Abundance

Abundance, published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025, brings together two of the most influential American political commentators, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and founder of Vox, and Derek Thompson, a writer for The Atlantic, who combine two parallel ideas, the supply-side progressivism Klein introduced in 2021 and the abundance agenda Thompson outlined separately. The book starts from a simple question, why can't the United States, the richest country in history, build enough housing, trains and clean energy despite having the resources to do so, and locates the answer not in a shortage of funds but in a tangle of regulations, permits and lawsuits that the authors, both progressives, trace largely to decades of political choices made by the American left. Klein and Thompson survey emblematic cases, from the delays in building high-speed rail in California to the ballooning costs of public housing, to argue that American liberalism ended up prioritizing protection from harm over the capacity to actually get things built, hurting the very people it was meant to help, those most affected by scarce affordable housing.

The book's central proposal is not a return to right-wing laissez-faire but a different strand of progressivism, able to act on the supply side rather than simply subsidizing demand, directly building housing rather than only funding vouchers, or streamlining environmental permitting that ends up blocking the renewable-energy projects it is meant to encourage. The style, journalistic and accessible, mixes data, case studies and policymaker interviews, remaining readable for non-specialist audiences. The book sparked a heated, cross-partisan debate, earning praise even from Barack Obama, who called it essential reading for progressives, while critics from labor and environmental circles argued the authors were too lenient toward unions and environmental litigation.

Within weeks it became a publishing phenomenon, climbing the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and giving rise to an informal political movement, the abundance movement, which has shaped debate inside the Democratic Party over economic priorities for years to come.