Apropos of nothing, there are a handful of words in the English language where you can insert spaces, and spell out something different from the original. Almost every time I read the word “nowhere,” I see the faint echoes of “now here,” for example. And abundance is one of those words, one that’s been on my mind since Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book was released. Given how many reviews, podcasts, and interviews I’ve seen over the past month featuring the book’s cover, I ended up going a different direction for my thumbnail. Courtesy of Midjourney, I present to you a bun dance.

I’ll drop the actual book cover below at some point. I acquired my copy of Klein’s and Thompson’s book on the day of its release, as I follow both authors with interest, and I’m tempted sometimes to position myself on the front edge of the Discourse. That is, when I know about a trendy book ahead of time, I will sometimes make a point of picking it up right away and zipping through it, both so that I can write knowledgeably about it here, and follow the Discourse as it unfolds. I subscribe to probably 10 or more newsletters which have done reviews of the book, and it ends up being a way to triangulate not only my own reaction but my relationship to them1. Of course, some of those “reviews” were written by folks who hadn’t actually read the book, but even that can tell you something about the book (not to mention the reviewers).

What it tells you is that Abundance is a certain type of book, one that sets out very intentionally to shape that Discourse. I don’t say this with any sort of judgment, except to note that these sorts of books often end up being written in a particular fashion. They begin with a particular thesis and tend to assemble what evidence they find necessary to justify it. That is, most of the book’s content is deducible from its central claim. Klein and Thompson announce theirs at the outset:

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.

It reads, even to us, as too simple. And yet, 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.

The next paragraph is composed of capsule summaries of the foci that take up the majority of the book: climate change/clean energy, housing, health care, and scientific research. Their position is that “Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially,” and this circumstance is the bipartisan product of “a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.” Our political parties have wasted so much time protesting the relative “size” of government that we’ve basically ignored the question of its effectiveness.

Most of the book digs into the ways that this thesis has played out in the various areas that Klein and Thompson introduce at the start. Their prose is very accessible and I don’t really know enough about the details to dispute their analysis2. But I came away from the book with a strong sense of its kairos3. That is, it’s very much a book that addresses a particular moment (and audience). Dan Davies notes that “the book is very clear from the start that its project is to tell a bunch of home truths to well meaning liberals about how the regulatory state gets in the way of itself.” And Dave Karpf suggests that it’s “a book for an alternate timeline:”

Books are time capsules, buried on the date the author sends it to press, unearthed by the reader months or years later. They are written for the world as it existed at the time of writing, often with an eye toward the world as the author imagines it might become….

I imagine reading Klein and Thompson’s book in an alternate timeline — one where President Harris and Vice President Walz hold narrow governing majorities in both houses of Congress, and are faced with decisions about how best to deploy their political power. Abundance has a lot of timely advice for that alternate universe.

Neither of these are intended (imo) as criticisms, but they do imply that Abundance is a book that feels out of place, written for a time when things like clean energy, scientific research, or the baseline understanding of the government as a steward of the public good weren’t under the blitzkrieg assault that they’re experiencing at the hands of the current regime.

All the same, while I found this an argument worth thinking about, for many of the reasons that Karpf offers, I’m not sure that I needed an entire book to do so. Another of the “reviews” that I came across was Venkatesh Rao’s, which doesn’t recommend the book but maps out its immediate neighborhood of influences. Among its conclusions, the review suggests that

Abundance is not a serious book in the philosophical sense. It is not addressed to those who wish to think. It is addressed to those who wish to recover legitimacy—without truth, without reckoning, without loss.

I’m not sure how biting this critique would feel to Klein or Thompson themselves; I don’t know that either would lay claim to that sort of seriousness. As I was finishing this section, Klein’s podcast featured an episode where he invited Saikat Chakrabarti and Zephyr Teachout to come on and share their disagreements with the book. I’m not yet finished listening, but it highlighted for me one of the issues that I wanted to consider further, and that (of course4) is scale. Even with a group as small as three people, I was struck by the challenges they faced in holding a coherent conversation about the book without really getting lost at different levels. If you read the transcript, you can see them bouncing back and forth (sometimes unproductively) from these massive thematic claims to specific examples, and it gets a little exhausting.

At one point in the podcast, Klein cautions against blaming everything on money in politics; by overemphasizing a single factor, “we make a fractious plural into a singular.” It’s a strange line coming from the co-author of a book that takes a single word as its title. And who, a couple of brief paragraphs later, reduces decades of policies and decisions to the single “flip” of a switch (“over time, we just flipped the default to make it easier to veto, easier to stop than to create.”) that we (simply?) need to flip back.

I get the point of this, and of putting out a book designed to jump start a conversation in this way. The difficulty of holding the conversation at a single scale, though, comes from the fact that the creation that Klein and Thompson advocate has to happen across a broad range of scales, both institutional and temporal. On top of that, it’s hard to get behind the pure exercise of power, unconstrained by the limits of scale, when we consider how quickly it devolves into boots stamping on human faces.

The harder path, I suspect, would be to try to achieve these goals effectively, across scales, while also holding all participants responsible for their participation. But that would require a much different political system than the one we’re currently struggling with, one that would require a great deal more accountability from both major political parties than they’ve been willing to endure thus far. That’s the “default” that’s really shifted over time, and I’m not sure lifting constraints will do much to change it, other than making it even more difficult for those of us who aren’t heirs or -aires to share in that abundance.

I’m trying to pick up the pace here, so I’ll tie this one off, and push forward. I’m trying to re-establish some reading and writing momentum heading into summer, so ideally, I’ll catch you sooner rather than later.