Book review: "Abundance"

Klein and Thompson discuss all of these challenges in detail. Of the five concrete items they want Americans to have more of — housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, and health care — four are clearly downstream of those pressing recent challenges.

But in any case, this is a huge idea, and one that America desperately needs in these trying times. For half a century, we assumed that America was this golden goose — the greatest industrial nation in the world, blah blah — that would reliably pump out massive amounts of stuff, and that we were all essentially just the custodians of this cornucopi... See more

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change,... See more

The first is procedural environmental laws . Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive law... See more

But in this case, as at times in the past, Klein has brought a gavel to a knife fight. Progressives didn’t just adopt anti-growth attitudes because they were reacting to the excesses of Robert Moses. Anti-growth attitudes are motivated by more than just NIMBYism and fear of change. There are deep class resentments involved.

Currently, most American policy debates are framed in terms of ideology — small government versus big government. Instead, Klein and Thompson, like the YIMBY movement that inspired them, want to reframe debates in terms of results . Who cares if new housing is social housing or market-rate housing, as long as people have affordable places to live? ... See more