Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

Book Summary

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's 2025 #1 NYT bestseller argues that America's defining problem is self-inflicted scarcity — of housing, energy, infrastructure, and scientific progress — caused by decades of well-meaning procedural rules that made it nearly impossible to build anything. Their answer is "a liberalism that builds": measure policy success by material outputs rather than process compliance.

Listen time: 15 minutes. Smallfolk Academy's AI-narrated summary distills the book's core ideas into a focused audio session.

Key Concepts from Abundance

1. Self-Inflicted Scarcity: The thesis at the heart of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's "Abundance" is that America's most painful economic problems — unaffordable housing, stalled clean-energy deployment, crumbling infrastructure, sclerotic science — are not caused by a lack of resources, a lack of demand, or even a lack of money. They are caused by a lack of the ability to build. Over the past half-century, layer upon layer of well-intentioned procedural rules, environmental reviews, community-input requirements, and litigation rights have accumulated in American governance until producing almost anything physical requires navigating a decade-long obstacle course. Scarcity, in Klein and Thompson's reading, is the predictable output of this system, and it is almost entirely self-inflicted. The authors document this pattern across every domain that matters for everyday material life. Housing is the most vivid. In the most productive cities in America — New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles — the primary reason a median family cannot afford a home is not that construction costs are high or that people don't want to build; it is that the legal regime makes building new housing functionally illegal across vast areas, and the regime that does permit building has review timelines measured in years. The result is that tens of millions of workers are priced out of the places where their productivity would be highest, and the national economy loses trillions of dollars a year in foregone output because people cannot live where they are most valuable. The same logic plays out in energy. The United States has the technology, the capital, and the demand to deploy vastly more solar, wind, transmission, and nuclear capacity than it currently does. What it does not have is the ability to get permits issued quickly enough. Transmission lines that are critical to connecting renewable generation to cities routinely take 10 or 15 years to approve. A solar project can be stopped by a single lawsuit filed under an environmental review statute passed in 1970 to stop freeways from cutting through neighborhoods. The clean-energy transition, the authors argue, is not actually constrained by physics or economics. It is constrained by process. The same logic extends to science, to public transit, to semiconductor fabs, to broadband deployment, and to almost every domain where we used to build things. The 20th-century American state built the interstate highway system, the TVA, the Empire State Building in a year, the lunar landing in a decade. The 21st-century American state struggles to build a few miles of subway track in less than twenty years. The change, Klein and Thompson are clear, is not about political will or funding. It is about a structural inversion in how the state uses its power: from enabling construction to making construction actionable in court. The practical consequence for ordinary people is that the cost of shelter, energy, and transportation rises every year not because those goods are genuinely scarce but because their supply has been artificially throttled. Recognizing this — naming scarcity as a choice rather than a fact — is the first and most important move in the book's framework.
2. A Liberalism That Builds: The positive agenda at the heart of "Abundance" is what Klein and Thompson call "a liberalism that builds." Their argument is that the center-left coalition that has dominated American progressive politics since the 1970s has spent decades defining itself primarily through what it blocks — harmful pollution, abusive development, unsafe products, unfair lending — and far too little through what it produces. The net result is a political tradition that is extraordinarily effective at stopping things but increasingly incapable of building them, even when what needs to be built (affordable housing, clean energy, modern transit) is itself a core progressive goal. The authors trace how this happened in unusually honest detail. After the environmental disasters and urban-renewal catastrophes of the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of progressive activists, lawyers, and policymakers built what amounted to an entirely new constitutional architecture of administrative law — NEPA for federal projects, CEQA for California, hundreds of similar statutes at the state level, and parallel frameworks for housing, education, and science. Each layer was a legitimate response to a real abuse. Together, they created a regime in which any powerful stakeholder can delay or veto almost any government action by filing a plausible procedural complaint. The same rules that stopped urban renewal from demolishing healthy neighborhoods now stop affordable-housing developments, solar farms, and bike lanes. Klein and Thompson's call is for the center-left to rebalance its relationship with construction. A liberalism that builds, they argue, is one that measures policy success by material output — homes built, megawatts deployed, rides delivered, drugs approved — rather than by process compliance or input spending. It is a liberalism that distinguishes between regulations designed to prevent concrete harms (worker safety, air quality, financial fraud) and regulations designed primarily to slow down decision-making (extended review, parallel litigation, veto-by-review). It retains the former aggressively and is willing to strip back the latter. This is politically uncomfortable for much of the existing coalition. It asks environmental groups to accept that blocking a transmission line can, in net climate terms, be more harmful than building one in a sub-optimal location. It asks housing progressives to accept that building 40,000 market-rate units in a city often reduces displacement more reliably than blocking a single luxury tower. It asks labor unions to accept that prevailing-wage requirements attached to federal infrastructure can sometimes mean that half as much infrastructure gets built. The authors are not unsympathetic to any of these constituencies, but they are unflinching about the tradeoffs. The broader framework is simple and generalizable to ordinary investors and citizens: when you evaluate a political program, policy, or candidate, ask not only "what are you preventing?" but also "what are you producing?" Movements that cannot answer the second question honestly, Klein and Thompson argue, will eventually lose both the political support and the material conditions required to keep preventing the first.
3. The Vetocracy Problem: Klein and Thompson devote significant attention to a concept they borrow from political scientist Francis Fukuyama: vetocracy. In a vetocracy, the ability of any single actor to block action accumulates faster than the ability of any actor to take action. The American system, they argue, has over the past half-century become perhaps the most developed vetocracy in the democratic world. Federal, state, and local governments, along with courts, administrative agencies, community boards, environmental review processes, and procurement law, now collectively provide dozens of independent choke points for almost any project of consequence. The authors walk readers through a specific case study that has become emblematic: a single solar farm in California that took 7 years from initial application to ground-breaking, despite being on land that was already agricultural, supported by the local utility, and required by state climate mandates. The delays came from cascading environmental reviews under CEQA, a lawsuit filed by a rival developer, a separate lawsuit filed by a local group with grievances unrelated to solar, and a discretionary permit process that required the same plan to be re-reviewed by three different agencies in sequence. Not one of these reviews found a substantive harm that could not have been mitigated with minor modifications. Each one simply added time. Multiply this pattern across tens of thousands of such projects and the cumulative cost to American growth is enormous. The authors cite research suggesting that the transmission-line backlog alone is costing the United States something on the order of a trillion dollars in deferred clean-energy investment. The housing review backlog in major cities adds years to every large project, which translates into decades of delayed supply and trillions in foregone household wealth. The NEPA backlog for federal infrastructure adds an average of 4.5 years to every major project, making it effectively impossible to modernize American ports, grids, and rail. Klein and Thompson are clear that vetocracy is not a partisan problem. Conservatives have their own version of it in the form of spending rules, arcane budgeting procedures, and procurement complexity that makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to buy things without extensive contractor intermediation. The core issue is structural: across the 20th century, every time the American system was embarrassed by a mistake, it added a procedural check without removing the old ones. The result is a system of government that treats error of commission as far worse than error of omission, even when the costs of doing nothing vastly exceed the costs of a modest mistake. The practical prescription is not to weaken safeguards but to consolidate them. A single rigorous environmental review should replace 11 overlapping ones. A single housing permit process should replace 20 discretionary veto points. One federal environmental-impact process should be binding across agencies rather than re-litigated at each. These are not radical reforms; they are the normal operating pattern of every other rich democracy. Recovering the American ability to act, in Klein and Thompson's view, starts with recognizing that the cost of excessive process is not zero, and is often the difference between solving a problem and watching it compound.
4. Science, Invention, and State Capacity: A section of "Abundance" that has attracted particular attention from the economics profession is Klein and Thompson's argument about the decline in American state capacity to invent. For most of the 20th century, the United States was the global leader in turning scientific research into deployable technology at scale. The Manhattan Project, the interstate system, the Apollo program, the internet, and the human genome project were all, in large part, products of a federal government that could marshal scientific talent, issue decisive mandates, fund at scale, and absorb failure as a cost of exploration. By the early 21st century, that capacity had atrophied in ways that are both poorly understood and enormously consequential. The authors lay out the specific indicators. The number of scientists per dollar of federal research funding has dropped significantly over the past four decades, because an ever-larger share of every research grant is consumed by compliance, reporting, and overhead. The median age at which an American scientist receives their first independent research grant has climbed from the low 30s to the mid-40s, because the grant-evaluation bureaucracy has become so risk-averse that it rewards only well-established researchers. Major federal agencies now take longer to approve a single routine research project than it took the entire Apollo program to land a man on the moon. The productivity of American research — papers per dollar, breakthroughs per scientist, drugs approved per research dollar — has declined for decades. None of these declines are inevitable. Klein and Thompson compare the United States against peer democracies that have modernized their research systems and shown what is possible. The UK's ARIA, modeled on the U.S.'s own DARPA, is an attempt to recreate the high-risk, high-trust funding model that made 20th-century American science so productive. Singapore's biomedical research ecosystem has outperformed the United States on cost-per-discovery metrics for a decade. Even within the U.S., specific high-functioning agencies like DARPA continue to demonstrate that the old model, when allowed to operate, still produces extraordinary results. The capacity exists. The question is whether policy will revive it. The authors' prescription here is not primarily about spending more. It is about spending differently. Concentrate funding on ambitious bets rather than spreading it thinly across incremental studies. Shorten the grant-decision timeline from years to months. Reward program officers for taking risks that sometimes fail rather than penalizing them for any failure. Rebuild the federal laboratory system as a serious peer to the private sector for mission-driven research. Remove the compliance bloat that has turned American universities into administrative organisms that happen to do some science on the side. The larger argument is that material abundance in the 21st century will run through scientific capacity. Solving climate change requires new technologies we do not yet have. Defending against pandemics requires a biomedical apparatus faster than anything currently in existence. Maintaining American geopolitical position requires a research system that continues to lead. None of this is possible, Klein and Thompson insist, without a federal government that can once again direct, fund, and absorb scientific risk at scale. Recovering that capacity is not a minor policy question. It is a precondition for almost everything else the book argues for.
5. Housing Is the Foundation: If "Abundance" has a single most-emphasized policy domain, it is housing. Klein and Thompson return to this theme throughout the book because housing, they argue, is not merely one policy problem among many. It is the master variable of modern American inequality, productivity, climate policy, and political feasibility. Nearly every other problem the book discusses — stagnant wages, regional divergence, political polarization, carbon emissions, even declining state capacity — is either caused by or dramatically amplified by the American housing shortage, and almost every other solution the book proposes becomes more achievable if housing is solved. The quantitative scope is staggering. The authors cite estimates that the United States is short something between 3 and 7 million housing units relative to what demand would sustainably support. This shortage is concentrated precisely in the highest-productivity metro areas — the Bay Area, New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles — where a median full-time worker now spends 40 to 60 percent of pre-tax income on rent. The primary cause is regulatory: zoning that makes multifamily housing illegal across 70 to 85 percent of urban residential land, discretionary permitting that allows any single neighbor to delay a project indefinitely, environmental review that treats a six-story apartment building as equivalent in impact to a freeway, and historic-preservation rules that have expanded far beyond genuine landmarks. The downstream effects are enormous and surprisingly underappreciated. Because workers cannot afford to live in high-productivity metros, they migrate to cheaper but less productive regions, and the national GDP grows measurably slower than it would in a better-functioning housing market. Because lower-income families are priced out of neighborhoods with good schools, upward mobility rates have collapsed in exactly the places where they used to be highest. Because families cannot live near their jobs, average commute times and transportation emissions have risen despite cleaner vehicles. Because young people delay family formation when housing is unaffordable, fertility has collapsed, which in turn destabilizes the entire social insurance system that depends on a younger population supporting an older one. Klein and Thompson's prescription is not subtle: build, aggressively, in the places people want to live. Legalize multifamily housing by-right across all residential zoning. Consolidate environmental review into a single fast process. Strip back discretionary permitting. Tax land value rather than improvements so that holding undeveloped urban land is expensive. Offer state-level preemption of local zoning in metros that have failed to meet housing targets for a decade. The model they cite repeatedly is Tokyo, which builds roughly as much housing as all of California every year despite having a fraction of California's land area, and where rents have been stable for two decades as a result. The larger lesson, and one the authors return to in the book's final chapters, is that material abundance of housing unlocks almost every other improvement this book argues for. A country that can house its workers where they are most productive is a country that can afford a more generous welfare state, more aggressive climate action, and more ambitious science funding. A country that cannot, will find every other progressive goal steadily eroded by the gravitational pull of its own housing crisis. Housing is not a separate policy problem. It is the foundation on which the rest of the abundance agenda stands.

About the Author

Ezra Klein is a New York Times opinion columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show, one of the most-listened-to political podcasts in the world. He co-founded Vox in 2014 and served as its editor-in-chief until 2020, after earlier roles at The Washington Post and The American Prospect. His first book, "Why We're Polarized" (2020), was a New York Times bestseller and widely cited analysis of how American political identity has hardened along partisan lines. Klein is one of the most influential policy journalists of his generation, known for long-form interviews with academics and policymakers across the political spectrum. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes on economics, work, and technology, and the host of the Plain English podcast. He is the author of "Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction" (2017), a bestselling study of why some cultural products succeed and others don't. Over more than a decade at The Atlantic he has written some of the most-read magazine pieces on the rise of the knowledge economy, the crisis of American housing supply, and the productivity slowdown. He is widely regarded as one of the clearest-eyed chroniclers of how American institutions shape daily life. "Abundance," published in March 2025 by Avid Reader Press, is their first book-length collaboration and became an immediate #1 New York Times bestseller. It has been described by reviewers as a generational policy manifesto — an argument that the center-left must stop apologizing for growth and reorient itself around the material question of building more housing, more energy, more infrastructure, and more scientific capacity. The book has reshaped the Democratic policy conversation and has been endorsed by a remarkably wide coalition spanning progressive housing activists, centrist Democrats, and center-right reformers. Klein and Thompson's combined authority — decades of political reporting, deep literacy in academic economics, and one of the largest audiences in American policy media — makes this the definitive public-facing argument for the "abundance agenda."

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "Abundance" by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about?

"Abundance" is a 2025 political-economy manifesto arguing that America's defining problem is self-inflicted scarcity — of housing, energy, infrastructure, and scientific progress — caused by decades of accumulated procedural rules that have made it nearly impossible to build at scale. The authors' prescription is what they call "a liberalism that builds": a center-left politics that measures success by material outputs (homes built, megawatts deployed, drugs approved) rather than by process compliance or spending.

When was "Abundance" published?

The book was published in March 2025 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It became an immediate #1 New York Times bestseller and has been described by reviewers and policy makers as one of the most consequential political books of the decade.

Who are Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson?

Ezra Klein is a New York Times opinion columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He co-founded Vox in 2014 and served as its editor-in-chief until 2020. His first book, "Why We're Polarized," was a New York Times bestseller. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of the Plain English podcast, and the author of "Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction." Both are widely read public intellectuals in American policy journalism.

What does Klein and Thompson mean by "the abundance agenda"?

The abundance agenda is the authors' shorthand for a set of policy reforms designed to dramatically increase the production of housing, clean energy, transportation infrastructure, and scientific capacity. Its core commitments include by-right housing construction in productive metros, consolidated and shortened environmental review, aggressive public investment in clean-energy deployment and transmission, and a federal research system oriented around ambitious bets rather than compliance-heavy incremental grants.

Is "Abundance" a left-wing or right-wing book?

Klein and Thompson are both center-left journalists, and the book is written primarily as a challenge to progressive policymakers — an argument that the center-left must reclaim its historical competence at building material things. However, the diagnosis (that America has become a vetocracy) and many of the specific prescriptions (zoning reform, permitting reform, science-funding reform) overlap significantly with center-right and libertarian reform movements, and the book has been endorsed by a notably broad coalition.

What is a vetocracy?

Vetocracy is a term the authors borrow from political scientist Francis Fukuyama. It describes a political system in which the ability of individual actors to block action has accumulated faster than the ability of any actor to take action. Klein and Thompson argue that federal, state, and local U.S. governance has become perhaps the most developed vetocracy in the democratic world, with dozens of independent choke points for any significant construction or policy project.

How does "Abundance" relate to the YIMBY movement?

"Abundance" is broadly sympathetic to the YIMBY ("Yes In My Back Yard") movement, which advocates for dramatically expanded housing construction in high-productivity metros. The book makes the most comprehensive public case to date for the YIMBY position, and connects housing abundance to a wider set of policy domains (energy, infrastructure, science) that YIMBY advocates often discuss separately.

What policy reforms does "Abundance" specifically recommend?

Key reforms include: by-right legalization of multifamily housing across all residential zoning; consolidation of NEPA, CEQA, and other environmental reviews into a single rigorous but fast process; transmission-line permitting reform to enable clean-energy deployment; restructuring federal science funding around ambitious bets with shorter decision timelines; state-level preemption of local zoning in metros that have failed to meet housing targets; and a general principle that policies should be evaluated by material outputs rather than process compliance.

Is "Abundance" relevant to investors?

Yes. The book describes the structural reasons why American housing, energy, and infrastructure supply is artificially constrained, and why permitting reform is emerging as one of the highest-leverage policy variables for long-term growth. Any investor with exposure to U.S. housing, homebuilders, clean energy, transmission, or infrastructure is directly affected by whether the reforms the book argues for move forward, and the book provides the clearest public-facing framework for reading those political developments.

Where can I buy "Abundance"?

The book is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and most major online booksellers in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook formats. Klein and Thompson narrate the audiobook themselves, which many listeners prefer for its authenticity and the authors' familiar voices from their podcasts.

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