This piece originally appeared in Fusion.
Abundance, the much-anticipated manifesto from the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Beginning with a vision of the world in 2050, full of clean energy, plentiful housing, and advanced technology, they work backwards to a rallying cry for a politics that sweeps away zero-sum thinking and bureaucratic meddling in favor of a bounteous economy and competent government.
But riding on that simple idea comes a much more fraught one: that liberalism is the political movement that will get us to this abundant future. With their first thesis and its dream of a more prosperous America, Klein and Thompson offer some worthwhile, if unexciting, policies and suggestions for their fellow progressives; but their second thesis is wholly unconvincing.
The bulk of Abundance focuses on a few prominent policy problems, from which it develops a blueprint for liberal governance. We’re not doing enough to protect the environment by deploying nuclear and solar power. Housing has grown wildly unaffordable, especially in major cities. And for all the money we pour into scientific research, we’ve seen relatively few breakthroughs. In short, why can’t we have nice things?
