ABUNDANCE, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
In 1833, John Adolphus Etzler, a German engineer who immigrated to Pittsburgh, announced that earthly paradise was suddenly in reach. Economic growth and modern technology were changing everything. Coal might run out, but humanity would harness wind, tidal and solar power. A trillion or more people could call this planet home, constructing islands across the seas to make room. And, as you built up land, you could drink directly from the ocean: Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade. After millenniums of austerity and poverty, the age of limitless “superabundance” was at hand.
Two centuries later, we remain so, so close. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in “Abundance,” a guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization, the United States can still blaze the path to progress, but only if progressives get out of the habit of putting obstacles in their own way. “If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen,” the authors write, “they need to offer the fruits of effective government.” But how?
Klein, a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, and Thompson, a journalist for The Atlantic, are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. “Abundance” expands on their previously published work over the last decade or so, and Klein and Thompson have no shortage of policy proposals on affordable housing (build more!), renewable energy (go nuclear!) and sustainable agriculture (vertical farming?).
But their book comprises more than a set of concrete steps to fix specific socioeconomic problems in America. It’s mainly a sharp cry against myopic Democrats who block new ideas and govern through checklists, leading to what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”
Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.
Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.
This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.
Borrowing a term from a 1954 book by the historian David M. Potter, the authors style themselves revivalists of the belief that American life revolves around the promise inherent in being a “people of plenty.” For the last 50 years, American voters have believed in anything but, electing politicians who mug for the camera as they tighten belts and slash budgets.
How did this happen? Mainstreaming a leftist talking point, Klein and Thompson point the finger at “neoliberalism,” the political movement against robust government that took flight in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and that has been adopted by presidents of both parties ever since.
Major government investment is an indispensable element of the innovative spirit. In the 1960s and ’70s, institutions like the U.S. Defense Department devised transformative technologies like the internet, which helped spread ideas and goods around the world. But today, the authors explain, modern Democrats are more focused on growth-slowing regulations than they are on pouring federal dollars into green, pro-growth solutions like climate-friendly cement. Great moments of American ingenuity still crop up, as pandemics and wars have shown, but they always involve government action. Why not a government promoting progress and plenty all the time?
Imagining an abundant, green future emerging out of federal spending rather than from government rule-making does sound appealing, but Klein and Thompson omit that the neoliberal era wasn’t just about conservatives downsizing government and liberals putting all their energy into regulatory wins like better food labels and fiscal transparency. If austerity policies cramp innovators, they have hurt others worse. Dramatizing the innovator’s plight, “Abundance” occasionally reads like the brief of a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities who are mainly upset by clogged transit and red tape. (Government efficiency, anyone?)
Neoliberal policies drove a great divide between the innovative few and the stagnant many, with investment bankers and Silicon Valley types increasingly liberated from the American masses whose best option, apparently, is to get better deals on urban rent so they can cut the hair and cook the food of the people who code and trade.
This is a bad place to end up. Even at the height of American optimism in the 1950s, historians and policymakers knew that the people of plenty had to keep inequality and immobility from bringing the experiment crashing down. Klein and Thompson refer to “redistribution” as a familiar liberal goal that they hope to supplement with their government-fueled growth agenda. But if the ability to innovate itself isn’t spread more widely, then, as Potter observed, “many people either lose confidence in themselves or rebel against the society which, as they feel, betrayed them with a false promise.”
Klein and Thompson have no answers for how to get the masses back their mojo, and “Abundance” does not seriously confront a big reason for Democratic aversion to dreaming big: neoliberal globalization. When making stuff migrated elsewhere, most Americans were invited to join the care and service economies and consume their way into national and personal debt. Clearing government obstruction only for a small vanguard could exacerbate this gap between the creative few and the consuming many.
The authors are focused not just socially, but geographically, homing in on a handful of urban centers, partly because those cities are where most of the country’s restive innovators work and live. But if the problem is a divided country, progressives should want to spread the opportunity to usher in utopia. A publicly controlled venture capital firm, for instance, could bring startup culture to places liberals long ago abandoned to the right, so that the next artificial intelligence company has as much chance to emerge from Tulsa as it does from Menlo Park. It could also promote a model of entrepreneurship that would include more people, especially if success means something other than the Silicon Valley standard of billion-dollar valuation.
“Abundance” opens with an idyll worthy of Etzler himself. The authors envision clean energy to grow meat in labs, more food on smaller plots of land, less work for more pay and Mach 2 jetliners that run on synthetic fuel to ferry people during the free time won for leisure — what’s not to like? Klein and Thompson call for a renewed commitment to “the fiery creation of the new,” suggesting that the opposite of austerity is an embrace of invention as a collective way of life. But they also seem ambivalent about whether creativity matters for its own sake or for the utopia it brings about. What happens when we stop innovating because we feel we have enough? If abundance just leaves us with consumption as an end in itself, reclaiming American originality would lead it to drown again — even if it is in a sea of lemonade.
ABUNDANCE | By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson | Avid Reader Press | 288 pp. | $30