Abundance

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built.

This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.

We take inspiration from People of Plenty, the historian David M. Potter’s brilliant 1954 book on how abundance shaped American thought and culture. “If abundance is to be properly understood, it must not be visualized in terms of a storehouse of fixed and universally recognizable assets, reposing on shelves until humanity, by a process of removal,

But some of this reflects a kind of ideological conspiracy at the heart of our politics. We are attached to a story of American decline that is centered around ideological disagreement.

It is routine in politics to imagine a just present and work backward to the social insurance programs that would get us there. It is equally important to imagine a just—even a delightful—future and work backward to the technological advances that would hasten its arrival.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government. An abundance of consumer goods distracted us from a scarcity of homes and energy and infrastructure and scientific breakthroughs.

What are cities, at their most elemental? “Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies,” writes Ed Glaeser in Triumph of the City. They are the ancient answer to the difficulties of distance.

There is a word that describes the future we want: abundance. We imagine a future not of less but of more. We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that

He hired a young activist named Denis Hayes, who came up with the idea of a walkout on the first day of spring, which they would call Earth Day. On April 22, 1970, more than 20 million people—roughly 10 percent of the US population—poured into the streets. It was the largest single demonstration in American history.