Everyone facing a problem hopes that their problem will go away. Confronting constant tough choices—caused by a faltering healthcare system, an aging population dependent on state pensions, councils teetering on bankruptcy, and a persistent cost of living crisis—Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves would desperately love a way to make their problems disappear, or at least become more tractable. Thus, they have wagered the success of their government on growth.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance is an important book as much for what it argues as for how it captures this hope—that economic growth, fuelled by a smarter, technocratic state, will allow the left to bypass many of its traditional challenges. Klein and Thompson’s core argument is that, across a variety of areas, poorly-designed regulations and a sclerotic state have hampered the supply of vital goods like housing, healthcare, and innovation. While they heavily critique regulation, their argument is not anti-statist: they believe in public goods and an active, energetic state working in tandem with market forces.
The book has become the lodestar for efforts to define a new centre-left agenda in the US. Ezra Klein was the invited speaker at the US Democrat Senate retreat. Rachel Reeves picked the book as one of her summer beach reads. Indeed, Klein and Thompson’s argument is unabashedly targeted at policy wonks and political elites. It’s a book that is as much about engineering as it is about politics—or about politics as engineering, where the heroes are adroit administrators who are skilled at managing large-scale projects like public rail development or research investment. Reading the book gives the same sort of pleasure as watching “how it’s made” documentaries about the production of doorknobs or brooms. There are absolutely some vital lessons in Klein and Thompson’s self-declared “supply-side liberalism,” by which they mean a liberalism that focuses on eliminating regulatory bottlenecks for the supply of things like housing and medicine. But in the end, Abundance is not so much about overcoming neoliberalism, as its authors claim, but about patching it up.
This is a book about two things: innovation and public procurement. Like all good storytellers, Klein and Thompson have protagonists—plucky, energetic policy innovators—and antagonists—anti-state extremists on the right and the left. Their ideal actor is a kind of public-sector entrepreneur—someone who brings together different parts of the state to achieve big projects. These actors are entrepreneurs in the older, Schumpeterian sense—their job is to bring together finance and infrastructure to bring a project to fruition. Klein and Thompson’s core message is that these policy-making entrepreneurs’ scope of action has been radically diminished by well-meaning liberalism; indeed, the best parts of the book chart how lawsuit-happy environmentalist and regulatory liberalism intersected with the cultural ethos of the New Left to hamstring the New Deal state.
There are enlightening sections. Klein and Thompson show how the politics of housing, with its focus on local control and oversight, hamstrings private and public housing development. There is no doubt that the older, conservationist model of environmentalism, designed to slow down construction and development, is ill-suited for the scale of infrastructure projects required to reduce carbon emissions. The authors are right that the government plays a central role in innovation, and draw together compelling evidence that funding bureaucracy and the review process is discouraging scientific risk-taking.
But is there a politics of abundance? Much of the book has a sort of engineering-mindset disdain for practical politics. On their podcast, Klein and Thompson chastise much of the left political class for focusing on the exciting politics of big new spending projects and ignoring the nitty gritty of implementation. For them, the action happens after politics—when laws become policies, when policies become institutions, and when institutions then try to achieve new and diverse goals. Klein and Thompson want a government that can do things, that is less hampered by cumbersome regulatory requirements, that is nimbler and more focused. They argue that if the government does more, there will be less scarcity, people will be less angry, and there will be less need for politics. People can go back to just focusing on their careers and families. As much as they pitch their book as a pro-government alternative to neoliberalism, this hope that economic growth will reduce the need for politics is in keeping with the anti-government spirit of the neoliberal age.
One of Abundance’s most revealing moments comes when Klein and Thompson discuss the politics of crisis. Neoliberalism, as Colin Hay has powerfully argued, was born from the constructed crisis of Keynesianism. And Keynesianism was itself a child of the intersecting crises of the 1930s. Klein and Thompson recognise that crises are central to their story too. They make a worrying observation: many of their key “success stories,” such as the emergence of the American research system during World War II, or the vaccine development in Operation Warp Speed, arose in response to crises. They note the “depressing thought” that “we seem to be at our very best when things are at their very worst.” Yet they also find some comfort in a “connection between perceived crisis and urgency. If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism…we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as crisis.” But who is the “we” here? Reflecting on the moon race, they make clear that “leaders define what counts as a crisis”-- elites commit to solving their perceived crisis, regardless of popular support. Political leaders, Klein and Thompson argue, could declare any one of many things—heart disease, climate change—a crisis, and thus, the thinking goes, enable the sort of all-hands-on-deck response that breaks with the calcified status quo.
Yet there is no end of political leaders declaring this or that a crisis, and setting up task forces to resolve it. The Starmer government confronts crisis after crisis and seeks to streamline government in all the ways Klein and Thompson would like. Indeed, we could see Starmer’s “deliverism,” with its belief that improved public services and a more efficient state will counter popular discontent, as a kind of experiment for the abundance agenda. But there is a danger that this fuels cynicism, because in many ways it tries to go around public discontent by changing the environment in which citizens exist, rather than addressing it directly. Indeed, such indirectness is a key trait of Klein and Thompson’s techno-utopianism, which is itself a sort of cynicism. Their techno-utopianism rests on a deep mistrust of collective projects that may draw people into politics—the ordinary citizens who react based on their passionate visions of fairness and have little interest in the engineering of government.
Klein and Thompson open the book with an image of a future: abundant lab-grown meat and life-extending drugs manufactured in space. Government investment in science and technology has generated massive improvements for humanity. But that was a side-effect of a political order, not the goal. The basic promise of the New Deal was a new vision of inclusiveness in political life. It was manifested in the workplace, in neighbourhoods, and in people’s new, day-to-day relationship with an expanded, democratic state. Innovation, dynamism, abundance—these were the effects of popular politics, of forms of mobilization that were often messy and threatening and not just focused on efficiency and streamlining. Abundance gets one thing right—the public want the government to do more and to do it better. But, for better or worse, politics is about forging solidarity in the face of conflict, and to that problem Klein and Thompson’s supply-side liberalism offers no solution.
Steven Klein is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London. He is writing a global history and philosophy of labour unions for Allen Lane.