#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 • NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 • KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2025 • NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2025
“A must-read for progressives who want a blueprint for reforming government so it can deliver for working people.” —Barack Obama • “A terrific book...Powerful and persuasive.” —Fareed Zakaria • “Spectacular…Offers a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward…Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination.” —David Brooks, The New York Times
From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.
To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.
Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.
About the Author
Ezra Klein is an opinion columnist and host of the award-winning Ezra Klein Show podcast at The New York Times. He is the author of Why We’re Polarized, an instant New York Times bestseller, named one of Barack Obama’s top books of 2022. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers and On Work, an anthology of his writing on labor and technology. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Praise For…
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2025 NPR Books We Love 2025 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee Bloomberg Best Books of 2025
“A must-read for progressives who want a blueprint for reforming government so it can deliver for working people.” —Barack Obama
“Spectacular . . . Offers a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward . . . Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination by describing the good things that are actually within our grasp: abundant energy, cheaper housing, affordable cities, shorter workweeks, lab-grown meat so that we no longer have to use 25 percent of global land to raise livestock.” —David Brooks, New York Times
“A terrific book . . . powerful and persuasive . . . People will recruit [Klein and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN
“Ambitious . . . Klein and Thompson want a ‘liberalism that builds,’ not just in housing and green energy but in artificial intelligence and in drug development, too, areas where they see similar patterns of stagnation. Their goals are broad. This group of policies, which they call the abundance agenda, offers, Klein and Thompson believe, ‘a path out of the morass we’re in. A new political order’ . . . Abundance is a fair-minded book, and it recognizes some of the trade-offs that come with redesigning government for dynamism.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker
“An absolute must-read.” —Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
“Klein and Thompson are two of the smartest voices from their generation of policy-oriented journalists, moving beyond horse race coverage of politics and integrating serious social science into political commentary. . . . [Their] vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society.” —Julian Zelizer, The New Republic
“A potent political manifesto . . . Its optimism is also compelling, even joyous. . . . The book’s core lesson, convincingly delivered, is that liberals ought to make it easier to do the things they want to do. . . . A can-do antidote to blue-state malaise . . . The timing of Abundance is extraordinary.” —Slate
“Helping liberals get out of their own way . . . It’s time to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful. Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Deftly diagnoses America’s sclerotic inability to build, well, much of anything across multiple domains in the physical world. . . . Trump supporters in Silicon Valley love saying ‘it’s time to build,’ and here are some influential liberals who wholeheartedly agree. . . . The nascent abundance movement is a tailwind for a broad effort that pro-growth conservatives can and should work with. . . . The modern right might not like everything Abundance has to offer, but it sure beats a bipartisan program of artificial scarcity.” —James Pethokoukis, Washington Post
“A guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization . . . [Klein and Thompson] are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. . . . Abundance might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.” —Samuel Moyn, New York Times Book Review
“A forceful, quick-moving broadside against the left-coded pathologies they see as standing in the way. . . . Klein and Thompson’s diagnosis gets much right. . . . A worthy read.” —Financial Times
