An Abundance of Takes on Abundance™

First of all, re: Charlie Kirk, his murder unnerved me, but I don’t see a point to saying anything more on the subject beyond freedom of speech is good, and gunning down a young man in front of his children is unequivocally wrong.

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This piece isn’t about Charlie Kirk though, it’s about Abundance™.¹

As I wrote before, the colloquial moniker, “Abundance” comes from the the March 2025 book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson of the same name, which like 20 people in America have read in full, including me. However, since the book’s release, Abundance™ has come to colloquially refer not just to the thesis laid out in the book, that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities stymies development of housing, infrastructure, and general development and needs to change and pronto, but also the (socially and economically and environmentally) moderate platform people, most of whom haven’t read the book, have decided the book is advocating for.

There has been a fair amount of criticism from progressives directed at the Abundance movement as well as at prominent figures who’ve embraced it, including Klein and Thompson, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, and David Shor². Examples include:

• Zephyr Teachout’s confusion at how Klein and Thompson’s work fit into her preconceived framework of politics (big vs. small government).

• Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg’s insistence that “Abundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and anti-government politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.”

• Sandeep Vaheesanan’s (overtly long) review where he accuses Abundance of being papered over “neoliberalism” and characterized by an obsequious deference to private capital

Full disclosure: I’ve never been good at economics. I’m great with numbers, and I enjoy statistics and calculus etc., but I got a 2 on the AP Macroeconomics exam³ in high school and my understanding of the subject isn’t much better now. That said, I do know enough about economics to understand the ideas expressed within these pieces miss the mark, and fundamentally misunderstand the arguments within Abundance (the book), as well as the problems it’s trying to diagnose.

On a holistic level, Abundance (the concept) is fundamentally about “MORE,” building more, doing more, achieving more, and a lot of progressive populist economics is rooted in scarcity mindset. A lot of progressive populists would rather everybody be equally poor than have a prosperous society with some people holding extreme wealth, and that’s evident in how they push back against Abundance. They insist that Abundance is recycled libertarianism and bankrolled by tech bros⁴, and falsely allege that Klein and Thompson are against redistribution, to the extent of insisting that Klein is guilty of holding beliefs espoused by his wife, Annie Lowrey⁵, beliefs that neither of them actually hold.

This may be my capitalist bias coming out, but I don’t really understand the left-populist brain on an emotional level. To me at least, it seems like the same mindset underpinning the worst and most inane Medicare For All defenses. I can’t find the link to this exchange, but back in 2021, a Bernie Sanders supporting progressive said the quiet part out loud, that she didn’t support any sort of universal healthcare that didn’t abolish private health insurance because she thought it was fundamentally unfair that some people had better health insurance than others even if everybody else was covered. She openly said that it’s better for everybody have equally terrible insurance (everybody knows that government health insurance is terrible⁶) than for some people to have better coverage.

However, while I think many progressive critics of Abundance aren’t approaching the subject with good faith and condemning Klein and Thompson as guilty by association to people like Matt Yglesias, I think that there are valid critiques to be made of the platform and its proponents.