Abundance
by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
In One Sentence
This book argues that many of our biggest problems—housing, energy, health, science, and infrastructure—are the result of chosen scarcity, and that a “liberalism that builds” can replace this with an abundance of the things that actually make life better.
Key Takeaways
- Scarcity in core areas like housing, energy, and health care is mostly political and institutional, not technological or inevitable.
- Subsidizing demand without increasing supply (housing, college, health care, child care) just drives prices up and fuels rationing.
- Cities are engines of innovation and mobility—but zoning, NIMBYism, and restrictive rules have turned them into exclusionary luxury goods.
- Affluent societies accumulate rules, veto points, and organized interests that make actually building things painfully slow and expensive.
- American science is structurally biased against young researchers and risky, weird ideas—leading to lots of safe papers and too few breakthroughs.
- Government is not just a regulator; historically it has been a key inventor, funder, and deployer of major technologies (penicillin, highways, NASA, Warp Speed, etc.).
- The real bottlenecks are often organizational and political (rules, permitting, funding design), not purely technological.
- A politics of abundance asks, again and again: What is scarce that should be abundant? If we can’t build more of it, why not—and how do we fix that?
Summary
The book starts from a blunt thesis: scarcity is often a choice. We say we care about climate change, housing as a human right, and curing disease, yet we block clean energy projects, restrict new housing, and fund science in a way that punishes risk. Policymakers spend trillions subsidizing demand for goods whose supply is deliberately choked—housing, health care, education—creating a world where middle-class feel is cheap (TVs, gadgets) while middle-class security (housing, care, stability) is wildly expensive.
From there, the authors argue that growth and abundance come from productivity—doing more with the same people and resources through better ideas, technologies, and systems. They focus on a handful of building blocks that matter most: housing, transportation, energy, and health. They contrast our “Consumers’ Republic” (endless stuff to buy) with a new agenda that prioritizes what we can build: homes, clean power, medical breakthroughs, and the institutions needed to deliver them.
A big chunk of the book explores how we got stuck. Zoning, environmental review, local vetoes, adversarial legalism, and a culture of process-over-outcomes have made building anything—from apartments to solar to high-speed rail—slow and expensive. Affluence creates powerful organized groups that fight over distribution and values, and the political system increasingly rewards those who can navigate or create complexity (lawyers, consultants) rather than those who can pour concrete or design bridges.
On science and invention, the book diagnoses the “Karikó Problem”: young, risky, paradigm-shifting researchers are systematically disadvantaged by grant systems biased toward safe, incremental work. Despite more scientists, more papers, and more tools, many fields show diminishing returns. The burden of knowledge is real, but so is the organizational problem: everyone is crowding into the same safe topics and ignoring the weird trees in the forest that might hide the next penicillin, CRISPR, or GLP-1.
Finally, the authors lay out a political and institutional agenda: treat bottlenecks as design problems, use both push and pull funding (like Operation Warp Speed) to accelerate key technologies, reform zoning and permitting to make building easier, and shift liberalism away from everything-bagel proceduralism toward outcomes. They position abundance as an emerging political order that can cut through both right-wing scarcity populism and blue-state NIMBY scarcity, aiming for a society with more homes, more energy, more cures, and more capacity to build.
My Notes & Reflections
This book basically frames a lot of things I already felt in my gut: the problem isn’t just “capitalism” or “markets,” it’s that we keep choosing structures that make it almost impossible to build the stuff that matters. We scream about affordability and climate, but then layer rules, veto points, and procedural safeguards on top of everything until it all grinds to a halt.
The housing sections hit hard. The idea that homelessness tracks rents and vacancy—more than poverty or unemployment—turns the whole debate on its head. It’s not that “these cities just have more broken people”; it’s that they have deliberately constrained housing. Same with the story of boardinghouses: we regulated out the cheap, imperfect options, then acted shocked when the only remaining alternative for some people is a tent under an overpass. That’s a brutal but clarifying way to see “housing as a policy choice.”
I also like the way the book refuses to romanticize “small is beautiful” or endless local control. The Olson/corporate-lawyer angle explains why a lot of ambitious people run toward software and away from things like high-speed rail or housing: it’s just soul-crushing to spend your life in permitting hell. That rings true. Building in the real world (or even just renovating) feels like fighting a thousand tiny vetoes, each backed by some piece of process or some group doing “values-based” opposition.
On science, the Karikó story and the novelty-bias experiments make the slowdown feel less mysterious. It’s not that we ran out of ideas; it’s that we’ve built a giant machine that punishes the exact mindset that produces breakthroughs. I like the “weird trees in the forest” metaphor—most people are staring at the same couple of trees because that’s where the citations and grants are. Meanwhile, things like GLP-1 from lizard venom and CRISPR from obscure bacterial defenses remind us how weird the actual path of discovery is.
The abundance framing also feels optimistic in a grounded way. It doesn’t say “tech will save us” or “government is the problem.” It says progress comes from pairing public vision and risk with private ingenuity and iteration. Government should do what others can’t or won’t: fund the early stages, de-risk deployment, pick some big bets (penicillin, solar, Warp Speed), and then get out of the way where it’s actually the bottleneck. The questions at the end—What’s scarce that should be abundant? What is hard to build that should be easy?—are a useful lens for basically any project, from national science policy down to “how do we build more housing in my county.”
For me personally, there’s an obvious throughline: if housing and energy abundance are this central, it’s not crazy to think about organizing a local “build club” or investment group to add units in places like Lunenburg County (or Nova Scotia, or Canada). The book nudges me to look at rules and bottlenecks first, not just “market demand.” Where exactly are the chokepoints—zoning, permitting, financing—and how do you design around or push through them? That’s a much more actionable way to think about “making things better” than just tweeting about inequality.
Who Should Read This Book
- People who care about housing, climate, or infrastructure and feel frustrated that nothing big ever seems to get built.
- Policy nerds and political junkies who want a framework beyond “left vs right” to explain why government keeps failing at execution.
- Scientists, founders, and technologists who sense that institutions are holding back progress and want language for the bottlenecks.
- Liberals who feel uneasy about NIMBY politics, process obsession, or blue-state dysfunction and want a constructive alternative.
- Anyone curious about how cities, zoning, science funding, and government design quietly shape their opportunities and quality of life.
Favorite Quotes
- Scarcity is often a choice: if we truly want a different future, we have to build and invent more of what we need, not just argue about who gets the too-small pie.
- Giving people subsidies for goods whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to chase an elevator that’s racing upward.
- We have an uncanny economy where the secure middle-class life is receding, but the material trappings of middle-class success have never been cheaper.
- “Abundance…is a state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.”
- Cities are “the absence of physical space between people and companies,” and proximity has become more valuable as the cost of long-distance connection has fallen.
- Symbolically liberal, operationally conservative: blue America puts “No human being is illegal” signs in single-family-only zones and then blocks the housing that would actually include more people.
- “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all.” Housing cannot be both a universal wealth machine and universally cheap.
- We didn’t just stop building boardinghouses; we made them at least functionally illegal—then wondered why more people ended up in encampments.
- Affluent societies accumulate organized interests and procedures until the hardest thing to do is to actually complete a big project.
- When the government is judged on processes instead of outcomes, legitimacy gets tied to box-checking rather than solving problems.
- In science, “too many projects get funding because they are probable, but science moves forward one improbability at a time.”
- The “burden of knowledge” is real, but an equally big problem is everyone looking at the same few trees, while weird, neglected trees—like lizard venom or bacterial immune systems—hide the next breakthrough.
- DARPA’s lesson: give smart program managers power, let them make counterintuitive bets, don’t punish failure, and don’t subject everything to risk-averse peer review.
- Most major inventions don’t matter at first; the world changes through tinkering, embodiment in infrastructure, and scaling—microinventions more than eureka moments.
- The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible.
- Advance market commitments and pull funding solve a basic problem: companies won’t scale production of expensive new tech if they can’t trust demand will be there.
- Operation Warp Speed worked because everyone, from generals to staffers, could answer the same question the same way: deliver at least one safe and effective vaccine, at scale, by the end of the year.
- “Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial”—we act like we can avoid hard choices and still build fast.
- Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity; blue-state scarcity politics (like tight housing) helped create the conditions for that populism.
- Abundance is “a liberalism that builds”: more homes, more energy, more cures, more construction, and institutions that can actually deliver.
FAQ
Is this book worth reading?
Yes, especially if you feel stuck in the usual “taxes and culture war” framing. The book offers a clear, coherent explanation for why we can’t build housing, infrastructure, or clean energy at the speed we need—and what a different politics might look like. It’s part diagnosis, part blueprint, and it’s concrete enough to change how you see local fights over zoning, permitting, and science funding.
What is the main argument of the book?
The core argument is that many of our scarcities are chosen: we’ve built institutions, rules, and funding systems that block supply in crucial areas. Instead of focusing only on redistribution or demand, we need a “politics of abundance” obsessed with making it easier to build more of what matters—homes, clean power, medical breakthroughs, and public works.
How is this different from a normal pro-growth or pro-market book?
This isn’t a simple “free market” or “cut red tape” rant. The authors are very explicit that markets alone won’t prioritize clean energy or risky, socially valuable science. Government has to act as investor, inventor, and bottleneck-solver—using models like DARPA, Warp Speed, and advance market commitments—while also reforming the very processes that make public projects so slow and expensive.
What does the book say about housing and homelessness?
It argues that high housing costs and homelessness are fundamentally about supply: places with high rents and low vacancy have more homelessness, regardless of poverty and unemployment rates. Zoning, minimum lot sizes, parking rules, and bans on “low-end” options like boardinghouses created artificial scarcity. Fixing homelessness at scale means building a lot more housing and undoing the policies that made that hard.
Why do the authors focus so much on cities?
Cities are where innovation, productivity, and mobility happen. Evidence shows that people in large metros are about 50% more productive, and kids who grow up in high-innovation places are more likely to become inventors themselves. But when housing in those cities becomes insanely expensive, poor and middle-class families are pushed out, and cities stop being engines of opportunity and turn into gated communities for the already-successful.
What’s the “Karikó Problem” in science?
The Karikó Problem is shorthand for a system where young, risky, high-potential scientists are sidelined by funding structures biased toward safe, incremental work. NIH peer review penalizes highly novel proposals, younger scientists struggle to get grants, and everyone is nudged into crowded safe topics. That’s bad for breakthroughs in medicine, climate tech, and everything else we need.
How does the book think government should support innovation?
It highlights a few tools: empowering DARPA-style program managers, using push and pull funding (grants plus guaranteed purchases), experimenting with grant models (lotteries, golden tickets, reduced paperwork), and focusing on big, clear goals like Warp Speed did. The key is to make possible what private actors alone cannot, then let the market compete and iterate on top.
Is the book critical of liberals?
Yes, but from the inside. It argues that liberal politics often overvalues process and underweights outcomes: everything-bagel projects with too many goals, environmental rules that block clean energy as much as fossil projects, zoning used to keep out new neighbors while flying progressive flags. The book calls for a “liberalism that builds” instead of one that mainly regulates and litigates.
Is this book still relevant in a polarized, populist era?
Probably more relevant. Scarcity and dysfunction are fuel for populism: when housing, health care, and energy feel out of reach, it’s easy to blame outsiders or “elites.” The abundance lens suggests an alternative: fix the supply bottlenecks, build visibly useful things, and restore some trust that democratic government can deliver. That doesn’t solve polarization on its own, but it shrinks the space where demagogues thrive.
How can I use this book practically?
You can use it as a diagnostic tool. For any local or national issue, ask: What should be abundant here? What is hard to build that should be easy? Where is the bottleneck—rules, funding design, permitting, capacity, political veto points? It’s a lens you can apply to housing in your town, deployment of clean energy, or even how your own projects are structured.
Click to expand comprehensive chapter-by-chapter breakdown (~15-20 min read)
