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From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.
To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don't have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven't built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that's clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven't been building enough.
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear's villains. Rather, one generation's solutions have become the next generation's problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.
Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.
Barak Obama's 2025 Summer Reading List
1m Since someone mentioned it, https://barackobama.medium.com/my-2025-summer-reading-list-bb25331e761b here you go : • Mark Twain — Ron Chernow A comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history. • The Book of Records — Madeleine Thien A bea...
-kim.kovacs
"Helping liberals get out of their own way...It's time to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors' debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful. Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today's biggest challenges." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson want you to hold space to dream about utopia. No need to tighten the belt, they argue: We have everything we need to build the future that liberals want, clean energy and affordable housing included, today! Their book explains how." —New York Times
"A forceful, quick-moving broadside against the left-coded pathologies they see as standing in the way...Klein and Thompson's diagnosis gets much right...A worthy read." —Financial Times
This information about Abundance was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ezra Klein is an opinion columnist and host of the award-winning Ezra Klein Show podcast at The New York Times. He is the author of Why We're Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named one of Barack Obama's top books of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers and On Work, an anthology of his writing on labor and technology. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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