(2025-03-30) Konczal The Abundance Doctrine

Mike Konczal: The Abundance Doctrine. Something has changed. Whether it is transit and infrastructure projects that seem to take forever or new laws that take years to go into effect, the government now moves much more sluggishly than in decades past. Two new books argue that these aren’t just isolated problems but instead reflections of a broader ideological dysfunction within left-liberal and Democratic coalitions.

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman • PublicAffairs • 2025 • 416 pages • $32.50
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson • Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster • 2025 • 304 pages • $30

Both books argue that we can’t address the major challenges of the twenty-first century, like the housing and climate crises, without a reorientation in ideas. Worse, they claim that the failure to execute has created a broader distrust in public action that amplifies those challenges. As Dunkelman concludes, “A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.”

To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need…. The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

Abundance builds upon articles, podcasts, and columns the authors wrote and recorded throughout the years of the Biden Administration. The book’s narrative momentum is propelled by recent examples of obstruction,

Dunkelman’s book takes a longer historical look, tracing the path we took to get here. Why Nothing Works is built around three arguments

Dunkelman’s animating point is his third one: that progressives’ distaste for power has led to ineffective governance, weakening the movement politically and causing widespread frustration within it.

Why Nothing Works follows a history in which progressive energy moved from the New Deal administrators who built up a Hamiltonian state capable of deploying federal programs and infrastructure to the New Left activists who used Jeffersonian arguments to shackle and weaken the state’s ability to act

Why are these arguments gaining strength and attention now? The authors’ own motivations for following these topics are telling. In the opening of the Atlantic piece that launched the term “abundance,” Thompson wrote in January 2022 about waiting in a long, cold line for a COVID-19 test, which should have been cheap and easily available

Dunkelman opens his book rereading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, about Robert Moses’s unchecked power to remake the New York urban landscape, while commuting into New York’s Penn Station, wondering why it was so dilapidated and why it was so difficult for New York to build more mass transit.

But the most important one has to be the housing crisis. Adjusting for inflation, housing prices have risen about 65 percent since 2000, compared to around 15 percent for median household incomes

The pandemic and its aftermath provide another clear reason for the growing interest in government capabilities, from managing test kit distribution to vaccine deployment

But there are also longer-standing forces driving this conversation. U.S.-China trade relations have grown increasingly tense, raising new questions of how essential manufacturing and production can best take place in the United States

The other long-term factor is climate change. For decades, putting a price on carbon was seen as the best way to slow carbon emissions, and in the mid-2000s this seemed like a bipartisan affair. However, the 2010 failure by Congress to price carbon through a “cap-and-trade” mechanism paused that push.

The book most influential here is Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens, which finds that many of the Reaganite, libertarian attacks on big government and the administrative state were first foreshadowed by the environmental and good-governance movements of the 1970s. Sabin writes that books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities—all published in the 1960s—criticized the actions of the administrative state as it had evolved from the New Deal and expanded in mid-century America.

Both Abundance and Why Nothing Works frame this as a debate within liberalism and ultimately one about balance.

Some will assume that the proposed remedies are mostly about slashing the government, but the debate is more about how the government acts than its raw size or presence

Many of the solutions involve finding the right level at which local decision-making should be preempted to break through coordination problems. The economist Zachary Liscow and his colleagues have found that construction expenses are driven by environmental reviews and other regulations; at the same time, they have also found that hiring more government workers to expedite reviews can bring down costs.

But the approach these books take also has its limitations. Folding so many developments and trends under one rubric, from federal research to administrative rule-making to local zoning regulations, can obscure many of the individual challenges. These are genuinely distinct problems, each demanding its own solution and each facing its own coalition of resistance.

The books want to emphasize recent failures of federal projects and programs for good reason. But there are also recent successes that we can learn from. When the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, was enacted, experts projected that federal health-care spending would be 0.9 percent of GDP higher than it is now.

*Moreover, criticisms of administrative inefficiency and capture were top of mind when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform... it has successfully returned more than $21 billion to consumers and produced rules addressing issues such as abuses in mortgage markets and student debt. Precisely because of these successes, ones that reformers can learn from, dismantling the CFPB has been a central goal of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

If we can’t offer a more prosperous future while also delivering on the things we promise, why should voters trust us?