Abundance is not a very good book

[alyaza]

Alyaza Birze (July 3, 2025)

welcome back to Birzeblog, after a lengthy hiatus.

if you've followed my Bluesky over the past three months or so you've probably seen at least one of my posts about the discourse du jour in liberal spaces, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance. perhaps because Klein is framing it as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberalism (or perhaps because people just like drama and argumentation) this book and its prescriptions are among the latest in a post-2024 series of online liberal-leftist litmus tests. there's a truly fascinating amount of sectarianism over it between mainstream liberals and self-described "abundance" types (who usually seem to come from the ranks of online YIMBYism). from the left, meanwhile, the book has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism against basically every premise it advances—this has become especially acute after the truly bizarre WelcomeFest, in which a large number of pro-abundance thinkers got very mad about Bluesky and people criticizing them there. from all the controversy you might therefore assume this book is actually interesting in some way.

unfortunately it really is not. it is clunky and pretty uncompelling, and it's bizarre to me that it has the reputation it already does. to the extent that the book arrives at correct conclusions, that's usually because the conclusions are self-evident to its audience. but in every other way the book is boring or a mess, and sometimes both. its broader argumentation is effectively libertarian despite coming from two ostensible social liberals. in a number of places—even to someone like myself, who does not specialize in much of what the book is about—the book is demonstrably falsifiable or outright bizarre in its argumentation (and, again, sometimes both). finally and on the whole, the framework of "abundance" is muddled and not coherent, largely coming off as a wishlist of loose demands with no central ideological core. i think you'll see what i mean as we go forward here.

the stuff Abundance gets correct

let's start with a few areas in which i think Abundance is, for the most part, correct in its analysis. you'll forgive me for only briefly explaining my thinking:

• onerous housing regulations: the existence of legitimately onerous regulations in the housing market is inarguable, and Abundance is correct to center this as a problem. from the issue of zoning (as M. Nolan Grey observes in Arbitrary Lines, "In a typical US city, at least three-quarters of the land zoned for residential uses will be zoned exclusively for single-family houses."), to parking minimums (parking spaces, according to Henry Grabar in Paved Paradise, often cost $30,000 or more per space and add hundreds of thousands to housing costs), to the design constraints created by multi-stair buildings (as lengthily recounted in Michael Eliason's Building for People), there are many things you could categorize as regulations which can be removed to ease the housing crisis and make new housing better for everyone.
• bizarre planning and design requirements: likewise, the process of planning and designing housing in the United States is usually a bad one across the board. the process takes far too long generally and is too easy to concern troll; when planning meetings are required, these are almost invariably a terrible and unrepresentative feedback mechanism. who we let build housing is often ridiculous. San Francisco's ordinance favoring construction by “Micro-Local Business Enterprises” is perhaps the primordial example in how it defines small business ("less than $12 million in average annual gross revenue"), and in so doing it discourages the use of proven contractors while consolidating business into a select few contracting companies. there are also no shortage of nonsensical bodies with power over the process they should not have. the book names the Art Commission and the Mayor’s Office on Disability as two examples in San Francisco; undoubtedly, most cities have formal or informal analogues, or just allow aforementioned planning meetings to disrupt the process. all of these are things we could streamline, and housing construction would assuredly not be worse off if we did so.
• weaponizing environmental protection laws: the weaponization of environmental protection laws (such as the infamous California Environmental Quality Act) is a constant issue that does need to be addressed in some form. (mercifully, in the time since i began drafting this, some of CEQA's worst excesses have finally been curbed!)
• homeownership cannot be a speculative asset and attainable to everyone in our current capitalist economy: this should be apparent to literally anybody who can understand supply and demand. for housing to be a useful speculative asset it must be scarce; and indeed, housing currently appreciates in value largely because of scarcity. but this is incongruent with affordable housing (or really housing people at all). it's also bad that for many people, their net worth is partially or wholly tied to the valuation of their home.

all of this is well and good. something you might be picking up on, though, is a pattern of things that are obvious. remember: this is marketed as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberals more generally. everything i have just described has a correct side and an incorrect side, and there is effectively no controversy over which side is correct within the audience Klein and Thompson are targeting with this book. you will find very few people in the liberal-left hemisphere of politics who, for instance, actually believe the California Environmental Quality Act ought to apply to literally any development requiring government approval. every governor of California since Jerry Brown has railed against its undue expansion by a court for a reason. and leftism and liberalism aren't even really in tension on the fourth point, even if they disagree on almost everything else that follows from the statement.

somehow, though, Thompson and Klein cherrypick these problems into a full blown crisis to which the only supposed solution amounts to libertarian deregulation. the book jumps from "CEQA is bad and should be reformed" to "virtually all environmental regulations are onerous, and stand in the way of building housing" without seriously considering the psychotic downstream implications of the second statement.

what the hell are we doing here?

lest you think my characterization is exaggeratory, i offer the following vignette based on my initial experience reading the book. Abundance immediately gets to making the second argument in its introduction, saying

well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

later on—in a section recounting the environmental history of the United States—it elaborates on the argument, positing that

Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens and the environment. They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act. In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building. [emphasis mine]

rather definitive of the book's alignment, i think. but just to quiet any ambiguity, the book picks up again later still by taking the side of a report by J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, which concludes

the problem is really the profusion of different, overlapping policies and authorities. Beyond NEPA, Ruhl and Salman note the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

to say this is goofy is putting it mildly. we don't have time to go through all of these, but it's not even clear to me how most of these regulations actually serve as the primary obstacles to housing construction—and the book does not really elaborate besides gesturing at regulatory and environmental groups and their litigious tradition that ostensibly began with Ralph Nader. i do not find this particularly convincing, nor do many reviewers. it also skips over the fact that many of these regulations are demonstrably some of the most valuable ever passed. the Clean Air Act is almost singularly responsible for the reduction of air pollution in the United States, preventing as many as 370,000 premature deaths and saving an estimated $2 trillion per year. laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act both seem pretty important, and successful at preventing large-scale extinctions, in what is otherwise the ongoing Holocene extinction event, wherein extinction rates are far higher than the estimated background rate. and even the most ambiguously beneficial regulations such as the Clean Water Act still seem advisable to keep around. despite the general improvement of water quality in the United States, many bodies of water continue to exhibit concerning—and dangerous—levels of pollution.

of course, the text also seems unintentionally revealing as to why Klein and Thompson are so willing to potentially throw out entire swathes of valuable environmental regulation: they seem to dismiss, or be ignorant of, how bad things still are because those things are not as visible as they used to be. according to them:

Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today. [emphasis mine]

almost none of this is correct. earlier this year—and for the 25th year in a row—Los Angeles was recognized by the American Lung Association as one of America's worst polluted cities. pollution has come down drastically, yes, but even current levels are known to cause excess mortality in the thousands every year in Southern California. and even when pollution doesn't kill, it has serious health effects: we know that Southern California pollution levels cause "reduced lung function growth, increased school absences, asthma exacerbation, and new-onset asthma" in children, for example. to call the problem "passed" is flatly ridiculous. similarly, Beijing's pollution problem—although massively improved—remains far above WHO guidelines and has an even higher annual body count than Los Angeles. nor have reductions been accomplished because Beijing nebulously "got richer;" they have been accomplished through a massive and multifaceted Chinese government program to address the causes of, sources of, and contributors to pollution.

another illuminating passage of the book in this vein decries "special air filtration systems for developments near freeways" which it poses as admirable, but symptomatic of too-strict green building requirements that increase homelessness through increasing the cost of construction. while i'm sure this does make it harder to build inexpensive housing, it seems rather straightforwardly bad to argue that—simply because the alternative is potential homelessness—people in affordable housing should not receive protections from car fumes and pollutants. arguably, air filtration has become necessary independent of freeways (and away from them too): the growing wildfire smoke problem in California is likely responsible for tens of thousands of premature deaths in the past decade. it is not going to get better as the climate continues to warm. should we simply not build with this in mind because it will be more expensive? this is a conclusion the book all but asks you to make in its one-dimensional advocacy for more housing.

what others are saying about the book

other deficiencies are, unsurprisingly, evident throughout other portions of the text—and in even defining the bounds of who supports abundance or what it means as a policy orientation. how, for example, can an agenda with little through-line besides deregulation keep itself from being weaponized by right-wingers who use deregulation to exact harm? already, such a "co-optation" (if you can even call it that) is evident. Hannah Story Brown, for instance, observes that "Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act," yet is also doing so in a manner which advantages fossil-fuel interests. she adds that "Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.”"¹ the through-line of deregulation, too, is fraught. even writers more amenable to the abundance agenda such as Mike Konczal are rather hesitant to concur with the book's attempt to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to a disparate set of problems. Matt Bruenig, another of the writers more sympathetic to abundance, summarizes best that "bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling." and it seems debatable at best, at least if you ask Liberal Currents, that abundance is capable of helping the Democratic Party electorally in the way Klein and Thompson want to believe. "Very few voters," write Isaiah Glick, "are actually going to notice the changes that Klein and Thompson suggest in their book."

in the ideological department, to call the book generally confused—outside of deregulatory libertarianism—is probably still generous. Malcolm Harris, in a lengthy piece, lingers on a number of questions that seem prudent such as "[...]why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?" surely, in a book where the pair find time to pooh-pooh measures such as degrowth, advertisement reduction, or a shift away from meat and dairy consumption, there is space to linger on the defense budget—often maligned as the representation of government waste and inefficiency among the liberal-left hemisphere of politics? but they are conspicuously pretty silent here, and in many places where scrutiny of government waste and inefficiency is actually warranted. there's also the book's bizarre forays into non-liberal economics. when the book starts "cit[ing] Karl Marx in [its] argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards," Harris understandably poses this as self-evidently stupid—not least because it is an absurdist usage of Marx in a book that, for the record, seldom even mentions class (much less class conflict).

returning to Bruenig (who to reiterate is otherwise reasonably sympathetic to abundance) he calls the book's narrativizing and historiography rather weak and scattershot, saying "Sometimes the blame [for obstruction] is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader." hardly an ideal review of one of Abundance's central themes. Bruenig's specialty is economic policy, though, and it is apparent that he is even more critical of the book's willingness to confidently assert things like "American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark." America is almost uniquely unwilling to implement Nordic-style measures, Bruenig notes, opting (largely at the behest of liberals like Klein and Thompson!) for means-testing over universality.

and more generally, to close out, the book seems to be irritatingly fast and loose with its facts and focus despite the wonkishness of both its writers. there are people who credibly contest Klein and Thompson's understanding of telecommunications or his characterization of the process for deploying rural broadband funding, the nuances of which he seems to have either missed or intentionally ignored because they undercut his thesis; and there are people who observe the oddity of the pair's hyperfocus on a handful of major U.S. cities as engines of creation and productivity in what is ostensibly intended to be a sweeping agenda for America. there are people who dispute the Abundance narrative of housing, its tendency to avoid having to address the impact of the Great Recession, and its dancing around inconvenient facts, such as

the Golden State [having] built plenty of housing in the mid-aughts. In fact, at times in 2004 and 2005, California even permitted more new housing units than Texas did. Since zoning restrictions didn’t suddenly get tighter in the second half of the 2000s, this building boom scrambles the thesis that public land-use controls are the root cause of today’s housing crisis.

to say nothing of those who raise their eyebrows at abundance and its willingness to sideline the very workers needed to carry out such a sweeping program of construction; or those who rightly point that infrastructural bottlenecks—from housing, to power, to transportation, and beyond—are often more a product of capital, corporate consolidation, and monopoly than regulation that needs cutting. for all the problems Klein and Thompson assign to regulation, there is above all very little engagement with what comes after (which is often less clear-cut than they would perhaps like), or even a fleshing out the intermediary between what we have now and what abundance looks like tomorrow. this is a bad way to do things.

in sum, it's not a particularly good or interesting book. it would be nice to talk less of it.

notes

¹ one is inclined to think, as an aside, that abundance would be less easy to "co-opt" if Derek Thompson could avoid paling around with conservatives like noted freak and probable white supremacist Richard Hanania. the organizational ties of abundance groups—rife with Silicon Valley capitalists, effective altruists, techno-libertarians, and all sorts of bizarre and reactionary monied interests—also leave quite a lot to be desired.

Comments

[citrakayah]

I broadly agree with everything you've said here. While I have not read the book yet (and likely won't) my impression based off seeing fans of the book and seeing these people and their ideological allies talk is pretty negative.

laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act both seem pretty important, and successful at preventing large-scale extinctions, in what is otherwise the ongoing Holocene extinction event, wherein extinction rates are far higher than the estimated background rate.

I don't think they actually care about this, at least not very much, and I think the fact that they don't is kind of central to their outlook on environmentalism. You see it more explicitly in pro-Abundance people who aren't big name pundits, but as a general ecological current the Abundance people are influenced pretty deeply by the ecomodernists. While I'm not a historian or scholar of environmental movements by any means, I have been paying some attention to this, and as far back as 2012 these people were arguing that conservation should abandon preserving the biosphere for its own sake and draping that argument in progressive-sounding language.

Since then, the (understandable) focus on climate change has allowed these people to argue for setting biodiversity and the nonhuman world to the wayside. If a desert species would be driven extinct by a solar power plant, well, that's too bad for them because otherwise we don't switch off fossil fuels and the entire biosphere collapses. This might be an understandable viewpoint... if all other options had been thoroughly exhausted, which they have not been. The fact that they insist so strongly on this binary, dismissing options like reducing consumption (particularly galling given that they are well aware of how many resources are sunk into 'AI' and, as you note, ignore the amount the USA spends on its military) is telling.

What I think is really going on here is that they only care about global warming because it threatens them personally and they're willing to hurt other people (human or not) to deal with that. Biodiversity loss largely doesn't, or at least they can tell themselves that; so long as Chesapeake Bay isn't flooding Klein's house or making a stink because of an algal bloom he's not overly worried about the living things in it. This is, I'm convinced, why they hate degrowth so much--a lot of them try to cloak it concern for the Global South but the idea of shrinking consumption was targeted at well-off Global Northeners and they're smart enough to know that. It would mean they have less stuff and live slightly less comfortable lives. But you can't just say that openly because while a lot of liberals are still pretty anthropocentric being that openly uncaring still gets you looked at askance; you need to use progressive language to justify it.

And this is why you can go look at the conversations of their fans and see people saying "Yeah if an endangered species is on a potential lithium mining site we should just kill it off, needs must" and then react with horror when anyone so much as mentions the term "degrowth" around them.

When I was in school, something we remarked upon in our political theory class is the difference between sustainability and, for lack of a better term, ecological healthiness. The Abundance people want their lifestyle to be sustainable, in that they can keep doing it without major consequences to them, but don't care about how healthy it is for the biosphere beyond that.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks for reading this so I don't have to. Sounds like the only good part is the title.