Ezra Klein

Abundance is the argument that a lot of what is wrong in our society is that we have manufactured scarcities. We have made it too hard to build and create the things people need more of. The places where we focus in the book are housing, clean energy, and state capacity.

New Deal liberalism was very much about the rapid creation of things that the working class needed in the physical world. But that growth machine became reckless — building highways through communities, despoiling rivers and streams, cutting down forests — and it created a backlash in the form of the New Left. And that was fair. There needed to be ways for people (and ultimately nonprofits) to sue and make sure their voices were heard.