The Poverty of Abundance

A meta-analysis of a hyperstitional project

A rhetorical letter in response to the question: “Is this book worth reading based on what you know about me?”

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Dear Venkat,

You asked me whether Abundance—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new treatise on progress—is worth reading, based on what I know about you.

My answer is no.

And not only no, but no in the way one declines to revisit the scene of a controlled demolition carried out by the same architects now offering blueprints for reconstruction. Abundance is not a serious book in the philosophical sense. It is not addressed to those who wish to think. It is addressed to those who wish to recover legitimacy—without truth, without reckoning, without loss.

Its authors and their allies—figures nestled for years in the editorial heart of elite liberal media—are not impartial analysts offering a vision for renewal. They are, in no small measure, the engineers of the present malaise. For the better part of two decades, they have constructed and defended a style of procedural liberalism that demoted imagination, displaced conflict, and outsourced moral complexity to the aesthetics of clarity and competence. The system they now diagnose as broken is not alien to them. It is their inheritance, and in many ways, their legacy.

Now, with their reputations tied to the stagnation they once rationalized, they pivot. They speak of building. They adopt the tempo of urgency. They borrow language from their ideological adversaries, hoping to remake themselves as forward-facing rather than culpable. But the wound cannot be closed by the hand that inflicted it.

What follows is not a conventional review. It is an accounting.

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Surveying the Discourse: A Chorus with One Voice

Before we can understand the shape of Abundance, we must first study its echo. The reception of this book is not merely a collection of opinions—it is a map of allegiances, a soft launch of an ideological bloc. The chorus of voices praising it are not simply impressed readers; they are participants in a long-running effort to refurbish the liberal project through the idioms of competence, optimism, and post-ideological pragmatism.

On the side of praise, we find the Vox-alumni network in full force. Matthew Yglesias, writing in Slow Boring, hosts a deferential interview with the authors (source). Noah Smith, from Noahpinion, offers a glowing review that reads more like a transposition of his own blog archives (source). Eric Levitz, at Vox, praises the book for diagnosing liberalism’s constraints.

Beyond this core, Abundance has drawn favorable commentary from voices in the institutional center-left, particularly those seeking to counterbalance the image of liberalism as technocratic or hesitant. At The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells frames the book as a sign that “Democrats are learning to build.” But that optimism is selective.

Elsewhere, the response has been more critical. In The American Prospect, Hannah Story Brown calls the book “unserious” for sidestepping political economy. In Jacobin, Matt Bruenig points out the book’s allergy to redistribution. Zephyr Teachout, writing in Washington Monthly, warns that its technocratic ambition masks a deregulatory logic. And in Democracy Journal, Mike Konczal’s review, The Abundance Doctrine, supplies the most serious internal critique to date: that Abundance forgets the historical function of the very procedures it derides. He reminds us that many administrative constraints were liberalism’s response to a hostile conservative judiciary—and that any “abundance” agenda blind to this context is courting fantasy.

This contextual vacuum is thrown into sharper relief by Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman, a book published alongside Abundance, which offers a historical diagnosis of institutional decay. Where Abundance diagnoses procedural friction, Why Nothing Works reveals the cultural shift—away from Hamiltonian ambition and toward Jeffersonian suspicion—that made such friction inevitable. The books together seem orchestrated, if not coordinated: one demanding speed, the other lamenting blockage, but neither quite naming power.

And if we step further back, the intellectual scaffolding comes into view. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker hovers as an unmentioned ghost text, a reminder that building at scale has historically meant bulldozing the weak. Daniel Stedman Jones’ Masters of the Universe—a revisionist account of neoliberalism’s ideological construction—serves as a counterpoint to Abundance’s pretense of neutrality. The liberal managerial class, like the neoliberals before them, dreams of a world where political theory is obsolete and policy flows frictionlessly from data to deployment. But politics has not obliged.

All this is to say: Abundance is not a text emerging in solitude. It is a coordinated signal, amplified by a coalition of reputation managers, policy narrators, and institutional survivors. Its very reception reveals its function—not as a proposal for change, but as an aesthetic rebranding of a liberalism in retreat.