In 1950, the median price of a house represented 2.2 times average American annual income. By 2020, this ratio had reached 6 times, revealing the scale of a paradox: the United States’ inability to make progress on ambitious projects related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson diagnose this strange paralysis of wealthy societies in Abundance, their call to transform American progressivism.
The journalist duo explores how to move from a liberalism that protects and preserves to one that builds. Their thesis is unsettling: the regulatory environment in progressive cities, despite good intentions, hinders development. Liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s.
The Essentials
- The ratio of housing price to income in America has risen from 2.1 in 1960 to 3.5 in 2019, a symptom of widespread artificial scarcity
- Klein (New York Times) and Thompson (The Atlantic) transform their 2021-2022 articles into a political manifesto
- Their diagnosis: Democrats prioritize process over results and favor stagnation over growth
- A network of 120 elected officials has already adopted the agenda as of September 2025
From Journalists to Movement Architects
Ezra Klein, columnist for the New York Times and host of the award-winning podcast Ezra Klein Show, author of the instant bestseller Why We’re Polarized, among Barack Obama’s favorite books in 2022. Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic and weekly analyst for NPR’s “Here and Now”, Northwestern graduate in 2008 with triple specialization in journalism, political science, and legal studies.
The book originates from an essay published by Thompson in The Atlantic in January 2022. Klein had written an New York Times op-ed in late 2021 titled “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting,” calling for a new “supply-side progressivism.” Four months later, Thompson published “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems” in The Atlantic, advocating for an “abundance agenda.” Recognizing the common essence of their ideas, they partnered to co-write a manifesto.
The Thesis of Chosen Scarcity
Scarcity, Klein and Thompson contend, is not an iron law of nature but a product of human decisions, institutional inertia, and regulatory obstacles. American failures in housing supply, energy, infrastructure, and medicine stem not from lack of capacity but from inertia arising from a kind of ideological conspiracy at the heart of our politics.
Their central argument: “The rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent projects of urban density and green energy that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws designed to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.”
Their diagnosis is devastating: liberalism has locked itself into a politics of scarcity, protecting the gains of the New Deal era while failing to build anything new. This politics of scarcity has left Democrats clinging to a nostalgic coalition that no longer exists. Working-class voters of all races, once the party’s foundation, have detached en masse.
The Argument for Constructive Liberalism
Klein and Thompson develop three main demonstrations to support their agenda.
First demonstration: bureaucratic inefficiency paralyzes Democratic ambitions. The Biden administration’s climate priorities and Congress’s historic infrastructure funding have been hampered by the federal government and blue states’ approach to environmental reviews and permitting. The infrastructure necessary to combat climate change requires rapid progress in permitting and implementation.
The emblematic example: the Biden administration’s broadband program. Three years after its launch, it had connected zero homes, in part because the law required states accepting funding to ensure providers planned for climate change, hired locally, and addressed unionized workforces.
Second demonstration: the land crisis reveals progressive contradictions. The lack of housing construction has contributed to rising property prices. Among comparable large countries, the United States is the only one where the housing stock has increased more slowly than the population between 1995 and 2020. The abundance movement argues that such measures are necessary to solve the country’s housing shortage—the United States is short at least 2 million households. Particularly in blue cities, zoning laws, major preservation ordinances, minimum lot sizes, and NIMBY neighbor complaints can make it terribly difficult to build apartments, multifamily residences, and even small starter homes.
Third demonstration: emergency capacity proves possible effectiveness. To show what can be accomplished when Democrats focus on production, they highlight Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s emergency declaration in 2023 after a bridge collapsed on a critical highway. The declaration allowed rebuilding the bridge with union labor but without the months of planning, consultation, and normally mandatory safety and corruption reviews. The highway reopened in just 12 days. As Klein and Thompson write: “The process used by Shapiro would typically be illegal. What does that say about the typical process?”
Pragmatic Politics Against Orthodoxies
Klein and Thompson’s response to critics about their ideological positioning is that it’s the wrong question. If deregulation produces more housing, then deregulate. If building more public housing produces more housing, then build more public housing. Why not both? The point is not which legal philosophy you embrace to get more housing. The point is that you get the housing.
Progressivism should not be a ritual to follow; it should be a tool for achieving real things that improve the lives of the American middle and working classes. This is the great intuition at the heart of Abundance and the movement behind it.
This pragmatic approach traces a path between established orthodoxies. The Democratic Party has not had a truly new idea in decades. It has fought to preserve programs and identities rather than build new coalitions and infrastructure. Abundance challenges this instinct, arguing for a pivot toward growth, building, and invention.
The Manifest’s Blind Spots
Abundance carries several limitations that its authors partially acknowledge. While they explain their governmental philosophy well, they are often vague and excessively non-confrontational when it comes to the ideological motivation behind this philosophy.
The book sidesteps certain internal tensions within progressivism. Klein and Thompson seem to say nothing about antitrust in the book, neither to discuss its political merits nor to use it as a contrast to the abundance agenda. This omission raises questions: antitrust defenders, who have succeeded in fighting to reach the top of the progressive economic agenda after previous focus on Sanders-style welfare state and macroeconomic stimulus faded, have reason to worry they have the most to lose if Abundance’s narratives and political focus become dominant.
The environmental dimension reveals another tension. Abundance is a secular eschatology without a doctrine of sin. It functions thus as a reminder for believers: we do not place our deepest hope in the supply economy but in substitutive atonement, notes a conservative critic. What is entirely missing from this vision is a recognition of the country’s natural abundance composed of wildlife, forests, wetlands, agricultural lands and other open spaces, and how hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of these irreplaceable places will be lost to development if we are not thoughtful and deliberate about where and how we build. Likewise, there is no recognition of the species extinction crisis bearing down on the country and the central role of unchecked loss of wildlife habitat in worsening this crisis.
Why Read It
Abundance is addressed to policymakers frustrated by governmental inertia, urban planners confronted with regulatory blockages, and progressives questioning the effectiveness of their agenda. Abundance is a brilliant work of synthesis, connecting many ideas that have been developed within the political community to make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The work offers what one rarely reads elsewhere: frank diagnosis of Democratic failures by two left-wing journalists. Abundance tackles the crisis of modern American liberalism with clarity and urgency, and dares to sketch solutions.
Its influence already extends beyond intellectual debate. In June 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom referenced the book and its thesis when he signed two bills he had pushed through the legislative process to overturn California’s emblematic environmental law. An “Abundance Elected Officials Network” was launched in September 2025, with initial participation from 120 legislators.
The book also reveals the emergence of a fracture within the Democratic Party. Our concerns are not that we oppose zoning reform. It is that business-aligned interests use abundance to get ahead of the long-awaited and desperately necessary return of the Democratic Party to economic populism. As a lifelong Democrat and former Democratic state representative, I have never seen the Democratic Party come as close as it does today to embracing FDR’s famous promise to “welcome the hatred” of the “monopoly of business and finance.”
For anyone wanting to understand future debates in American politics, Abundance maps an intellectual terrain that South-South trade is already recomposing at the global scale, revealing how institutional rigidities slow adaptation to contemporary economic transformations.
Bibliographic Information
- Abundance
- Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
- Avid Reader Press
- March 2025, 304 pages
Sources