Abundance

Name: Abundance
Author: Ezra Klein

by Ezra Klein

Genre

Nonfiction, Business, Science

Year

2025

Pages

304

Contents

Overview

Abundance argues that many of America’s most painful modern problems—sky-high housing costs, fragile supply chains, stalled climate action, and waning trust in government—are not inevitable shortages but “chosen scarcities” created by political incentives and institutional barriers to building and innovation. Ezra Klein reframes the core question of governance as whether the country can reliably produce more of what people need: homes in opportunity-rich cities, clean energy and transmission, functional infrastructure, and medical and technological breakthroughs.

Moving from housing and permitting to science funding and industrial policy, the book critiques a pattern in which policymakers expand demand (through subsidies or promises) while leaving supply constrained by layered procedures, veto points, and risk-averse systems. Klein calls for a “liberalism that builds”: rebuilding state capacity, accepting real trade-offs, and redesigning rules so public goals translate into visible results.

Across case studies—from California’s housing and high-speed rail to mRNA vaccines and solar power—the book’s central conflict is between a politics of scarcity that rations and blames, and a politics of abundance that invests, builds, and deploys at speed. Its themes include state capacity, innovation, legitimacy through outcomes, and the democratic stakes of proving that progress is still possible.

Plot Summary ⚠️ Spoilers

Ezra Klein opens by imagining an ordinary day in 2050 shaped by abundance: ultra-cheap clean energy, plentiful water through desalination, new food systems like vertical farms and cultivated meat, AI-driven productivity that frees time, and medicines made and delivered more efficiently. The point of the vignette is not prediction but orientation. Klein argues that a richer, cleaner, less anxious society is technologically plausible—yet the United States has repeatedly failed to deliver the material preconditions of that future because it has made it too hard to build and too hard to invent.

From that imagined future the book turns to overlapping crises of the early twenty-first century—housing, financial instability, the pandemic, climate, and political turmoil. Klein frames these not as mysteries without solutions but as breakdowns in production: society underbuilt homes and infrastructure, underprepared supply chains, and underinvested in the capacity to scale what it discovers. He diagnoses a “supply-side mistake” in modern politics. Republicans claimed “supply side” as tax cuts and market-first ideology, while Democrats often subsidized demand—through vouchers, credits, and insurance expansions—without expanding the supply of what those subsidies were meant to buy, like housing, doctors, or child care. When demand rises against rigid supply, prices surge and access is rationed. COVID-era inflation and shortages, he suggests, exposed how central the supply problem is: leaders could either “make more” of what people needed or try to suppress demand.

Chapter 1 (“Grow”) argues that the country’s most important frontier is no longer open land but productive cities, where proximity accelerates innovation and opportunity. Klein contrasts the mythic “Go West” impulse with the reality that power and prosperity have long been made in dense urban centers. Yet in “superstar” metros—San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Boston—housing supply has not kept up with demand, transforming cities from escalators of mobility into luxury goods. High costs do not fully push out elite workers or firms because agglomeration still pays, but they block the broad base of workers and families who once moved toward opportunity. Research on mobility and migration is used to argue that children’s outcomes depend heavily on where they grow up and how long they can remain in high-opportunity places; when rents spike, the ladder is pulled up.

Klein traces this shortage to policy choices: zoning that restricts density, political incentives of homeowners whose wealth is tied to scarcity, and a strain of politics that is “symbolically liberal” but operationally conservative about growth. California becomes the key example. The state once built rapidly, but over time adopted caps, growth boundaries, and procedural systems that allow projects to be delayed or killed. Homelessness, the book argues, tracks housing costs and vacancy rates more than climate or individual pathology; when cheap forms of housing are eliminated and vacancies vanish, people at the bottom lose the last “chair” in a game of musical chairs. Klein also treats the environmental and procedural reforms of the 1970s as a turning point. Laws designed to stop pollution, sprawl, and destructive projects came to be used as general-purpose tools to block housing, especially when litigation and review processes expanded to cover most development.

Chapter 2 (“Build”) extends the supply argument to climate. Klein contends that avoiding catastrophe requires building a clean-energy world at enormous scale, not pursuing “degrowth” that attempts to impose scarcity quickly. Energy access has historically tracked human well-being, and global energy inequality remains a moral reality; the task is to make energy clean, not to make it unavailable. The book emphasizes that decarbonization means electrifying daily life—replacing vast numbers of fossil-fueled machines in homes and transportation—while also expanding electricity generation and building far more transmission. The core obstacle is no longer merely technical feasibility; it is whether the United States can permit and construct fast enough.

To show what “can’t build” looks like, Klein uses California high-speed rail as a warning. A project with voter approval and high-profile political backing becomes mired in eminent-domain fights, environmental review cycles, litigation, and cascading delays that turn time into the main cost driver. As costs balloon and timelines stretch, political support frays, and the project’s ambition shrinks. Klein generalizes this pattern: construction productivity has stagnated, and affluent democracies have accumulated so many veto points and procedural requirements that even widely supported projects struggle to complete. The “Green Dilemma,” as described through environmental law scholarship, is that older environmental rules meant to stop harmful development can also slow the green infrastructure now needed to solve climate change. Klein argues that legitimacy cannot come only from process; it must also come from the ability to deliver outcomes.

Chapter 3 (“Govern”) focuses directly on state capacity. Klein contrasts a relatively fast, lower-cost supportive-housing project in San Francisco—helped by faster approvals and, crucially, by avoiding many public-funding requirements—with Los Angeles’s slower, more expensive homeless-housing efforts under Proposition HHH. The difference, he argues, is not simply money or intentions; it is a governance style that adds layers of goals, reviews, audits, and standards until delivery collapses. Klein labels this “everything-bagel liberalism”: trying to pack every political good (workforce rules, design demands, equity requirements, green standards, extensive community processes) into each project without confronting trade-offs, raising costs and slowing timelines so much that fewer units, miles, or benefits actually get produced.

The same pattern appears in industrial policy. Klein notes that ambitious federal efforts, including CHIPS, often come with sprawling requirements that may be individually defensible but collectively delay and dilute implementation. He argues the United States has also hollowed out internal expertise by outsourcing too much to consultants and by keeping the public workforce small even as public spending and responsibility grow. A pandemic-era breakdown at California’s Employment Development Department illustrates how old technology, procurement constraints, and accumulated rules can immobilize an agency just when speed is most needed. As a counterexample, Klein points to Pennsylvania’s rapid rebuild of I-95 after a tanker fire: emergency authority waived normal procedures, empowered managers, and prioritized reopening quickly while still using union labor. The bridge reopens in days, offering a model of legitimacy earned through competent delivery.

Chapter 4 (“Invent”) argues that some crises cannot be solved mainly by regulating or scaling existing tools; they require breakthroughs. Klein tells the story of Katalin Karikó, an mRNA researcher whose grant applications were repeatedly rejected and whose academic standing declined even as she pursued an idea others dismissed. Her partnership with Drew Weissman eventually yields key advances—modifying mRNA to avoid dangerous immune responses—but their work is initially overlooked, even rejected by a top journal. Only later, through private-sector adoption, does the platform mature. When COVID-19 arrives and the viral sequence is published, an mRNA vaccine can be designed within days, leading to record-speed trials and authorization. Karikó and Weissman’s later recognition underscores the book’s warning: the breakthrough was close to being lost.

Klein names this systemic risk the “Karikó Problem”: a science-funding system that is increasingly bureaucratic and risk-averse, biased against young scientists and highly novel ideas. Peer review, paperwork, slow processes, and incentives for safe proposals can turn public funding into a status game rather than an engine of discovery. He contrasts that model with institutions built for ambitious bets—DARPA’s empowered program managers and Bell Labs’ long-horizon research culture—and calls for “metascience” experiments to redesign funding: simplifying applications, using lotteries or discretionary “golden tickets,” funding people rather than projects, and reducing reporting burdens. The goal is not one perfect system but a diversified one that is more willing to take risks.

Chapter 5 (“Deploy”) argues that even successful invention is not enough. Klein uses penicillin to puncture the “eureka myth”: Alexander Fleming’s discovery did not immediately transform medicine, and early human use was limited and precarious. Only when U.S. wartime institutions treated deployment as a coordinated problem—identifying bottlenecks, standardizing production, funding factories, running trials, and organizing distribution—did penicillin become a mass-produced lifesaver. Scale then drove costs down and benefits up.

That lesson becomes a critique of modern American weakness: the country often invents but fails to scale. Klein points to solar power as a case where U.S. breakthroughs and early policy support were later undermined by policy whiplash, while Germany built markets through sustained subsidies and China achieved manufacturing scale that made panels cheap. Deployment creates learning-by-doing; building more teaches builders how to build better and cheaper. Operation Warp Speed is presented as a modern example of competent deployment: government acted as a “bottleneck detective,” spreading bets across vaccine platforms, accelerating trials and review, expanding manufacturing capacity, solving supply-chain constraints, and purchasing doses so vaccines were free. Klein argues the program’s political orphaning should not obscure its practical lesson: focused government can move fast when it chooses to.

In the conclusion, Klein situates abundance in a wider political transition. Drawing on the idea of “political orders,” he argues the neoliberal era’s story—prosperity through markets and smaller government—has been breaking under the weight of the Great Recession, climate change, inequality, the pandemic, and affordability crises. In the vacuum, scarcity politics thrives: the right channels shortage into exclusion and suspicion, while liberal governance can inadvertently deepen scarcity through restrictive rules that prevent building. Klein argues that abundance is not a checklist but a governing lens: decide what should be plentiful, confront trade-offs openly, subtract rules that exist mainly to create veto points, and rebuild the capacity to execute. If democracy cannot deliver tangible improvements—homes, clean power, infrastructure, cures—politics will keep curdling into resentment and attraction to authoritarian “capacity.” The book closes by insisting that focus is a choice, and that institutions can be rebuilt so public investment turns into visible results that sustain a new consensus.

Characters

Ezra Klein

Author-narrator who argues that many modern crises are “chosen scarcities” created by barriers to building, deploying, and inventing. He uses case studies—from housing and high-speed rail to vaccines and solar—to make the case for a politics of abundance and stronger state capacity.
Joe Biden

U.S. president cited as framing the inflation-era choice between reducing demand and expanding supply, and as pursuing build-oriented legislation. The book uses his agenda and its implementation bottlenecks to illustrate the gap between spending and state capacity.
Donald Trump

Used as an emblem of scarcity politics that channels grievance rather than delivering durable capacity to build. The book also presents him as benefiting from backlash against ineffective governance in liberal strongholds.
Ronald Reagan

Represents the market-first branding of “supply side” politics and the anti-government turn that shaped later constraints on public capacity. He is also linked to policy choices that derailed U.S. momentum in deploying solar.
Jimmy Carter

Cited as a Democratic voice echoing skepticism about government’s ability to solve major problems. His quotes help frame the bipartisan retreat from building state capacity.
Bill Clinton

Quoted declaring “the era of big government is over,” illustrating a bipartisan shift toward smaller-government assumptions. The book uses this as background for why public institutions later struggled to deliver.
Arthur Laffer

Referenced for the Laffer Curve as a symbol of how Republicans branded “supply side” as tax cuts rather than a broader commitment to expanding real-world capacity. His inclusion supports the book’s argument about a misdefined supply-side politics.
George H. W. Bush

Appears via his critique of Reagan-era tax-cut claims as “voodoo economics.” The reference underscores intra-conservative disputes over what actually strengthens the supply side.
Aaron Bastani

A techno-utopian author invoked to show the value of imagining futures of material abundance. His work helps Klein argue that politics needs a compelling vision of what building can achieve.
Neil Postman

Quoted to emphasize that technologies embed values and reshape society rather than remaining neutral tools. The book uses this to connect innovation choices to political and social outcomes.
David M. Potter

Cited for a definition of abundance as a dynamic relationship between society and nature. His framing supports the book’s theme that abundance is created through institutions and choices, not just resources.
Lizabeth Cohen

Referenced for the idea of a “Consumers’ Republic,” which Klein critiques as misaligned with ensuring abundant essentials. Her work helps distinguish abundance of necessities from consumerism alone.
Horace Greeley

A symbolic “Go West” figure used to contrast frontier mythology with the real engine of American prosperity: cities. His story sets up the argument that today’s frontier is urban growth.
Ed Glaeser

Urban economist cited to explain why dense cities drive productivity and innovation, and how affordability changes their social role. His work supports the claim that housing scarcity undermines opportunity.
Enrico Moretti

Economist used to explain why firms and talent continue clustering in high-cost metros despite cheap communication. His research helps anchor the claim that proximity still matters for innovation.
Michael Bloomberg

Quoted describing New York as a “luxury product,” illustrating how housing scarcity turns cities into elite-only spaces. The line supports the book’s case that supply constraints reshape urban life.
Raj Chetty

Mobility researcher cited to show that children’s outcomes and economic opportunity depend strongly on place and time spent in high-opportunity areas. His findings are used to argue that housing scarcity blocks upward mobility.
Peter Ganong

Coauthor of research showing that housing costs and constraints reduced migration and ended regional income convergence. His work is used to link zoning to national inequality.
Daniel Shoag

Coauthor with Ganong on evidence that constrained housing supply dampened mobility and income convergence. The book uses this research to argue shortages have economy-wide consequences.
William Fischel

Economist cited on zoning’s political economy and the incentives of homeowners to restrict new housing. His work supports the argument that scarcity is often an asset-protection strategy.
Jacob Anbinder

Historian used to trace the rise of anti-growth politics in liberal places, especially California. His account supports the thesis that well-intentioned reforms became tools for blocking construction.
Gregg Colburn

Coauthor cited for evidence that homelessness rates are best explained by housing prices and vacancies rather than individual-level pathologies. His work grounds the argument that housing abundance is central to reducing homelessness.
Clayton Page Aldern

Colburn’s coauthor who supplies data-driven arguments tying homelessness variation to housing scarcity. The book uses their framework to rebut common alternative explanations.
Matthew Yglesias

Writer cited for arguments about how policy choices eliminated cheap housing options and intensified homelessness. His role supports the book’s emphasis on supply, not just services.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Referenced as a symbol of midcentury liberal ambitions and later invoked via a warning about choosing abundance over desolation. His presence frames abundance as a civilizational choice with political stakes.
Rachel Carson

Author of Silent Spring, cited as a catalyst for the environmental movement that reshaped regulation. The book links that era’s reforms to later procedural barriers that also slowed beneficial building.
Richard Nixon

Presented as a Republican who advanced major environmental regulation in the 1970s. His inclusion helps show that the regulatory state expanded through bipartisan politics.
Jason Hickel

Degrowth advocate cited as representative of a climate strategy Klein critiques as politically infeasible and too slow for the necessary timeline. The book contrasts his approach with a build-focused clean-energy agenda.
Jesse Jenkins

Energy expert used to quantify the massive grid and generation build-out required to electrify and decarbonize. His work supports the argument that permitting and construction are central constraints.
Jerry Brown

California governor portrayed as a champion of high-speed rail and ambitious public projects. His role illustrates how political will can still be defeated by process-heavy systems.
Gavin Newsom

California governor who scales back high-speed rail ambitions amid delays and ballooning costs. His decisions exemplify how prolonged timelines erode support and shrink projects.
Barack Obama

President cited for backing high-speed rail with stimulus funding as future-oriented infrastructure. The reference supports the argument that ambition without execution can still fail.
Brian Kelly

CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (2018–2024) who describes how delay compounds costs and argues for stronger internal capacity. His perspective anchors the book’s critique of time, litigation, and consultant dependence.
Nicholas Bagley

Law professor cited for criticizing America’s process-obsessed “procedure fetish.” His analysis supports Klein’s claim that legitimacy has been defined through paperwork rather than results.
Ralph Nader

Consumer advocate referenced as part of a movement that helped expand lawsuit-driven oversight. The book uses this to show how accountability tools can later become obstacles to building.
Mancur Olson

Economist cited for a theory of interest-group proliferation that creates more veto points over time. His framework helps explain why projects get slower and harder in mature democracies.
J. B. Ruhl

Environmental law scholar cited for the “Greens’ Dilemma,” describing how older environmental rules can block green infrastructure. His work supports the call to modernize permitting without abandoning environmental goals.
James Salzman

Environmental law scholar referenced alongside Ruhl on how permitting regimes create “nightmares” for clean-energy projects. The book uses this analysis to argue for faster, clearer pathways to build.
Ed Zarenski

Construction estimator quoted on how accumulating requirements and paperwork raise costs over time. His account supports the argument that delay and complexity have become structural cost drivers.
Austan Goolsbee

Economist cited as coauthor of research documenting construction productivity stagnation. His work supports the claim that the problem is systemic and long-running, not a short-term labor issue.
Chad Syverson

Economist cited for emphasizing the many interacting causes behind construction slowdown, including “a million veto points.” His framing supports Klein’s emphasis on governance design.
Zachary Liscow

Legal scholar cited for linking permitting regimes to high infrastructure costs and low trust in government. His work is used to connect administrative failure with political consequences.
Larry Selzer

Leader of the Conservation Fund who argues environmentalism must shift from blanket opposition to enabling necessary build-out. His role supports the book’s effort to reconcile climate goals with faster construction.
Rebecca Foster

CEO of the Housing Accelerator Fund who explains how layered public requirements slow and raise the cost of affordable housing. Her account helps illustrate the mechanics of “everything-bagel liberalism” in housing delivery.
Scott Wiener

California state senator credited with a 2017 law that fast-tracked certain housing approvals. He appears as an example of policy aimed at reducing procedural barriers to building.
Yasmin Tong

Affordable-housing consultant who describes how multi-funder financing stacks, audits, and standards inflate costs and delay projects. Her perspective supports the book’s critique of complex public delivery systems.
Ron Galperin

Former Los Angeles city controller who criticizes regulations that consume funds and inflate per-unit costs in homeless housing. His analysis is used to show how good intentions can reduce real output.
Heidi Marston

Former LAHSA leader who describes how restrictive funding rules and oversight can leave agencies unable to spend large budgets effectively. Her experience illustrates capacity limits inside service systems.
Michael Gerrard

Climate law scholar cited for arguing that environmental politics often denies trade-offs and delays decisions. His role supports Klein’s call for explicit prioritization and faster choices.
Gina Raimondo

Commerce secretary who defends CHIPS funding criteria as tied to project success and labor needs. Her inclusion anchors the book’s discussion of industrial policy requirements and trade-offs.
Jen Pahlka

Civic-tech leader who recounts California’s Employment Development Department breakdown during the pandemic. Her story illustrates how accumulated rules and outdated systems can paralyze government under pressure.
Josh Shapiro

Pennsylvania governor who declares an emergency to waive procedures and accelerate the I-95 rebuild. His role provides a counterexample of rapid, outcome-focused governance.
Mike Carroll

Pennsylvania transportation secretary who executes the no-bid, round-the-clock I-95 rebuild. His account emphasizes empowered managers taking calculated risks to deliver speed.
Bob Kuttner

Liberal commentator who argues for social housing, prompting the book’s supply-focused rebuttal emphasizing zoning and building constraints. He appears as a foil within debates over housing solutions.
Brink Lindsey

Policy writer cited arguing that both left and right must rethink governance to restore effective state power. His role supports the book’s cross-ideological case for rebuilding capacity.
Katalin Karikó

mRNA pioneer whose repeated grant rejections and professional setbacks exemplify how breakthrough ideas can be stranded by risk-averse funding systems. Her eventual vindication through COVID-era vaccines anchors the book’s argument for a stronger politics of invention.
Drew Weissman

Penn immunologist who partners with Karikó to solve key problems that enabled mRNA vaccines. Their collaboration illustrates how persistence and support structures determine whether breakthroughs survive.
Pierre Azoulay

Economist cited critiquing risk-averse scientific institutions and advocating diversified funding experiments. His work supports the book’s call for “metascience” reforms.
Heidi Williams

Economist cited on innovation’s role in growth and on the declining government share of R&D. Her inclusion supports the argument that abundance depends on sustained public commitment to discovery.
John Doench

R&D leader cited arguing that scientific bureaucracy wastes researchers’ time and slows progress. His perspective supports the book’s critique of paperwork-heavy funding systems.
Jeremy Neufeld

Policy advocate cited for arguing that restrictions on high-skilled immigration reduce U.S. inventive capacity. He appears in the book’s broader agenda for strengthening innovation inputs.
Vannevar Bush

Central figure in the book’s innovation history, cited both for shaping federal basic-research policy and for leading wartime coordination that enabled penicillin to scale. He represents government as an organizer of both invention and deployment.
Francis Collins

Longtime NIH director cited acknowledging outdated support structures and the need to better enable young scientists. His presence supports the argument that even insiders see the system’s constraints.
Patricia Labosky

NIH program leader who describes High-Risk, High-Reward grants designed to fund unconventional ideas. She appears as evidence of attempts to counteract systemic risk aversion.
Erica R. H. Fuchs

Scholar cited explaining DARPA’s success through empowered program managers and talent networks. Her work supports the book’s argument for alternative institutional designs that take bigger bets.
J. C. R. Licklider

ARPA program leader cited as an example of how assembling collaborators can produce foundational breakthroughs like early internet development. He illustrates the book’s emphasis on institutions that cultivate networks and direction.
Jon Gertner

Author of The Idea Factory cited to describe Bell Labs’ model of long-horizon research and collaboration. His work provides an institutional template for productive invention.
Alexander Fleming

Discoverer of penicillin whose initial “eureka” did not translate into mass benefit without further work. His story anchors the book’s argument that discovery is only the first step.
Howard Florey

Oxford professor who advances penicillin toward usable testing but struggles with scale and early human outcomes. His role illustrates the long bridge between lab success and widespread deployment.
Ernst Chain

Biochemist who partners with Florey in developing penicillin while confronting the limits of production and consistency. He supports the theme that innovation requires systems, not just ideas.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

President associated with wartime innovation coordination that enabled U.S. mass production of penicillin. He appears as evidence that government can organize deployment at scale when focused.
James Phinney Baxter III

Historian quoted on penicillin’s development and the irony of contamination in production. His perspective supports the argument that scaling depends on solving mundane bottlenecks.
Joel Mokyr

Economic historian cited for the idea of “microinventions” needed to tinker and scale technologies. His work reinforces the book’s rejection of the lone-breakthrough myth.
Thomas Edison

Invoked as an example that innovation is systems-building and incremental improvement, not a single flash of genius. He supports the book’s emphasis on deployment and iteration.
Gregory Nemet

Scholar cited on solar’s cost decline and on how U.S. policy choices contributed to losing deployment leadership. His analysis supports the argument that consistent scaling policy matters.
Mariana Mazzucato

Economist cited to argue governments already shape technological outcomes and “pick” enabling technologies. Her work supports Klein’s case for explicit public strategy rather than denial.
John Maynard Keynes

Quoted to define government’s role as doing what markets cannot or will not do at all. The citation reinforces the book’s argument for public action on bottlenecks and public goods.
Paul Mango

Operation Warp Speed official cited describing the program’s venture-style bets and logistics focus. His account supports the book’s argument that coordinated deployment can be a core government competence.
Moncef Slaoui

Leader of Operation Warp Speed cited emphasizing that manufacturing scale is the hardest part of vaccine delivery. He reinforces the theme that implementation determines impact.
Caleb Watney

Policy advocate cited highlighting the importance of whole-of-government urgency and decision sequencing. His role supports the book’s argument that speed requires intentional coordination.
Nan Ransohoff

Climate policy leader cited explaining advance market commitments and “pull funding” as tools to spur deployment. She appears in the book’s proposed toolkit for scaling climate-critical technologies.
Thomas Kalil

Former OSTP official cited advocating success-contingent commitments such as prizes and advance purchases. His role supports the book’s argument for smarter incentives that reduce demand uncertainty.
Leopold Aschenbrenner

AI researcher cited warning that energy constraints and geopolitics could push critical AI infrastructure abroad. His inclusion links abundance politics to emerging bottlenecks in power and computation.
Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO quoted to frame AI’s dependence on chips and energy, raising the stakes for clean-energy abundance. He appears as a contemporary marker of how demand for power may surge.
Gary Gerstle

Historian cited for a framework of U.S. “political orders” and how durable governing eras form and collapse. His ideas structure the conclusion’s argument that the neoliberal order is breaking and a new one is contested.
JD Vance

Cited as using housing scarcity rhetoric to blame immigrants, illustrating how shortages can be weaponized into exclusion. His role supports the book’s warning about scarcity politics.
Kamala Harris

Mentioned proposing building millions of homes, presented as evidence of Democrats moving toward a supply-side housing stance. Her inclusion supports the book’s claim that a building agenda is becoming politically salient.
Jerusalem Demsas

Quoted arguing that scarcity encourages people to view outsiders as threats to resources. Her perspective supports the book’s link between shortages, fear, and polarization.
Elon Musk

Mentioned as an innovative figure reportedly focused on shrinking government rather than rebuilding capacity. He appears in the book’s discussion of competing visions for how the state should relate to technological progress.
Michael Bennet

Senator quoted contrasting U.S. legislative paralysis with China’s perceived productivity. His remarks support the book’s argument that visible capacity to build affects legitimacy at home.

Themes

Abundance argues that America’s defining crises—housing, climate, health, and political instability—share a surprisingly concrete root: the country has lost the habit (and capacity) of making enough of what people need. Rather than treating scarcity as inevitable, the book frames abundance as a governing philosophy that measures success by lived, physical outcomes: more homes, more clean power, more cures, and faster delivery.

Scarcity politics vs. the politics of plenty. The introduction’s 2050 vignette (cheap clean energy, desalination, vertical farms, shortened workweeks) functions as a moral counterweight to the present, where shortages harden into zero-sum conflict. The conclusion extends this into a story of political order: when visible progress stalls, politics curdles into blame—immigrants as the housing culprit, strongmen as the solution—rather than collective problem-solving.
The “supply-side mistake” and the cost of not building. A recurring theme is that liberal policy often boosts demand (credits, vouchers, subsidies) without expanding supply, producing higher prices and rationing. Chapter 1’s “superstar city” diagnosis shows how constrained housing supply turns opportunity engines like New York or San Francisco into “luxury products,” reversing upward mobility (Chetty) and pushing homelessness into a brutal game of “musical chairs” (Colburn and Aldern).
Process as a form of power—and paralysis. Chapters 2 and 3 trace how layered procedures, litigation, and veto points turn time into the central cost driver: California high-speed rail’s shrinking ambition becomes a case study in how legitimacy is too often equated with endless review. The “everything-bagel liberalism” motif sharpens the critique: each project accumulates worthy add-ons (local hiring, audits, design mandates) until outcomes collapse, as seen in LA’s Proposition HHH and even CHIPS-style industrial policy.
State capacity as the missing ideology. The book refuses the “big vs. small government” frame, arguing instead for competent government that can choose priorities and execute—illustrated by the I-95 rebuild’s emergency discretion and union-backed speed.
Innovation is political—and deployment is the real bottleneck. Chapter 4’s Karikó story exposes a system that filters out risky breakthroughs through bureaucratic grant culture; Chapter 5 rejects the “eureka theory” by showing how penicillin and solar required wartime-style bottleneck-solving to scale. Operation Warp Speed becomes the emblem of abundance governance: targeted, pragmatic, and relentlessly focused on turning ideas into mass benefit.

Together, these themes insist that abundance is less a utopia than a discipline: identify constraints, accept trade-offs, subtract needless barriers, and rebuild institutions that can deliver progress at the speed democracy now demands.