A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Simon & Schuster, 2024
In the year 2050, according to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, you will wake up in clean sheets, turn on the desalinated tap water, eat your vertical-farmed aubergine, and receive your “star pills” from a hummingbird drone. Your fridge will run on solar and small modular nuclear; your steak will be grown in a vat; your friends, newly enriched by AI, will holiday at Mach 2. Scarcity will be a thing of the past, rendered obsolete by a liberalism that finally remembers how to build. The opening’s speculative frame blurs the line between aspiration and inevitability, a familiar trope of techno-utopian writing, which allows Abundance to deflect attention from the material questions of power, ownership, and class that any serious discussion of the future must confront. The future, they assure us, is abundant.
It is, on one level, a compelling fantasy. But what kind of fantasy, and whose? Abundance proceeds with the breezy confidence of a TED Talk: heavy on metaphors, light on material analysis. Its premise, that the principal constraint on progress is no longer material limits but a political failure to build, functions as a homage to managerial liberalism in a high-vis vest. Klein and Thompson call for what they term a “supply-side progressivism”: a project that invests, constructs, and invents. It is liberalism in a hard hat, ready to pour concrete and code software. But the workers are missing, the owners are unnamed, and capital is nowhere to be seen.
“Abundance proceeds with the breezy confidence of a TED Talk: heavy on metaphors, light on material analysis.”
There is no clearer signal of the book’s political imaginary than its recurring refrain: “scarcity is a choice.” What the authors mean is that the United States, particularly its Democratic strongholds, has failed to build housing, infrastructure, energy systems, and scientific capacity not due to physical constraints, but because of inertia, bureaucracy, and ideological gridlock. This is not entirely untrue. But it is so partial as to be misleading. Scarcity is not merely a political failure, it is an economic strategy. Scarcity disciplines labour, sustains profitability, and creates markets. To mistake it for a lapse of administrative nerve is to misunderstand the logic of capitalist accumulation. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, capitalism depends on “the continual expansion of the market” to absorb surplus capital, a process that necessarily generates uneven development and artificial scarcities.1
In Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, William I. Robinson describes how transnational capital has abandoned even the pretence of social compromise, deepening exploitation while outsourcing repression to surveillance and militarised police.2 Abundance evades this entirely. It imagines a capitalism so amenable that it might be coaxed into egalitarianism with solar panels and zoning reform. The authors wax lyrical about clean energy and modular housing, but offer no account of why these things are not already universally available. They treat the housing crisis, climate breakdown, and collapsing public services as essentially technical problems. They are not. They are problems of ownership and class power.
This is clearest in their treatment of cities. San Francisco and New York are criticised for becoming luxury products, playgrounds for the rich rather than engines of mobility. The prescription? Liberalism must remember how to build. But what goes unmentioned is that these cities have been reshaped precisely through building, by and for capital. Gentrification is not a failure of supply. It is the success of rentier capitalism.3 To build housing without confronting the commodification of land is to pour fuel on the fire. To condemn rising house prices while preserving the logic of asset speculation is to argue against effects while safeguarding their cause.
“To build housing without confronting the commodification of land is to pour fuel on the fire. To decry the price of homes while defending the system that treats them as speculative assets is to speak in gibberish.”
Books like Abundance make me want to scream. And not just the books, the entire ecosystem of content that surrounds them. The podcasts, Substack newsletters, panel discussions, and conference circuits where these ideas are ruminated on, recycled, and endlessly refined by men who own ergonomic chairs and call themselves “builders.” There is something profoundly maddening about watching the beneficiaries of capitalism’s spoils ponder how to retrofit abundance into a system designed to hoard. It is a kind of cognitive dissonance so profound that it passes for common sense in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill alike. The fantasy persists that with enough solar panels and zoning reform, capitalism might finally deliver on its broken promises. But the problem was never that we didn’t build. It’s that what we built was for profit, not for people.
The solution offered is greater state capacity. Klein and Thompson invoke a technocratic idealism drawn from the New Deal and Silicon Valley, an image of a liberal state that builds bridges and passes laws. But as Nicos Poulantzas observed, the state is not a neutral instrument to be wielded at will, it is an institutional condensation of class forces.4 Its function, as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, is to be “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie.”5 The state has built plenty. It builds pipelines and prisons, data centres and border walls. What it builds—and for whom—is a question of class struggle, not procedural competence.
Their answer, predictably, is the state. But which state? While I acknowledge this book was written before Trump’s second administration took office, it’s already debatable whether there will be a functioning state left after Musk and DOGE have reduced it to a holding company for billionaires and code. The idea that liberal technocrats can simply reboot state capacity, clean it up, speed it up, and make it build again, assumes that the state still exists as a site of democratic will. But the American state, especially in its post-2025 form, increasingly resembles a captured platform: depublicised, securitised, and optimised for accumulation. It builds, yes, but what it builds are surveillance systems, private infrastructure, and fiscal firewalls for capital. Whatever fantasies liberalism might have about state-led abundance, they now run through a shell hollowed out by capital, not an institution at the service of society.
It is telling that while the book references Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, it strips out the communism. What remains is luxury without class struggle, automation without expropriation, abundance without abolition. Their vision of the future borrows selectively from the aesthetics of the left while retaining the property relations of the present.
“What remains is luxury without class struggle, automation without expropriation, abundance without abolition.”
Throughout, Klein and Thompson treat technology as a neutral multiplier, capable of serving whatever politics chooses to wield it. This is the Enlightenment myth retooled for the age of AI. But as Neil Postman warned in Technopoly, every technology arrives embedded in social relations.6 AI may reduce labour time, but who owns the model? Vertical farms may grow food, but who owns the land? Desalination may produce water, but who controls the supply? Without rupturing the circuits of ownership, the abundant society becomes merely a more efficient one, efficient at producing profit, inequality, and ecological crisis.
“Politics is not just about the problems we have,” the authors write, “it’s about the problems we see.” But their vision is occluded by their commitments. There is no serious engagement with labour, with rent, with race or imperialism. The US military—the most lavishly funded builder on the planet—goes unmentioned. The chapter on climate change praises the Inflation Reduction Act while ignoring the billions funnelled into fossil fuel infrastructure via back channels and subsidies.7 The AI revolution is presented as inevitable, not contested.
In the final chapter, they lament that “too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.” It’s the kind of line that plays well on podcasts, but betrays a failure of historical consciousness. The left sees the injustices of the present because it understands their origins. It does not romanticise scarcity, it understands its function. And it does not fantasise about an abundant future without asking who will own it.
“too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.” It’s the kind of line that plays well on podcasts, but betrays a failure of historical consciousness.
If Abundance is a vision of the future, it is one that leaves the relations of production untouched, imagines away the antagonism between capital and labour, and replaces politics with logistics. It is an optimism born not of struggle, but of comfort. The world it imagines is not impossible. But under capitalism, it is not for us.
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Footnotes
- Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Chapter 31. ↩︎
- William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2014). ↩︎
- David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012); see also Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier (Routledge, 1996). ↩︎
- Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (Verso, 1978), esp. Chapter 1. ↩︎
- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). ↩︎
- Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage, 1992). ↩︎
- https://www.fractracker.org/2025/03/fossil-fuel-subsidies-free-market-myth/ ↩︎
