Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Avid Reader Press.
One way of thinking about Abundance might be to see it as a blueprint for a Democratic victory in 2028. Structured around five chapters, Klein and Thompson want to teach liberals how to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. At the core of their vision is the idea that the state needs to take on a more active role in helping build green energy or basic infrastructure and funding daring new scientific research.
There’s nothing particularly controversial about this. The economist Mariana Mazzucato showed in her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, how crucial government action is to forging dynamic, vibrant economies. (Klein and Thompson cite her work.) And there are genuinely sound ideas on display in Abundance: we do need more green energy, solar panels, high-density housing, high-speed rail, and spending on basic science that isn’t stifled by funding agencies. But is the vision bold enough to bring us to a true state of abundance? And can it puncture MAGA’s grip on power—or in a broader, global context, deflect the rise of the far right?
One is a question of the radicalism of the societal vision being proposed, the other a question of political strategy. What is ultimately dissatisfying about Abundance is that it neither seems utopian enough to live up to its titular promise, nor does it seem sufficiently responsive or well-timed enough to forge a new politics of the left capable of ejecting fascists from power.
Nothing New—and Not So Relevant
Despite its piecemeal merits, it is tempting to say that Abundance is a book “about nothing,” to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, in two very specific senses.
First, it’s about nothing new: as the authors themselves admit, Biden adopted much of the industrial-policy ethos that the authors spend a whole book advocating for. Klein and Thompson want a “Liberalism That Builds,” with government taking a more proactive role in supply-side interventions, either getting out of the way of market actors or rolling up its own sleeves for more direct involvement—in everything from building high-speed rail or microchip foundries to high-density housing and solar panel arrays.
But who needs to hear this? Certainly not centrist Democrats. As the authors admit, the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were motivated by this very same pro-“build” ethos. That Biden’s policies “represent a break with recent decades of American politics is undeniable,” they write. So who needs Abundance? “This book has offered a critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years,” the authors write in their conclusion—which is hardly politically apposite. What purpose is served by such a backward-looking prospectus? The authors rail against an orthodoxy—a version of the neoliberalism that extended from Reagan and the Bushes through Clinton to Obama, evolving along the way—that already seems passé.
Second, and relatedly, this is a book about nothing much of relevance to this political moment, which is, of course, dominated by Trump’s increasingly assertive fascist authoritarianism. It is a flaw of centrist liberalism that one could gaze out over the American social landscape of the first half of the 2020s and think that the core political problem facing progressives is one of overregulation. Klein and Thompson also offer no meaningful analysis of the other side, Trump’s MAGA movement. How do you beat the authoritarian nativism, the strategically deployed right-wing Christian nationalism, the creeping fascism? Surely not with bureaucratic downsizing—if anything, that’s part of the other side’s playbook.
This might seem to be a book for a Democratic presidency that never came to fruition. For Klein and Thompson’s message to truly have landed, one might think, Harris—or a Democratic contender like her—would have had to win in November 2024. But even then, its message would have been off-kilter. If anything, Abundance should have been written ten or fifteen years ago—pre-Trump 1.0 and, just as importantly, pre-Biden, whose political-economic sensibilities were, as Klein and Thompson note, transformed both by Trump’s first-term right-wing economic populism and, just as importantly, Bernie Sanders’ left-wing economic populism. The center of the Democratic Party has long since caught on to the core ideas defended here as if they were a new and dangerous heterodox creed.
In short, the book suffers from poor timing, both because of Democrats’ own ideological shifts, and the fraught politics it landed in. Appearing in March 2025, just as Musk’s DOGE army was rampaging through the U.S. federal government, Klein and Thompson were promoting a book that pushes for deregulation, especially of environmental protections and municipal zoning. In the very same moment that Musk and his cronies were busy tearing it all down, Klein and Thompson seemed to hammer away at the kinds of protections that liberals helped forge over multiple decades. Now, the authors might claim that Trump, Musk, and co. are more intent on destroying than building—but the convergences are disconcerting. When they take to task the Biden-era CHIPS Act’s funding for semiconductor foundries for asking how prospective projects “would include minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses . . . in their supply chain,” Klein and Thompson’s argument resonates uncomfortably with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI policies.
Abundance without Abundance
Klein and Thompson’s book has been pitched to the reading public as something that it is not: a blueprint for a (realistic) utopian, or even, we might say, cornucopian capitalism, overflowing with prosperity for all. Its glossy cover illustration envisions a clean, green, high-tech society, perched between urban high modernity and the demands of natural ecology; its introductory vignette, “Beyond scarcity,” sketches the kind of future society the authors want their readers to inhabit—but it feels more like Denmark of today than, say, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. It’s hardly a model for how to counteract far-right resurgence, deal with impending climate catastrophe or tamp down global social inequalities. The authors likely realize the oversold utopian dimension of their book—poorly matched by its contents—which is why they give a nod to Aaron Bastani’s (2019) Fully Automated Luxury Communism, though without deeper engagement with its closer attention to economic welfare, planning, and redistribution.
We might consider what Klein and Thompson omit from their vision. They seem unconcerned about proposals for a shorter working day or working week. They are uninterested in even modest redistributions of income and wealth or ideas like Universal Basic Income. There’s effectively nothing about free public healthcare here, in a country wracked by the extreme commodification of healthcare and soaring levels of medical debt; and nothing about student loan forgiveness or shoring up free higher education. The authors are unfazed by capitalism’s basic ecological problem, its infinite growth imperative—that is, the fact that market actors are constantly required to grow, despite clear planetary constraints; instead, we get a snide remark about “the degrowther movement,” and the need to avoid “regress,” betraying a lack of understanding of this intellectual movement’s true concerns.
What we get instead are tweaks around the margins—technological fixes like carbon removal—alongside repackaged Biden-era political-economic orthodoxies, rebranded as a bold new vision—and a hope that everything can go on as before, with minor adjustments and no real need for systemic change.
In fact, what Klein and Thompson propose isn’t really abundance at all: it’s capitalism with a human face—increasingly deregulated, though encapsulated by a moderately more activist state. Writing a book about how to “build a better future” in the United States in the first half of the 2020s without addressing the need for economic redistribution or free public healthcare seems injudicious.
At its core, Abundance might even be said to be a case of conceptual co-optation: the idea of abundance, more properly the preserve of radical progressives, is dragged rightward, to be held at center-ground. But this is political turf that seems to belong to democratic socialists—or social democrats—like Warren, Sanders, and Mamdani. It feels obvious that elevating politicians of their stripe is the left’s only real hope of fending off a MAGA victory in 2028. Ideally, a big-tent center-left could soak up the functional parts of Abundance worth keeping, while being propelled by the energy, enthusiasm, and credibility of real progressives, more attuned to the welfare needs and interests of ordinary people—and with bigger, bolder visions. But Abundance-style centrism alone? That won’t carry the day.