Abundance is the bold title for a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been receiving a lot of attention. Given my own profound interest in how to get past scarcity thinking I felt compelled to read it rather than rely on the profusion of reviews. In short, while I commend Klein and Thompson on wanting to shift the dialog towards a positive vision, the book falls comically short of its title. A more apt name would have been something like “Awakening” as it does a good job of representing the authors’ realization of just how ineffective government has been.

Unless you have been sitting under a rock, or been an unquestioning Democrat (maybe the two are the same?), very little in the book will be new to you. It recounts our inability to build new housing, new railways, new transmission lines, along with the apparent slow down of innovation and traces it back to bureaucracies more concerned with process than with outcome, mired in complex laws and regulations, and subject to constant litigation by myriads of interests. All correct but definitely not news. 

The question has been for quite some time: what should we do about it? And here is where the authors utterly lack the courage of their convictions to call for bold changes, for some kind of actual reinvention. The inside jacket breathlessly claims “Abundance is a once-in-a-generation paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty” (admittedly this is language by the publisher but the authors have sufficient heft that they could have probably objected to this). If this is what you are looking for you will be sadly disappointed. Whenever they get to the point of talking about what could be done, for example to drastically refocus government funding for innovation, they pull back hard towards incremental patches applied to the existing system.

Late in the book Klein and Thompson appear to grasp how short they are falling of boldness and their unease is captured perfectly in this sentence “What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve” (p. 216). Now here is a guess: they encountered a fear that the degree of change required is such that we don’t know how to accomplish it with “democracy as usual” but they rightly don’t want to provide any ammunition for the “tear it all down” and “we need a new aristocracy” crowds.

This is the real discussion we need to be having: how can we achieve the disruptive level of change required for an actual abundance agenda in a democratic fashion. Now that would be an actual once-in-a-generation paradigm-shifting book. A good first stab at this is Astra Taylor's book from 2020 presciently titled "Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone."

P.S. I am really tired of the current style of popular books where everything has to be motivated by some anecdote to apparently make it engaging. The anecdotes at times drag on for pages of fluff that does nothing to push harder on the arguments.