein in historic designations, and embrace upzoning, it will have done this country a great service. But as the book and the movement expand into outlining a grand vision, the prescription is nostalgic: confronting the “crisis of the old order” with something akin to a new model army of New Dealers.
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