Klein, Ezra. Abundance. 1st ed. New York Amsterdam Antwerpen: Avid Reader Press, 2025.
We’re in the middle of a crisis of constraint—affordable housing, aging infrastructure, fragmented care, unworkable cities. It’s tempting to believe, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson do in Abundance, that the answer is simply to build more. Just unshackle ourselves from bureaucracy and fear, embrace a “builder’s mindset,” and abundance will follow.
But that framing skips over too much. It treats scarcity as a political failure rather than a systemic tension—ignoring how our norms, histories, and physical infrastructures generate the very constraints we now face.
In The Geography of Desire,1 I argued that the housing crisis is rooted in a deeper tension: the desire for privacy and the desire for a manageable commute. That tension has shaped our cities for more than a century. Without confronting it, no amount of zoning reform or modular construction will resolve the crisis.
This review of Abundance isn’t just a critique of one book. It’s a critique of a wider way of thinking: the idea that progress is simply a matter of will, rather than culture, structure, and constraint.
I’m halfway through Abundance, and it hasn’t developed beyond a solution looking for a justification—rather than an investigation of root causes and real possibilities. Does it get any better? I doubt it.
The book is animated by a strong thesis (“we need to build”) and then works backwards, assembling evidence to support it—a classic case of motivated reasoning.
Abundance assumes the problem is mostly one of political will and institutional capacity. The core narrative becomes:
“We could have abundance if only we unshackled ourselves from outdated policies and embraced a builder’s mindset.”
But it skips over the deeper questions:
- Why do those constraints exist? (Think: the moral history embedded in zoning, or how Western cultures tie privacy to physical space.)
- Why do they persist?
- What needs are they actually satisfying—stability, familiarity, neighborhood identity, fear of change?
The result is persuasive in tone but often shallow in analysis. It’s a form of supply-side idealism: if only we built more—housing, infrastructure, energy—everything else would sort itself out.
But Abundance doesn’t ask what kind of system demands those things, or what frictions might emerge when we try to scale them.
In that sense, it offers a vision, not an inquiry. It asserts—without much reflection—that a better world is possible if only we got out of our own way. But it never seriously asks:
Why are we in our own way to begin with? And what does that tell us about what people actually value?
If we want to understand the roots of our current problems, we need to look elsewhere.
Crabgrass Frontier,2 for example, is a far richer source. It’s historically grounded, analytically sharp, and deeply attuned to the systemic forces that shaped suburbanisation: government policy, race, transportation, finance, cultural ideals of domesticity. It shows how these forces produced the very housing patterns Abundance wants to “fix” through supply-side solutions.
I don’t think I’ll finish Abundance. I’ve read the conclusion—now I’m just watching it loop.
We don’t just need more housing. We need to understand why we want the kind of housing we do, in the places we do, and for the reasons we do. That means going beyond “abundance” as an output—and asking what inputs, assumptions, and constraints are shaping our present.
Books like Crabgrass Frontier—and histories of technological systems more broadly—show us that abundance is never neutral. It’s structured. And unless we understand that structure, we risk building our way back into the same problems.
- Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “The Geography of Desire.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), April 15, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/the-geography-of-desire. ↩︎
- Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ↩︎