Abundance: How We Build a Better Future - critical summary review

Have you ever looked at your rent, your power bill, or the wait time for a doctor's appointment and wondered why everything feels harder than it should? You work more. You earn more. Somehow you still fall behind. The problem isn't that you're doing it wrong. The problem is that the things you need most have become deliberately hard to make.

In his 1978 State of the Union address, Jimmy Carter told Americans that government cannot solve every problem, and that we must set priorities. It was a signal that a certain kind of ambition was winding down. What followed were decades of policy that tried to help people afford things without ever asking whether we were making enough of them. We handed out housing vouchers while blocking new apartments. We subsidized college tuition while tuition kept climbing. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe this as building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.

Here's the good news buried inside that frustration. Scarcity in housing, energy, and health care isn't a law of nature. It's a set of choices, made in city councils and permitting offices and grant committees, over fifty years. Choices can be unmade. What follows is a tour of how we built a country that struggles to build, and what it would take to start saying yes again.

The Subsidized Ladder and the Runaway Elevator

Think about what happens when you give ten families money to buy a house, but only five houses exist. Prices rise. The families with vouchers compete against each other. The subsidy ends up in the seller's pocket. That's the supply-side mistake, and both political sides made their own version of it.

Conservatives believed that cutting taxes and stripping regulations would automatically summon more supply. It didn't. Capital flowed toward finance and software, not toward apartment buildings and power lines. Liberals took a different path. They funded demand generously — vouchers, subsidies, tax credits — while leaving the barriers to production untouched. Both approaches skipped the same question. Who is actually allowed to build the thing?

Klein and Thompson push back hard on a story many of us absorbed without noticing: that society is not a pie. We talk about the economy as a fixed dessert to be divided fairly, arguing endlessly over slice sizes. But a pie can be baked bigger. When solar panels get cheaper, nobody loses their share of sunlight. When a city adds fifty thousand homes, existing residents don't lose their bedrooms. The fight over distribution matters, but it becomes far less brutal when there's more to distribute. That's the whole wager of an abundance politics.

Why Cities Became Luxury Products

In the nineteenth century, Horace Greeley's advice was simple: Go West, Young Man. If your town had no room for you, there was always land somewhere else. That frontier is closed now, but a new one replaced it — the productive city. Move to Boston, San Jose, or Seattle, and your wages rise, your kids do better, your odds improve. Economists have measured this repeatedly.

Then those cities locked the gate. Consider what changed after World War II. Lakewood, California went up almost overnight in the early 1950s, thousands of modest homes for working families, built at a pace that seems impossible today. Two decades later, Petaluma passed a plan capping new housing permits each year — and courts upheld it. The Petaluma Plan became a template. Cities learned they could legally refuse to grow.

Michael Bloomberg once described New York City as a "high-end product," maybe not for everyone, priced like a luxury good. He said it plainly, and he wasn't wrong about what the city had become. But notice what that means for a nurse, a teacher, a line cook. The places with the best jobs became places they cannot afford to live. Zoning rules that ban apartments on most residential land, plus neighbors empowered to veto anything nearby, turned opportunity into a gated community. The American dream didn't die. It got a waiting list.

The Musical Chairs of Homelessness

Ask people why cities have so many homeless residents and you'll hear the same answers: drugs, mental illness, poverty, weak policing. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern tested those answers against the data in Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, and the results are hard to argue with.

West Virginia has brutal poverty and one of the worst opioid crises in the country. Its per capita homelessness rate is a fraction of California's. Why? Because in West Virginia, a room is cheap. A person can fall apart in a hundred ways and still keep a roof. In California, the margin for error vanished. The same struggles that produce a hard year in Charleston produce a tent in Los Angeles.

The authors reach for an image from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. A stranger arrives in Washington, D.C. with no money and no plan, and simply walks into a boarding house and rents a room. That kind of housing barely exists anymore — we zoned it out of existence. Homelessness works like musical chairs. Addiction, illness, and bad luck determine who loses a seat. The number of chairs determines how many people end up on the floor. You can spend forever treating the vulnerabilities, but until you add chairs, someone stands.

Using Earth Day Laws to Block Clean Energy

Some environmentalists answer the climate crisis with degrowth — consume less, build less, shrink the economy. Klein and Thompson consider this both politically toxic and factually shaky. Hannah Ritchie makes the case in Not the End of the World: on nearly every environmental measure, the path forward runs through better technology deployed faster, not through voluntary poverty. Telling voters their lives must get smaller is a losing pitch, and it isn't even necessary.

Solar power, wind turbines, and batteries have gotten stunningly cheap. Energy superabundance is technically within reach. The obstacle isn't physics or price. It's paperwork.

Here's the painful irony. The great environmental laws of the 1970s were written to stop bulldozers and smokestacks. Today they mostly stop clean energy. The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project in Wyoming — one of the largest wind farms ever proposed in North America — spent well over a decade grinding through environmental reviews and litigation before turbines went up. Legal scholars J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman call this "The Greens' Dilemma." The movement built an extraordinary machine for saying no, and now it needs to say yes at enormous scale, using tools designed for the opposite purpose.

The Everything Bagel That Collapsed the State

In 2008, California voters approved a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Nearly two decades and tens of billions of dollars later, the segment under construction runs from Merced to Bakersfield. Not the route anyone voted for. Meanwhile, China built tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. State capacity — the plain ability to finish what you start — eroded here while it grew elsewhere.

Los Angeles offers a sharper lesson. Proposition HHH raised $1.2 billion to house homeless residents. Some units ended up costing around $600,000 each. Every project had to satisfy union rules, environmental standards, design reviews, community input, and layered funding sources, each with its own conditions. Klein and Thompson call this "everything-bagel liberalism." You load a single project with every worthy goal until it collapses under the weight.

The alternative exists. The Tahanan project at 833 Bryant Street in San Francisco built permanent supportive housing at roughly a third of the typical cost, in under three years, largely because philanthropic funding let it skip the tangle of public strings. Contrast that with the CHIPS and Science Act, whose Notice of Funding Opportunity asked chip manufacturers to address child care, workforce diversity, and community investment alongside building factories. Each goal is defensible. Stacked together, they make the main thing nearly impossible.

Why Science Is Terrified of Crazy Ideas

Katalin Karikó spent years at the University of Pennsylvania trying to make messenger RNA work as medicine. Grant reviewers kept rejecting her. The idea was too strange, too far from consensus. In 1995 she was demoted, her salary cut, her lab space shrunk. She kept going anyway. That research became the foundation of the COVID vaccines that reached billions of arms — and a Nobel Prize in 2023.

The system that nearly discarded her is still running. A 2020 study titled "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" documented something unsettling: research effort keeps climbing while breakthroughs per researcher fall. Part of that is the burden of knowledge — you need bigger teams and more years to reach the frontier. But part of it is design. Scientists at institutions like the NIH spend enormous stretches of their careers writing grant applications, and the applications that win tend to promise safe, incremental results.

Biologist Gregory Petsko captured it perfectly in a satirical essay in Genome Biology, imagining a grant committee reviewing Christopher Columbus. Insufficient preliminary data. The applicant has never sailed west before. Rejected. Compare that to J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA in the 1960s, a program manager with real money and real freedom, who backed a wild idea about connecting computers to each other. That bet became the internet. We need more Lickliders and fewer committees.

The Bottleneck Detective

Alexander Fleming noticed mold killing bacteria in 1928 and gets the credit. But Fleming's discovery sat mostly idle for a decade. It took Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford, then a wartime American manufacturing push involving fermentation tanks and corn steep liquor, to turn penicillin into something that could actually save soldiers. Invention was the easy part. Making it by the ton was the miracle.

That's the eureka myth — our habit of worshipping the lone flash of genius while ignoring the thousands of small improvements that make a technology cheap. Wright's law says every doubling of production drives costs down by a predictable percentage. Chinese solar manufacturers exploited this relentlessly, building at scale until panels became one of the cheapest energy sources in human history. The technology was largely American. The manufacturing dominance was not.

Operation Warp Speed shows what the alternative looks like. Under Moncef Slaoui, the government stopped acting as a referee and started acting as a bottleneck detective — finding whatever would slow vaccines down and clearing it in advance. It bought doses before they existed, funded factories before trials finished, and secured glass vials and raw materials early. Stripe's Frontier fund uses the same logic for carbon removal, committing nearly a billion dollars to buy a technology that barely exists yet. Guaranteed demand pulls supply into being.

Learning to Say Yes

We got extraordinarily good at building veto points — every review, every lawsuit, every hearing designed to stop the wrong thing from happening. That skill was earned honestly, and it still matters. But a country that can only block cannot house its workers, power its grid, or scale its own inventions. The next era belongs to whoever remembers how to finish things.