In the pantheon of modern policy failures, the homelessness crisis in America’s progressive strongholds is among the worst. Consider California, a blue state that trumpets its commitment to social justice and equity. California hosts about half of the country’s unsheltered homeless but only 12 percent of its population. Analyzing HUD data, Fox News notes that between 2019 and 2024, homelessness surged 24 percent in California despite the state’s spending $24 billion to alleviate it. In contrast, Texas and Florida—solidly red states with minimal affordable-housing mandates and substantially lower per capita spending—experienced homelessness increases of just 8 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
This disparity is no coincidence. In their interesting but frustrating new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic—prominent liberal journalists both—present an account of the failures of blue-state governance that often sounds like a libertarian polemic. In their telling, progressive policies (in California and other states) that are supposedly designed to ease suffering instead exacerbate it through regulatory overreach, misallocated resources, and ideological rigidity. In the case of housing, these burdens include restrictive zoning laws, permitting delays, and a variety of environmental, labor, and other mandates that balloon the cost and extend the timeline of new construction, often to absurd levels. In San Francisco, it now costs $700,000 and takes years to construct a single “affordable” housing unit.
In a paragraph that could have been stolen from a Republican campaign consultant, the authors lament:
Liberals should be able to say: vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! California … has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.
Klein and Thompson complain that Democratic legislators shun policies that would increase the supply of goods and services to which all Americans are naturally entitled. Instead, these politicians prioritize laws meant to ensure equity, inclusivity, environmental protection, and labor rights, even though the regulations that flow from these laws severely delay and increase the cost of essential projects. These legislators are committed to programs that subsidize demand—for example, offering housing vouchers, food stamps, Pell Grants, and tax credits. The authors note that these policies, however well-intentioned, are analogous to “building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.” The more you subsidize demand for a good or service, the higher the price climbs, and the more elusive the legislative goal becomes.
Asserting that “the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities,” the Klein-Thompson solution is simple: “To have the future we want, we need to build more of what we need.” Instead of doubling down on subsidies, they argue for clearing away the bureaucratic impediments that stifle supply. Streamline permitting. Slash red tape. Eliminate mandates. Reorient government priorities toward aggressively expanding the supply of housing, clean energy, infrastructure, and other progressive priorities.
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Klein and Thompson sound, for a time, like Chicago School economists. They acknowledge that tax cuts can
encourage work, that housing is subject to the laws of supply and demand, that trade-offs are inevitable in formulating policy, and that cheap energy is the foundation of wealth creation. They could be working at the Cato Institute.
But then comes the inevitable turn to the left.
The market, they insist, cannot be trusted to provide essentials like housing, education, and medicine—areas where “access is a matter of justice.”
Underlying this pivot is a deep philosophical divide. Their call for policies that provide “the future we want” and “the things we need” begs an important question. As Thomas Sowell says, “the most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” For Klein and Thompson, the answer is clear. The decision-makers cannot be ordinary people acting in their own self-interest in the free marketplace, but enlightened policymakers guided by the best of intentions. Only an empowered government can do what is necessary. In making this case, they ignore the lesson their own analysis lays bare: Interference in market decisions leads to shortages, surpluses, wasted resources, and stunted innovation. This is true whether the interference is on the demand or the supply side, a point the authors make early in Abundance.
Rather than shrink the size of government, Klein and Thompson propose to make it more effective. They believe this to be particularly important as we face what they see as the defining challenge of our era: decarbonizing the global economy to avert catastrophic climate change. Here again, their vision collides with reality. The push for an abundance economy—one characterized by cheap, plentiful energy and rising living standards—stands at odds with the costly and complex process of the rapid decarbonization they call for.
As critics such as Bjorn Lomborg note, the expansion of supposedly “cheap” renewables like solar and wind leads to higher energy prices, not lower. Lomborg points to Germany as an example, where electricity costs have soared to more than twice those in the U.S. and more than three times those in China, despite massive investments in renewables. On sunny and windy days, renewables provide up to 70 percent of Germany’s electricity, a statistic celebrated in the media. But on cloudy, windless days, that figure plummets to less than 4 percent, forcing the country to rely on expensive backup power, which drastically drives up costs.
The authors acknowledge that current clean-energy technology is lacking. They concede that “the only way for humanity to limit climate change while fighting poverty is to invent our way to clean energy that is plentiful and cheap and then spend enough to deploy it.” So they call for substantial government intervention to spur these innovations, because, in their view, the free market is not up to the task. It cannot distinguish between the profits that flow from burning coal and the benefits to society of better battery storage, and so the market will not “fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic.” As a result, “government must.”
The problem is that government intervention, however well-meaning, inevitably slows economic growth, which is the only genuine engine of environmental progress. As Lomborg notes, environmental stewardship rises in lockstep with prosperity; wealthier nations deliver superior environmental outcomes. Policies that constrain economic growth undermine both prosperity and environmental health. The irony here escapes Klein and Thompson, and caught between competing imperatives—the desire for abundance and the urgent need to decarbonize—their plan will deliver neither.
Klein and Thompson developed their abundance agenda as both an economic necessity and a political strategy to revitalize liberalism. However, their goal of refocusing the Democratic Party’s attention away from redistribution and regulation and toward supply-side growth without alienating core party constituencies—for example, labor unions and environmentalists—is fraught with formidable political challenges.
Their proposed remedy for dealing with competing priorities is striking: Declare we are in a crisis. Because when reasoned argument fails, why not try controlled panic? To support their observation that progress often hinges on the galvanizing power of disaster, they look to history:
Penicillin took a war and mRNA vaccines took a plague. The Federal Reserve was created only after … the panic of 1907. The tragedy of the Great Depression allowed for the boldness of the New Deal. The Nazi domination of Europe galvanized the creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik … pushed the U.S. to … launch the Apollo program. Again and again in American history, we seem to be at our very best when things are at their very worst.
It is, they say, “always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis.” That is a startling way to advocate for change. Stoking fear for the sake of producing a feeling of urgency bypasses genuine debate. It is consciously designed to manipulate citizens into accepting measures they would otherwise oppose. This tactic erodes public trust and diverts attention and resources from genuine problems that require thoughtful, transparent solutions. Moreover, framing every issue as an existential crisis desensitizes the public, making them less able to distinguish and respond to real emergencies. Ultimately, achieving the “abundance” Klein and Thompson seek depends not on crisis-driven shortcuts but on the hard work of building broad, inclusive coalitions.
Institutional inertia and coalition resistance help explain why the agenda has yet to gain traction among Democratic politicians, despite significant interest among progressive thinkers and journalists.
Of those who do express support, some, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, seem to praise the philosophy more as a strategic re-positioning for national viability than out of genuine conviction. At the very least, Newsom’s historical rhetoric and legislative record are inconsistent with its principles. Others, such as Bronx Representative Ritchie Torres—a likely candidate for New York governor in 2026—appear sincerely committed. Torres calls the abundance agenda “the most effective framework I have encountered for reimagining Democratic governance.” He seems to mean it.
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I recently came across a story that captures the central flaw in Klein and Thompson’s book. A home cook spent weeks collecting vegetable remains and fresh herbs to create the perfect stock. After hours of simmering, the fragrant broth represented weeks of patient preparation. Then came the critical moment: straining the valuable liquid from the spent ingredients. In a cognitive misfire, she poured everything into a colander over the sink and watched as her creation disappeared down the drain, leaving only the useless bits and pieces behind.
Abundance suffers from a similar tragic disconnect. The book diagnoses liberalism’s current malaise and prescribes a refreshing alternative. Its call for liberal governance to pivot from managing scarcity through redistribution toward building abundance through innovation represents an intellectual breakthrough that could revitalize Democratic politics and shift the Overton window—the range of generally acceptable political policies—meaningfully toward the right.
Yet after this masterful setup, Klein and Thompson commit a fatal error. Despite recognizing government’s role in creating artificial scarcities, they nonetheless prescribe more—albeit “better”—government as the solution. This contradiction undermines their entire project. As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey observed, “The Great Enrichment came from innovation released by economic liberty, not from state direction of the economy.” The historical evidence suggests that abundance emerges not from more-effective government intervention but from a government that creates space for markets, voluntary exchange, and decentralized innovation to flourish.
Like the unfortunate chef watching her broth disappear, Klein and Thompson assemble all the right ingredients only to let their central insight—that abundance requires removing barriers to production and innovation—drain away at the crucial moment. Until they reconcile their critique of government-created scarcity with their faith in government-directed abundance, their dish will remain fundamentally flawed, abundant only in contradictions.
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