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 BookThe 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
