An Abundance of Takes

Reboot takes on the Abundance Agenda

Graphic by Connie Liu

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are podcasters. Everyone — or, at least, neoliberals, center-left wonks and their leftist haters — is talking about their new book Abundance, and the agenda/movement/web of think tanks around it.

In the two weeks since the book came out, the collective discourse consciousness has seemingly produced every possible take about this book. One roundup of reviews by Matt Bruenig lists twelve different takes in relatively major publications, not counting the author’s own perspective — in the week since that came out, there have been untold more. Yet questions still remain about the book and the political movement behind it; questions that may shape the path of left-of-center politics in the United States for the next election cycle and beyond.

Now, Reboot’s very own Shohini and Jacob will answer the political question of our time:

Source (https://www.bustle.com/entertainment/is-everybody-horny-for-ezra-klein)

Abundance: Is it any good?

Shohini

My personal philosophy is that having a scarcity of critical services is a choice we shouldn't afford as a country and outcome orientation is good. I work in Medicaid and Medicare services, and I see the ways in which the process bogs us down from actually thinking about whether a patient is actually getting better. It doesn't matter if we did 500 visits with that person if they didn't get better. That’s influenced by Silicon Valley thinking, but it doesn’t have to stay there.

I think Abundance gives us the language to think about large social problems in two ways.

The first step is that, for critical infrastructure that progressives believe is important, we should be thinking about policies to increase access that aren't just subsidies. I don't actually have a problem with subsidies, but in places where there is no train, making the train free doesn't help.

The second step is recognizing that the government needs to be more effective to actually execute on large infrastructure projects. It’s removing some barriers for the government because you want to do bigger and better things for everyone, not because you want to strip down the influence of the government so that companies can do whatever they want.

So I think the Abundance philosophy gives us a different set of policies to put in play that are not just demand side, and a shared language for this kind of framing.

Abundance doesn't think about money in politics or antitrust, which would also impact the issues that Abundance cares about. But these things are not mutually exclusive.

Jacob

If you have the glass-half-full version of that take, I have the glass-half-empty version. I completely agree that the fact that we can't provision good public transit and good green infrastructure is a crisis. The efforts of the past two Democratic administrations (I don't know that much about Clinton era policy. It seems like it kind of sucked?) to halfheartedly turn around from neoliberal norms and back to greater state capacity happened very slowly.

That contributed, among a lot of other major issues, to the Democratic Party's defeat in 2024. Where I diverge with your read is that I think that this book is weirdly unambitious in its goals.

The book starts with a vision of 2050 that talks about all these ways the future would be different under the Abundance Agenda TM. It's definitely a better world in a lot of ways than our contemporary world. They would not write a version that was a worse world because they aren't completely delusional, of course. But on the other hand I have this other book that I've been reading through. It’s Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and it is in some ways a slightly older, socialist left take on this abundance thing.

I hate to say it because I don't actually like him that much as a thinker, but Benjamin Bratton, the philosopher of technology, tweeted something to the effect of “it looks like Ezra Klein has invented fully automated luxury liberalism.”

Shohini

I mean, they do reference Fully Automated Luxury Communism in that intro.

Jacob

Sure — but the vision of those books (Inventing the Future and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism) were ambitious — even a little goofy in their ambition. They were talking about things like Marxist space colonies. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are much more respectable thinkers in a lot of ways, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The life depicted in their vision of 2050 — it’s very similar to a modern, upper middle class American's life except greener and slightly faster.

Abundance needs ambition if it wants to happen. And in this book the two of them are stuck within trying to be the best representatives of mainstream liberalism. Maybe they're succeeding at that, but maybe that's not what we need right now politically in this country.

Is this the right book for the moment? They’ve said it is, but this really feels like a book that was written to be a manual for either a second Biden term or a Kamala term or a Gavin Newsom term — well, probably not Gavin.

Shohini

I think Gavin Newsom is torpedoing himself on that podcast by the way.

Jacob

The guests on this podcast have been Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and Ezra Klein. That's such a funny trio of big name guests to get.

Shohini

I think he did bring in Tim Walz.

Jacob

A real nightmare blunt rotation. Four of them, plus Gavin.

Is this “Progressive Techno-Optimism”?

Shohini

I'm surprised by the reach that this book has gotten — well, am I surprised at the attention this book has gotten? Or is my Twitter feed just responding to the fact that I liked and bookmarked a bunch of Abundance takes? Because I have mentioned this book to some normal people and they do not know what this is.

Jacob

I don't know. Both can kind of be right!

That is: this book is still niche — it's not like this is a book that everyone is talking about. But in the set of people that it's trying to reach, which is liberals, progressives, the types of highly educated people who are a real core demographic in the Democratic Party right now, it’s big. I think it's reached a very large portion of that demographic.

Shohini

Is it normal for book tours to sell out for this kind of a book?

Jacob

This is a big book tour — in the Bay Area, they're doing 2 nights at one of the big theaters that City Arts and Lectures has. They sold 900 seats two nights in a row and then they also had one the earlier this week down in Los Altos [Editor’s note: Patrick Collison hosted this one!]. So in these very niche circles, it's really doing well.

But the interesting parallel is to the Bernie Sanders and AOC rally tour stops that are getting 30,000 people to show up on cold days in Denver, CO. That's genuinely a mass political phenomenon. This, on the other hand, is a relatively mass political phenomenon for this world of people who care about what liberal think tanks are saying.

Shohini

Looking at their tour list, it's telling where they go — all these big cities where people follow political news as a hobby, which is not to say that people are necessarily engaged in politics in a deep way. The only place I would not consider a major city is Chapel Hill, NC.

Jacob

I mean, even then that's in the Research Triangle. It's a college town.

I think that is maybe why it has become such a discourse event — why people are on Twitter and in the dozens of reviews in every publication to the left of the Financial Times rehashing every fight between liberals and the left of the past six years.

There have been bits that have been very Elizabeth Warren versus Bernie. There have been bits that were like the YIMBY versus left-NIMBY debates. This feels like it's been a great way to play the greatest hits of what the left of center groups of American politics have been talking about since midway through the first Trump term.

So, considering all that, why are we talking about this for Reboot specifically? Other than the two of us being part of Reboot’s editorial board.

Shohini

They kind of dropped a summarized version of Jen Pahlka's book Recoding America into one of the chapters. Their point is that having good governing operations at scale requires software and the government is somewhat bad at actually building and deploying software.

Jacob

That feels like the least controversial bit of this book. No one is, like, “this is fine.” Even, as you found, the government employees and former government employees you talked to who have benefited from federal hiring rules think this severely needs to be fixed.

But I think also there's something here: Joshua Citarella, this very online left commentator guy, interviewed Ezra Klein. And he, in his pseudo-review of Abundance, asked “is this just a progressive techno optimism?”

And when I saw that I thought, “oh, that's what Reboot is sort of saying it is. That's part of what Reboot has been trying to do since the start.”

Shohini

Ezra Klein is very obviously influenced by Silicon Valley-type frameworks of thinking and that is actually why this is interesting for Reboot.

This is so cursed, but what they're saying is “OK, what if we first-principle all these problems and actually figure out where the blockers are and try to unblock these problems”. That's a very, very Silicon Valley way of thinking and it's directly trying to appeal to that Silicon Valley center-and-center-left audience. And it’s working, as evidenced by the fact that they're selling out an 900-seat theater in San Francisco multiple times.

Silicon Valley also has been looking for a home politically. In this most recent election cycle the masks have been off for some of the most powerful folks, I guess. But a lot of people I think are looking for an alternative to voting for Trump, even if they think the Dems are too socially liberal (because, I don't know, they care about the three trans college athletes or whatever). I think Abundance gives them an ideological home in the Dem tent.

Jacob

That’s definitely the strategy — maybe that's why they sent Derek Thompson to go talk with fucking Richard Hanania. That’s a move that makes no sense if you think that this is about capturing broader sections of the Democratic Party because there are not that many persuadable voters who are big Richard Hanania fans, but there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who, for worse, think that Richard Hanania is an interesting thinker and writer.

So if they are trying to execute an operation to cut off the growth of the political formation that is loosely known as the “Tech Right,” this is a way to do it. There was one school of thinking that we saw with certain Democratic Party political moves where they say, essentially, “We're going to appeal to Silicon Valley the way you would normally appeal to an industry.” And that looks like giving them various kickbacks and incentives and regulatory changes to promote their industry.

The Abundance approach reflects a sort of deeper philosophical way of appealing to them, where it's showing, from Ezra and Derek’s point of view, something to the effect of, “Yes! We, as liberal politicians and political writers, can think like you as well.”

Shohini

Exactly! Maybe Silicon Valley is uniquely this way, but I do think like “tech people” tend to try and find other folks who think like them. There’s a huge cultural value placed on the way people think, completely divorced from what they're actually trying to execute, in ways that are sometimes frightening. And this book thinks like Silicon Valley does and is trying to appeal to tech.

I don't think this book is particularly techno optimist in the Silicon Valley techno-optimist sense, right? Because they talk a little bit about some of the future inventions in the intro. But, on housing and transit, the vision there is mostly just “Can we do things that Europe and China already do”?

Jacob

It’s techno-optimist and futuristic to the extent that France, Japan and China are living in the future. Maybe you can make some arguments that America has slowed down its technical progress in all these ways, but there's nothing excitingly futuristic about their vision. What’s different is that they’re thinking about it and talking about it like venture-funded startup guys rather than pure wonks.

So this is not the answer I was first thinking about when trying to answer how or why this was Reboot-related. So I'm glad we got here.

Ok, but, is Abundance any good?

Shohini

I give it a 2.5 stars, but am ultimately pro Abundance because this is a great introductory book. I only rate it so low because It's not useful if you read or listen to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s stuff regularly, and have read books like Why Nothing Works and Recoding America.

Jacob

If you already know about what mixed-use zoning is, then you are not really the target audience. You're kind of—

Shohini

Past the point of being the target audience.

Jacob

This is going to sound really mean to Abundance, but if Abundance were a multi-level-marketing scheme, here’s how it would work: if you already know about zoning your job is not to buy the book, your job is to sell the book to your less online friends.

This is kind of just how political organizing works, though! The point of a well written accessible book in any style is not to reach the true believers. It's to give the true believers a compact package they can give to their interested friends. This is a good example of that.

Even with that in mind the prescriptions through the rest of the book feel strangely unambitious for a manifesto — a rallying cry book that they are clearly swinging for the fences in terms of the media tour.

Their pitch is “this is a paradigm shifting once in a generation call to renew politics”!

Shohini

Yeah, but doesn't everybody have to write that line in their political book advertising copy? Do you think it's a device to actually not be ambitious? To bring the time scale and the ambition closer so that it feels practical?

Jacob

I think that's intentional, but that move lets the book down - it bleeds through not only their vision in the prologue but a lot of the meat of the book. Frankly, they end up suggesting a bunch of pretty small changes.

I don't think that the two of them are closet neoliberals trying to just do Koch brothers agenda things. They’re actually committed liberals who are taking some amount of Libertarian-ish money because that is where there's a lot of money and they don't have hard principles against it. But one place where that “they’re closet libertarian/neoliberals” critique feels real is that, even though the book is saying, “yes, we need a state that can actually Do Things,” a lot of what they end up endorsing in practice is the deregulatory, removing barriers approach.

What kind of Agenda is this, anyways?

Jacob

The agenda is definitely focused on the problems of Blue states and the big Blue cities within those Blue states. And I think that's a fair thing to do, but also I have problems with it.

Shohini

They talked about this on the podcast crossover episode where they gave a background of how they wrote the book. They gave an impassioned defense of why big cities are the economic engines in a services economy.

But the focus on blue cities means that an interesting example of abundance they didn’t cover is how to grow more varied food and use farmland more effectively for food production and for the environment. So much of our actual land use is farmland!

Jacob

You know what really pissed me off? They endorse vertical farming.

“You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away. These crops don’t grow horizontally, across fields. They grow vertically on tiered shelves inside a tall greenhouse. Banks of LED lights deliver the photons the plants need in precisely timed increments.”

I think that this passage totally reflects how they talk mostly to urban planning and industrial policy people, because practically no one, from hippy, ecological-leaning regenerative agriculture people to even ag-tech people are pro vertical farming. This is a very poorly thought out idea! Vertical farming operations are constantly going bankrupt!.

Shohini

Even though the book doesn’t cover it, I think Abundance stuff is pretty compatible with antitrust, and some of these other liberal-progressive agenda items. But there's a weird undercurrent of anti-union labor. The coalition really likes to bring up how the teacher’s unions prevented schools from going back to in-person post-COVID for a long time, as an example of minoritarianism preventing abundance of education. It's a discordant example to me because I expected the take to be that “education isn’t abundant due to a teacher shortage because teachers don’t get paid enough”. The unions are actually helping keep the teachers that are there at all!

Jacob

I feel like it was a very urban, liberal, young-ish parent thing to bring that up as a major, headline problem. It’s reflective of the audience of this book and movement.

Shohini

They're not anti-union on principle. They love to point out that Josh Shapiro used union labor to fix I-95.

Jacob

I saw an interesting discussion that said, essentially, that this conflict is what happens when union density is as low as it is in the US. A lot of what unions are trying to advocate for are these smaller, minoritarian things where, if we had union density back at 1950s or 1960s levels then there would be much more compatibility because there'd be a sense of building for the sake of the greater good, when now it's more of a need to protect an already niche and narrow fiefdom.

Shohini

Like, an abundance of unions.

Jacob

When I was reading this, the thing I was most reminded of was the Green New Deal. That plan felt like a genuine vision of abundance. I don't think there was much about zoning reform there, but there was a lot about building green infrastructure and how we can create good union jobs with that.

Shohini

I think people just throw out, “We can create union jobs.”

Jacob

That's one of the things that they critique in the book that maybe leads people to think it’s anti-union — they say, “Actually, you should not be talking about these big projects just by way of how many jobs they'll bring.” Because to them that's a metric that is not the actual metric of “did you build the thing bridge that you were trying to build?” The maximally ridiculous version of this is you generated 50,000 jobs because you kept getting people onto this job site, but none of them actually built anything.

Maybe this is another point where the policy and the politics run into each other. People obviously like when there are jobs - especially if they are trying to appeal to working class and union voters.

Whether it's relatively white collar union labor like teachers, or blue collar union labor like manufacturing and construction labor, they don't see it as a fundamental part of the Abundance coalition. I think they still see those groups as part of the Democratic coalition, but they don't see them as the groups that they need to get on their side - like Silicon Valley people and Washington thought leaders.

The DOGE in the room

Jacob

I want to talk a bit about the DOGE stuff. Kevin on Ed Board asked “Is this just a center left take on DOGE?” Which, I think, feels kind of mean, but it's not wrong in that they are definitely coming from that same impulse of “The government is so inefficient.” The main distinguishing factor is that DOGE is very clearly a tear it all down, rip it to shreds - like “government so small you can drown it in a bathtub” [Soft quote - originally from Grover Norquist]. Whereas I believe that Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein want to have the government do things.

But I wonder if, in practice, the early stages of an Abundance takeover and a DOGE takeover would look the same?

Shohini

Like, if technocratic Dems got into power and they took it seriously that they only had four years to get everything done?

I think it probably wouldn't be so haphazard. Is it even culturally possible for someone who believes that the government should function to execute like what we’ve seen with DOGE?

I think we could take an example of the case studies that Pahlka talks about in Recoding America. Pahlka’s work is, in a certain sense, literally center left DOGE because it’s the United States Digital Service (USDS) that she founded that has been rebranded to DOGE, right?

It's not like they shut down the services or fired 10000 people. What they actually did in most of these cases is build parallel systems that worked a lot better and then migrated people onto those faster systems.

So I don’t think a center-left DOGE would look the same, because their instinct would not be to reflexively slash. It would be to build the parallel system and then migrate people so that people can still be getting unemployment even if it’s through a really subpar system.

Jacob

Yeah, that is definitely the difference. In addition to a just transition for oil, gas and coal workers, in their view you need a just transition for government workers who are in badly designed parts of the system. They need to be retrained into more effective modes of work.

Shohini

We will probably never have an answer to this question, but what is actually the right balance between executive power and citizen voice?

For example, every healthcare company I’ve worked for either accepted Medicaid, Medicare, or played in state-regulated insurance marketplaces. In every state, we have to operate with different and often contradictory sets of rules. Just to get a license to operate is really expensive - checkboxes that in practice don’t drive quality patient care.

On the opposite end, though, what someone like Robert Moses did was pretty bad. He cut through communities and created significant long term economic and health impacts (beyond the medium term displacement that is well documented).

None of the books or articles in this canon can give a good example where the balance is correct, forget an overall prescription on executive power.

Jacob

As a side note on Moses - one interesting thing I'm thinking about is that tech people are increasingly thinking of themselves as little statesmen, with their companies being sovereign states. I’m reading The Power Broker right now and thinking about Robert Moses and massive-scale building.

The Power Broker has become a tech canon-esque book, in part because Robert Moses exerts this huge amount of executive control without ever having been elected anything. He has sort of the same control that a lot of tech CEOs have, where it's manifested just purely through his “brilliance,” his good relations with power, his ability to move fast and break things relative to the standards of 1930s New York.

Anyway, I think “executive power balance” is a classic unstable equilibrium dynamic. Whenever you think you've got a good balance, there are smart people working on both sides of these regulatory fights. People will always try to find more loopholes.

Maybe what this book is in the end is not like a precise set of policy prescriptions, but a big arrow pointing towards a different direction.

Shohini

This is where Marc Dunkleman's book Why Nothing Works comes in. It’s a detailed history of progressive movements and how they have culturally shifted between policy prescriptions that centralize power to execute (Hamiltonianism), and policies that diffuse power to empower minorities (Jeffersonianism).

Today we’ve diffused into a Jeffersonian system - so many people have power. Everyone has a say, lots of people can stop a project despite there being a better overall utility function.

The prescription here is not specific policies but pushing for a cultural change for progressive policy makers. Rather than including the maximum number of people in a process, maybe you actually maximize good by reducing the power of certain people. That's not a frame in the 2020 era people were willing to consider.

At a point in time where the national executive branch is running roughshod over the country, I don’t know if there’s appetite for centralizing power. Maybe there are opportunities to prove this thesis in local elections where there’s tighter feedback loops rather than taking it straight to a national Dem platform.

There’s already an interesting crossover in how these ideas are permeating the upcoming New York City Democratic primaries for Mayor. Major Blue city, but the Mayoral race has an intense focus on attracting working class voters given the backslide in November.

The two leading progressive candidates added “Building housing” to their platforms a couple months AFTER launching their campaigns for mayor. I went to a canvassing training for a City Council race and they said the top priority for constituents is building more affordable housing. This was not the case four years ago. They're feeling electoral pressure to do this!

Jacob

I think we were talking about this specifically in the case of the Zohran Mamdani campaign, which is really, really exciting. People are saying - “oh, there's a blueprint for the Left here.” I didn't realize the housing build part was added on afterwards. That's interesting because it's not like he walked back from his really strong rent control proposal and said, “oh, never mind, we actually don't need to do rent control”. Maybe the Left answer is “Yes, and”-ing Abundance!

Signing off

Shohini

I think this conversation helped clarify a lot for me:

1. This book is for Silicon Valley, and therefore doesn't meaningfully talk to or about other Democratic constituents.

2. This book is not a complete platform for the Dems, even though they try to frame it that way. It's meant for political elites in Blue cities.

Still, a discourse to change the framing of problems from demand side policies to supply side is a positive contribution, and if we can see this work well in Blue cities, this framing could be taken to other places.

Jacob

I think you see it as a hopeful thing, and I see it as a worry. This book is best treated as opening a set of questions rather than answering them, like the starting gun of a race rather than like the finish line.

I worry that people are going to be like, “Abundance just means doing the things in this book,” which would mean listening to this narrow set of center-left, YIMBY-leaning thinkers, when really I think that there is ultimately a debate still to be had about what a politics of abundance can look like in the American political and economic context.

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Thanks!

We received some advanced reader copies that helped us develop this perspective over the last couple months, ahead of these releases.

Thanks to:

1. Hachette Book Group and Marc Dunkelman for sharing Why Nothing Works, and Marc’s generous time speaking with Shohini.

2. Simon & Schuster for sharing Abundance

Here are all the books mentioned in this article, which you can get on our Bookshop page!

• Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974)

• Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015)

• Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019)

• Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (2023)

• Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back (2025)

• Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (2025)

Have any more takes on Abundance/Abundance/Our Review of Abundance? Let us know! Send in your letters to the editor here.

—Shohini, Jacob & the Reboot team