Abundance

Klein and Thompson begin the book with a hypothetical vision of 2050 in which the major crises of the first decades of the 21st century have been solved. Energy is cheap and environmentally-friendly, water is no longer scarce thanks to desalination plants cleaning ocean water, food is grown in sustainable labs and indoor farms, and people have more free time and resources thanks to the sharing of AI’s profits that allow people to complete their work in less time. Klein and Thompson explain that this future would be possible with collective action and attention to the world’s crises, crises that are currently being ignored.

Scarcity Is a Choice

Klein and Thompson assert that scarcity is a choice. Their thesis is that to have the future people want, people need to build more of what they need. The story of 21st-century America is chosen scarcities, as people struggle to accept or implement the changes necessary to address the scarcities. Klein and Thompson give the examples of Americans resisting climate change measures, the construction of affordable housing, and reforms of the healthcare system. These resistances can stem from different beliefs or interests; an example includes the construction of a field of solar panels that would benefit the city they power but be a detriment to the rural community near which they’re built. Crises can also reflect what Klein and Thompson call “an overhang of the past into the present” (4). An example of this overhang is the clean air and water regulations passed after the explosion of housing and infrastructure built after World War II caused pollution. These laws, however, now prevent the implementation of clean energy projects.

Klein and Thompson state that an ideological conspiracy sits at the core of American politics, a conspiracy that American decline is caused by ideological disagreement, which boils down to “a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it” (5). Arguments over the size of government “obscured the diminishing capacity of government” while an abundance of consumer goods distracted people from the scarcity of homes, energy, infrastructure, and scientific breakthroughs (5).

A Supply Side Mistake

Supply and demand lie at the heart of economics. Demand is how much people want, while supply is how much is available to people. Economic balance occurs when supply and demand match. However, the Democrats and Republicans of the American government have divided up supply and demand. The term “supply side” is linked with right-wing ideologies. Supply-side economics, first introduced by conservative economist Arthur Laffer in the 1970s, states that countries that have too high taxes have slower economies and falling revenues. Supply-side economics led to decades of Republican promises that cutting taxes on the rich would encourage the lower classes to work smarter and harder to boost the economy and revenues.

Klein and Thompson state that tax cuts can be a useful tool for boosting economies, but they do not routinely lead to higher revenues. Supply-side economies have been tried and failed repeatedly. Supply-side economics, according to Klein and Thompson, “made it vaguely disreputable to worry about the supply side of the economy” (6). Another issue with supply-side economics is scenarios in which society needs a supply that the market cannot or will not provide on its own.

Democrats, in contrast to Republicans, worry about the demand side of economics. Instead of seeking to work against supply-side economics while worried about being called socialists, Democrats also sought to keep government small. Ronald Reagan and Republicans were not the only ones pushing the idea that the government could not solve America’s problems; the Democrats endorsed it. For decades, progressivism was built around giving people money to buy things they could not afford that the market was producing. Examples include the Affordable Care Act, which gives subsidies for people to use to pay for healthcare; food stamps, which give money for people to buy food; or Pell grants, which give people money for college. Klein and Thompson agree that these measures are good and important for people’s well-being, but that the Democrats’ fixation on giving people money to buy things makes them pay less attention to the supply of goods and services they want everyone to possess. Countless taxpayer dollars go toward health insurance, infrastructure, and housing vouchers without focusing on what the money is buying and building.

Democrats express as much faith in the market to right itself as Republicans. As long as money is dangled in front of the private sector, it will achieve social goals. However, if demand for something scarce is subsidized, it will raise prices and potentially force rationing. For example, too much money and buyers for limited houses lead to windfall profits for sellers and too-high prices for buyers. This prompts Republicans to push back against subsidies and to advocate for keeping the government out of the private sector. This can work, but not for goods that are a matter of justice, like housing, education, and medicine. When people receive a subsidy for a good with a choked supply, it’s like building a ladder to try to match an upward-moving elevator. Klein and Thompson offer examples of this mistake: in the housing market in 1950, the average house was 2.2 times the average annual income, while in 2020 it was 6 times the average annual income; between 1999 and 2023, the price for employer-based family healthcare increased 300%; the cost of college tuition in 1970 increased from $394 for public school to $11,310 at in-state public school in 2023.

Klein and Thompson state that “an uncanny” economy has emerged, in which the middle-class lifestyle is receding while the material trappings of the middle-class are more widely affordable. The affordability has been “papered over” with low-cost consumer goods, soaring asset values to keep the wealthy happy, and “mountains” of debt (housing debt, student-loan debt, medical debt, etc.). These issues have led to the recent decades of economic debates surrounding the housing debt crisis, programs to subsidize health insurance, the cost of college, forgiving student loans, tax cuts, the cost of childcare, and the cryptocurrency bubble.

Inflation followed these economic debates. Klein and Thompson explore the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the American economy. Democrats learned from the 2008 financial crisis that too small a stimulus can cause slow economic recovery, so they worked alongside Republicans to inject more into the economy. Democrats prefer a “hot” economy with risks of inflation instead of the risk of increased unemployment. They solved the crisis of the pandemic economy, but they created a crisis of too much demand. Too much demand without matching supply led to inflation. By 2024, inflation began to ease, but the fear of scarcity caused by inflation remained, and the political landscape trended away from globalization and toward domestic manufacturing, the cultivation of housing supply, and the building of the infrastructure necessary for green energy. The “supply problem” is becoming the new core of American politics.

Society Is Not a Pie

A pie, which must be grown but not sliced, is a frequent metaphor for the economy. Klein and Thompson argue that this metaphor is wrong, as a pie growing would be a growth of sameness, not change. When the economy grows, it hastens toward a different, or changed, future. The more growth there is, the more different the future is from the past. Economic growth can come from a few places: adding more people, adding more land or resources, or crafting innovation to boost productivity. Klein and Thompson offer an example of accelerated productivity. A person who fell asleep in 1875 New York City and woke up in 1905 New York City would find the physical world radically different, with skyscrapers, cars, and the invention of the first airplane. In contrast, a person who fell asleep in 1990 and woke up in 2020 would find technological innovation, but the world around them would be familiar. Productivity has stagnated, and people have lost their faith in an optimistic future.

American society lacks the utopian thinking of the past, but an exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), a work that asks,

What if everything could change? What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time—from climate change to inequality and ageing—we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun? (13).

In politics, it’s routine to imagine a just present and work backwards to create the necessary programs to make such a present happen. Bastani encourages people to imagine an idealized future and work backward to create the necessary technology to bring that future about faster, an effort that must be collective amongst the people who seek such a future.

New technologies can create new possibilities and solve once-impossible problems, and people already know how to build what they need for the good of the world, but a free market may not offer all these technologies. The market itself cannot distinguish between money earned ethically and unethically; the government can, and the government must, fund risky technologies that will benefit the world but perhaps not make a meaningful profit. The government is not always the problem or always the solution; it is oftentimes both. Politics shapes the technologies people create, while technologies also shape the political landscape. For example, a world built upon cheap and available renewable energy is different from a world where renewable energy is expensive and scarce. Klein and Thompson state that the right often sees the past’s “imagined glories,” while the left fixates on the injustices of the present. Neither side has a vision for the future, which is what Klein and Thompson seek to craft.

A Liberalism That Builds

Klein and Thompson are both liberals in the American tradition, and the problems they seek to solve lie in the “zone of liberal concern” (15), including climate change, health inequality, affordable housing, etc. Klein and Thompson have many disagreements with the American right, but Abundance focuses on the pathologies of the broad left, as Klein and Thompson view themselves as effective messengers to the left, not the right. The book is motivated by their “belief that [people] need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change” (16), as well as the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the liberally governed cities and states. Klein and Thompson offer the example of California, where Klein grew up and lived while writing Abundance. While there are numerous positives to California, like it leading the world in technology, having a massive gross domestic product (GDP), and creating a culture that much of the world consumes, it faces a homelessness crisis and a housing affordability crisis, causing many Californians to move out of state.

The left tends to look at the sins of Trumpism without acknowledging the contributions of liberal governance to the rise of Make America Great Again (MAGA) populism. In the 2024 election, many liberal cities, counties, and states trended more to the right than in previous years, and more people are leaving blue cities and states, causing a shift in the Electoral College toward the right. Liberals need to “offer the fruits of effective government” to avoid the “false promise of strongmen” and have political success (18).

The Abundant Society

“Abundant” is the word that Klein and Thompson use to describe the society they seek to build. They are not lured in by the “seductive ideologies” of scarcity, meaning they do not believe people will get better jobs if America closes the doors to immigrants, nor will climate change reverse due to a lack of technological growth. Klein and Thompson seek to identify a new kind of abundance. America has an “abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life” (20). Klein and Thompson are more interested in the abundance of production than consumption. Abundance is a state of living in which there is enough to create better lives and a better future.