Abundance

The story of the twenty-first century so far, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue, is one of shortage and rising costs. America refused for years to build enough homes and now has a national housing crisis. It limited immigration and now lacks workers. It was warned for decades about climate change and has still built nowhere near the clean-energy infrastructure it needs. Big public projects arrive late and over budget, when they are finished at all. The authors say this crisis has been decades in the making, because the country has not been building enough.

Their central claim is that today's problems are not the work of villains from the past. One generation's solutions turn into the next generation's obstacles. Rules written to address the problems of the 1970s now block the dense urban housing and green-energy projects that could help with the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to make government weigh the consequences of its actions have made it hard for government to act in ways that matter. Over the last few decades, the authors say, we have become better at spotting problems and worse at fixing them.

Progress, in their view, means facing the institutions that are not working. Liberals have to admit when government is failing, and conservatives have to admit when government is needed. The book asks how liberalism can move beyond protecting and preserving to building again. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic and cultural barriers to progress and lay out a path toward a politics of abundance. They present it as an answer for a moment when movements built on scarcity are gaining power in country after country, and they take seriously the anger so many people feel.

Ezra Klein is a journalist, a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times, and a co-founder of Vox. Derek Thompson is a journalist and was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic.