"Abundance" is a book for an alternate timeline

There are many good ideas in Klein and Thompson's book, but no solutions to the crisis we now face.

[Adapted from my bluesky review thread]

There is a jarring, stray passage in chapter 4 of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance:

Today NIH, along with NSF, are irreplaceable. If these institutions had never been created or expanded, the lives of millions, even billions of people around the world would be shorter than they are today, and people would be sicker. If they disappeared tomorrow, the world would instantly be worse.

But it is precisely because the NIH stands above every bioscience institution in significance that we should scrutinize the way it shapes the practice of science in America and around the world. (page 152)

Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.

As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can.

Books are time capsules, buried on the date the author sends it to press, unearthed by the reader months or years later. They are written for the world as it existed at the time of writing, often with an eye toward the world as the author imagines it might become. But writers are not soothsayers by trade. And it seems the times we now live in are better suited to apocalyptic fiction.

I imagine reading Klein and Thompson’s book in an alternate timeline — one where President Harris and Vice President Walz hold narrow governing majorities in both houses of Congress, and are faced with decisions about how best to deploy their political power. Abundance has a lot of timely advice for that alternate universe. Their central argument is twofold:

1. Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.

2. In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.

I do have a few quibbles, and suspect I would even in that alternate universe. There are several spots in the book where I get distinct Lucy-and-the-football vibes. Things get more difficult and complicated when we ask “how will capital-holders undermine these well-intentioned efforts?” But, as an overarching positive agenda for a Democratic administration, I find the argument to be quite compelling.

It brings to mind the conversations that progressive legal thinkers were engaged in throughout 2016, after Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat surprisingly opened up and we started imagining the sort of jurisprudence that a 5-4 progressive Supreme Court majority might advance. Regardless of the particulars, those discussions were rendered painfully moot.

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In the book’s introduction, Klein and Thompson write:

“This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.”

Thankfully, there is more to the thesis than that. And the added nuance is important, because an oversimplified version of the Abundance argument can sound a lot like the old corporation-friendly, pro-growth, yes-to-everything critique of environmentalism that I see rebranded as new every five years or so. Klein and Thompson are, I think, making a more interesting argument than many of their predecessors in the lets-just-grow-our-way-to-utopia genre.

I’d go so far as to say that they are taking a swing at articulating a new governing philosophy that might at long last replace the decaying corpse of neoliberalism.

The neoliberal project insists (1) we can grow our way to paradise and (2) governments should stay out of the way and let the magic of the marketplace work out the details.

By contrast, Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.

I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.

Chapter 3 (“govern”) argues that a significant problem the government routinely faces is that it layers so many priorities onto any effort that it exponentially increases the cost while slowing completion. They draw on Jennifer Pahlka’s book Recoding America (one of the best two or three books I read last year). This core insight is plainly correct. It is too hard for government to implement worthwhile projects, and it results in declining trust in government.

There’s an odd tension with our current reality because (as Ezra has said on his podcast) the Trump 2/DOGE governing philosophy can be summarized as “you can just do things.” As a frustrated progressive, I’ve spent the past few months occasionally wishing wishing Biden and his team had taken a bit more of that approach.

(…Then again, the answer probably resolves to that old acronym, IOKIYAR (It’s OK If You Are Republican). The Roberts Supreme Court would have issued immediate injunctions had the Biden team taken procedural shortcuts.)

Mostly this is an argument for Dems-in-power showing a bit more positive ambition and procedural risk-taking. In a world where Harris wins, there’s a solid Abundance-style argument for something along the lines of “declare a climate emergency and speed up development of Inflation Reduction Act infrastructure projects.” Abundance, in this sense, does not necessarily have to be a radical departure from the status quo. When there is an emergency, the government can and should choose to suspend review procedures and move quite fast. When there isn’t an emergency, we can continue to pursue multi-objective procedural fairness, hopefully simplifying things along the way.

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But… It’s still more complicated than that.

What is missing here — what Klein and Thompson for-the-most-part-artfully dance around is how we prevent the unchecked power of capital-holders from ruining everything in exactly the way they always seem to.

The book opens with a lovely little solarpunk/hopepunk allegory. The year is 2050 and people’s lives are GREAT because we got the pace and direction of technological development right. It’s a lovely vision, exactly the kind of world I want my kids to live in. I can immediately see the appeal.

They then offer the core thesis: “Scarcity is a choice. To have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need.”

I could not help but notice the incompleteness of the thesis though. Cue Frederic Jameson: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

ONE of the reasons it is hard to build an abundant future today is that we have too many legacy veto-points. Responsive government, by design, tends to move at a plodding pace. (As Dan Davies put it: “Of course things are slower and more difficult now – the reason that it’s more difficult to build the second million homes is that the first million homes get in the way!”)

But another, trickier reason is that if you reduce the veto-points that make it hard to build, and you don’t shift the incentives for Exxon and private equity, then what they will end up building will be godawful for the rest of us.

Chapter 1 (“Grow”) is basically a YIMBY argument. Cities are good. Housing has gotten WAY to expensive. We ought to build a lot more of it. I myself am basically a YIMBY, so I generally nodded in agreement throughout the chapter.

But…

The simple reason why housing is so expensive is that we don’t have enough of it. The more complicated reason, as I understand it, is the that buying houses is an investment, and capital-holders (private equity) keep buying up the housing stock, artificially inflating home prices through a dozen tricks.

I recently read Catherine Bracy’s new book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy. It has an excellent chapter about how VCs have taken a bite out of the housing market, extracting rents while adding zero social value. That’s, y’know, bad. It won’t just go away by increasing supply. It will only get worse.

Chapter 2 (“Build”) expands on the “we need a liberalism that builds” part of their argument. It focuses on the climate crisis, and the sheer amount of development it will take for wind/solar/electric grid/battery tech that can meet our energy needs in a green energy transition.

They build on Saul Griffith’s argument from Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. (Another very good book) And they are broadly right that the regulatory, policy, and legal tools we developed in the 1970s to stop bad development are now a procedural impediment to building good things.

The one problem I saw in Saul Griffith’s book, though, was in chapter 13, where he proposed the “bold idea” of treating the fossil fuel companies as “friends, rather than enemies.” The idea is neither bold nor new though. It has constantly been tried. It always fails. It turns out that the fossil fuel companies are happy to have a seat at the table. They’ll even spin up renewable programs. But when push comes to shove, they will betray their allies and prioritize short-term profits and sweetheart deregulatory deals over longer term profits within reasonably regulated markets.

Klein and Thompson have a similar blindspot when discussing high speed rail in California It is genuinely infuriating that we have failed to build high speed rail. And permitting is PART of the problem. But another part has been figures like Elon Musk operating in bad faith to actively bury the project (Read Paris Marx on Elon and his hyperloop headfake).

This is, IMO, the singular problem that makes NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) reform and other just-reduce-the-damn-veto-points proposals so gnarly. There are exceptionally powerful incumbent actors. They will always promise good-faith cooperation. And they are lying every time.

I agree with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and Saul Griffith that we need a liberalism/an environmentalism that builds. But we also need a liberalism that takes power seriously, and doesn’t assume good-faith from companies that have never and will never live up to the expectation.

Call it “an environmentalism that builds and also is not a sucker’s bet.” It’s near-impossible, given present-day political and economic circumstances. I do not know how to get there. But I know the solution is going to have to address the problem head-on. Even in the world where Kamala Harris won, I’m not sure if the Abundance Agenda has worked out a stable solution.

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We can also read Abundance as a valiant initial attempt at answering “Why the hell wasn’t Bidenism more popular?!?”

The Biden political project was, roughly speaking, “go big on policy. Go ahead and spend public dollars on public programs. Good policy makes good politics. You will be rewarded.” This was an upgrade from the Obama political project, which tried to keep price tags modest, fumbled the economic recovery, and then got electorally smoked because the recovery was too small and slow. Bidenism was far from perfect, of course. As was Biden himself. But it also should have electorally worked better than it did.

Throughout 2024, the mystery for many economists was why voters weren’t happier with the state of the economy. We had a couple years of bad inflation, but those were in the rear view mirror. We dodged a recession when a recession seemed all but certain. Employment was historically good. Unions were building power at a rate not seen in a generation. The U.S. economy got out of the pandemic faster and better than any peer nation.

The whole debate might be moot now, since Trump and the Republican Party are not behaving as though they’re planning on holding competitive elections anymore. But if we have a near-term future where Democrats again hold power across multiple branches of government, the stories we tell about Bidenism’s failure will have a load-bearing quality. There will inevitably be a set of advisors telling the next Democratic President “just keep inflation low and the business community happy. You don’t want to end up like Biden.” Klein and Thompson are setting up an alternative story — sort of an amended Bidenism: “Go big on policy. Spend public dollars on public programs. And MAKE SURE you get government out of its own way! Do that, and you will be rewarded.”

I don’t know whether this story is right. Frankly, I expected Bidenism (separate from Biden himself) to be modestly more popular than it was. But, directionally, they are setting up a story here that I agree with on the merits, and would like to help make true.

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It’s in chapter 4 and 5 that it becomes hard to avoid the four horsemen in the room.

Chapter 4 features the NIH/NSF passage I mentioned at the beginning of this review. The central puzzle of the chapter (“Invent”) is “why has the pace of scientific discovery slowed down?” So it includes an awful lot of scientists-bitching-about-the-NIH-being-slow-and-cumbersome. Those problems a lot real, but they’re now trivial. Elon and RFK and the DOGE failsons have decided to take all the scientists out of science.

They end the chapter with a metascience proposal that we should “experiment with experiments.” Try lots of different arrangements and funding models! Reduce reporting requirements! See what works! I, again, am generally in favor of the idea but also think it misses a beat.

When funding is scarce and fraught, you are inevitably going to see that funding steered toward “safe” and “popular” projects. A handful of tech billionaires (and Tyler Cowen) are obsessed with posing “what happened to American innovation” questions. The basic answer, as far as I can tell, is “YOU GUYS HAPPENED. PAY YOUR DAMN TAXES!”

We have been defunding science for 40+ years. Experimenting with experiments is a fine approach to getting more from a fixed resource pool. But the best way to support and fund scientific breakthroughs is actually just to lavish excessive amounts of money into a field, accept that plenty of ideas will fizzle, and then give it time. We could have that. It would just require more tax dollars. It is close to that simple.

Chapter 5 (“Deploy”) continues in the same vein. It primarily argues that successful innovation only matters when you also have implementation. There is, again, much that I agree with in this chapter. I read Klein and Thompson as saying that we need government to actively govern, rather than just leaving it to “the market.” Yes, thank you, absolutely.

But, again, there is the looming specter of politics. The chapter includes a long passage on Operation Warp Speed, and was updated to include mention of Trump’s victory and RFK Jr. It is indeed quite strange that Trump stopped claiming credit for this massive policy success that saved millions of lives!

It isn’t just a one-off oddity. There is a direct line from vaccine denial and the attack on science itself. Scientific progress SHOULD be bipartisan! But the defining faultline of our politics right now is that the party in power is trying to demolish all sources of authority that it does not control. Had Harris and Walz won, that still would have been a defining faultline.

I don’t have a grand solution to that problem. But my main critique of the book — or at least the publicity tour surrounding the book — is that Abundance is being treated as a big, ambitious solution to the woeful current state of the Democratic Party. And it really is only partway there. We’re also going to have to do something about the tech billionaires and the private equity ghouls who have amassed such power and accept no social responsibility. We’re going to have to face up to the malicious propaganda machine that is the conservative media ecosystem (the topic of Ezra’s previous book, incidentally). We’re going to have to fight the antiscience ideologues head-on, rather than hoping a grand social vision will win them over to our side.

No single book ever has all the answers. And Klein and Thompson at their best are really quite good. In the alternate timeline where we weren’t dealing with the collapse of the goddamn Republic, I think this would be a vital-but-incomplete book, setting the table for some quite-necessary conversations. But we do not live in that timeline.

Books are time capsules, and this one was buried before everything fell apart. That isn’t the authors’ fault, but it is the book’s biggest limitation.