ABUDNANCE by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson ⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The story of America in the twenty-first century is a story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.”

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If you’re wondering like me why it seems there are road blocks to progress everywhere but it’s unclear where they are or where to start, read this.

We are in the midst of transition, teetering between the right and wrong path, waiting every day to see what event tips the scales. While it seems like this has happened only recently, the book explains how decades of choices have turned American life into one of scarcity instead of abundance. It’s rather eye-opening (and beyond frustrating) to realize we squandered much of the head start we had in this country. But maybe it’s not too late to get it back.

There are unsolved issues everywhere you turn, and the authors found the perfect way to explain it: the supply of goods that can fill a house is sky high, but the supply of things that make a ‘good life’ (healthcare, housing, clean air) is bottomed out. We can’t be a growing, prosperous, healthy society with that kind of ratio. It’s a ratio that favors the rich and leaves the rest fighting over the scraps. It’s a ratio that favors a zero-sum world. It doesn’t have to be.

I liked this because it isn’t all doom and gloom. It’s more focused on explaining how we got here in terms that also searches for solutions. We’ve regulated ourselves into a mess (NIMBYism and housing shortages, uneven medical funding, restricting cheap solar and wind energy), but we can just as easily deregulate ourselves out. It’s a major step to becoming the America of the future.

If we can grow into a country that creates opportunity instead of stifling advances; build the housing and infrastructure and medical breakthroughs to enhance our day-to-day; govern where it can help and deregulate where it has stood in the way; invent the technologies that will give us a more equitable world and stop turning away the brilliant people that will do it; and deploy these tactics into society, there’s hope we can claw our way back to being a country worth bragging about again.

Even though I deeply yearn for the future described in the introduction, I’m still skeptical it will ever happen. Can we override human greed and billionaires gatekeeping the world’s resources and money? Or the decades of stacked policies that have changed cities from places of innovation and wealth opportunity to unaffordable scapegoats for the Right? The problems are so ingrained that it feels insurmountable. But Klein and Thompson have provided a blueprint so optimistic it gives me something I almost daren’t say out loud: hope.