Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

2026-02-06 Tags: books, books-nonfiction

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is one of those books that seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but I think is a real challenge to Democrat politics.

The core thesis is that Democrats are comfortable re-allocating money (health care subsidies, welfare, rent stabilization) but are really bad at building real things in the real world (housing, renewable energy), and the latter is what people need to see to believe democrats are capable of governance.

"Big government is inefficient and bad at doing things" is such a conservative coded critique that a lot of people instinctively feel the need to reject it, but the book addresses it as a very real problem.

Part of that solution might look like simplifying or removing red tape, but the book makes a strong case that there are many problems that the government is better able to solve than the private market, and we need to unconstrain the government to allow it to do big things.

This looks like cutting a lot of red tape that created for individually good reasons: limiting the ability of citizens to indefinitely sue projects for environment review, allowing the government to build capacity in house rather than needing to out source everything, simplifying bidding procedures (that have legitimate goals to prevent graft), trying to solve one problem at a time (does affordable housing need to be built by x% women owned businesses?).

I think one of the core insights for me is that we're not just going to be able to piss off billionaires, we're also going to have to make hard judgements and piss off some of your own constituents. Trying to make everyone happy all the time makes you ineffectual.

The segments on invention and research make a good case that some products (low cost medicine that will never repay the trial costs, subsidizing research on things like solar panels that may take decades to pay off) are much better served by the government than private markets, and we need to 1. support it, and 2. fix the incentive structure to avoid the conservativism of wanting to avoid making embarrasing mistakes or looking like we're wasting money.

From what I can see, a lot of the leftist pushback against this book is that it doesn't critique capital enough. It feels like a pre-emptive argument that if we allow separate critiques of "why are things bad", it'll distract from our ability to fight billionaire oligarchs. They don't seem to grapple with one of the core questions of the book, "Why can Texas build lots of market rate housing when California can't?" The problem can't just be "Republicans ruin everything" and "Political capture by capital", since Texas is run by Republicans and also has billionaires.

I dunno, I hope we can have both? The book doesn't at all deny that redistribution is a core tool of abundance, and proving that we can deliver good things seems like a great way to win.

It's really interesting to look at the book after Mamdani's election, where he seems so able to just get shit done, and some of that looks like cutting red tape to support small business.

Overall, recommended, worth thinking through in depth.