What are we talking about this time?
The money has already been approved, but the project cannot get moving; the technology is mature, but the grid that would support it cannot be connected; the city clearly has opportunities, but housing is not allowed to be built; the drug has already been invented, but the production and distribution system cannot keep up. How did the United States, the world’s leading superpower, end up in this increasingly absurd predicament where it cannot seem to make anything?
This episode looks at Abundance: A Guide to Optimizing the Future, co-written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The program calls it “Abundance: A Guide to Optimizing the Future”; the official Traditional Chinese edition is titled “2050: Toward Abundance—When National Development Falls into Long-Term Stagnation, How to Turn the Tide and Create a Prosperous, Abundant New Future.”
The most counterintuitive thing about this book is that it is not the right attacking the left. Klein is a star columnist for The New York Times, and Thompson is a veteran staff writer at The Atlantic. Both are thoroughly left-wing American public intellectuals, and this is a book that turns the knife inward, criticizing their own camp. Their core judgment is this: America’s scarcity today is not caused by nature; it is produced by institutions—the right’s mistake is passive inaction, while the left’s mistake is to hand out money and vouchers only on the demand side, then wrap “increasing supply” in one tightening constraint after another.
So you get an America like this: progressive neighborhoods put up signs saying “Black Lives Matter,” then vote to zone their land for single-family homes only; San Francisco’s Black population has fallen in every census since 1970; the Austin metro area approves 18 new homes per 1,000 residents, while Los Angeles and San Francisco approve only 0.5; California’s high-speed rail, approved by voters back in 2008, has seen its route shrink to one-third of the original plan while its budget has ballooned from 330 billion dollars to 950 billion dollars, and it will not carry passengers until after 2030 at the earliest, while China built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail during the same period. The authors say that a wealthy, stable society good at expressing itself will keep accumulating organizations, interests, procedures, and veto points—the more capable people are of organizing to say “no,” the less capable they become of building anything. And America has gone a step further by turning this veto power into law.
The book’s nastiest cut is called “Everything Bagel Liberalism”: a policy could originally get by with doing A, but the government demands that you satisfy B, C, D, E, and F at the same time, or it will not approve the money. In 2016, Los Angeles passed a 1.2 billion-dollar bill to build 10,000 apartments for people experiencing homelessness. Eight years later, just over 4,000 units had been completed, at an average construction cost of 700,000 dollars per unit; meanwhile, a San Francisco project funded by a private charitable foundation and freed from the conditions attached to public money built 145 single-room units in three years, each costing less than 400,000 dollars. On the other hand, when a tanker truck fire brought Philadelphia’s I-95 bridge down in 2023, the governor declared a state of emergency and waived normal procedures, and traffic was restored in 12 days. Suddenly everyone realized: the government is not incapable of moving fast; it simply is not normally allowed to.
The second half of the program pushes the question further: America is still unrivaled when it comes to going from 0 to 1, but it is increasingly bad at going from 1 to n. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, yet 13 years later it had been used to treat only 5 people; what truly changed the world was its large-scale deployment during World War II. The world’s first silicon solar cell came from Bell Labs in the United States, yet today China manufactures around 90% of the world’s photovoltaic panels. The one time America really got it right was Operation Warp Speed for COVID-19 vaccines: the government played “bottleneck detective,” spent less than 40 billion dollars, and one study estimated that the value of the lives saved in the first eight months after vaccination reached 2.5 trillion dollars—but later, neither party wanted to claim ownership of the program.
Highlights
- The housing shortage is not a natural disaster: the Austin metro area approves 18 new homes per 1,000 residents, while Los Angeles and San Francisco approve only 0.5; the neighborhoods with the most progressive slogans are often precisely the ones keeping newcomers outside the gate.
- The real variable behind homelessness: authoritative research cited in the book shows that weather, welfare, drugs, and mental illness cannot explain the enormous differences between cities. What is truly highly correlated is rent and vacancy rates.
- How “Everything Bagel Liberalism” kills supply: Los Angeles’s 1.2 billion-dollar bill produced only a little over 4,000 units in eight years, at about 600,000 dollars each, while a San Francisco project funded by a private charitable foundation was completed in three years, with each unit costing less than 400,000 dollars.
- Philadelphia’s I-95 bridge reopened in 12 days: when officials are allowed to take risks and make trade-offs under a state of emergency, the government suddenly gets fast.
- From 0 to 1 and from 1 to n: penicillin was discovered, but 13 years later it had treated only 5 people; solar cells were invented in the United States but made cheaply in China—the factory itself is where innovation happens.
Jump to a section
- 00:00 The world’s leading superpower—why can it no longer make things?
- 01:25 Not the right attacking the left: two left-wing authors turn the knife inward
- 04:01 Housing: who is stopping good cities from building homes?
- 07:59 Homelessness: it is not the weather or drugs—it is a shortage of chairs
- 10:03 Clean energy: they want to decarbonize, but they will not let anyone build
- 12:41 California high-speed rail: money, technology, and public support—and it still cannot get done
- 14:17 A veto-point society: from Mancur Olson to Ralph Nader
- 18:38 Everything Bagel Liberalism: stuffing every good thing into one project
- 21:36 Philadelphia’s I-95 bridge: reopened in 12 days—the government is not incapable of moving fast
- 23:55 The lesson of penicillin: invention is not the same as changing the world
- 27:05 Operation Warp Speed: America’s most cost-effective policy—and a political orphan
- 30:24 China and America as mirrors: one does not have enough brake, the other cannot push down the gas pedal
This book
- Title: Abundance
- Authors: Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson
- Publisher: Avid Reader Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
- Publication date: 2025-03
- ISBN：9781668023488
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