Abundance - Book Summary
Book by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson
Summary
Through compelling case studies in housing, energy, government, innovation, and technology deployment, Klein and Thompson argue that our most pressing challenges stem from chosen scarcities rather than natural limits. They outline a framework for building a future with more homes, cleaner energy, better governance, and breakthrough innovations that make life better for everyone.
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America's Housing Crisis by the Numbers
America is facing a severe housing affordability crisis. In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it had risen to 6 times. The cost of housing has skyrocketed while wage growth has stagnated.
This crisis isn't evenly distributed. In 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year. Since 2007, it has never permitted more than 150,000. The consequences are stark: California has about 12 percent of the nation's population but 30 percent of its homeless population and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Cities: Engines of Innovation and Mobility
Cities serve two crucial economic functions:
- Engines of Innovation - They create economic value by bringing people together. 'Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas.'
- Engines of Mobility - They provide economic opportunity for ordinary workers. Cities with dynamic economies pay higher wages even for service jobs, allowing for upward mobility.
When housing costs rise too high, cities still function as engines of innovation but fail as engines of mobility. The wealthy and high-skilled workers can still afford to live in expensive cities, but ordinary workers are priced out, destroying a traditional path to the middle class.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Why Housing Became a Crisis in the 1970s
The 1970s marked a dramatic shift in how Americans viewed housing. Before this period, housing wasn't considered a prime asset - you simply bought a home to live in it. But several factors converged to change this fundamentally.
Inflation made 30-year fixed-rate mortgages incredibly valuable, as the real value of payments decreased while home values rose. From 1955 to 1970, owner-occupied housing held steady at about 21% of total household net wealth. Between 1970 and 1979, it jumped to 30%.
As homes became central to Americans' wealth, homeowners became increasingly motivated to protect and enhance their property values. The most effective way to do this was through restrictive zoning laws that limited new construction, creating artificial scarcity that drove up prices.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
Homelessness Is Primarily a Housing Problem
In their book 'Homelessness Is a Housing Problem,' Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern systematically debunk common misconceptions about homelessness. They found almost no correlation between homelessness rates and factors commonly blamed:
- Poverty rates don't predict homelessness - many cities with high poverty (like Detroit) have low homelessness
- Unemployment shows no correlation
- Mental illness rates don't align with homelessness rates
- Drug use explains only about 5% of the difference between places
What does predict homelessness? Housing costs and vacancy rates. As rent rises and available housing decreases, homelessness increases almost in lockstep.
Homelessness is like a game of musical chairs. With enough housing (chairs), everyone finds a home. With too little housing, the most vulnerable are left out.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
The Birth of Anti-Growth Liberalism
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new strain of liberalism emerged in response to the environmental devastation caused by unchecked growth and development. This wasn't merely a conservative reaction - it was led by progressives who witnessed the destruction of natural landscapes, polluted air and water, and bulldozed communities.
In May 1964, President Johnson warned, 'The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs... Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.'
This environmental consciousness led to a wave of legislation between 1966 and 1973 that created new barriers to development: the National Historic Preservation Act, the Department of Transportation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and many others. These laws allowed citizens to sue the government to stop harmful projects, but they eventually became tools that could block almost any new development.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
The Environmental Crisis That Inspired Regulatory Reform
The environmental devastation of mid-century America was severe and tangible. In 1943, Los Angeles residents woke to air so dark they feared a Japanese gas attack. In 1948, a lethal smog in Donora, Pennsylvania killed twenty people. In Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River became so polluted it caught fire in 1969.
In Pittsburgh, drivers used windshield wipers to clear away soot so they could see the road. The Merrimack River in New Hampshire ran different colors depending on which dyes textile mills were dumping that day.
This visible destruction spurred the environmental movement, culminating in the first Earth Day in 1970 when 20 million Americans—roughly 10% of the population—demonstrated for environmental protection. This wasn't partisan; Republican President Richard Nixon created the EPA and signed the Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and Endangered Species Act.
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
The Climate Dilemma: Growth vs. Degrowth
Two competing visions exist for addressing climate change:
- Degrowth: Argues that endless economic growth is unsustainable and we must accept material sacrifices, especially in wealthy nations. It critiques our relationship with nature as exploitative and calls for a fundamental shift in values.
- Abundance: Contends that human progress requires more clean energy, not less overall energy. It sees technological innovation as key to solving climate challenges while improving living standards globally.
The political challenge of degrowth becomes clear when governments face energy shortages or price spikes. In 2022, protests over fuel prices erupted in 90 countries. When Sri Lanka restricted synthetic fertilizer use, agricultural yields collapsed, contributing to political instability. While degrowth offers a coherent critique, its political viability is questionable when voters consistently reject material sacrifice.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
The Clean Energy Cost Revolution
A clean energy revolution has arrived with astonishing speed. The cost of solar energy fell by about 90% between 2010 and 2020. Wind power costs dropped by nearly 70% in the same period. The world installed more solar power in 2023 than it did between 1954 and 2017 combined.
Energy researchers found that previous projections dramatically underestimated these cost reductions. The best forecasting models expected solar costs to fall by 2.6% annually and never more than 6%. In reality, they fell by 15% per year, year after year.
By 2022, solar was already cheaper than natural gas for new electricity generation, with wind just slightly more expensive. Both were about half the price of coal. These dramatic cost reductions make rapid global decarbonization technically and economically feasible for the first time.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
The American Electrification Challenge
Decarbonizing America requires electrifying virtually everything. Energy analysts estimate that in the coming years, consumers will need to replace about one billion machines with clean alternatives - gas-powered cars with electric vehicles, gas furnaces with heat pumps, gas stoves with induction cooktops, and more.
This creates two massive challenges. First, we must generate enough clean electricity to power all these devices. According to Princeton energy expert Jesse Jenkins, 'For every fifteen years from 2020 to 2050, we need to build the entirety of our electricity grid worth of supply again.'
Second, we must build an unprecedented amount of transmission infrastructure. This would require constructing more than 4,100 miles of transmission lines annually - more than we've ever built in a single year - and sustaining that pace for decades.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
The Green Infrastructure Construction Challenge
Building clean energy infrastructure at the necessary scale requires solving several interlocked challenges:
- Land Use: Wind and solar require far more land than fossil fuels to produce the same energy. According to Princeton researchers, a plausible decarbonization path requires renewable energy installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers—roughly equal to Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee combined.
- Construction Scale: Meeting climate goals would require building two new 400 MW solar facilities—each covering at least 2,000 acres—every week for the next 30 years.
- Transmission: Moving electricity from sunny and windy regions to population centers requires an unprecedented expansion of transmission lines, which face their own severe permitting challenges.
- Local Opposition: Every project must navigate community concerns about viewsheds, local impacts, and changing land use patterns.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Environmental Laws vs. Environmental Progress
Environmental laws created to protect nature are now often the biggest obstacle to building the clean energy infrastructure needed to address climate change. A 2023 study called 'The Greens' Dilemma' highlighted this contradiction:
'The US government is helpless as an investor in new technologies. One useful summary of this view came from a 2012 Economist essay, which claimed "governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online [and] turn them into products."'
This dual image—the state, as a lazy slowpoke, versus the market, as the self-sufficient dynamo of innovation—bears little resemblance to history.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Democracy by Lawsuit: The Unintended Legacy of Environmental Law
In the 1960s, attorney Ralph Nader became famous for exposing how car manufacturers resisted safety improvements while blaming individual drivers for accidents. His work led to the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and inspired young activists known as 'Nader's Raiders' to create a movement focused on suing the government to force better regulations.
These efforts helped pass crucial environmental laws like the Clean Water Act. But they also created a system where litigation became the primary tool for achieving progressive goals. Between 1971 and 1973, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund pursued 77 legal actions, with approximately 70 seeking to block government actions or influence regulatory practices.
While this 'democracy by lawsuit' approach achieved important environmental victories, it also inadvertently created procedural obstacles that now block the very clean energy projects needed to address climate change.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Bureaucracy Does Not Equal Good Governance
America's government processes have become so complex that they've begun to undermine the very goals they were designed to achieve. Nicholas Bagley, a law professor who served as Michigan Governor Whitmer's chief counsel, argues that liberals have developed a counterproductive 'procedure fetish.'
'Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,' Bagley writes. 'The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rulemaking, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions—the list goes on and on.'
These procedures were created with good intentions—to ensure legitimacy and accountability. But they've grown so cumbersome that they prevent government from effectively addressing urgent problems, undermining public trust rather than building it.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Government Capacity and Infrastructure
When California began building high-speed rail in 2008, the state's High-Speed Rail Authority had just ten employees. One was responsible for designing social media graphics. The actual work was outsourced to consulting firms like WSP, which estimated the system would cost only $33 billion and take just twelve years to build. That estimate proved wildly optimistic.
By contrast, when Bay Area Rapid Transit contracted with Alstom to deliver 775 rail cars, something unusual happened: the project came in faster and $400 million under budget. A key factor was 'BART's decision to have its own staff do more of the engineering work in house.'
This pattern repeats across government: agencies that maintain in-house expertise consistently deliver better results than those that outsource everything to consultants. Research found that increasing employment in state departments of transportation by 1 employee per 1,000 residents reduced highway construction costs by 26%.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
How Fixing I-95 Shows What Government Could Be
On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying gasoline flipped over and ignited underneath the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia, causing a catastrophic collapse. The bridge carried 160,000 cars daily, and officials initially warned rebuilding would take months.
Instead, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro declared an emergency, exempting the project from normal procurement rules, environmental reviews, and bureaucratic procedures. Work began immediately with contractors who were already nearby on other jobs. Labor worked 24/7, and officials made rapid decisions without waiting for committee approvals.
The result: I-95 reopened in just twelve days. As Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll explained, 'The emergency declaration was a game changer. I took calculated risks that I'd have not taken in a normal project.' This demonstrated that government can work quickly and effectively when empowered to focus on outcomes rather than processes.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Everything-Bagel Liberalism: When Good Goals Crowd Out Great Results
Liberal policymaking often suffers from trying to achieve too many worthy goals simultaneously, making it difficult to accomplish any of them effectively. This 'everything-bagel liberalism' adds requirements and standards that each seem reasonable but collectively make projects unworkable.
For example, the 2023 Notice of Funding Opportunity for semiconductor manufacturing asked applicants to prepare 'an equity strategy... to create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals,' develop plans 'to include women and other economically disadvantaged individuals in the construction industry,' provide 'access to child care for facility and construction workers,' and detail how they would include minority-, veteran-, and female-owned businesses in their supply chain.
While each goal is worthy, collectively they create complexity that can delay or derail vital projects. Effective policymaking requires prioritizing what matters most and being willing to make strategic trade-offs.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Housing Affordability: When Public Financing Makes Things Worse
In San Francisco, Tahanan is a 145-unit permanent supportive housing complex for the chronically homeless. Built in three years for less than $400,000 per unit, it stands in stark contrast to typical affordable housing projects in the Bay Area that take twice as long and cost up to $700,000 per unit.
Tahanan's secret? It used private funding from Charles and Helen Schwab to avoid the regulatory requirements triggered by public money. These include local business enterprise requirements, arts commission review, disability office review, and complex financing arrangements that typically require affordable housing projects to secure multiple funding sources, each with their own compliance demands.
The result is a paradox: using public funds intended to make housing more affordable actually makes it more expensive and slower to build. As Rebecca Foster of the Housing Accelerator Fund explained, project delays can cascade: 'It might mean that you miss a financing deadline and have an adjuster on your tax credit fees that are another $2 million.'
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
The Bell Labs Success Formula
'If Bell Labs had a formula, it was to hire the smartest people, give them space and time to work, and make sure that they talk to each other.'
- Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
The DARPA Model: How to Fund Breakthrough Innovation
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the US established the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to ensure America wouldn't fall behind technologically again. Despite a modest budget (about one-tenth of NIH's), DARPA has produced an extraordinary array of innovations, including the internet, GPS, and technologies crucial to personal computers.
What makes DARPA so effective? It empowers program managers to recruit and fund networks of researchers without bureaucratic constraints. They're not subject to peer review, can make bold bets, and aren't punished for failure.
Unlike traditional grant processes where researchers submit proposals that undergo peer review, DARPA program managers actively seek out talent and build collaborations between people who wouldn't normally work together. As one researcher described it: 'They say, 'If we get this person over here, working with this person over here, and then we bring in this third person, we could solve this unsolvable problem.'' This approach creates new connections between fields that often lead to breakthrough innovations.
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
'Doomed to Succeed': How Scientific Research Lost Its Edge
'We want the most life-saving, life-enhancing, productivity-expanding inventions and innovations possible. That means we need a system that is designed to take more risks, and accept more failures, as a part of the scientific process. The problem isn't that too much science is "doomed to fail." It's the opposite. Too much science is doomed to succeed—fated to duplicate what we know rather than risk failure by reaching into the unknown.'
- James Evans
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
The 'Grantsmanship' Problem in Scientific Funding
Scientific funding has increasingly rewarded researchers who excel at writing grants rather than those with the most innovative ideas. As Pierre Azoulay, an MIT economist who studies scientific productivity, notes, 'There is a hidden curriculum for navigating grants, and it is critical for success as a scientist today. But those skills are weakly correlated with scientific potential, and they might be negatively correlated.'
This emphasis on 'grantsmanship' has created a system that rewards those who master bureaucracy rather than those who push boundaries. Scientists now spend up to 40% of their time writing grant applications and administrative documents rather than conducting actual research. Funding agencies sometimes take seven months or longer to review applications.
As John Doench of the Broad Institute asks, 'Why are we doing this? Because they're afraid that I'm going to buy a Corvette with the grant money?' While accountability matters, the current system's procedural burden has become counterproductive.
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
The Burden of Knowledge
Why has scientific progress slowed in many fields despite more scientists, more funding, and better tools than ever before? Economist Benjamin Jones proposes an elegant explanation called 'the burden of knowledge.'
The theory starts with two observations: nobody is born an expert, and expertise in any field grows over time. As we accumulate knowledge, scientists must spend more years mastering what's already known before they can contribute something new. They must climb higher to reach the frontier of knowledge.
Consider element discovery: in the 1600s, phosphorus was discovered by a German alchemist boiling urine. In contrast, discovering element 117 (tennessine) required creating a rare isotope, sending it to a nuclear facility where it was bombarded with calcium ions for 150 days, and using specialized equipment to detect its fleeting existence. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, forcing us to climb higher and use more complex tools to make new discoveries.
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
The Karikó Problem: How Scientific Funding Fails Innovation
Katalin Karikó spent decades studying messenger RNA (mRNA) as a potential therapy, but her work was repeatedly rejected for funding. At the University of Pennsylvania, she submitted dozens of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health, receiving constant rejections. 'Every night I was working: grant, grant, grant,' she said. 'And it came back always no, no, no.'
Without funding, Karikó was demoted and eventually left academia. Yet her research on mRNA became the foundation for the COVID-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives during the pandemic. When Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the coronavirus on January 11, 2020, Moderna used Karikó's work to design its vaccine within 48 hours.
This 'Karikó Problem' reveals how scientific funding systems are biased against risky, innovative ideas that don't fit established paradigms - often the very ideas with the greatest potential for breakthroughs.
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
The Youth Drought in Science
American science is aging at an alarming rate. In the early 1900s, many revolutionary scientists like Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger did their breakthrough work in their twenties and thirties. Their youth may have been vital to their paradigm-breaking insights.
Today, young scientists are becoming an endangered species. The share of NIH-funded scientists who are thirty-five years old or younger declined from 22 percent in 1980 to less than 2 percent by the 2010s. This dramatic shift reflects how scientific funding has become biased against risk-taking.
The problem isn't just that young scientists struggle to get funding. It's that the entire system now rewards safe, incremental research over bold new ideas. As James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist, puts it: 'Too many projects get funding because they are probable. But science moves forward one improbability at a time.'
Section: 1, Chapter: 4
A New Political Order of Abundance
American politics undergoes fundamental transformations roughly once every 30-40 years. Historian Gary Gerstle calls these 'political orders' - constellations of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape politics beyond typical election cycles.
The New Deal order (1930s-1970s) featured government actively managing the economy and protecting workers. The neoliberal order (1970s-2010s) emphasized individual freedom and market solutions. Both represented points of agreement between parties despite their many disagreements.
Today, we appear to be in a transition between political orders. The financial crisis of 2008, the climate emergency, the failures of globalization, the COVID pandemic, and the affordability crisis have all undermined confidence in the neoliberal framework. Both parties are rethinking core assumptions about trade, industrial policy, and the role of government in the economy.
This transition creates an opportunity for a new politics of abundance that transcends traditional left-right divides - one focused on building what we need rather than restricting what we have.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
The Eureka Myth
We celebrate the 'eureka moment' - that flash of insight when a scientist or inventor discovers something revolutionary. But this narrative fundamentally misunderstands how progress actually happens.
Consider penicillin. Alexander Fleming discovered it in 1928, but thirteen years later, it had still been used to treat just five human patients, with two dying. The drug became useful only after the US government coordinated hundreds of scientists to solve manufacturing challenges, standardize production, and distribute it widely.
Similarly, Thomas Edison didn't 'invent' the lightbulb - he improved existing designs and, more importantly, built an entire electrical system around it, including generators, wires, sockets, switches, and billing meters. In both cases, the initial discovery was just the beginning.
Real progress comes from three crucial steps that follow discovery:
1. Tinkering - improving and refining the initial concept
2. Embodiment - creating the systems and infrastructure around the core invention
3. Scaling - making it widely available and affordable
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
America's Implementation Gap
The United States excels at invention but struggles with implementation. We have more Nobel Prizes for science than the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. Yet we often fail to turn our breakthroughs into domestic industries.
An American craftsman, Elisha Otis, invented the first safe passenger elevator in 1853. Today, basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland. Americans invented the world's first nuclear reactor and solar cell, but we're well behind various European and Asian countries in deploying these technologies.
In the 1950s, researchers at Bell Labs built the first silicon-based solar cell, converting sunlight into electricity. While the New York Times heralded it as 'the beginning of a new era' that might realize 'mankind's most cherished dreams,' America largely abandoned solar development after the 1970s. By 2020, China was making 70 percent of the world's photovoltaic panels, having reduced costs by about 90 percent in fifteen years.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
Pull Funding: A Better Way to Accelerate Innovation
When funding innovation, governments typically use 'push funding' - giving money upfront for research and development. But there's another approach called 'pull funding' that can be more effective for certain challenges.
While push funding pays for effort, pull funding pays for success. It works by promising to purchase products once they meet specified criteria. This approach solves a common barrier to innovation: demand uncertainty. Companies are often reluctant to invest in developing products if they're unsure whether there will be sufficient market demand.
One powerful form of pull funding is the Advance Market Commitment (AMC). In 2007, the Gates Foundation and several countries offered pharmaceutical companies $1.5 billion to develop pneumococcal vaccines for low-income countries. By 2020, hundreds of millions of doses had been purchased and distributed, saving approximately 700,000 lives.
This model could be applied to other urgent challenges like carbon removal technology or green cement, guaranteeing a market for effective solutions and accelerating their development.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
Operation Warp Speed: A Model for Government-Led Innovation
When COVID-19 struck, experts believed developing a vaccine would take years, possibly a decade. Yet Operation Warp Speed (OWS) delivered vaccines in just 10 months - the fastest vaccine development in history.
OWS succeeded by tackling the entire innovation pipeline systematically:
- It spread risk by investing in multiple vaccine technologies simultaneously
- It accelerated clinical trials and regulatory review
- It built manufacturing capacity before knowing which vaccines would work
- It solved production challenges like developing specialized glass that wouldn't shatter at ultra-cold temperatures
- It created a distribution system to deliver vaccines to 70,000 sites across the country
- It made vaccines free to the public
The US government spent less than $40 billion on OWS - a bargain considering the lives saved and economic damage prevented. One analysis estimated that vaccinations in just the first eight months were worth $6.5 trillion in economic value. Yet despite this success, neither political party fully embraced OWS as a model for future challenges.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
Wright's Law: Why Building More Makes Technology Cheaper
In the 1930s, American engineer Theodore Wright observed a remarkable pattern: for every quadrupling of aircraft production, unit costs fell by about one-third. This relationship, now called Wright's Law, explains why technologies often become dramatically cheaper as we build more of them.
Wright's Law reveals that innovation is embedded in the act of making. As we manufacture more of something, we discover efficiencies, solve problems, and develop better techniques. This virtuous cycle of building and learning explains the cost declines in everything from Model T automobiles to computer chips to solar panels.
China's solar revolution exemplifies Wright's Law. Drawing from expertise in making cheap textiles and shoes, Chinese firms gradually learned how to produce solar panels more efficiently. They developed better methods for cutting silicon wafers, automated production lines, and scaled up successful approaches. The result: solar panel costs fell by 90% in fifteen years, making clean energy economically competitive with fossil fuels for the first time.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
Focus Is the Foundation of Success
'On the Warp Speed team, you could have asked anyone what the project's goal was, from the generals and leaders, down to the lowest-ranking officials, and they would all give the same answer: deliver at least one safe and effective vaccine, manufactured at scale, before the end of the year. Every decision we made was based on those constraints.'
- Paul Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services during Operation Warp Speed
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
AI and the Energy Abundance Imperative
Artificial intelligence might be the most important technology of our time, but its development faces a critical constraint: energy. AI requires enormous computing power, with data centers projected to triple their share of American energy use in the next decade. This energy hunger is already causing problems for the power grid.
Major tech companies have pledged to run their facilities on clean energy, but America's inability to build energy infrastructure fast enough has forced them to seek creative solutions. Amazon and Microsoft have recently made deals to buy electricity from nuclear plants, including the last working reactor at Three Mile Island.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, an AI researcher, warns that this energy bottleneck could have serious consequences: 'AI researchers are years, not decades, away from building a superintelligent system... Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?'
Solving this challenge requires treating energy abundance as a national security priority.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
The False Choice Between Building and Conserving
We face critical choices about our future that don't fit neatly into traditional political categories. The right offers a politics of scarcity - focusing on restricting immigration and preserving the status quo. But some on the left also embrace scarcity through degrowth philosophies that see abundance as unsustainable.
A better approach recognizes that abundance isn't just 'more of everything' but rather more of what matters most:
- Build housing that people can afford
- Construct clean energy infrastructure at unprecedented scale
- Streamline government processes without sacrificing core values
- Fund scientific research that takes appropriate risks
- Develop systems to deploy innovations quickly and equitably
This framework focuses on making key resources abundant - energy, housing, transportation, healthcare - while respecting environmental boundaries. It requires liberals to critique their own governance failures while maintaining their commitment to collective action and environmental stewardship.
Section: 1, Chapter: 5
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