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What’s the Matter with Abundance?

The last thing society needs is more stuff A speculative toroidal colony by Don Davis. | NASA Ames Research Center

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages. 2025.

January of 1992 was a strange time to be thinking optimistically about the future prospects of global communism, but the end of the Soviet experiment prompted Howard University professor (and inveterate red) David Schwartzman to wonder what it would take to bring the promise of “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs” into the twenty-first century. A biogeochemist trained at Brown, Schwartzman was faced with prevailing pessimism in both his academic field and the political scene. Influential economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s argument that entropy was the dominant factor for our world—increasing scarcity and environmental degradation were products of a fundamental law of physics, not human mistakes—helped inspire a “degrowth” line that came to dominate ecological economics in the West. All there seemed left to offer was less.

This did not sit right with Schwartzman. A red-diaper baby who grew up on the Marxist pamphlets his parents hid around in their McCarthy-era Brooklyn home, he still believed in the advent of a classless global society. And as a biogeochemist, he knew something was getting lost in Georgescu-Roegen’s confusion over whether Earth is a “closed” or “isolated” system. A thermodynamically “closed” system still allows for energy flux, such as the cosmic radiation with which the sun bathes our planet. Earthbound energy sources are bound to disintegration—whether fossil fuels combusting into the atmosphere or waste heat from nuclear plants flowing into the water system—but in the shadow of galactic combustion, whatever we cobble together from the sun’s rays is moot; whether our small inhabited planet spits into the astral stream of solar energy or sips from it makes little difference to the heavens.

Schwartzman recognized a narrow path for humanity, powered by what he hoped would be increasingly efficient modules of photovoltaic cells. “Like the natural biosphere powered by solar energy,” he wrote in a 1996 article for Science & Society that summarized his conclusions,“the ordering and maintenance of the material creation of human activity on the Earth’s surface can continue far into the future by the export of an entropic flux into space, provided a long-term energy source (the sun) is utilized.” His vision and his paper has the same name: “Solar Communism.”

David Schwartzman’s work occurred to me throughout the new book Abundance by the podcast hosts and writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Though Abundance doesn’t reference Schwartzman or solar communism, it is similarly predicated on the question of how a surfeit of clean energy might provide better lives for the shell-shocked, disappointed people of the twenty-first century. Abundancerepurposes pieces Klein and Thompson originally wrote for the New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, into a compendium that “reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply?” It’s a little more earthbound than solar communism, but it’s at least pointed in the same direction: up.

“If there are not enough homes, can we make more?” the authors ask. “If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy can we make more? If not, why not?” Their solution is for politics to take technology and innovation “more seriously” and to relieve them from the encumbrance of bad policy. “To have the future we want,” they helpfully summarize their case, “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” It’s hard to argue with that. Abundance is mostly hard to argue with, by design: Klein and Thompson have written a super-partisan sales pitch for a politics of new construction rather than a rigorous, methodical inquiry regarding the causes of national stagnation. The authors lament that America is “stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.” This third way is well trod, by everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to today’s Democratic Party insiders, and Klein and Thompson’s offering is among the most approachable attempts to map it of late. But their collation of columns is less than the sum of its parts, like a clip-show episode of a 1990s sitcom.

Klein and Thompson are at least more interested in building social consensus for an abundance perspective than in picking fights or covering for industry, which is more than can be said of some of their fellow travelers. They introduce the text by asking the reader to imagine the year 2050—the same year Schwartzman envisioned for solar communism—replete with desalinated ocean water flowing from the taps, skyscraper farms growing our food indoors, and “star pills” manufactured in space. Clean air and super-fast planes. Lest we confuse this scenario with science fiction, Klein and Thompson remind us what it was like to live in New York City between 1875 and 1905, when the streets filled with novelty: “automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations.” The world has changed very fast before. Why not now?

But though they promise they’re more curious about what we can build than what we can buy, Klein and Thompson suffer from the telltale symptoms of commodity fetishism. To maintain an interest in production means investigating the conditions and relations of production—not just the policy mechanics. A turn-of-the-century New Yorker might be thrilled with his new rubber goods and the innovation embodied therein. But we can’t forget the enslaved rubber workers of the Belgian Congo from whom the industry tortured its material. Life did not simply get better and easier with innovation, not even for white people: the violence of the imperial scramble rebounded on the European Metropole and the continent’s scientists turned their attention from fun new electronic doohickeys to killing machines.

If a hammer thinks every problem is a nail then Abundancemust be the work of a plumbing snake. Whether housing, electric vehicles, vaccines, electronics, or high-speed rail, the system that is meant to fulfill society’s needs is blocked from doing so. Once these clogs are cleared, there’s no reason to believe we won’t supply ourselves with the high-pressure spray of ever-improving goods and services that is the American birthright. If there appears to be a problem regarding scarce resources or conflicting values, we should just innovate our way out. Lab-grown meat means we get to have our animals and eat them too. This isn’t the focused solar-communist prediction about the increasing efficiency of photovoltaic modules, it’s an all-purpose ideological faith in novelty.

Klein and Thompson are skilled presenters, and Abundance is hardly the worst thing for sale at the airport. If anyone can persuade America’s selfish liberal homeowners to stop thinking of every new housing development within their real estate market as a personal attack, it might be these two. But overall, their thinking represents a step back for a society that, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, fought for the space to think about our problems structurally. As the Obama administration hit the limits of its own politics of progress, Americans on the left (to whom Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their book) questioned whether economic inequality, racism, misogyny, and environmental destruction really werein the process of evaporating, as progressives had hoped. And if not, why not? Perhaps innovating to meet everyone’s needs was not truly what the system was for.    

American liberalism’s brightest and best-intentioned—plenty of them inspired into public service by Obama-era optimism—couldn’t undo the damage of the previous administration, never mind lift the country onto a new, better trajectory. Klein and Thompson explore this failure through the disappointing fate of California’s proposed high-speed rail project. The state’s voters approved startup funding for the train plan in the fall of 2008. It should have been a gimme; but almost twenty years later, we’re still flying between LA and San Francisco, at an absurd cost to the climate. Klein and Thompson’s explanation threads through the rise of special interest groups that slow down and veto public works. This work had previously been in the public interest—witness crusading lawyer Ralph Nader, highway safety, and environmental regulation—but “democracy by lawsuit” would reveal its downsides:

Nader and his Raiders believed in government. They defended it from conservative assault. When they criticized it—when they fought it, sued it, restrained it—they did so to try to make it better. But those same laws and processes were available for anyone else to use too. You can bog clean energy projects down in environmental reviews. You can use a process meant to stop the government from building a highway through your town to keep a nonprofit developer from building affordable housing down the block.

Abundance is not a permanent solution—Klein and Thompson would probably admit that we’ll need to cycle back toward environmental concerns at some point—but society is a living body, and the abundance perspective is an advocacy campaign for rebalancing its humors. Klein and Thompson suggest a controlled bleeding of regulations not because they are antigovernment ideologues but because society has become melancholic. Instead of controlling market actors by bopping them on the head, the state can provide reliable support for fledgling industries. “Government should have a vision of the future, and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot,” they write, “to make possible what is otherwise impossible.” By adjusting our national priorities in favor of building, America can stop failing its capitalists.

There are, however, other prescriptions. When California governor Gavin Newsom decided it was less risky to cancel the train than to plow ahead after a decade of failure, California Marxist professor Joshua Clover argued that it was a sad confirmation that capitalists would rather use their planning prerogative to invest in financial schemes, insurance, and real estate than in green infrastructure. “Money moves toward profit and if there is no profit, it does not move,” Clover writes, “even if it seems cool that businessmen can get from San Francisco to Los Angeles swiftly while speaking loudly into their earpieces in the quiet car.” Without a strong base level of state capacity, even a state rail project is dependent on the cooperation of many contractors, and these private actors are looking for a nice and easy return. High-speed rail becomes too costly not because there’s not enough steel or labor but because we find ourselves unable to exercise substantive democratic control over our national resources. Americans can only get a well-planned, transformative high-speed rail network by wresting control of that planning prerogative from the capitalist class. (And whatever Klein and Thompson have heard about degrowth, I assure them that communistsdowant the fast trains.)

Clearly, something is sabotaging society’s rational development. We should have those trains, and some big solar-powered apartment buildings near the stations. Even if I think the solutions are probably closer to agroecology than indoor vertical farming and giant sailboats than green jetliners, that doesn’t stop me from agreeing with the Abundance authors that there’s a block. But where Klein and Thompson blame self-seeking “groups” who—according to the work of economist Mancur Olson—are a constant and unavoidable threat to human collective action, Marxists understand capitalist production as riven by particularironies and contradictions.

For example: capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter, for fear competition will drive out the profit. The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density: the more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge. But the same supply mechanism that pushes down prices discourages capital from the sector. As Yogi Berra might’ve said: No one invests there, it’s too crowded. If what developers experience as an “excess” of supply stops them from projecting the same high rent levels, their lenders might just decide to put their dough in crypto instead. There’s no reason to assume a market equilibrium point at which investors are satisfied with their projected returns and Americans of all income levels enjoy an abundance of high-quality housing.

Permitting single-stair apartment buildings, ending single-family zoning, and eliminating parking requirements are all strong housing reform ideas, but no one seriously believes such an updated regulatory program will yield abundant housing for America’s poor. A good policy is better than a bad policy, but don’t piss in a ditch and call it an ocean of lemonade. The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general. I imagine Klein and Thompson know all of that, but it doesn’t belong in their sales pitch, which can brook no structural conflict between social classes. If developers want to change the rules to let them pay their workers less, it’s only so that they can build more, better, cheaper houses. The authors acknowledge, but decline to unravel, the ways that private demand for profit itself is a fetter on production, leading to a confused moment in the conclusion where they cite Karl Marx in their argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards.

It’s one thing to advocate for class compromise, but another to exclude discussion of class conflict altogether. The book’s single mention of Bernie Sanders is in the sentence, “In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable.” Abundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms of scarcity-thinking on “both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right.” Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace.

The Abundance authors are hesitant to enumerate the tradeoffs their agenda will require. Prompted by the work of degrowth advocate Jason Hickel, they consider whether we should shut off or scale down destructive sectors of production, such as military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion. “There is some appeal to this,” they write. “All of us can identify some aspect of the global production system that seems wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. The problem is that few of us identify the same aspects of the global production system.” Hamburgers, they inform us, are popular in America. As is advertising, I suppose, insofar as we see a lot of it. But why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget? It can’t just be an issue of popularity; after all, there’s nothing Americans like better than living in single-family homes, and the authors aren’t too afraid to call for the return of boarding houses. This country’s bombs don’t merely “seem” wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. And disarmament is not scarcity—on the contrary.

Would you rather have abundance or scarcity? Easy: more is better than less. What about abundance or scarcity of war? If the philosophy can’t clear that hurdle, perhaps it needs another lap around the practice track. This isn’t a game with language; Abundance lauds Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for pulling out the stops to repair I-95 after a turned tanker truck melted a hole in the interstate. Under Shapiro’s emergency declaration, the state didn’t stop to ask the standard questions, it got to building (with union labor of course—it’s still Philadelphia). But what makes Klein and Thompson so sure that using a freeway to slice a major city off from its waterfront as part of an explicit plan to promote suburban automobile sprawl is abundant policymaking in the first place? Remaking the previous century’s mistakes as fast as possible without thinking is not actually the most optimistic approach to public leadership.

Ultimately, the Abundance authors ask too little of themselves and their readers. In adapting their short-form work, Klein and Thompson haven’t challenged themselves to go deeper or contend with their strongest critics. Expanding the material into a book should have been an opportunity to develop a solid intellectual foundation for what Klein and Thompson present as a new approach to politics—and at a time of planetary emergency, it’s worth noting, when new approaches are desperately needed. But even with four hands, they haven’t managed the task.

I find myself wishing Klein and Thompson had done something more host-like, maybe an interview program investigating “abundance” as defined by different communities, from AI futurists to the Amish. That would be better than this halfhearted attempt to compile a neo-neoliberal political philosophy. A more rationally organized society would put these approachable, regular-aged men on Netflix, where they could ask good questions of interesting people. Then it would publish David Schwartzman’s Solar Communism as the political manifesto that upends existing categories and points a strange, exciting new way forward for society.    

Schwartzman has continued to research and publish on solar communism for the past three decades, joined by his research partner: his son Peter, a trained climatologist and professor of environmental studies in his own right. Their Web 1.0 anti-commercial vibe—the website for their book The Earth is Not for Sale includes a note that “we removed the Amazon link because we do not want to support Amazon”—belies the rigor of their work and its predictive powers. Their math-heavy report for the Institute for Policy Research & Development, “A Solar Transition is Possible,” saw that large growth in solar was much closer at hand than most analysts assumed. If they happened to find themselves scrolling SolarUtopia.org, Klein and Thompson would probably enjoy some of the critiques of current degrowthers as well as the Schwartzmans’ consistent and ambitious eco-techno-optimism. Their main message, they write, is that “if we succeed in the near future to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of decarbonizing our global energy supplies by solar technologies such as wind power, we open up an unprecedented path to solar utopia.” It would be hard for Klein and Thompson to accuse the Schwartzmans of having a scarcity mindset, socialists though they may be.

Where the solar communists split with the abundists is in identifying their enemies. “We submit the obstacles are not technological, rather lie in the political economy of real existing 21st Century global Capitalism,” the Schwartzmans write in their statement of purpose, “specifically in the Dinosaur sitting in the Room, the Moloch called the Military Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, State Terror) Complex. Only a transnational movement for peace and justice can put this Dinosaur in the Museum of Prehistory where it belongs.” In an essay titled “The Path to Climate Security Passes through Gaza,” David presciently identified that “the struggle for justice in Palestine is a transcendent challenge for the global human rights, peace, ecological and environmental justice, anti-war and emerging climate security movements.” On one hand, he writes, “it is the nexus of potential escalating conflict, even nuclear war. On the other hand, it’s just resolution is likewise an immense opportunity to create the ‘other world that is possible.’” Schwartzman concludes by calling for unification of the Palestinian solidarity and international climate movements—a proposition that he acknowledges might strike some readers as absurd. But if you understand Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a load-bearing pillar in the edifice of the status quo, a capitalist world-order of things that withholds our collective resources and attention from the climate crisis currently elapsing all around us, the claim is straightforward.

Imagine the Middle East at peace, with popular governments devoted to using their national fossil fuel reserves to transition their societies to solar utopia, rather than on American-made weapons or weapons to shoot back at American-made weapons. Latin America has struggled and continued to struggle to wrench its planning prerogative from Yankee-aligned capital, but the work has already borne fruit, and the region leads the world in clean-energy use. And if China’s leadership jealously guards their own planning prerogative—by banning bitcoin mining or disappearing tech billionaires before they can take over the country, for example—that doesn’t reflect a scarcity mindset. It’s a choice, for the abundance of solar panels and high-speed rail rather than the abundance of dogecoin and the Boring Company.

Abundance is not a way around the hard questions of our age. At its best, this perspective reminds us that there’s a lot at stake in how we answer—a better world to win as well as a beautiful world to lose. At its worst, it’s new packaging for a tried and failed attempt to escape from history on a rocket ship. Let us instead embrace the Schwartzmans’ solar utopian credo:

We will solve the Energy Problem!

We will do it with EVERYONE in mind!

We will do it T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R!

We will do it in the 21st Century!