(2025-03-24) Breuenig The Abundance Agenda

Matt Breuenig: The Abundance Agenda. I spent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly to make of it all.

The main policy argument of Abundance is that the administrative burdens placed on construction are too high

applied to transportation and energy infrastructure too... The secondary policy argument of Abundance is that the innovation system in the United States is broken in a number of ways.

The authors seem to think these two arguments, and the dozens of sub-arguments flowing from them, all fit together because they relate back to “abundance,”

But I find myself agreeing with Mike Konczal’s point that bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling

Of course, if you treat the various policy topics of the book as separate issues requiring their own specifically tailored technocratic solutions, then you don’t really have a book. You just have a list of discrete proposals that could make up one section of a Project 2029 white paper but don’t amount to a political manifesto.

they make it very clear that they want Abundance to be part of a vanguardist movement that remakes the Democratic party and then the political order

To achieve something as grandiose as that, the authors are forced to pair the policy ideas with a specific declinist historical narrative, contestable ideological commitments, and a utopian vision of the future

In the history offered by Abundance, the main economic story of 20th century America is that the country went from having low administrative burdens on construction to having high administrative burdens on construction. The book is actually a little scattered when it comes to explaining why this happened.

Competing Historical Narratives

I don’t personally understand why policy arguments need to be coupled with historical narratives to be compelling

Among the left, for whom the book is written, this historical narrative has quite a lot of competition for the master story of the late 20th century. Alternatives include:

• neoliberal wave of reduced unionization, welfare state retrenchment, privatization, and deregulation
• *wave of monopolization and corporate concentration following changes to the interpretation and enforcement of antitrust... Three of the most critical reviews of the book came from Zephyr Teachout, Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, all of whom appear to be big believers in the centrality of this historical narrative.
• shift from managerial capitalism where executives were given relatively free rein to govern corporations according to their personal judgment to shareholder capitalism... JW Mason is the most prominent proponent of this story

Sidelined Agendas

Abundance, by its own telling, is not simply a book aimed at adding some items to the policy radar. It is meant to become the focus of first liberal and then American political life, the answer to the question of what should the Democratic party look like post-Biden.

Because these fairly narrow technocratic policy issues are pitched in this way, critiques about what Abundists leave to the side are, I think, completely legitimate. What are we meant to be moving away from if we remake American liberalism in this way?

One of those things appears to be welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism more generally

they write that “the world we want requires more than redistribution,” which they punctuate by writing that “We aspire to more than parceling out the present.”

we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk.

The preservation or deepening of economic inegalitarianism could easily turn the authors’ utopian vision of 2050 into a dystopian nightmare. Attending to distribution is a must.

Klein and Thompson don’t appear to say anything about antitrust in the book, neither to discuss its policy merits nor to use it as a contrast to the abundance agenda

Political Practicality

...kept reminding me of a two-hour discussion I had with Ezra Klein in 2019 about Medicare for All. In the discussion, Klein is fairly agreeable to the point that moving to a universal public health insurance model would be hugely preferable over the status quo... In our discussion, Klein balked at making Medicare for All the centerpiece of a Democratic health care agenda because he thought it was not politically practical

It’s not hard to imagine having the same conversation about Abundance but with the roles reversed. Whatever the merits of their proposals, Klein and Thompson are pushing an agenda that requires direct confrontation with many powerful, entrenched constituencies

• homeowners
• American Medical Association
• highly-paid consultants and paperwork jobs generated by the current system
• firms that manage to win a lot of government business

Conclusion

Ultimately, the book seems fine to me. I’d say the policy specifics are a bit of a retread, but that’s not really a critique

It’s a pop policy book written for a Malcolm Gladwell type of audience, which is a valuable thing for a political movement to have. In short, I think the pique over the book is out of proportion to what the book is.

Commentary Many review links