Over-regulation has rendered progressive change impossible, argue the authors of this clear and rigorous book. But what about the tradeoffs?

Every political movement has an image of the past that motivates its view of the future. For conservatives, it might be the imaginary suburbia of a 1950s coffee commercial; for liberals, the solidarity of a New Deal-era Works Progress Administration poster. For Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, it is the techno-optimism of the 1964 New York World’s Fair “Futurama” exhibit: a vision of commuter flights to the moon, desalinisation turning deserts into farmland, hotels on the ocean floor. In their book, Abundance, they argue for a new politics that unlocks the potential of the remarkable technologies that already exist, as well as those yet to be invented.

But that future is behind schedule – and Abundance holds late 20th‑century liberalism responsible. (Klein and Thompson critique the right, too – they are themselves liberals – but this book speaks only to their co-partisans, with the downside of artificially telling just half the story). Liberals, Klein and Thompson say, nobly fought to redistribute what we have to those without, while losing sight of the goal of creating more to redistribute in the first place. Meanwhile, they sought to protect the public from the unchecked consequences of growth: the bulldozers of urban renewal and the pollution of industrialisation. They succeeded, but left the state too constrained to solve the challenges of today. When government rouses itself – as with the breakneck effort to invent, manufacture and deploy a Covid vaccine – it can perform miracles. Too often, it doesn’t. (Their focus is the US, but readers in other developed economies will quickly see analogies in infrastructure projects and opportunities for innovation stymied closer to home.)