In the introduction to their bestseller Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write that the book is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis. It reads, even to us, as too simple.”
Klein and Thompson are right on both counts.
They are right that addressing the challenges of the climate crisis, affordable housing shortages, prohibitive healthcare costs, and stymied scientific innovation–all topics discussed in the book–will require ramped-up creativity, cooperation, funding, and planning. They are also right that their prescription for this need is too simple, at best.
The book focuses on the proper role and scope of government regulation, arguing that in many situations, government should simply get out of the way. Meanwhile, the warping, smothering influence of corporate money and power lurks on every page unacknowledged, like a monster Klein and Thompson refuse to see.
Scarcity is indeed a choice, as the authors say, but not one being made by overzealous regulators or litigators. Scarcity is a choice made by those who profit from imposing it on the rest of us. The problem is not chiefly a regulatory bottleneck–it is a boot on the neck of progress, competition, innovation, and millions of Americans who struggle to survive, by those enriched by the status quo. Abundance is a detailed indictment of the wrong suspect, which only serves the interests of the real culprits.
A book that hit a nerve
Abundance has garnered significant attention in political and policy circles and has spent more than six months on the New York Times bestseller list, and with good reason. Klein and Thompson are talented writers and the book includes earnest, trenchant observations.
At a time when progressives face constant assault for ineffectual messaging, Abundance feels like a lifeline, offering an alluring vision of a progressive future and identifying past liberal overreach as the barrier to achieving it. In that scenario, it is within liberals’ power to achieve the future “we all want.” Unfortunately, this apparent oasis is a dangerous mirage.
Rose-colored glasses
The original sin of Abundance is careless nostalgia. The book is premised on a rose-colored remembrance of a time when the United States “built things.”
To be sure, the United States has seen periods of explosive growth in manufacturing, housing, highways, and more–in part thanks to lower density, world wars, untapped resources, and undeveloped land. It is true that it only took about five years to erect Hoover Dam. It is also true that scores of workers died during construction.
The “golden ages” of US development came at the cost of lives, neighborhoods, air and water quality, biological diversity, and public health; these costs were largely paid by the poor and those living in Indigenous and front-line communities.
Klein and Thompson are self-described liberals and acknowledge the need for laws protecting the health and wellbeing of people and the environment, but it is difficult to reconcile that with their yearning for the good old days.
Any fair critique of our current regulatory system must begin with a clear-eyed assessment of the devastating, unsustainable, and unjust impacts on people and the planet wrought by oil companies, developers, mining companies, and highway builders before regulations were promulgated to govern them. Abundance fails to do so.
The elephant in the room
In addition to the authors’ averting their eyes from the realities of corporate money and power, they also write in a vacuum divorced from the current political reality.
There is no bill or Executive Order that could pass this Congress, or be signed by this President, to “cut red tape” that would be even remotely responsible. While Klein and Thompson offer their views on the need to speed permitting in good faith, the Trump Administration and the current Congress have already begun to adopt their talking points in the worst faith possible. Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Developers have enormous sway over the agenda in Washington, and they are more than happy to glom on to abundance talking points to maintain wildly profitable scarcities.
Nothing demonstrates this more powerfully than repeal of significant portions of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). While neither law was perfect, the IIJA included billions for new infrastructure development and the IRA included funding and tax incentives in support of sustainable electricity generation, clean transportation, green buildings and energy efficiency, sustainable manufacturing, environmental and climate justice, agriculture, forestry, land conservation, and more. In other words, Congress had enacted much of the abundance agenda.
And then, backed by millions from industry, the Trump Administration and the new Congress repealed virtually all of it (including provisions that were clearly benefiting red states) and replaced it with a budget bill designed to help old industries kill new ones. “Red tape” did not reach up and stymie a new age of abundance, wealthy special interests did, and any permitting “reform” passed now will only benefit those same old power players.
To focus on a utopian future where the biggest barrier to “the world we all want” is an inefficient regulatory process, while ignoring the stranglehold that monied interests have on American progress, fails to meet the moment.
The weeds are where it happens
Klein and Thompson are clear that their book does not offer specific policy solutions. Rather, they are offering a “lens” through which these issues might be examined. This feels inadequate. Permitting reform is not a new issue. Dozens of legislative proposals on the topic exist and the authors should reckon with them.
It turns out, every time lawmakers pushing permitting reform put pen to paper, the resulting legislation is the same: some combination of provisions that truncate public participation, limit judicial review, and privilege fossil fuel development even more. In many cases, the proponents of development are already benefiting from an approval process that skirts public awareness and effective judicial review, and they just want to write those shortcuts into law.
To give a recent example, last month the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted to “cut red tape” and approve three new Entergy gas plants to power a data center for Meta. From the beginning, the proceeding lacked transparency and skipped crucial state-mandated measures aimed at saving money for ratepayers. Review by an Administrative Law Judge of the final deal is typically part of the process, but Commissioners rushed a final vote before the judge could even issue a recommendation to the Commission.
A process that was even slightly less rushed would have allowed the judge to express an opinion about whether this proposal was truly in the “public interest” and allowed the Commissioners to attach bare-minimum safeguards for ratepayers as conditions of approval. Instead, regulators hurriedly granted the wishes of Entergy and Meta.
This is not the “future we all want.” This is abundance for Entergy and Meta’s shareholders at the expense of millions of Louisianans and the environment. If the “lens” described in Abundance can be used to justify this kind of irresponsible permitting, it is not a new vision: it is just a new weapon available to the old guard.
The corporate interests which benefit when these proposals become law once claimed such legislation was necessary to “create jobs.” Over time, the messaging evolved through “energy independence” to “energy dominance.” More recently, “national security” and the need to “beat China” have been the alleged justifications. Now these same special interests can claim we need to bar access to the courts and shut the public out of permitting decisions to achieve abundance.
The future we all want
UCS is a nonpartisan science advocacy organization. We advocate for robust science; accountability for fossil fuel corporations; Environmental Justice; democracy; clean energy; healthy and sustainably produced food; clean transportation; and a safer world. And at every turn, the forces lined up to oppose our advocacy are well-funded, powerful, entrenched special interests who profit from a lack of progress on any of those fronts.
Our experience tells us that curtailing the ability of regulators to place even minimal limitations on the appetites of those special interests will not unleash a new era of progressivism: it will only help the rich get richer.