The introduction opens with a speculative day in 2050 to depict what “abundance” could feel like: ultra-cheap clean energy from solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal; desalinated water easing drought pressures; vertical farms and cultivated meat freeing land for rewilding; AI-driven productivity shortening the workweek; and new medicines manufactured in space and delivered cheaply.

From that future, the authors pivot to the early twenty-first century’s overlapping crises—housing, finance, pandemic, climate, and political instability—and argue that many hardships persisted not because solutions were unknown, but because the United States repeatedly chose not to build and not to invent at the needed scale. The book’s thesis is framed bluntly: to get the future people want, society must produce more of what it needs.

The authors then diagnose a political “supply-side mistake”: Republicans claimed the supply side through tax cuts and deregulation, while Democrats focused on subsidizing demand (vouchers, credits, and insurance subsidies) without sufficiently increasing the supply of homes, doctors, infrastructure, and breakthroughs. When demand is boosted in the face of constrained supply, prices rise and rationing worsens, producing the affordability crises seen in housing, health care, education, and child care—temporarily masked by cheap consumer goods, asset booms, and debt.

COVID-era stimulus is presented as a turning point that exposed supply constraints through inflation and shortages, pushing policymakers back toward production capacity (chips, ports, medicines, housing, energy). The authors argue economic growth is not simply “more pie,” but faster change driven by productivity and new technologies; without visible physical-world progress, politics curdles into nostalgia and zero-sum conflict.

Finally, the authors call for “a liberalism that builds,” focusing on failures in liberal-governed places such as California as both a governance problem and a political vulnerability that feeds populism. They define abundance as having enough housing, transportation, energy, and health capacity to enable better lives, and set the book’s agenda: rebuild state capacity to build and invent rather than merely redistribute what already exists.