# Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance explained: building homes, energy and science

> In Abundance (Avid Reader Press, Simon & Schuster, 2025), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that rich democracies, and American liberals above all, have made homes, clean energy, infrastructure and scientific progress scarce through layers of rules, reviews and veto points that reward correct procedure over results. Their answer is a liberalism that builds: ask whether supply can solve a problem, and redesign government around delivering it. For radical centrism the book joins a left goal (plentiful public goods) with a market-liberal method (let builders build), judged by what actually gets built. In Spain, where the Banco de España counts a deficit of 750,000 homes and most of the distribution grid is reported as saturated, that means counting homes and connections delivered and cutting every condition that slows them without serving the goal.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/ezra-klein-derek-thompson-abundance-explained
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-11-09
- Topic: Economy & work
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, was published on 18 March 2025 by Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and in the UK by Profile Books.
- The book argues that scarcity of housing, energy and infrastructure is a choice, produced by decades of well-meant rules that together block building.
- ‘Everything-bagel liberalism’ is the authors’ name for loading every project with so many goals and mandates that it stalls.
- Critics on the left say it underplays corporate power; critics on the right say it trusts government too much; several reviewers say it leaves unclear which rules to cut.
- In Spain the Banco de España counts a deficit of 750,000 homes for 2021–2025 and recommends regulatory simplification together with faster public affordable housing.

*Abundance* by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson came out on 18 March 2025 from Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and later in the UK from Profile Books. Klein was then a New York Times columnist and Thompson a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the book grew out of Thompson's 2022 essay on what he called a scarcity crisis. It became one of the most argued-over political books of the year in the United States, and it belongs on any reading list for radical centrism, because it takes a goal the left cares about and a method the market-liberal tradition has long defended and asks a government to be judged on whether it delivers.

The question running through the book is simple. Greg Berman, reviewing it for Vital City, quotes the authors asking whether we can solve our problems with supply. If there are too few homes, can we build more, and if we can't, why not? The same question goes to clean energy, to transmission lines, to scientific research and to the public projects that arrive years late and wildly over budget.

## What Klein and Thompson argue

Their starting claim, as Pieter Garicano sums it up on Silicon Continent, is that housing, infrastructure and energy have grown scarcer in America over fifty years, and that the scarcity is a choice. Demand rose; supply was held back. The home that cost twice a year's income in 1950 now costs around six times as much, and productivity in construction has fallen even as manufacturing productivity soared.

The authors trace the cause to a wave of laws and legal habits from the 1960s and 1970s. Kirkus describes what they call a procedural kludge, partly the work of lawyers who pioneered "democracy by lawsuit". Each rule answered a real abuse: pollution, highways bulldozed through neighbourhoods, unsafe workplaces. Garicano notes that some came from Republicans, with Nixon's environmental agency and California's environmental review law signed by Reagan. Berman stresses that the book treats environmental review, worker safety and disability access as good-faith responses with real costs attached. Added together, they let almost anyone stop almost anything.

The examples are vivid. Homeowners in liberal areas cite anti-pollution laws to block affordable housing, and the same laws slow the clean energy projects the climate needs. California planned a high-speed line in the 1990s and, by Garicano's count, spent about 23 billion dollars over fifteen years without a kilometre of working track; the Irish Examiner's reviewer sets that beside the more than 38,000 kilometres of high-speed rail China built over the same period. In science, the authors argue that the grant system rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.

The phrase most readers remember is "everything-bagel liberalism". Kirkus explains it as the habit of layering government programmes with mandate after mandate, so that a housing scheme also has to deliver a dozen other social goals and ends up delivering the main one slowly, if at all. Garicano puts the logic plainly: Democrats want worker safety, environmental clean-up, union jobs, affordable housing and a local say all at once, and the sum is paralysis.

The remedy is a politics of abundance, a liberalism that builds. That means changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard, and giving officials the discretion to act. Berman points to Pennsylvania's governor Josh Shapiro rapidly reopening a damaged stretch of the I-95 motorway as the kind of thing discretion makes possible. The deeper stake is trust: the book cites polling showing that the share of Americans who trusted government to do the right thing most of the time fell from 77% in 1964 to 16% in 2023. A state that visibly builds earns trust back.

## The critics

The book has drawn fire from several directions. Some on the left say cutting red tape does nothing about corporate power, a point Berman reports and answers by saying the book never claims to fix everything. Matthew Fleming of the Pacific Research Institute, from the right, argues that its own evidence of government failure should lead to a smaller state and more trust in private enterprise. The Irish Examiner's Brendan Daly, who liked the book, finds its main weakness in the missing rule for deciding which regulations to keep and which to scrap. Garicano, writing for a European audience, thinks the book overrates Europe as a model and that Europe's version of abundance should centre on regulatory rollback.

We side with the critics on that missing rule, and the radical-centre answer supplies it: keep the rules that serve the goal of the programme, and measure the cost of each in time.

## Spain and Europe

Europe has its own scarcity. Garicano lists some of it: in 2022 the EU had five times more wind capacity stuck in permitting than under construction, France's average permit took 220 days in 2023, and Berlin's new airport took fourteen years to open. Spain fits the pattern in housing and in the grid.

The Banco de España's 2025 annual report, as reported by El Debate, puts the country's housing deficit for 2021–2025 at 750,000 homes. In 2025 about 92,000 homes were finished while some 240,000 new households formed. The public housing stock is 1.5% of the total, against a European and OECD average of 7%. The bank names long and complex planning procedures as a cause of weak supply, and its prescriptions combine regulatory simplification, more administrative capacity for local councils and faster construction of public affordable housing, including industrialised building. That is close to the book's position, coming from a central bank.

Electricity shows the same knot. According to the utilities' association Aelec, cited by Endesa, 83.4% of the nodes on Spain's distribution grid were saturated in September 2025; about 67 GW of new demand asked to connect in 2024 and almost half was refused. The industry says a medium-sized grid project takes more than seven years to come into service, mostly because of administrative procedure. These are figures from interested firms, and they still describe a country with cheap sun and wind that cannot plug in the factories and homes that want to use them.

The radical-centre position puts three ideas together. The left is right that homes, clean power and transit are public goods, and that their scarcity falls hardest on young people and renters, which justifies building public housing at scale. The market-liberal tradition is right that permits, procedures and vetoes strangle supply, and that private builders and grid companies need to be allowed to build. The idea that fits neither camp is to judge every housing plan, grid investment and research programme by what gets built and how fast, and to publish that count each quarter, council by council and node by node. Before a new condition is attached to a programme, someone states what it adds to the goal and what it costs in months. Conditions that pass stay; the rest go. Jennifer Pahlka makes the case for this kind of delivery focus in [Recoding America](/en/articles/jennifer-pahlka-recoding-america-explained), Marc Dunkelman tells the history of how the left learned to block in [Why Nothing Works](/en/articles/marc-dunkelman-why-nothing-works-explained), and our piece on [why Spain grows without gaining productivity](/en/articles/what-is-productivity-why-spain-grows-without-it) shows what is at stake for wages. A [productivity commission](/en/articles/productivity-commission-for-spain-reviewing-rules) would be a natural home for the test.

## FAQ

### What is the main argument of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson?

That shortages of homes, clean energy, infrastructure and scientific progress in rich democracies are largely a policy choice. Rules, reviews and lawsuits built up since the 1960s and 1970s make building and inventing slow and expensive, and the authors want a politics that asks whether supply can solve a problem and then delivers it.

### What is everything-bagel liberalism?

Klein and Thompson's phrase for programmes that pile so many goals and mandates on top of their main purpose (labour standards, local consultation, environmental reviews, social targets) that the main purpose gets delivered late, at great cost, or not at all.

### Is Abundance left-wing or right-wing?

The authors are liberals writing to their own side, and they present abundance as an alternative to a left wary of growth and a right hostile to government. Reviewers from both sides have praised the diagnosis and argued with the remedies.

### What does Abundance mean for Spain?

Spain has a housing deficit the Banco de España puts at 750,000 homes and a distribution grid that, according to the utilities' association Aelec, was 83.4% saturated in September 2025. The book's lesson is to measure homes and grid connections delivered, and to rebuild procedures around getting them delivered faster.

## Sources

- [Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (review)](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ezra-klein/abundance-2), Kirkus Reviews (2025)
- [Why ‘Abundance’ Matters](https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-abundance-matters), Vital City (2025)
- [Book review: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson](https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/book-review-abundance-by-ezra-klein), Silicon Continent (2025)
- [Book review: Radical shift in political culture](https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-41774309.html), Irish Examiner (2026)
- [El Banco de España cifra en 750.000 el déficit de vivienda y pide simplificar la regulación](https://www.eldebate.com/economia/20260618/banco-espana-cifra-750000-deficit-vivienda-doble-italia-pide-simplificar-regulacion_429981.html), El Debate (2026)
- [La red eléctrica, ¿está saturada?](https://www.endesa.com/es/la-cara-e/red-electrica/saturacion-red-electrica), Endesa (2025)