Podcast-tested and campaign trail-ready, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance agenda aims to fix stagnation with speed and scale. But in bypassing democracy, it revives the worst habits of the order it claims to replace.

The newest Pokemon card of middlepath optimism now being eagerly traded among sensible-center political thinkers and messaging mavens — who now recognize the need for change (provided it leaves the cushioned upholstery intact) — is Abundance®. As presented wherever thinkfluencers publicly cogitate on questions of policymaking and political messaging about policymaking, Abundance promises, with that familiar glow of Silicon Valley earnestness, to solve our collective ills by building more housing, more energy infrastructure, more market-pleasing deliverables! Now doing it faster, smarter, and with less of what it coyly (and rather quaintly) calls “red tape.” As a policy agenda, Abundance seeks to transcend our present dysfunctions not by asking who owns the grid, or who profits from precarity, but by assuring us that permitting reform and public-private partnerships will usher in a post-scarcity age — one solar panel and zoning variance at a time.

What is striking about this latest generation of bushy tailed techno-optimists is not their enthusiasm for material expansion, but their resolute avoidance of political economy. For, in their telling, Abundance is not the shared fruit of collective power, but a kind of logistical miracle, summoned by streamlining procedure and silencing the frictional fuss of democracy. In the book that serves as the New Testament of Abundance (efficiently titled “Abundance“; get it?), authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer what they believe to be a visionary solution. One could be excused for believing that what they actually offer is scarcity — not of resources, but of imagination.

The Abundance agenda does have a few things going for it. First, to its credit, it dares to openly speak — if a bit obliquely — of a real crisis, and not the one conjured by MAGA toxins (the soft center of Democratic Party politicos having made that their near-exclusive concern). Second, by donning the label “Abundance,” it quickly sets up a contrast with the austerity politics that have dominated policy discourse since 90s era Clintonism consolidated Reaganomics. After decades of disinvestment, dithering, and decay, it is refreshing to hear anyone in the mainstream speak of building anything bigger than a policy boutique or public provision kiosk at all, let alone with urgency. The supply of housing is indeed constrained, the energy transition does require infrastructure, and permitting can be maddeningly opaque. What Abundance offers, then, is a sense of kinetic purpose — a promise to shift from what Klein calls the “everything-bagel liberalism” of endless deliberation to something brisker, more material, more generative. So, in tone, it is a welcome departure from austerity. In substance, however, the question remains: what exactly is being built — and for whom?

Far from a departure from the policy consensus of the past three decades, as it turns out, Abundance reveals itself as little more than New Coke neoliberalism: a fizzy rebranding of a doctrine that promises transformation while preserving the structures that necessitated it. It offers to rescue us from precarity and stagnation not by redistributing power, but by streamlining its exercise — soothing a public desperate for real change with the assurance that this time, at least, the disruption will come with better UX design and municipal consent. It is a potion for politicians who need to propose change without disturbing their donors, and a balm for voters who seek reassurance that they won’t get fooled again — but also won’t get hurt again by the unpredictable side effects of genuine transformation.

To understand how Abundance proposes to deliver its post-scarcity future, it is worth attending to the actual mechanisms it champions: permitting reform, infrastructure acceleration, and innovation unburdened by what Klein and Thompson call “process over outcome.” In a summary published by the Energy and Environmental Study Institute, Klein and Thompson’s argument is captured this way: “The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.” Permitting, in this framing, is less a site of democratic deliberation than an unfortunate bottleneck — one best overcome through streamlining and preemption. Infrastructure, too, is recast as a technical challenge of throughput. Facing what they describe as a kind of “national emergency,” Klein and Thompson suggest — as paraphrased in The New Yorker’s review of Abundance — that this urgency may require liberals to sideline their quest for a Scandinavian-style social democracy in favor of more immediate, action-forward governance. Even innovation itself becomes a casualty of excessive friction: the state, they argue, must become a “bottleneck detective,” unblocking the arteries of progress by simplifying grant processes, easing immigration restrictions, and replacing deliberation with administrative efficiency — as The New Yorker summarizes the argument made in Abundance.

And so the policy pathology the Abundance potion aims to cure is not inequality, monopoly, or captured institutions, but drag — delay, redundancy, proceduralism, fuss. In this telling, the villain is not concentrated ownership or political disenfranchisement, but municipal zoning boards and environmental review panels. As Derek Thompson put it in The Atlantic, “The U.S. doesn’t have enough COVID tests—or houses, immigrants, physicians, or solar panels,” concluding that “scarcity is a choice.” The path forward, then, is not redistribution but deregulation — or, in more polite terms, the rationalization of bureaucracy. The governing ethos is not transformation through collective decision-making, but optimization: a faith that if we can just remove the procedural snags, the system — ownership intact, power undisturbed — will finally work as intended. In substance, this is not a redistributive politics but a managerial one: state capacity refashioned not to reshape power, but to smooth its delivery.

More years ago than I care to calculate with any precision, I was struck — as an undergraduate studying politics and public affairs — by the strange absence of the public itself in most discussions of policymaking. Outside of courses in political philosophy or the occasional nod to “public opinion” polling, the democratic will was treated less as a governing mandate than as a limiting factor. In many policy frameworks, the ideal was not government with the consent of the governed, but governance within a broad zone of public indifference — where expert administrators could pursue efficiency without interference. Democratic mechanisms like hearings, reviews, community input, and legal challenges were often coded as friction, inefficiency, or what Abundance prefers to call “red tape.” What struck me then — and strikes me now — is how easily this managerial mindset reframes democracy itself as drag. Consent becomes something inferred, not given; the public becomes a logistical variable, not a political subject. In this light, Abundance is less a departure from the technocratic tradition than its latest product line — streamlined, search-optimized, and eager to deliver progress without the nuisance of participation.

The appeal of Abundance cannot be understood apart from the real political contest in which it is situated. In the wake of resurgent interest in democratic socialism and left-populist movements — energized especially by younger progressives around climate, labor, housing, and healthcare — Abundance has emerged as a more palatable alternative for those wary of polarization but hungry for policy motion. It offers a forward-looking, high-efficiency agenda that promises urgency without upheaval. But what it sidesteps is precisely what democratic socialism seeks to foreground: that the structures which shape material life — housing, infrastructure, energy — are not merely delivery problems but power problems.

A democratic socialist approach begins elsewhere entirely. Rather than asking how to accelerate delivery, it asks who decides what is delivered — and who owns the means of its provision. Where Abundance speaks of permitting, a democratic socialist framework speaks of planning — collective, participatory, and accountable. Where Abundance emphasizes frictionless implementation, democratic socialism insists that some of what the technocratic mind calls “drag” is, in fact, the work of democracy itself: negotiation, contestation, coalition-building, and repair. Efficiency has its place, but justice does not always move quickly — and transformation that bypasses politics will often bypass the people, especially those already marginalized, those with the least access to, or influence on, the levers of power. The question is not merely whether we build more, but whether we build together, for the many, and on terms shaped by those who must live with the results.

If the ethos of Abundance is logistical, the ethos of democratic socialism is egalitarian. It begins from the premise that no small group — whether of technocrats, landlords, financiers, or philanthropic billionaires — has a superior claim to govern society’s shared resources. The core values that follow from this are ownership, deliberation, and solidarity — not simply as ideals, but as structures for organizing the provision of public goods. Democratic socialism insists that workers — as the producers of social wealth — are entitled not only to the fruits of their labor, but to co-ownership of the systems and institutions through which that labor is expressed and distributed. Ownership here does not mean individual property titles or state monopolies; it means democratic control over the material infrastructures of life.

If ownership addresses the question of who controls material life, deliberation addresses how decisions about that life are made. Whereas Abundance seeks policymaking processes that are anodyne — streamlined, technocratic, frictionless — a democratic socialist approach accepts that in a diverse society, policymaking will necessarily be agonistic. Disagreement is not failure; it is the democratic condition. Public hearings, community councils, labor assemblies, tenant unions — these are not bottlenecks, but arenas of participation through which competing visions of the good can be argued, refined, and sometimes reconciled. This stands in sharp contrast to Abundance, which treats disagreement as something to be smoothed out rather than worked through, and democratic friction as something to be optimized away. Deliberation does not promise consensus or speed, but it does promise accountability — the chance for those affected by policy to shape it.

But ownership and deliberation alone are not enough. The third value that grounds democratic socialism — and that is nearly absent from the Abundance agenda — is solidarity. Where Abundance tends to treat people as users of systems in need of better delivery, democratic socialism treats people as co-owners of a shared world. Solidarity is not sentiment. It is the practice of mutual responsibility forged through struggle — across class, race, geography, and experience — and it insists that policy must be shaped not just for the marginalized, but with them. Rather than bypassing politics to deliver efficiency, solidarity requires that we stay in the room with difference and make demands of each other — that we act not as stakeholders but as co-builders of a livable future.

Abundance may present itself as a bold alternative to austerity, but what it offers is not transformation — it is rebranding. It swaps out scarcity talk for build talk, but leaves unchallenged the very power arrangements that produced the scarcity in the first place. Its streamlined technocracy promises to clear a path forward but avoids asking who owns the road, who sets the destination, and who gets left behind. In doing so, it offers a post-political future to a public still living with the consequences of political abandonment. Abundance is not a politics of the many — it is a logistics of the few.

A democratic socialist politics begins from different premises: that those who create society should govern it, that material life should be organized around care and justice rather than efficiency and profit, and that the future we build must be rooted in shared power, not just increased production. After a withering season of elite consensus around the prescriptions of neoliberalism, the problems we face — now grown critical — of housing, climate, labor, and inequality are not just delivery issues, or even matters of manufactured scarcity and the politics of austerity. They are struggles over who decides, who benefits, and who belongs. And those struggles cannot be optimized away. They must be won. Abundance may sound like a fresh alternative, but at its core, it is neoliberalism in a fleece vest — reheated and repackaged for the podcast circuit and campaign trail, still allergic to power analysis, still afraid to name who must give something up for the many to thrive.