Klein and Thompson’s Abundance sounds progressive but delivers repackaged trickle-down economics, blaming NIMBYs while ignoring corporate power and capitalist inequality. Their technocratic utopia misreads deregulation as justice, with wealth for the rich disguised as abundance for all.
Abundance, the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has taken the centre-left by storm. First in the United States, and now increasingly in Australia, it is being hailed as a new framework for progressive politics. Hearing the buzz, I joined a group read. The question was simple: is this really the future of the left?
The answer: abundance as an idea is good. But Abundance as a book presents a framework that will be extremely destructive for the left.
The premise
Klein and Thompson argue that progressives need to embrace an “abundance agenda”. They lament that America is stuck between a left fearful of growth and a right hostile to government intervention. Instead, they call for a program that celebrates growth and abundance — of housing, energy, food, water, and more.
This vision is what they call an “abundance agenda” and they open the book with a vision of utopia:
The year is 2050. You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Water from the ocean pours out of the faucet. It’s fresh and clear, piped from a desalination plant. These facilities use microbial membranes to squeeze out the ocean salt. Today, they provide more than half of the country’s fresh used water. Previously overtaxed rivers, such as the Colorado, have surged back now that we don’t rely on them to irrigate our farms and fill our coffee mugs. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, previously parched cities are erupting in green foliage (2025, 1).
The utopian sketch continues for pages. It is vivid and appealing, although at the same time extremely technocratic, being stale and without any sense of human creativity, debate or messiness.
Even if we accept this utopia, what’s stopped such an agenda, and how do we make it happen? Their diagnosis is that liberal cities, since the 1970s, have layered environmental regulations and process-heavy frameworks onto every decision. Well-intentioned rules, often championed by NIMBYs, have ended up blocking the very things progressives claim to want. Liberals, they argue, became obsessed with preventing bad development, and abandoned any interest in building a positive future. In turn, the roadmap offered by the authors is a politics that pares back regulation and prioritises growth. This, they believe, is a truly progressive agenda the left should adopt.
Abundance is a good idea
The idea of abundance is sound. The left should fight for abundance – a world where nobody wants for the basics of life. Food, housing, water, power, and transport should be guaranteed.
Indeed, the strongest progressive campaigns of recent years have been grounded in abundance, even if they did not use the term. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York was abundance politics: free buses to guarantee mobility, rent freezes to secure homes, public supermarkets to provide food. Zack Polanski has run on a similar platform to win the leadership of the Green Party of England and Wales on a massive majority, while Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn both mobilised millions with similar ideas.
Klein and Thompson are also right to point out that Governments have fundamentally failed to deliver on such promises. Governments have lost the will and ability to build things that are good for society and they are failing to provide the services that people need. Projects that once could be completed in years and now taking decades – whether a Light Rail Project in Canberra or a High-Speed Rail Project in California. And when we continue to be promised progress that either takes decades to arrive or never occurs at all, it is reasonable for people to be angry at this, and to want to see a better alternative.
Abundance resonates. Wanting everyone – and I mean truly everyone – to be free of want is a genuinely a left-wing idea.
The problem is that Klein and Thompson misunderstand what really blocks abundance from being a reality, and in doing so head us down a path that would simply give more power to big corporations and more money for the rich.
We do not live in a scarce world
The key difference between their book and campaigns like Mamdani’s lies in their view of scarcity. At the heart of Abundance is the claim that we live in a scarce world, and that our politics is driven by a “scarcity mindset”.
Klein and Thompson, for example, argue that the left’s scarcity mindset has been key to the rise of the right in the United States. They argue that “Liberals might detest the language that Trump and Vance use to demonize immigrants. Blue blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics. Zoning regulations in liberal states and cities that restrict housing have increase costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants. These restrictions exacerbated an affordability crisis that was harnessed by the right” (2025, 208).
That is the book’s fundamental flaw.
We do not live in scarcity. We live in abundance. The world overflows with wealth, food, and energy. Take housing. Australia today has more homes per person than ever before. What has changed is not the number of homes, but their distribution, which has become more and more unequal.
Our politics is not dominated by scarcity either. Yes, some environmental movements argue that growth has limits on a finite planet. But they hold virtually no power compared to mainstream parties. For the ALP or the Democrats, growth is not just one goal — it is the overriding goal. GDP expansion trumps all else. Environmental protection, social equity, and long-term sustainability are always subordinated.
The problem is not that we lack abundance. It is that abundance is hoarded. Billionaires accumulate obscene wealth and trillionaires loom on the horizon, while governments design policies to feed them more. Corporations corner resources, capture subsidies, and entrench their dominance. The scraps that remain are left for everyone else. It is this real scarcity that the right has harnessed, engaging in a bait and switch where they scapegoat immigrants and other minorities for the failures of the neoliberal system they promote.
It is astonishing that a book about abundance barely addresses inequality. Klein and Thompson assume that if we build more, everyone will gain access. At one point, for example, they recycle Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern’s analogy from Homelessness Is a Housing Problem (2022). Homelessness, they argue, is like musical chairs: with ten chairs for ten people, all can sit; with nine chairs, one is left standing.
But this misses the reality. We can add chairs and still leave people without a seat if the wealthy hoard them all. We see this in our modern housing market, with homes often sitting empty, the rich having multiple homes in different cities that they can live in, and with developers building homes targeted directly at investors – i.e. apartments and townhouses not designed to live in, but to make money off. Building more homes will not guarantee access unless we change the rules of the system.
In turn, Abundance is actually just a version of trickle-down economics – a belief that if we let big corporations and huge developers do what they want then everyone will benefit. As Brian Callaci argues in his review of the book, Abundance “places its faith in the idea that private capital, finally freed from onerous regulation, will spring into action and undertake the massive investments required for broad prosperity.” That is another fantasy that just doesn’t make sense. Trickle-down economics has never worked before, and it will not work if done by progressives.
This is the gulf between Abundance and the politics of Mamdani, Sanders, and Corbyn. The latter fight for abundance for the 99% – not just more, but fairer distribution. Klein and Thompson offer only more of the same, perpetuating a system that already serves the wealthy.
Who has the real power?
The book also misdiagnoses power. It claims NIMBY activists are the main obstacle, blocking governments and developers from delivering abundance.
This is implausible. Yes, I hear the frustration about NIMBYs in our cities, and often feel that frustration myself. NIMBYs often use legal mechanisms like environmental or heritage laws to stop good projects because they don’t want change in their suburbs. We’ve seen this time and time again – whether it was the fight to stop the train from going to Bondi Beach or countless campaigns against public housing development.
In saying this, however, NIMBYs are not stronger than governments or corporations. While they can be a frustrating nuisance, pretending they all-powerful obscures where power really lies.
Take Australia. The Federal Government continues to approve coal and gas projects in defiance of widespread community opposition. As I write this, for example, the Government has just approved Woodside’s massive North-West Shelf project. This comes despite years of opposition from environmental groups, the local Indigenous community, and many more. In fact, the Government continues to approve coal and gas projects despite polls showing that a majority want to ban new coal mines and reduce gas exports. But the Government ignores these views, not to mention the science on climate change, and does what it wants instead.
In another example, in Melbourne, the state Labor Government has happily overridden NIMBYs with rezoning around transport hubs — but at the same time is demolishing public housing towers in the inner city. These demolitions will have a far greater impact on housing than any appeal lodged by residents. Yet somehow government still paints itself as pro-housing, while casting communities as the problem. It was not local residents who ordered the bulldozers. It was the government.
Klein and Thompson seem to absolutely miss these kinds of decisions, however. Talking about the failures of renewable energy projects, for example, the authors state examples are “piling up of renewable energy projects being stalled or killed by coalitions akin to those that formed against dirty energy projects, and deploying the same environmental laws” (2025, 95). Yet, they have no explanation for why these groups have, apparently, been so successful in stopping renewable projects when stopping new coal and gas projects that an effort of mammoth proportions. The answer, naturally, lies in the relative power of the two industries, a question Klein and Thompson never really delve into.
By exaggerating NIMBY power, Klein and Thompson give governments an alibi. They frame the state as benign, keen to build but thwarted by cranky locals. In reality, governments and corporations hold immense power and often use it to serve developers, crack down on protest, and defend corporate interests.
Regulation is not the problem
The book also blames regulation, especially environmental law. Once again, there is a shred of truth here, in that environmental laws alongside other regulations are often outdated and thwart both the ability to do good things for society as well as to protect our environment. The need to constantly “do something” has in many cases meant a bloated Government that is stopping people from achieving good things.
However, it is wrong to blame regulation for all these problems, particularly when often the culprit is Government inaction.
Klein and Thompson, for example, point to California’s high-speed rail as a project strangled by red tape. But regulation is certainly not the only culprit. The bigger issues are political will and state capacity. The rail project has been crippled by chronic underfunding, not permitting. Successive governments banked on private investment that never materialised, leaving the state without the money or workforce to deliver.
This pattern is familiar worldwide. Decades of neoliberalism have hollowed out the public sector. Governments that once built housing, energy, and transport have shed the engineers, planners, and project managers who made it possible. Today they outsource everything to corporations whose priority is profit, not the public good. The result is predictable: delays, cost blow-outs, and compromised outcomes.
To respond by weakening environmental law is perverse. Our protections are already too weak. Projects that destroy habitat and accelerate climate change – mines, dams, sprawl, harbours – are routinely approved. At a moment of ecological crisis, further deregulation would be reckless.
The answer is not to strip back regulation but to rebuild public capacity. Governments must regain the skills, resources, and institutions to plan and deliver good projects. That, not deregulation, is the path to genuine abundance.
A wasted opportunity
At the end of the book, Klein and Thompson decide, of all people, to quote Marx and Engels. They state that “abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged that capitalism was superior to its predecessor, feudalism, at producing goods and wealth” (2025, 214).
It is true that Marx and Engels made this very claim, and they were right in doing so. To that end, the idea of abundance is a claim of a genuine leftist tradition. The left should embrace it.
Yet it is also clear that Klein and Thompson haven’t read much more of Marx and Engels. Because if they had they would have also understood that while these two acknowledged what capitalism could achieve, they also fought tooth and nail against it, believing it to be a system that was producing mass inequality and alienation.
Abundance the book does not understand this, and instead promotes an approach that would entrench power, increase wealth for the rich, and further alienate the poor. By ignoring inequality, misreading power, and scapegoating regulation, it offers shallow optimism dressed up as vision. While abundance is a good idea, the ideas the book promotes will just give us more neoliberalism, fewer good things, and far less justice.
The task for progressives is not to adopt Klein and Thompson’s blueprint. It is to build a politics of abundance rooted in justice: redistributing wealth, rebuilding public capacity, and ensuring the plenty we already have is shared fairly. Many are already doing this and those are the paths we should be following.
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Dr Simon Copland is the Executive Director of Pedal Power ACT, Canberra’s oldest and largest cycling organisation. In his role Copland is advocating for a mass increase in investment in cycling infrastructure in the ACT. Simon completed his PhD in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), studying online men’s rights groups and communities ‘manosphere’. He has research expertise in masculinity, the far-right, online hate, and digital media platforms. He has a Masters in Science Communication.