Abundance

By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Abundance is a manifesto for what they dub supply-side liberalism. The key idea of the book is that instead of relying on redistribution, liberals should focus on building more—housing, energy, infrastructure. Not just paying for existing scarcity. They argue that today’s politics often entangle us in a “vetocracy”—where endless oversight, red tape, zoning battles, and procedural gridlock block everything worth doing.

A key example: zoning laws. Once useful, today they’re absurd—no boarding houses allowed. Places like New York City mandate sprawling 600 sq ft apartments, even when the alternative is a homeless encampment. This zoning-driven squeeze isn’t abstract: it literally prices upward mobility out of reach.

Houston vs. California is another dramatic comparison. The Bay Area—home to pretty much all the major tech firms—issued only about 7,500 residential building permits last year. Houston, a city with almost no zoning, issued 70,000. Combine that permit drought with skyrocketing rents, and you’ve got a recipe: people locked out of opportunity, forced to commute four hours, or left on the street.

Klein and Thompson offer a game plan: cut approval timelines, limit NIMBY chokeholds, streamline permitting. They’re not calling to burn through regulations but to remove bottlenecks—so government can meet its goals instead of choking on its own process. The irony? These aren’t radical ideas—they echo Patrick Geddes’ 19th-century call to “build, build, build!” Yet today, climate-smart designs remain stuck behind outdated permit frameworks.

On climate: to meet global clean-energy targets, America needs to build a 400 MW solar farm every two weeks for 30 years, plus massive new transmission lines. Right now, permits slow that rollout to a crawl. Texas builds more clean energy than any other state—even as its politicians deny climate change. The real blockers are no longer technology or capital—but NIMBY objections over views, wildlife, and land use. We need smarter oversight, not just more of it.

Degrowth advocates push a different frame: maybe we need less building, not just faster building. But as Klein points out, degrowth is a position no one votes for—it’s politically dead on arrival.

When government struggles to deliver a few billion dollars' worth of housing or infrastructure, people rush to blame corruption or incompetence. But the truth is more boring—and more frustrating. Most officials are trapped in a maze of overlapping oversight, bureaucratic checkpoints, and tangled coordination. It’s not that they don’t want to act—they’re just bound so tightly, they can’t. This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a structural one.

Why hasn’t DOGE uncovered trillions in waste and corruption, as promised? Not because all public officials are evil or incompetent—but because they’re buried under a procedural avalanche. It's death by paperwork, not conspiracy. They are so thoroughly entangled in oversight and meeting checklist demands that they cant achieve the goals neither on budget nor on time.

The scarcity we lament—of housing, clean energy, medical innovation—is not fate. It’s a structural choice: too much regulation, too little ambition, too many blockers, and far too few permits. If you want clean energy, affordable housing, AI labs, vaccine factories, or fast bridges—first, build the permission engines. Then share in the abundance.

Thankfully, the Democratic party is offering a few centrist candidates with abundance agenda - Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttgieg, Ritchie Torres etc.

Its the book of the hour, and I hope it also becomes the politics of the hour.

Thoroughly recommended.