Abundance

Klein and Thompson argue that the United States has lost the capacity to build the physical things it needs, including housing, transmission lines, clean energy, transport and public infrastructure, and that the obstacle is a set of procedural constraints created by people who intended to protect the public.

Their central claim is that the political left has focused on distributing access to goods while losing the ability to increase their supply, and that the resulting scarcity in housing, energy and infrastructure produces the outcomes it was meant to prevent. They document the cost and schedule overruns on specific projects including California high-speed rail, and the procedural requirements including environmental review, litigation exposure and multi-agency approval that produce them.

Their analysis of housing follows the supply argument, holding that restriction produces the prices that then require subsidy, and that the subsidy does not address the restriction. On energy they argue that transmission capacity rather than generation is the binding constraint on decarbonisation, and that the permitting regime prevents building it. On science and technology they argue that funding mechanisms have become risk-averse and process-heavy in ways that select against the work most likely to produce breakthroughs.

The book is a political argument aimed at a specific audience and published in 2025. Critics on the left argue that it understates the interests protected by the procedures and treats regulatory capture as procedural failure. Critics on the right argue that it avoids the question of state capacity. The specific documentation of how long things take and why is the substantive material.