Description
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that’s settled into American civic life — a bone-deep fatigue at wanting things that never seem to materialize. Affordable housing. Clean energy infrastructure. Fast rail. We debate them endlessly, and yet nothing gets built. I found myself thinking about all of this while working through the digital ebook edition of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance over a rainy weekend, and I’ll say this: few books in recent memory have so precisely named the thing I’d been unable to articulate myself.
The argument, stripped to its core, is almost brutally simple. If you want the future you keep describing, you have to actually build it. Klein and Thompson call what we’ve created instead a civilization of “chosen scarcities” — and the phrase lands hard, because it implies agency. Blame. Us. Through a mix of economic history and political diagnosis that never feels like a lecture, they trace how America ended up with a conservative movement that opposed government on principle and a progressive movement that, with entirely good intentions, slowly strangled it in procedure. That second part is where the book gets genuinely uncomfortable, and where it earns its keep.
The authors spend considerable time inside what they call “everything-bagel liberalism” — the tendency to load any single infrastructure project with so many layered social requirements that the whole thing buckles. It’s a phrase that will stick, and probably haunt a few policy meetings. They also dismantle something I hadn’t realized I believed: the Eureka myth, that seductive story where lone geniuses have flashes of insight and history pivots. Klein and Thompson aren’t interested in invention. They’re interested in deployment — the grinding, bureaucratic, deeply unglamorous work of actually getting things into the world. The wartime production of penicillin, California’s high-speed rail disaster, the decades Katalin Karikó spent in institutional obscurity trying to fund mRNA research — these stories aren’t just illustrative. They’re genuinely moving, in the way that watching someone persist against senseless obstruction tends to be.
I couldn’t help but notice how the book reframes what “state capacity” means — not as government size, but as government competence and will. The distinction matters enormously, and the authors are patient enough to show rather than just assert it. Their prescription to become “bottleneck detectives,” to ask not who’s ideologically correct but where exactly the gears have jammed, feels refreshingly non-tribal. Whether you encounter this argument in a Kindle ebook on your morning commute or in a PDF ebook pulled up on your office screen, the prose itself helps — it’s warm, propulsive, closer to narrative journalism than academic argument. There are echoes of Matthew Yglesias’s policy clarity and Mariana Mazzucato’s structural ambition, but the voice is distinctly their own.
A fair warning: readers wanting clean partisan vindication will find neither comfort nor escape here. The book demands a willingness to sit with the possibility that your own side’s good intentions have contributed to the mess. A few stretches deep inside administrative procedure slow the momentum slightly — there’s a passage or two that requires patient re-reading — but the payoff is real. This is, at its heart, a book for people exhausted by zero-sum culture warfare and hungry for something that actually resembles hope. The ePub renders cleanly on most devices, which matters when you’re the sort of reader who keeps returning to dog-ear a passage, and there will be passages here worth returning to.
What the book ultimately asks — quietly, without triumphalism — is whether we might stop arguing over how to divide a shrinking pie and simply build a larger kitchen. It’s a pragmatic question dressed up as a radical one, which is precisely why it lands. Essential reading.
★★★★☆
David –
good