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Littler Books cover of Abundance Summary

Abundance Summary

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

3.8 minutes to read • Updated June 25, 2025

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Book Description

An explanation of how to solve today's societal problems by overcoming systemic barriers and building progress.

If You Just Remember One Thing

Many of our current crises are chosen scarcities because, despite having the technological potential for abundance, we fail... More

Bullet Point Summary and Quotes

  1. “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That's it. That's the thesis. It reads, even to us, as too simple. And yet, the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. ... We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes. We say we want better health care, better medicine, and more cures for terrible diseases. But we tolerate a system of research, funding, and regulation that pulls scientists away from their most promising work, denying millions of people the discoveries that might extend or improve their lives.”
  2. To have an abundant society, we need to shift our focus from consumption to production, which requires a new political vision that actively invests in and removes barriers to building a better life.
  3. Historically, cities have been the main drivers of opportunity and innovation, but this is no longer the case due to the housing crisis making the cities unaffordable for most people.
    1. The housing crisis and mass homelessness are direct results of not enough homes being built.
    2. The anti-growth movement originated in the 1960s and 70s as a response to the environmental damage of post-war development. This led to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Over time, these laws were weaponized by homeowners to stop new constructions so that their property values can keep rising.
  4. The solution to climate change is to build an abundance of clean energy by leveraging the plummeting costs of solar and wind to power society without burning fossil fuels.
    1. This requires massive infrastructure overhaul, which America has become inefficient at. For example, the California high-speed rail project began as a widely supported plan, but it had decades of delays, ballooning costs, and endless political negotiations and regulatory reviews. As a result, its scope has been drastically scaled back.
    2. This inefficiency stems from a political and legal culture of adversarial legalism that emerged in the 1970s which created a system designed to stop government action through lawsuits and procedural roadblocks, making government process-obsessed rather than focused on delivering results.
    3. This creates The Greens' Dilemma: the very environmental laws and activist tactics created to stop destructive projects (like highways and polluting plants) have become the primary obstacles to building the green infrastructure needed to fight climate change.
  5. Degrowth (decreasing production and consumption) is not a viable solution because forcing scarcity on the public is politically impossible and creates a powerful backlash that empowers anti-climate leaders.
  6. Government is often its own worst enemy.
    1. The Tahanan affordable housing project in San Francisco was built in half the time and for nearly half the cost of similar public projects because it used private funds, allowing it to bypass the burdensome regulations tied to government money.
  7. Liberal governance often hampers its own goals by piling too many secondary objectives onto a single project (everything-bagel liberalism), such as local hiring, small business preferences, and extra design reviews.
  8. Philadelphia rebuilt the I-95 bridge in just twelve days with an emergency declaration. This shows that the government can be highly effective when leaders are empowered to cut through bureaucracy and make decisive choices.
  9. American science is suffering from a great slowdown, where more scientists and funding are producing less disruptive progress. This is caused by a system bogged down by bureaucracy that favors safe, incremental projects over bold ones.
    1. Katalin Karikó's Nobel-winning mRNA research was repeatedly rejected by the National Institutes of Health for being too risky. It eventually led to COVID-19 vaccines. Her work almost lost due to a funding process that is biased against novel ideas.
  10. Invention is crucial for progress, yet it is undervalued by both political sides. Liberals often focus on distributing existing resources rather than creating new technologies, while conservatives often underrate the government's vital role in funding research and development.
    1. Tesla (received a $465 million loan), GPS, and the internet all succeeded with the help of the government.
    2. “Where are the brand-new government research labs for the 2020s? Such institutions are not guaranteed to succeed, but they represent the sort of risk-taking that American science needs more of.”
  11. The government should apply the scientific method to science funding itself, which means to run experiments on how to best fund innovation. This is called metascience.
  12. A discovery is practically useless until it is massively scaled and deployed. This is often more difficult and critical than the initial idea.
    1. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but for over a decade, it led to almost no real-world benefit as researchers could not produce enough of the drug to treat even a few humans effectively. It wasn't until World War II the U.S. government treated penicillin's development as a national industrial project, solved the mass-production challenges, and organized nationwide distribution.
    2. “With the help of the War Production Board, OSRD [Office of Scientific Research and Development] spent millions of dollars paying firms to set up penicillin plants. Penicillin production went exponential, rising from an average of 10 million units per plant per month in 1942 to 646 million units by June 1945.”
  13. The successful development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is a modern blueprint for effective deployment. By acting as a bottleneck detective, the government didn't just fund research, it actively managed the entire process -- from spreading investments across different technologies, to solving supply chain issues and guaranteeing a market.
  14. Progress doesn't have to wait for a catastrophe. The Apollo space program was driven by political will despite inconsistent public support. Leaders can choose to define national priorities (for example, energy abundance or disease eradication) and focus state capacity on solving them and efficiently creating real benefits.
  15. “The US could announce a Warp Speed for heart disease tomorrow, on the theory that the leading cause of death in America is a national crisis. We could announce a full emergency review of federal and local permitting rules for clean energy construction, with the rationale that climate change is a crisis. The US could decide that the major diseases afflicting developing countries, such as malaria, deserve a concerted global coalition to eradicate them within a decade.”
  16. We should not choose politics of scarcity, which blames others (like immigrants) for shortages. We should choose politics of abundance, which focuses on building more.

Abundance: Resources