The Middle Z

I picked up Abundance in part because nearly every podcast I follow has been enthusiastically recommending it and partially because I’ve been looking for a book that is finally self-critical of the progressive movement with respect to the things i care about, building a better world. So many books these days rattle on about how the failures of our world would be solved if we just removed the impulses of the other side. But this one, written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson take the harder route: it questions whether our own ideals are getting in our way.

Their argument is simple. Many of the policies that progressives, myself included, champion from environmental protection to scientific research, were designed to make the world better. But over time, those same policies have slowed or even blocked the very things we now need most: clean energy infrastructure, affordable housing, mass transit, scientific breakthroughs. We are standing in our own way.

The chapter on housing hit closest to home. I want to be a home owner. We talk endlessly about the affordability crisis around the world but in practice we’ve made it so difficult to build that developers avoid blue states, generally the cities i want to live in, entirely. Rules meant to protect communities have ended up freezing them in amber. When it’s easier to build in places that care less about equity or sustainability, it’s hard not to see how we’re losing ground.

The same pattern shows up across climate and science. We want a decarbonized future, but we’ve layered so many permitting and approval hurdles that even wind farms and solar projects get stuck. We want moonshot innovation, but without the shared urgency of a crisis like World War II or the Cold War, we’ve become cautious and incremental. Our ambitions remain high, but our systems can’t deliver. And slowly, faith in government’s ability to do big things has eroded.

I appreciated the book’s clarity and its willingness to say what many on the left hesitate to. Our good intentions don’t always translate into good outcomes. There’s a maturity to that perspective. But I found myself frustrated by what the book didn’t offer, solutions. Abundance diagnoses the sclerosis in our public institutions, but it doesn’t lay out a path forward. It asks us to believe in the possibility of building again, but doesn’t show us how.

That absence wouldn’t bother me as much if the stakes weren’t so high. But as the authors themselves make clear, we are running out of time. Not just to address climate change, but to rebuild public trust in collective action. Regulation isn’t inherently the problem. It’s the way our systems have evolved into process over purpose. And that’s a hard thing to unwind.

To their credit, some of the changes the book calls for may already be underway. The day I finished reading, California announced plans to scale back parts of its landmark environmental law, recognizing that the same rules used to block highways in the 1970s are now being used to block bike lanes, solar farms, and transit housing. That tension between protection and paralysis is exactly what Abundance is about.

The book left me both concerned and motivated. Concerned because our current model is clearly unsustainable. Motivated because it reminded me that systems don’t change themselves. We have to be willing to push for smarter rules, faster timelines, clearer goals. We have to become builders again and not just in the literal sense, but culturally. That will mean letting go of some of the habits and reflexes that have defined progressive politics for decades.