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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“A terrific book…Powerful and persuasive.” —Fareed Zakaria

“Spectacular…Offers a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward…Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination.” —David Brooks, The New York Times

From acclaimed authors and respected journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson comes Abundance—an urgent and groundbreaking invitation to embrace a politics of plenty, acknowledge the shortcomings of liberal governance, and reject the artificial and unnecessary scarcities at the heart of America’s present-day struggles.

When we look at the early twenty-first century, we find a history defined by shortages and unaffordability. Despite severe warnings, America has consistently failed to construct sufficient housing, producing a nationwide housing crisis. After prolonged restrictions on immigration, we now suffer from a significant lack of workers. We’ve had decades to anticipate climate change, yet still haven’t built anywhere near the necessary clean-energy infrastructure. Ambitious public projects, essential to our progress, are habitually completed late, run over budget, or abandoned altogether. The crisis we now experience has been decades in the making because we have continuously failed to build at the scale necessary to address emerging problems.

Abundance makes clear that our modern challenges are not merely the consequence of past villains or mismanagement; rather, solutions created by one generation have evolved into the barriers faced by the next. Many regulations and rules put into place during the 1970s intended to address urgent issues of that moment now make it virtually impossible to develop urban density or sustainable infrastructure critical to solving today’s challenges. Laws established to ensure that the government thoughtfully considers consequences before acting have, ironically, now paralyzed our ability to act decisively and effectively.

In recent decades, while our capability for identifying problems has intensified, our capacity to resolve them has significantly weakened. True advancement means recognizing frankly which institutions are failing us. It requires liberals to accept that government often falls short, and conservatives to admit when effective government intervention is needed.

In exploring how liberalism can evolve from merely preserving and protecting to actively building and innovating, Klein and Thompson rigorously analyze the political, economic, and cultural roadblocks that hold us back and outline a vision toward renewed prosperity. As scarcity-driven movements gain momentum worldwide, Abundance proposes a compelling alternative—a politics of plenty—rooted in hope and realistic about the anger and frustration so many people justifiably experience.