Where do America’s biggest problems stem from? What if America could create a world of plentiful resources?
In their book Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that excessive bureaucracy and regulatory barriers are creating manufactured scarcity in housing, energy, and innovation. Their solution: a new “abundance agenda” that removes obstacles to building while maintaining important protections.
Continue reading for an overview of Abundance.
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Book Overview of Abundance
In their book Abundance (2025), New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson argue that America can create a world of plentiful resources and improved living standards, but is being held back by manufactured scarcities and barriers to production. Their central thesis is that by removing bureaucratic obstacles to housing construction, energy infrastructure, and other essentials while reinvigorating scientific innovation, we can solve major challenges like climate change, housing shortages, and economic stagnation. They argue that this “abundance agenda” represents a new direction for liberalism: one focused on increasing the supply of essential goods and services rather than merely redistributing existing resources.
Abundance attempts to address a core problem affecting Americans across the political spectrum: that the rising costs of housing, health care, education, and other necessities have outpaced wage growth. Klein, who founded Vox Media before joining the New York Times as a columnist and podcast host, and Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic known for his coverage of economics and technology, published the book during a period of intense political polarization. They offer their abundance agenda as a potential third way toward social and economic progress beyond traditional left-right divides.
Written primarily for a progressive audience, the book challenges liberals to reconsider their regulation-focused approach to governance and embrace a more pro-building, pro-innovation mindset. Our guide organizes Klein and Thompson’s ideas into three sections: what abundance means, why Klein and Thompson believe it’s the path forward, and how to achieve it in our divisive political climate. We’ll also assess how effectively the abundance agenda addresses corporate monopoly power, examine the practical challenges of implementing its reforms, and analyze how grassroots movements are already putting these principles into practice.
What Is Abundance?
Klein and Thompson begin by establishing what abundance means and how it contrasts with our current state of manufactured scarcity. This section explores their vision of a plentiful future, traces how America shifted from a building mindset to a constraining one, and examines how excessive regulation creates bottlenecks in housing, energy, transportation, and innovation.
Defining Abundance and Scarcity
Klein and Thompson envision a future where society produces more than enough of what people need to live fulfilling lives. Abundance means ensuring everyone has access to affordable housing, clean energy, reliable transportation, high-quality health care, and educational opportunities. The authors describe what life could look like in 2050: clean energy flowing abundantly from nuclear plants and solar panels, vertical farms growing fresh produce in urban centers, lab-grown meat reducing environmental impact, and artificial intelligence boosting productivity while letting people devote more time to leisure, creativity, and family.
Klein and Thompson believe we could achieve this if we remove the barriers we’ve built that block progress. At its core, abundance requires rejecting the assumption that resources are limited and embracing the idea that human ingenuity and the right policies can create plenty for all. Klein and Thompson argue that most shortages we face today aren’t inevitable: They’re choices we’ve made through policies that constrain production and innovation.
Scarcity refers to the insufficient supply of essential goods and services. But Klein and Thompson differentiate between natural scarcity (genuine physical limitations) and chosen scarcity manufactured by policy decisions and institutional failures. For instance, during the Great Depression, fears mounted that the US couldn’t grow further. The New Deal policymakers responded by embracing an abundance mindset: building infrastructure, creating jobs, and expanding production. Later, the authors argue, the environmental movement of the 1960s to 1970s emphasized limits, focusing on problems caused by unchecked growth and advocating constraints on development.
The Rise of Regulatory Obstruction
The reason we experience so much scarcity, Klein and Thompson argue, is that America has developed a system where stopping projects is far easier than starting them. Project approval processes have numerous review levels that create opportunities for slowing or rejecting plans, making it difficult to build even essential infrastructure. The authors explain that the gradual transformation of progressive politics contributed to this conundrum. Once champions of ambitious building projects like interstate highways, dams, and mass housing, liberals have moved over time toward a more constraining approach.
This shift didn’t happen without reason. The authors acknowledge it emerged partly in response to rapid development in mid-20th-century America, which brought environmental degradation, community displacement, and social disruption. People like Robert Moses, who bulldozed neighborhoods to build highways, became symbols of how unchecked development could harm vulnerable communities. As Klein and Thompson see it, modern progressivism came to focus primarily on giving people money or vouchers to purchase goods and services at market prices, rather than increasing the supply of those goods and services. This demand-side focus works well when supply is plentiful but falls short when regulatory barriers limit production.
The negative side of rapid development led to progressive reforms designed to give communities more control over local development and protect environmental resources. But Klein and Thompson contend that today, these same reforms often prevent even beneficial projects from moving forward:
Environmental review processes like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) give virtually anyone grounds to sue and block projects, often delaying them for years or killing them entirely through uncertainty and mounting costs.
Local control over land use empowers current residents to block new development. City councils respond primarily to existing voters, not to people who might move to an area if housing were available, creating a bias against change and growth.
Government contract requirements have multiplied, adding costs and delays. In San Francisco, affordable housing projects must use small contractors rather than larger, more efficient firms, adding millions to costs and months to timelines.
The government overloads multiple policy goals onto single projects, which dilutes their effectiveness. For example, applications for government semiconductor funding require addressing environmental impacts, workforce diversity, community benefits, and numerous other considerations beyond the core goal of building semiconductor capacity.
What Kinds of Scarcity Does This System Produce?
Klein and Thompson contend that this system of regulatory obstruction has created scarcity in several critical areas, with consequences for American life. In housing, the effects are most visible in cities with strong economies like San Francisco, New York, and Boston. These cities attract workers with high-paying jobs, but restrictive zoning, environmental lawsuits, and complex approval processes have driven housing prices to unaffordable levels. This housing shortage limits economic opportunity and mobility, forcing people to live far from job centers and preventing them from moving to areas with better prospects.
Energy infrastructure faces similar constraints, according to Klein and Thompson, and environmental laws originally enacted to protect nature now block the very infrastructure needed to address climate change. Despite the urgent need to transition to clean energy, renewable projects often languish for years awaiting approvals. The authors note that 95% of energy projects held up by permitting are clean energy projects—solar, battery storage, or wind power.
Transportation infrastructure has also become difficult to build in America, according to Klein and Thompson. California’s high-speed rail project exemplifies this dysfunction: Decades after initial planning and billions of dollars over budget, it remains incomplete. The authors explain that even basic infrastructure needs like subway extensions cost far more and take longer to build in American cities than in peer countries.
Scientific innovation also suffers from funding constraints. According to the authors, federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) increasingly favor established researchers, while younger scientists with potentially groundbreaking but unproven ideas struggle to secure funding. Scientists spend up to 40% of their time on administrative tasks like grant applications rather than conducting research.
The Cycle of Scarcity
These scarcities reinforce each other. Housing scarcity in productive cities means talented people can’t access opportunities. Energy scarcity makes addressing climate change harder. Infrastructure scarcity reduces mobility and economic efficiency. Scientific scarcity slows the development of solutions to these other problems. Klein and Thompson argue that we’ve created a system that excels at saying “no” but struggles to say “yes” to building the things we need. This has trapped us in a cycle of scarcity despite having the technological capability and wealth to create abundance.
Breaking this cycle requires recognizing that we’ve structured our institutions to prioritize constraint over creation—a concept we’ll explore in the next section—and then reforming those institutions to enable a future of abundance.
Why Do We Need to Shift From Scarcity to Abundance?
Klein and Thompson present three arguments for why we need to abandon the scarcity mindset: It causes material harm to everyday people, it weakens democratic stability, and its effects on society are morally indefensible.
Lack of Supply Causes Measurable Harm
The most direct case for abundance is improving people’s daily lives. Klein and Thompson note that when essential goods are scarce, everyone suffers—but especially those with fewer resources. For example, Klein and Thompson note that 30% of Americans are “house poor,” spending at least 30% of their income on housing, which reduces resources for other necessities, education, health care, and saving for the future. Meanwhile, our failure to build energy infrastructure means clean energy projects remain disconnected from the grid, while scientific stagnation means that potentially life-saving medical treatments remain undiscovered or undeveloped.
These scarcities compound each other. When housing costs prevent people from moving to where their skills are most valuable, productivity suffers. When infrastructure is inadequate, businesses face higher costs. When scientific progress slows, technological solutions to other problems remain out of reach.
Political Instability and Zero-Sum Thinking
Perhaps less obvious but just as important are the political consequences of scarcity. Klein and Thompson argue that scarcity fuels zero-sum thinking, feeding movements that thrive on division and undermine democratic norms. When people believe there isn’t enough housing, jobs, or opportunities to go around, they become susceptible to narratives that pit groups against each other. If resources seem fixed, then one person’s gain seems to require another’s loss. This mindset underpins arguments that immigrants take jobs or housing from others who need it, or that environmental protection comes at the expense of economic growth. Abundance, conversely, creates conditions where more people can thrive simultaneously.
The consequences of scarcity extend to governance and regional population shifts. When governments fail to deliver visible improvements in people’s lives—such as affordable housing or reliable infrastructure—public trust in institutions erodes. Both progressive and conservative administrations suffer when they can’t demonstrate tangible results.
Meanwhile, the population is shifting from states with high living costs, like California and New York, to states with more affordable housing, like Texas and Florida. This migration reflects economic reality: people move where they can afford to live, which increasingly means leaving regions with regulatory barriers to building. The authors note that these demographic shifts have significant electoral implications that could reshape political power for decades to come.
Abundance Is a Moral Imperative
Beyond material benefits and political stability, Klein and Thompson make a moral case for abundance as essential to human flourishing and addressing our greatest challenges. They argue that chosen scarcity is morally indefensible when we have the technological capacity to overcome it. If we can build enough housing for everyone but choose not to—because of regulatory barriers or local opposition—that represents a collective moral failure. Similarly, if we have the knowledge to develop clean energy but fail to deploy it at scale, we betray future generations.
Abundance represents a commitment to possibility over constraint. Klein and Thompson envision a future where we solve big challenges rather than merely managing scarcity. They reject what they see as false choices between environmental sustainability and economic growth, urban density and livability, or scientific progress and safety. This moral vision emphasizes that removing constraints on production and innovation can create a world where more people have what they need. Rather than abandoning progressive values like economic justice and environmental protection, the abundance agenda would fulfill these commitments more effectively by expanding production rather than just redistributing existing resources.
How to Advance an Abundance Agenda
Klein and Thompson argue that several factors make this the right moment to embrace an abundance agenda. They explain that public frustration with institutional failures has created an openness to new approaches: Americans across the political spectrum recognize something is broken in our capacity to build for the future. Meanwhile, compounding crises—from climate change to housing shortages to pandemic-exposed vulnerabilities—demand responses beyond mere incremental adjustments. Technological advances in renewable energy, AI, and biotechnology have created vast potential for improvements in living standards and sustainability—if we remove barriers to deployment and scaling.
Klein and Thompson also contend that abundance offers a positive vision when many feel pessimistic about the future. Rather than simply opposing negative trends or defending an unsatisfactory status quo, an abundance agenda presents a concrete, aspirational alternative that could inspire broader political engagement. The authors outline a roadmap for implementing their vision, addressing their message to both policymakers and grassroots activists who can push for reforms at every level of government.
Streamline Without Sacrificing Protection
First, a central theme in Klein and Thompson’s reform agenda is that we can streamline processes without abandoning important protections. They reject what they characterize as the false choice between progress and safeguards. Throughout these recommendations, Klein and Thompson maintain that the goal isn’t deregulation but better regulation: rules that achieve their intended protections more efficiently and with fewer unintended consequences.
For environmental impact assessments, Klein and Thompson propose reforming laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to maintain substantive environmental protections while reducing procedural burdens. Rather than eliminating assessments of how projects affect the environment, they advocate clear timelines, narrower grounds for litigation, and expedited pathways for projects with clear environmental benefits like renewable energy. The goal is a process that genuinely protects natural resources without becoming a tool for blocking change.
For housing development, Klein and Thompson call for zoning reforms that allow greater population density and diversity without abandoning standards for safety or livability. They point to successful reforms in Minneapolis, which eliminated single-family zoning citywide in 2019, allowing duplexes and triplexes in previously restricted neighborhoods while maintaining building codes and other protections. By removing arbitrary restrictions on housing types, cities can increase supply without sacrificing quality or neighborhood character.
For government contracting, Klein and Thompson recommend simplifying procurement requirements for companies bidding on public projects, while maintaining core standards. For example, they critique San Francisco’s affordable housing program, which requires using small contractors rather than larger, more efficient firms—adding millions to costs and months to timelines. The authors advocate focusing on essential requirements that directly ensure project quality and safety, rather than procedural box-checking and excessive documentation that adds costs without improving outcomes.
Empower Decision-Makers to Act
Klein and Thompson’s next recommendation is to restore agency and authority to government officials who can make decisions and take responsibility for outcomes. This emphasis on empowered decision-making represents a shift from progressive politics that has often sought to constrain authority through procedural requirements and diffused power.
In scientific funding, Klein and Thompson propose giving program officers at agencies like the NIH more discretion to fund promising but risky research without excessive peer review. They suggest looking to models like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which empowers program managers to make bold bets on potentially transformative technologies. Under the DARPA model, expert managers can approve innovative projects quickly, rather than requiring researchers to navigate multiple rounds of conservative peer review. This approach would reduce administrative burdens on scientists while encouraging more innovative research.
For infrastructure projects, the authors argue that responsibility is often diffused across multiple agencies and levels of government, making it unclear who can approve or reject projects. They recommend designating clear authorities who have both the power to greenlight important projects and the accountability for their outcomes. For example, they suggest that state governors or federal agency heads should have more direct authority over critical infrastructure, rather than allowing decision-making to be fragmented across numerous bodies with overlapping jurisdictions.
Klein and Thompson extend this principle of clarifying authority to local governance as well, arguing that state governments should limit the power of local authorities to block housing and infrastructure projects that serve broader public interests. They suggest that issues like housing supply and clean energy deployment are too important to be left entirely to local decision-making, where narrow interests often prevail over wider needs.
Balance Competing Interests
Third, Klein and Thompson recognize that abundance requires making tradeoffs between competing values and interests. The goal is to make these choices transparently and with greater weight given to broader public interests over narrow private ones.
For housing, Klein and Thompson acknowledge the tension between existing homeowners’ interests and broader needs for affordability and access. Their solution isn’t to ignore current residents’ concerns but to rebalance decision-making to include the interests of people who would benefit from new housing—future residents who currently have no voice in the process. This would require reforms that limit the ability of small groups to block development that serves wider community needs.
In energy development, they recognize conflicts between local opposition to infrastructure and national climate goals. Here, Klein and Thompson recommend stronger federal authority to override local vetoes of projects that serve essential national purposes, such as building electrical transmission lines. For instance, they suggest that for critical interstate transmission projects, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should have enhanced powers to approve routes and override local objections, while still requiring reasonable mitigation measures for affected communities. This approach ensures that narrow interests can’t block projects with broad benefits, while still addressing legitimate local concerns.
For scientific research, Klein and Thompson propose balancing accountability for public funds with the need for risk-taking in pursuit of breakthroughs. They recommend creating dedicated funding streams specifically for high-risk, high-reward research alongside more conventional grant programs. For example, they suggest setting aside a percentage of NIH funding specifically for young scientists pursuing novel ideas, with streamlined application processes and greater tolerance for failure. This approach would ensure both innovation and responsible stewardship of taxpayer money.
Build Political Support for Abundance
Finally, Klein and Thompson recognize that policy recommendations alone aren’t enough: Abundance requires building political coalitions capable of implementing reforms. They offer several principles for effective political advocacy. First, they argue for focusing on tangible outcomes that matter to people’s daily lives. When people see concrete benefits—more affordable housing, cheaper clean energy, faster commutes—they’re more likely to support the policies that enabled them. This outcomes-focused approach can neutralize abstract ideological objections and build broader constituencies.
Second, Klein and Thompson recommend highlighting how abundance serves diverse values and interests. Aspects of the abundance agenda appeal across the political spectrum: Progressives value climate action and expanded opportunity; moderates appreciate practical problem-solving; business interests support reduced regulatory barriers; and young voters are drawn to solutions for clean energy and climate resilience. By emphasizing these varied benefits, abundance advocates can build coalitions broader than traditional political alignments.
Third, Klein and Thompson suggest using successful local and state reforms as proofs of concept for wider implementation. They point to “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) victories such as California’s laws allowing homeowners to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and Minneapolis’s elimination of single-family zoning as examples of how policy innovations can spread. These local successes create demonstrations that can inform broader adoption.
Finally, the authors propose reframing political debates around abundance versus scarcity rather than traditional left-right divides. For example, they suggest reframing climate policy as a competition to build clean energy infrastructure quickly and effectively, not as a debate about whether the government should regulate carbon emissions. Klein and Thompson believe this approach can transcend current partisan deadlocks by shifting focus from ideological differences to shared goals of material progress.
Exercise: Identify Scarcity in Your Community
Klein and Thompson argue that many of our most pressing problems stem from “chosen scarcity” rather than actual resource limitations. Recognizing chosen scarcities is the first step toward creating abundance.
- What’s one example of chosen scarcity you’ve observed in your community (housing, transportation, energy, and so on)? What specific rules, processes, or bottlenecks might be creating this scarcity?
- If you could change one policy or process to address this scarcity, what would it be? How might removing this barrier increase abundance in your community?
- How would you build political support for this change? Which groups or interests might benefit from your proposed solution, and how would you frame the issue to highlight tangible outcomes rather than ideological positions?
