Book Review: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
It isn’t every Sunday that the New York Times Book Review places a work of political economy at the center of its pages. But Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance has managed to capture something rare in contemporary politics: a diagnosis both the left and the right can, at least briefly, agree upon. America doesn’t build anymore. What once took years now takes decades. Housing is smothered by zoning boards, green energy is strangled in litigation, and infrastructure withers under a jungle of regulation. Even career progressives now admit that sclerosis is the defining feature of American governance.
To their credit, Klein and Thompson write with clarity and urgency about this national malaise. They name the problem plainly, and in today’s climate that counts as progress. Yet when they turn to the question of remedies, their courage falters. Their prescription is not radical at all, but familiar: “better government, smarter planning, more efficient bureaucracy.” One can almost hear the creak of the administrative state sighing in relief. The medicine that caused the disease is, once again, prescribed as the cure.
There is an older wisdom, one Klein and Thompson nod toward but never quite embrace. Milton Friedman argued, half a century ago, that abundance is not born of planners but of freedom. The prosperity Americans now take for granted — affordable groceries, ubiquitous smartphones, the conveniences of modern life — did not arrive by way of congressional subcommittees or White House councils. They came from entrepreneurs willing to risk failure, investors free to place bets, and markets ruthless enough to punish mistakes. Silicon Valley was not a zoning initiative. The fracking revolution was not designed in a federal office park. Walmart, Costco, and Amazon did not make goods affordable because regulators blessed them.
And yet the priesthood of the economic establishment resists this truth. Larry Summers, ever the global grandee, still lectures Americans on Europe’s supposed superiority — even as the Continent drifts into demographic decline and economic stagnation. Paul Krugman, Pulitzer in hand, continues to wave away debt as a harmless abstraction — until inflation surges and working families shoulder the cost. Both men have built careers as prophets of managed abundance, yet their prophecies collapse under the simplest weight of reality.
Klein and Thompson deserve credit for acknowledging the problem so starkly. But by refusing to embrace the solution, they reduce their own argument to an elegant Beltway parlor game. Abundance will never arrive through “better bureaucracy.” It will come only when we cut the bureaucracy loose — when markets, not mandarins, are allowed to build again.
And here lies the irony. The authors know the truth, but dare not say it aloud. To do so would be to admit that Friedman was right — and that their intellectual lodestars, Summers and Krugman, have been wrong so many times they ought to come stamped with a government warning label. Until that priesthood of failure is finally retired, America’s only abundance will be in slogans — shiny promises from people who couldn’t run a lemonade stand without a federal subsidy.