There are books you read, and there are books that read you. Abundance (2025), by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, belongs to the second category — at least for anyone who has spent years inside the machinery of government, wondering why a file that should take a week takes a year, and why a project that should take three years takes thirteen.
I picked up this book expecting another American policy tract. What I found instead was a mirror. The authors are writing about America, but on page after page I kept scribbling the same note in the margin: this could be us.
The Question at the Heart of the Book
The question Klein and Thompson ask is deceptively simple: why do rich, stable, well-intentioned democracies find it so hard to build things? Houses. Trains. Bridges. Clean energy. Vaccines. Why does everything take so long and cost so much?
Their answer is not the usual one. It is not corruption. It is not laziness. It is not even lack of money.
Their answer is more uncomfortable: scarcity is a choice. We have, over decades, constructed elaborate systems of rules, reviews, lawsuits, and vetoes — each one reasonable in isolation — that together make building nearly impossible. The authors call for a politics that measures government not by the rules it follows but by the outcomes it delivers.
That single reframe is worth the price of the book.
It Begins with Housing
The book opens where the American dream is dying most visibly: housing. In the mid-twentieth century, an ordinary American family could buy an ordinary house on an ordinary income. Today, in the most productive cities — San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles — home prices have detached so completely from incomes that even well-paid professionals are priced out.
Where did all the houses go? The authors’ answer is blunt: they were never built at all.
And why not? Zoning laws. Minimum lot sizes. Environmental reviews weaponised against apartment buildings. Community consultation processes where a handful of objectors can stall housing for thousands. One highlight from my Kindle that stayed with me: a state report found that in San Francisco it took, on average, 523 days just to get clearance to construct new housing, and another 605 days to get building permits. Three years of paperwork before a single brick is laid — and that’s for projects that survive at all.
The line that hit hardest as a reader: New York was once where you went to make your fortune; it is now where you go to spend it. Cities are supposed to be escalators into the middle class, the authors write, not penthouses for the upper class. When I read this, I thought about our own metros, and about how every nation perhaps needs its wealth-creating cities and its wealth-spending cities — and needs to know the difference.
Why Cities Still Matter
One of the most fascinating detours in the book is its defence of physical proximity in the age of Zoom. You would think video conferencing had made cities obsolete. The data says otherwise. Americans living in metropolitan areas of more than a million people are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than those in smaller metros.
Why? Because, as the authors put it, we create in community. Innovation is not a solo sport. It happens in cafeteria conversations, in chance corridor meetings, in late-night arguments between people who trust each other. To defeat the human need for face-to-face contact, one researcher quoted in the book says, our technology would have to defeat millions of years of evolution that made us machines for learning from the people next to us.
Trust, it turns out, is the real infrastructure. And trust is built at close range.
The Cholesterol Theory of Decline
The intellectual spine of the book, for me, comes from an older work the authors lean on: Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982).
Olson’s insight is that stable, affluent, democratic societies accumulate organized interest groups the way arteries accumulate plaque. Each group is legitimate. Each has a voice, a lawyer, a lobbyist. Each wins small protections and carve-outs. None of these ever get removed.
This is what I have started calling, after reading the book, regulatory cholesterol. No single regulation kills you. Each one was created for a rational reason — to protect the environment, to prevent fraud, to ensure fair procurement, to give citizens a voice. The problem is the accumulation. Rules are added in response to yesterday’s scandal and never subtracted when circumstances change. Layer settles upon layer, until the system exists mainly to service its own procedures.
The most vivid illustration is California’s high-speed rail. Voters approved it in 2008 with a budget of around 33 billion dollars and trains expected by 2020. Today the cost estimate has crossed 100 billion dollars, and even the first stretch through the Central Valley may not run before the early 2030s. Meanwhile, in the same years, China built tens of thousands of kilometres of high-speed rail. The authors are honest about why: China’s system concentrates power in ways that lead to abuse and imperiousness. But it also leads to high-speed rail. The rebuke is not that we should become China. The rebuke is that we have stopped even asking why we cannot deliver.
And then comes the counter-example that every civil servant should frame on their office wall. In June 2023, a section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia collapsed after a tanker fire. This is one of the busiest highways in America. Under normal procedure, rebuilding would have taken months, perhaps years, of assessments, tenders, and reviews. Instead, Governor Josh Shapiro declared an emergency, suspended the standard procurement processes, gave his engineers and contractors direct authority — and the highway reopened in twelve days.
Twelve days. The same government. The same engineers. The same laws of physics. The only thing that changed was that someone stripped away the process and made the outcome the only thing that mattered. The capability was always there. It was the system that was suppressing it.
When Process Becomes the Product
Part of the book is a history of how this happened, and it is genuinely surprising. The villains are not who you expect. Much of the machinery that now strangles building was constructed by well-meaning reformers — Ralph Nader and his “Raiders,” who sued government agencies relentlessly in the 1960s and 70s to make them accountable. They believed in government; they sued it to improve it. But the legal tools they built were available to everyone, for any purpose. A process designed to stop a highway from destroying a neighbourhood can equally be used to stop affordable housing, or a solar farm, or a homeless shelter.
The result is what law professor Robert Kagan calls adversarial legalism — governance by lawsuit. America today has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany and four times as many as France. And when legal training becomes the default training for public life, legal thinking becomes the default thinking of government: obsessed with statutory language and procedural correctness, indifferent to outcomes. California’s High-Speed Rail Authority has been scrupulous in following the law, the authors note dryly, but has been unable to deliver a train.
As someone who works inside a bureaucracy, the chapter on Jen Pahlka’s experience with California’s unemployment department during COVID was almost painful to read. Officials believed the backlog of pending claims was around 2,30,000. When Pahlka’s team finally untangled the overlapping computer systems — three separate Deloitte-built systems sitting atop an ancient IBM mainframe — the true figure was 1.2 million. The department had spent ten years not modernising its technology, but preparing the contract to modernise its technology — a contract expected to take another eleven years to execute.
And the fraud-detection system? It flagged 1,83,167 claims in a single quarter for tiny data mismatches. Only 804 turned out to be actually invalid. Meanwhile, real fraudsters — using stolen identity databases purchased from the dark web — sailed through, because their stolen data matched the government’s records perfectly. The honest citizen with a typo was blocked; the criminal with a clean stolen file was paid. Any government anywhere in the world running database-matching verification should sit with that lesson for a long time.
Pahlka’s conclusion, which the authors endorse, is the most counterintuitive line in the book: what government needs is not addition but subtraction. For government to do more, it sometimes first needs permission to do much less.
There is a related sin the authors call “everything-bagel liberalism” — the habit of loading every project with every goal at once. A housing project must also generate local employment, use green materials, satisfy a dozen consultation processes, and advance five unrelated social objectives. A government that tries to accomplish everything through one project often accomplishes nothing at all. Every officer who has watched a scheme collapse under the weight of its own convergence guidelines will nod quietly at this.
The Machinery of Invention
The final third of the book turns from building to inventing, and here the case studies sparkle. Bell Labs, whose formula was simply to hire the smartest people, give them space and time, and make sure they talked to each other. DuPont’s Experimental Station, which gave the world synthetic rubber, nylon, and Kevlar. And above all, DARPA — the Pentagon’s advanced research agency — whose secret is radical trust: empowered project managers who can back seemingly laughable ideas without fear of committee review, because the laughable ideas of one decade become the internet of the next.
Contrast this with what the authors call the Karikó problem. Katalin Karikó, whose mRNA research made COVID vaccines possible, spent decades being demoted and defunded because grant committees found her work unfashionable. American science, they argue, has accumulated its own procedural cholesterol: the share of NIH-funded scientists aged thirty-five or younger fell from 22 percent in 1980 to under 2 percent by the 2010s. A system that funds only safe, senior, well-networked proposals is a system that has optimised away its own future.
And yet — when it mattered, the old capability flickered back to life. Operation Warp Speed took a virus whose genome was sequenced in January 2020 and delivered authorised vaccines before the year ended. Guaranteed purchases, parallel manufacturing, obsessive bottleneck-hunting (the programme even shipped 110 needles for every 100 vaccine doses, so that syringes would never be the constraint). Proof, once again, that the state can move at the speed of the emergency when it decides outcomes matter more than process.
One quote from the book has stayed with me above all others: America has the ability to invent. China has the ability to build. The first country that can figure out how to do both will be the superpower. I would only add: that race is not closed to two participants. For a country like India, with its demographic energy and its own thickets of inherited procedure, this book is not a spectator’s account. It is a syllabus. The case for building our own DARPA-style strategic science institutions, for auditing our regulatory stock as seriously as we audit our expenditure, has rarely been made more persuasively — even though the authors never mention us once.
The Verdict
Book Abundance is not flawless. It is stronger on diagnosis than prescription; the authors tell us to choose outcomes over process but say less about how democracies build the political coalitions to actually subtract rules, when every rule has a defender and no one lobbies for deletion. The book is also unapologetically rooted in American debates, and readers elsewhere must do their own translation work.
But that translation work is precisely the pleasure. This is one of the rare policy books that is genuinely fun to read — vivid, story-driven, honest about its own side’s failures — and that leaves you looking at your own daily frustrations differently. The delay is not fate. The friction is not culture. Scarcity, in societies as capable as ours, is a choice.
Which means abundance can be a choice too. That is the book’s wager, and after 200-odd pages, I found myself wanting to take it.
Rating: 4.5 / 5. Read it if you have ever asked why things take so long — and especially if you are one of the people who could make them faster.
Excellent summary. The rebuke is that we have stopped even asking why we cannot deliver