Abundance

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By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (New York: Avid Readers Press, 2025, 289 pages)

Reviewed by Fisher Humphreys

This is a book about how to make the world a better place. “To have the future we want,” the authors write, “we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” I came to the book looking for fresh ideas about how to make the world better. I was not disappointed.

Republicans today tend to believe that government can’t make things better, only worse. They try to shrink government so it will do as little harm as possible. They believe in supply-side economics, by which they mean allowing rich people to keep most of their wealth. They think the wealthy will invest their wealth and thereby create more wealth which will trickle down to the wider society. The authors say this never works. Instead, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

Democrats, on the other hand, believe that government can make things better, and they try to make that happen. Usually they do this by means of demand-side economics. They provide those who need help with resources such as tax credits, food stamps, health insurance, housing vouchers, and grants to go to college. Klein and Thompson support this, but they insist that it isn’t enough. They say that Democrats also need their own version of supply-side economics, by which they mean that government should help America produce more of the things that people need to make life better—in other words, to create abundance. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

The authors criticize Democrats for slowing down economic development by over-regulation. This happens from small-scale matters such as zoning which inhibits housing construction, to massive building projects. In 1982, for example, California launched a project to build high speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Today, 43 years and billions of dollars later, there is still no high speed rail. In the same period of time, China has built 23,000 miles of high speed rail.

The authors recognize that government regulation can be a good thing. It can promote safety and require good wages for workers, for example. But they emphasize that it can also inhibit the kind of development that will make the world a better place. They urge Democrats to recognize that creating abundance is as urgent as regulation, and to act accordingly. They do not offer a list of things to do to make this happen. What they offer is a lens through which to see what needs to happen.

Two things occur to me about the call to create abundance. First, I think Democrats have done this better than the authors acknowledge. President Biden is an excellent example. In his first year as president he oversaw the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law which provided $1.2 trillion for improving nation’s highways, public transit, water, electricity, and broadband. The following year he pushed through the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act which authorized spending $280 billion to stimulate the manufacture of semiconductors and scientific research of various kinds. These seem to me to be exactly the kind of supply-side projects that Klein and Thompson believe in. I find it baffling, therefore, that when they mention these things, they do not hold them up as examples of what it looks like to carry out their proposal.

Second, the authors’ word “abundance” and their phrase “the future we want” feel utopian to me. Their thesis is an economic one. It is true that the future we want includes economics: better health care, enough housing, good jobs, efficient communication and transportation systems, and so on. But that future also includes issues for which economic policies can provide no more than a partial solution. For example, we want the future to be more just about race. Some of the mistreatment of racial minorities is economic, of course, but a lot of it concerns attitudes and social arrangements which can’t be addressed by economic policies.

This is a readable and informative book brimming with insights about public life in America today. For me, its most important contribution is the authors’ argument that people who want to make the world better need to adopt a new theory of supply-side economics. I don’t think the Christian faith requires us to do this, but I do think the theory is consonant with the Christian faith. It helps those who can’t compete successfully in today’s capitalistic system.

I suspect that working for abundance may be closer to some biblical teachings than the counter-cultural, anti-empire, small-is-beautiful ideas promoted in some progressive churches today. The theory has the feel of a society-wide version of the biblical instruction to “labor and work . . . so as to have something [abundance] to share with the needy” (Eph. 4:28).

— Fisher Humphreys is Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He serves on the Board of Christian Ethics Today. He and his wife, Caroline, live in Birmingham.

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