The Limits of Abundance

REVIEW ESSAY
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Avid Reader Press, 2025, 304 pages

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back
by Marc J. Dunkelman
PublicAffairs, 2025, 416 pages

A new consensus is emerging, or maybe an old consensus is reemerging, within the Democratic Party: namely, that “it’s the economy, stupid.” The party can no longer win on “defending democracy,” protecting rights to abortion and same-sex marriage, and modest defense of preexisting welfare and entitlement programs. The neoliberals who once trafficked in cultural policing have returned to insisting that, when Democrats open their mouths, it should be to say something about the economy.

But what should they say? For these newly politically conscious Democrats, this is the difficult part. The Biden administration’s ambi­tious industrial policy failed to register on voters’ radars. And, amid rumblings of capital flight from the Democratic Party, its leadership appears desperate to avoid offending the donor class it is attempting to win back.

This is the backdrop of the furious “abundance debate” consuming left-liberal circles since the debut of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s much-talked-about book, Abundance. It is also the terrain of Marc J. Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, an inquiry into America’s institutional dysfunction that is, in many ways, Abundance’s more wonkish, scholarly twin. Klein and Thompson, true to form, adopt a cheerful Vox-esque tone; Why Nothing Works is a bit more somber in its recounting of the degeneration of the American developmental state.

Both books respond, in part, to a belated realization among left-liberal policy hands that the moderation of the Obama years and the ensuing sluggish recovery from the 2008 recession did more profound political damage than anticipated. Eager to diffuse populist challenges to their faction’s continued rule, they have set about imagining an antidote to secular stagnation. “In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achiev­able,” write Klein and Thompson. “What both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties . . . had come to its end.”¹

Abundance and Why Nothing Works ought to be understood as reflecting a renewed liberal interest in market-making and the state-led loosening of “bottlenecks,” and as an effort that expounds upon the works of the political economist Marianna Mazzucato, the historian Gary Gerstle, and the calls for a renewed national industrial policy issued by many within the Biden administration. They should not be understood as classically neoliberal: Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman each look fondly upon the New Deal, calling for a renaissance of American infrastructure development, the strengthening of America’s capacity to construct public housing, and (in Abundance’s case) for a dramatically expanded industrial research complex. They are frustrated, rightly, with American liberalism’s inability to engage in long-term thinking.

Yet Abundance is also an attempt to decouple developmentalist politics from the problem of inequality. It cannot content itself with simply being a series of good, potentially bipartisan ideas which may assist in restoring Americans’ faith in government. In attempting to answer the call of “it’s the economy, stupid,” Abundance provides a totalizing story about the character of American politics: namely that “the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities.”² Klein and Thompson begin their book with a utopian vision of a fully decarbonized society, wherein AI has done away with most labor and drones deliver weight loss drugs from mechanized factories in Earth’s orbit. This sparkling tomorrow cannot be, they write, because “[f]or years, we constrained our ability to solve the most important problems.”³ Inequality is not among these constraints; of redistributive programs like Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, Pell Grants, and the Child Tax Credit, Klein and Thompson write: “These are important policies, and we support them. But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have.”⁴ Where the “bottlenecks” fettering housing and infrastructure development do not slot neatly into the Abundance framework, they go unmentioned.

Why Nothing Works, for its part, is a narrower critique directed at the progressive Left. As Dunkelman argues, two conflicting impulses have long animated American progressives: the first, to centralize power upward for exercise by an interventionist, market-making state; and the second, to guard against abuse of centralized power by the state and the entities in the market whom it favors. Since the sixties, a Jeffersonian overcorrection against the Hamiltonian overreach of the New Deal era has dominated American politics largely in the form of burdensome environmental regulations. If progressivism is to deliver the kinds of public goods which progressives claim to value, then they must bring their Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses into balance. It is an analytically neat framework, and a persuasive one; it undergirds an impressive tract that is at once a political clarion call and a dense policy study. Yet Dunkelman’s critique of the Left is, at times, overzealous, and it causes him to lose sight of how the cases used to illustrate his argument offer less-than-complete answers. Why Nothing Works writes off the problem of “political will” entirely, dismissing it as a “red herring” and a hallucination of “the young college graduates who typically staff Democratic congressional offices” that is induced by “doom-filled social media feeds.”⁵

Had the authors of Abundance and Why Nothing Works limited themselves to advancing a pragmatic, broadly agreeable set of reforms, they would have been more persuasive. It is plainly absurd, for example, that the New York Power Authority must wade through environmental litigation just to change its energy rates. It’s not farfetched to imagine bipartisan momentum behind reforming environmental protection laws; Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman could have taken refuge in the maxim that “politics is the art of the possible.” Instead, Abundance frames itself as something closer to a techno-utopian manifesto akin to the left-wing commentator Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018).⁶ Dunkelman’s posture is, to his credit, more cautious: “This book was written not to prescribe the specific changes that should be made in every realm of public policy,” he writes.⁷ Yet even he sets out to offer a roadmap for what he calls “an Articles of Confederation moment” for American liberalism.⁸ That framing invites higher expectations. Neither book meets them.

The Geography of Abundance

The first of the goods that Abundance seeks to deliver in “abundant” sums is housing. But here the book immediately runs aground on what may be its most fundamental contradiction: it purports to be a reform project for the national Democratic Party while remaining, by the authors’ own admission, a book primarily concerned with the politics of coastal “superstar cities.”⁹ The concerns of this narrow geography—San Francisco, Brooklyn, Los Angeles—are forced to stand in for the broader American condition.

Why might urban housing policy be relevant to the rest of the country? “Cities play two roles,” write Klein and Thompson: “They are engines of innovation and engines of mobility.”¹⁰ The key to upward mobility and economic renewal, they argue, is freeing Americans to migrate to places like the Bay Area or Park Slope. The problem is housing prices: solve that, internal migration resumes, and prosperity returns. Any familiarity with American history, though, ought to instill deep skepticism about the redemptive power of migration. Internal migration has long been less an engine of opportunity than an index of failure. The Dust Bowl, for example, marked a collapse in local capacity rather than a new golden age of geographic mobility. Unless one believes, against all evidence, that the desire to move to San Francisco is universal, and that the Democratic Party’s national prospects hinge on enabling it, there’s no reason to treat urban housing shortages as a stand‑in for the national condition.

Dunkelman’s segments on housing initially appear to be antidotes to Abundance’s metropolitan myopia. The scope of his undertaking extends to Connecticut mill towns, the inner-ring suburbs of Ohio, and regional hubs like Minneapolis and San Antonio, tracing how the residents of such places weaponized zoning codes to protect rising property values. Dunkelman gives the rise of “Not in My Backyard” (nimby) politics a rigorous (and even empathetic) treatment, narrating how legitimate concerns over environmental quality and the well-being of endangered species devolved into an impossibly complex legalistic regime capable of blocking any and all new housing development. Yet Dunkelman’s lens remains strictly focused upon the law: prune the appeals calendar, rationalize the hearing process, and abundant, affordable housing will rise. But what never enters Dunkelman’s calculus is the simple arithmetic of yield. In much of rural America, the expected internal rate of return on workforce housing is below zero.

Housing affordability, after all, is not a crisis unique to cities: 30 percent of rural households—and nearly half of rural renters—struggle with housing costs.¹¹ Perhaps both books neglect the politics of land use in rural America because they do not map neatly onto their market‑first frameworks, which suppose that overregulation is the primary cause of housing unaffordability in the United States. Even if rural towns wanted to upzone, many lack the basic infrastructure—sewers, water, roads, broadband—to support new construction. Profit margins for developers, moreover, are slim to nonexistent. Capital is scarce, and where rural housing has been successfully delivered, it has only been because the state guaranteed it, through USDA’s Section 502 and 515 programs, for instance. That funding has been gutted: Section 502 direct loans alone were slashed by nearly a third between fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

These are, put simply, not problems deregulation alone can solve; they are problems of insufficient public capacity. If they are to be resolved, it will require something closer to the old developmental liberalism of the postwar era: housing cooperatives, rural electrification boards, public water agencies, and the USDA‑backed credit ecosystem that once made building at scale outside metropolitan cores possible in the first place.

Abundance is more persuasive when addressing the regulatory sclerosis of urban centers. American cities are dramatically underbuilt. Progressive advocacy groups have, in some cases, burdened public development with overlapping sustainability mandates and prevailing wage requirements that drive up per‑unit costs. Klein and Thompson are equally persuasive in arguing that zoning reform, streamlined permits, and Houston-style flexibility would encourage the building of homes of many different sizes and kinds. Indeed, the authors highlight a genuine collective action problem on the left: when every interest group adds a requirement to the building process, public development becomes structurally impossible. This critique is useful, and the Left would do well to engage with it seriously.

Relaxing those local veto points is a necessary precondition for abun­dance, but it is only a precondition. On this point, the best counterexample is, ironically, Austin, which Abundance touts as a quintessential upzoning success.¹² Upzoning and regulatory streamlining were followed by a post‑pandemic construction boom, yet that boom has since stalled. Since its post-pandemic peak of nearly ninety-five multifamily starts per ten thousand people in greater Austin, construction has fallen to 64.5 units per ten thousand.¹³

As ever, capital fears overproduction more than it fears scarcity; Dunkelman’s toolkit cannot explain that bust either. Discussion of credit conditions, and how they might constrain housing development, is absent from Why Nothing Works. And both books ignore the ways financialized capital—and the structure of housing ownership and development—have reshaped American housing markets in ways deregulation alone cannot reverse. Real estate investment trusts, private equity landlords, and algorithmic rent‑setting platforms now dominate many metros where housing is most unaffordable. Mergers in the homebuilding sector since the 1990s have produced financial middlemen who hoard undeveloped land until prices have climbed.¹⁴ New supply, when it does appear, is often captured by ownership structures designed to preserve high rents and rapid returns.

Loosening restrictive zoning removes the brake upon development, but it does not guarantee that a coherent, large-scale building regime will roar to life in its absence. The next step should be in the province of industrial policy: the state acting not merely as referee but as market-maker and backstop. The intellectual seed for such a post-neoliberal housing policy, ironically, is already in Abundance. When the authors hail Operation Warp Speed’s “promise to buy a certain number of early products to accelerate their invention,” they are describing, albeit unintentionally, a blueprint for a national housing strategy.¹⁵

American developers have, for the most part, failed to scale innovations in the realm of housing construction, largely owing to creditors’ unwillingness to support investment in new technologies: offsite construction demands heavy initial investment, making it a tough sell to American lenders used to the incremental financing model of onsite development. In Europe, where modular construction is rapidly scaling, public procurement has allowed modular housing developers to scale up while capital remains skittish.¹⁶ Likewise, vacancy taxes, taxes on undeveloped land, taxes on unoccupied foreign-owned homes, and taxes upon institutional investors’ properties would render markets—especially those in major urban centers—responsive to local price signals rather than to international finance capital.¹⁷ These are, no less than upzoning, preconditions to true abundance.

Above all, any serious strategy to reduce housing costs must be attentive to financing. The state, whether on the municipal or national level, can accept a vastly lower rate of return on investments in housing than private financial investors who otherwise demand exorbitant rates of return. By acting as a lender, it can render development attractive even in a climate of slow rent growth. Without a fiscal apparatus that provides countercyclical housing finance—or a state willing to act as market-maker—the supply-side liberalism of Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman is little more than deregulation. Thus, it is fair to say: there is no “liberalism that builds” without a liberalism that spends. Neither Abundance nor Why Nothing Works are willing to say how much (or from whom) the money must be raised.

Abundance Is Overcapacity

Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman, then, are essentially wedded to a vision of developmentalism which accepts, barring certain means-tested edge cases, that finance capital can deliver abundance for all—and that we should pay little mind to the fact that its fear of overcapacity frequently undercuts its responsiveness to demand. A similar blindspot pervades their account of the stalling American energy transition. Klein and Thompson, for their part, are adamant that the energy transition is chiefly throttled by paperwork. The problem, they write, is an accumulation of “well‑meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century [that] now block the clean‑energy projects needed in the twenty‑first.”¹⁸ Dunkelman adopts the same frame: after walking the reader through a litany of stalled lines and cancelled wind farms, he concludes that “the succession of hurdles a proposal . . . has to clear, and the absence of any centralized authority capable of pushing past entrenched resistance, made it practically impossible to pursue” major renewables; “in a system full of vetoes, no one has sufficient power to push through a worthwhile endeavor.”¹⁹ The cure, for all three authors, is to slash environmental regulations and allow finance capital to do the rest.

Yet as economic geographer Brett Christophers has demonstrated in his study of the economics of climate transition The Price is Wrong (2024), environmental law is only one piece of the puzzle; the decisive chokepoint is profitability. Whenever a project’s expected returns sink below the hurdle rate investors demand, developers and lenders alike pull capital—whatever the state of the environmental paperwork. This was the case in 2022, when Avangrid’s Massachusetts offshore wind contract became so unbankable after turbine price and interest rate spikes that the company chose to pay nearly $50 million in penalties rather than build at a loss. In spring 2024, regular negative price episodes in ERCOT (roughly one in every twelve settlement intervals) prompted three West Texas solar sponsors to cancel tax equity closings they had already booked. Ørsted’s abandonment of its New Jersey Ocean Wind offshore project followed the same script: once its locked-in Purchasing Price Agreement (PPA) price could no longer cover debt service, the firm simply cancelled and wrote off the $4 billion project. In each of these cases, and many more, profit expectations—and fear of having to supply electricity at low, or even negative cost—hamstrung the deployment of clean energy. Finance dreads overcapacity because true abundance hammers the very margins its models depend on.²⁰

These are not uniquely American problems, and other countries have not shied away from using state intervention to solve them. In Denmark, the state-owned grid operator Energinet finances new transmission at bond market rates and accepts 3 to 4 percent returns. In the United Kingdom, a contract-for-difference system guarantees revenue floors and allows developers to borrow at favorable rates.²¹ Whether structured as public-private interplay or as a state-owned enterprise, in both cases, public instruments enable investment even as wholesale prices fall. What the United States lacks is not, first and foremost, a more efficient permitting regime, but an institution, whether public or private, capable of absorbing low returns at scale. A development bank—capitalized by the Treasury, equipped to take equity stakes, able to refinance projects at fixed long-term coupons, and, when necessary, hold assets outright—could make overcapacity financially tolerable. Barring such an institution, though, energy abundance will threaten the same agents tasked with delivering it. Once again, Abundance and Why Nothing Works neglect constraints that are fiscal in nature and find themselves with little recourse against the misallocation of resources in financial markets.

A Liberalism That Builds?

Nowhere is this attitude more evident than in the authors’ treatment of the ongoing failure of California High‑Speed Rail (cahsr). The authors explain the project’s beginnings as such:

In 2009, then, this was the status of high‑speed rail in California: It was a signature project of the president of the United States. A signature project of the most powerful governor California had in decades. Voters in California had set aside billions to make it real. And the federal government was adding billions more. It is hard to imagine a more favorable climate for the project.²²

If the political will and the corresponding funding to complete the Los Angeles–San Francisco high‑speed railway were always there, as Klein and Thompson assume, then the obstacles that have stalled its completion for seventeen years must be regulatory in nature. Dunkelman, equally enamored of the cahsr case, considers it evidence that the level of political support a project enjoys is an almost wholly irrelevant factor. “For all that progressives tend, still today, to ascribe their frustration to a lack of political will,” he writes, “the bulk of culpability clearly rests elsewhere.”²³

And with one fell swoop, Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman dodge serious discussion of California’s budgetary politics. For Dunkelman, it is “a case in point” of how proliferating veto points make “stick‑to‑itiveness almost inconsequential.”²⁴ Nowhere in the book’s otherwise rigorous treatment of the project, however, do the authors grapple with its missing dollars. For all three, this is a serious omission: from having guaranteed funding as early as 2009, the project has sputtered through a political climate of perpetual fiscal uncertainty and austerity. As mechanical engineer Rob Davidoff writes, “The story of cahsr is not about a state trying and failing to overcome its own bureaucracy and broken political process. It’s about a state that barely tried.”²⁵

California voters approved an issuance of $9.95 billion in state bonds in 2008. Typically, as is the case with highway projects, federal funds match or exceed state appropriations, an assumption which the California High‑Speed Rail Authority (chsra) reasonably made. That federal cash, however, did not arrive until 2012, when chsra received just $3.5 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. By June 2013, chsra had, at long last, appropriated enough money to issue its first major construction contract. It would take another year to secure its only ongoing funding source: 15 percent of the revenue from the state’s cap‑and‑trade carbon auctions. With funding finally in place, chsra issued its next three contracts across 2015 and 2016. The delay in appropriating funding and contract issuance, however, persistently interrupted construction and forced chsra to constantly revise its plans while delaying work accordingly.

Given the fluctuating nature of carbon auctions, moreover, chsra‘s ongoing funding fluctuated significantly by year—and as such, could be neither planned for nor borrowed against. As Davidoff notes, Brightline West, the in‑progress high‑speed rail linkage between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, credibly expects to spend $12 billion between 2024 and 2028, the four years needed for its construction. It has taken nearly four times as many years for chsra to have $12 billion on hand.

It is standard practice in much of the world and, indeed, in much of the United States, to line up funding for the construction of high‑speed rail before the project begins. Chsra did not. The trickle of funding delayed the project, empowering critics to deny it funding, further delaying progress. Governor Gavin Newsom, elected in 2018, was among these critics, publicly dismissing the project’s viability and slashing funding for geological surveys.

If chsra has an original sin, it has been the state and federal governments’ refusal to properly fund the project. It has certainly faced great regulatory barriers. But these challenges, however significant, are also faced by projects for new bridges and highway projects, which do manage to routinely overcome them. More than a state that “gets out of its own way,” as Klein and Thompson demand, America needs a state comfortable spending on things beyond highways and bridges.

This is a persistent blindspot in Abundance and Why Nothing Works alike. Why did the Obama administration fail to provide timely and adequate funding for the project? The precise politics of the decision to underfund the chsra under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are not, and may never be, known. But given that the Biden administration seemed determined to avoid the same fate in generously funding Brightline West, we are left to surmise that the project’s anemic funding was a result of the broader insufficiency of the Obama administration’s stimulus package. Here lies another irony of Abundance: despite the fact that the Biden administration’s fiscal policy generated the most assured funding environment for long‑term infrastructure projects in recent American history, Klein and Thompson do not vigorously defend the American Rescue Plan against charges of overspending. Indeed, they imply the opposite, writing that “solving the crisis of the pandemic economy created a new crisis for the post‑pandemic economy: too much demand.”²⁶

The lack of capacity to engage in competent, state‑led planning precludes any ability to construct the large‑scale, long‑term projects Klein and Thompson demand. Nowhere does this fact appear in Abundance, perhaps because it has no formula for surmounting what is probably the greatest bottleneck of all: Americans’ reluctance to spend. Dunkelman’s proceduralism fares no better.

And, indeed, there are many examples of nation‑states powering through nettles of onerous regulation and accomplishing the large, society‑wide transformations Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman (and I!) would like to see. Few do so with the kind of iterative, slow reformism Klein and Thompson propose. Overcoming these regulatory barriers, alongside the funding challenges which lurk behind them, would require a model more akin to the New Deal–era Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) than “abundance” à la Klein and Thompson. Unlike cahsr, which has been repeatedly stalled not just by environmental reviews and jurisdictional fragmentation but, above all, by chronic underfunding, the RFC had its own capital base. Initially capitalized at $500 million and later expanded through Treasury borrowings, it could issue loans, buy bonds, or directly invest in infrastructure without waiting for annual appropriations. In this way, the RFC functioned less like a passive lender and more like a national development bank with broad authority to mobilize resources, precisely what the chsra lacked as it sputtered through a piecemeal, uncertain funding environment.

The RFC was not just a technical or administrative tool; it was the product of a political project that valued decisive national planning and centralized funding. Cahsr exists in the opposite political world. It is, yes, one of hyperlocalism, fragmented governance, legal veto points—but it is also one of excessive fiscal caution. Until liberalism relearns how to tax, borrow, and spend at scale, the dream of California high-speed rail will not materialize.

Financialization against Abundance

Klein and Thompson dedicate nearly a third of Abundance to critiquing America’s “innovation system,” which they see as bogged down in paperwork, risk-averse, and unwilling to engage at scale in the bold public-private partnership models that characterized the twentieth century. Here Klein and Thompson demonstrate welcome skepticism of free markets’ ability to deliver innovation. In a passage on Bell Labs, they note that its success depended upon AT&T’s status as a state-sanctioned monopoly, enabling the firm to act “without concern for short-term profits, which gave its scientists and engineers the freedom to pursue ambitious projects over decades.”²⁷

Yet the other half of the Klein-Thompson “invention agenda” largely amounts to infinite, no-strings-attached subsidies for the private sector. They chalk China’s success in industrial innovation up to its “lavishing subsidies, loans, and free land to upstart solar-panel makers.”²⁸ The success of the Chinese subsidy model, however, is not just a product of its scale but also of the Chinese political economy’s unmatched capacities for capital intensity and strategic investment in industrial innovation; where Abundance falters is in failing to grapple with the ways shareholder primacy and financialized governance constrain such capacities in the U.S. case.

The differences between American and Chinese financing practices come across most starkly in sectors that are capital-intensive and supply‑sensitive, such as electric vehicles. Consider, for instance, that China simply does not have a growth model based on the continual appreciation of equities. Whatever abundance China managed to achieve has, as Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal notes, hardly trickled up to Chinese shareholders: the Shanghai Composite Stock Index reliably oscillates around where it sat in October 2009. Equities in China are dead money.²⁹

If any episode in recent American history most strongly embodies Klein and Thompson’s “invention agenda” beyond that of Operation Warp Speed, it is that of the Obama administration’s electric vehicle subsidies, mainly designed with the intent of transforming Tesla into an American national champion. Their failure is instructive. As the sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo explains, the immense success of Chinese auto manufacturer BYD is owed not only to the generous character of the Chinese subsidy regime—which, indeed, is greatly overstated by American observers—but also to BYD’s ability to engage in managerial behavior which American shareholder-activists have made a chronic habit of fiercely opposing.³⁰

Tesla, while not a typical dividend-issuing or buyback-driven firm, still operates within the logic of equity market discipline. Its valuation depends on maintaining investor confidence through its capital-light scalability; it outsources around 90 percent of its battery supply while avoiding the vertically integrated, labor-intensive model that defines its Chinese rival. By contrast, BYD has brought nearly the entire EV production process in-house: it builds its own batteries, semiconductors, drivetrains, and even operates its own fleet of ships to export finished vehicles. It controls upstream lithium mines and downstream service networks. This extreme vertical integration has given it an overwhelming cost advantage over its American and European competitors, and, moreover, a far greater degree of insulation from global supply shocks.

Put simply, the Chinese innovation ecosystem is characterized by a willingness to tolerate short-term inefficiencies to build long-term capacity. Shareholder primacy, even in its less overt forms, makes that kind of ambition difficult, if not impossible, in the U.S. context. Even firms like Tesla, nominally free from dividend obligations, must still navigate a market that punishes capital-intensive, slow-return investments. Abundance largely sidesteps this major structural issue. But any serious supply-side agenda—liberal or otherwise—must confront the simple fact that the American financial system is not configured to support firms that innovate like their Chinese counterparts. Klein and Thompson end in a position much like the one they disavow: the abundance state, as they have envisioned it, is seriously hobbled by its inability (or unwillingness) to balance tradeoffs or make decisive choices about the direction of national development. It has no recourse against the financialized corporation’s fundamental aversion to long-term fixed investment.

Obamaism Redux

In attempting to offer a totalizing theory of politics that recasts the problems of the American economy as entirely solvable through win-win solutions, Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman have severely misjudged the moment we find ourselves in. Both books, though, have offered useful starts for imagining a liberal developmentalism for the twenty-first century. Taken as wish lists of necessary reforms toward that end, both are successful texts. Neither Klein and Thompson nor Dunkelman, though, have written texts as definitive or far reaching as they would have liked. Abundance is not the “once-in-a-lifetime, paradigm shifting call” its press copy claims it to be. Quite the contrary. Its solutions, at best, are half-measures: many necessary, though none comprehensive.

There is a meaningful political opening for abundance. It is an attempt, though a deeply flawed one, to speak something approximating the language of national development and industrial policy, which has largely been missing in the United States since the late twentieth century. Its suppression in the long heyday of globalization—and its banishment from the bounds of respectable expert discourse—is precisely what has led to the instability and unevenness of present efforts at redevelopment, particularly the second Trump administration’s exceedingly crude project of mounting a crash course in reindustrialization through aggressive, simultaneous tariffs against the rest of the world and neoliberal tax cuts and deregulation at home. In the face of this bastardized McKinleyism, which is not only likely to fail but to supercharge social inequality and reinforce the financialized distortion of the U.S. economy, progressives better have a suitable and ready alternative. The stakes are high.

The trouble is that “development,” as the sociologist Holly Jean Buck explains, makes many in the American and global Left squirm. The term’s intellectual roots lie squarely in European colonialism, with its belief that advanced nations should shepherd “less‑developed” societies along a single, linear path from “underdeveloped” to “developing” to “developed.”³¹ Attempts to humanize this model, like the 1980 Brandt Report on North-South relations, never really stuck. By the 1990s, scholars had largely turned their attention to “post‑development,” looking instead to grassroots movements and bottom‑up localism. But if progressive forces wish to meet this moment, they must, like Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman, reclaim national development as a program and an ideal.

Yet because these ideas are only now being dusted off and brought back into the intellectual spotlight, agreement on what a revived developmental politics should look like is still, unsurprisingly, quite far off. Critics on the left, for instance, frequently charge the advocates of abundance with replicating the politics of Elizabeth Warren: too invested in incremental reform, unwilling to force confrontations with the powerful, and allergic to the barn-burning populism of Bernie Sanders. “Abundance would turn out a crowd at the Aspen Ideas Festival,” writes the political commentator Ross Barkan, “but not one like Sanders attracted in Denver.”³² Abundance, though, is hardly even that: vigorous antitrust enforcement, after all, was the lynchpin of the Warren agenda.

In attempting to offer universally palatable remedies to questions of national development, it resembles something closer to the governing philosophy of Barack Obama, with its timid refusal to face the difficult but necessary questions arising from divergent economic interests and politically costly tradeoffs. Abundance liberalism is guilty of the everything-bagel ethos it claims to transcend. It was Klein himself who wrote, on the day of Donald Trump’s first inauguration, that “Obama­ism” had pursued the theory “that bitter partisanship was a childish thing that could be put aside to solve America’s toughest problems.” Klein concluded: “Obamaism was wrong. And now Obamaism is over.”³³ Abundance appears bound for the same fate.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 54–68.

Notes