A lot of people have been asking me for a review of Abundance, the new book from Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. I’ve now read the book and will offer a couple thoughts.

The book Abundance is Thomas Friedman’s Lexus and the Olive Tree updated for 2025. Friedman’s book was a pragmatic guide to using the levers of top-down power to achieve progressive goals (and political victory) in an era of rising globalization. Thompson and Klein’s book is a pragmatic guide to using the levers of top-down power to achieve progressive goals (and political victory) in a deglobalizing world.

They both offer a vision of the world where the best and the brightest not only understand the problems we face as a society but have the vision/courage to see past our collective cultural pettiness to envision a beautiful future of technomagical prosperity for all.

I think both of these books are very smart, but that is a flaw and not a feature. I’m reminded of a speech that JC Nichols gave in the 1950s, which I quoted extensively from in Escaping the Housing Trap, where he laid out a similar vision of simple-to-achieve prosperity for all.

His speech was called Planning for Permanence. It put forth a new approach for building America’s cities, one where our leaders “anticipate all aspects of urban life” so the places they built would last for “a century or more.” Permanence, the hubris that now the problems were known and the obvious solutions so close at hand. All that was needed was boldness by men of action.

What does Planning for Permanence, Lexus and the Olive Tree, and Abundance all have in common? Hubris, the belief that really smart people can not only understand complex problems, but engineer top-down solutions that the rubes will not only accept, but ultimately benefit from (at least in the marketing materials).

Look just at housing, a central theme in Abundance:

• Planning for Permanence: A new version of city-building (federally-backed suburbia) will make permanent prosperity for everyone.

• Lexus and Olive Tree: Advancements in financialization and global capital (Lexus, representing modernization) will allow individuals the ability to achieve more prosperity in their community (Olive Tree, representing community).

• Abundance: We need to tinker with the administrative state — cut red tape, streamline permitting, break local resistance to growth—so that innovation and investment can finally flow unimpeded into housing. The future is here; the problem is that our governance systems are too sclerotic, our democracy too fragmented, and our neighbors too provincial to allow it to flourish.

What ties all three visions together is the conviction that structural complexity can be overridden by technocratic clarity. If only the smart people were in charge. If only the bottlenecks to progress—whether they be local zoning boards, populist reactionaries, or legacy regulations—could be surgically removed or bypassed. Then the prosperity would flow.

This is the archetype of “Abundance” thinking: the idea that scarcity is a failure of execution, not design. That the systems we have are fundamentally sound, just badly run. That the solutions are known and the obstacles mostly political. But that overlooks the deep, systemic fragilities built into those systems, the unintended consequences, feedback loops, and the misalignments between top-down plans and bottom-up realities.

In that sense, Abundance is a mirror image of Escaping the Housing Trap. Where the former sees dysfunction as something to be unlocked with smarter governance, the latter sees fragility as something to be understood and respected. Where Thompson and Klein offer us confidence in the machine, Daniel and I call for humility before complexity.

That doesn’t make Abundance a bad book. It’s well-argued, thoughtful, and at times inspiring. But it belongs in a long tradition of elite progressivism that promises to solve hard problems with centralized intelligence and upgraded institutions. We’ve tried that before. It sells books, empowers politicians, and sometimes wins elections, but it ultimately doesn’t work.

What we need instead is the humility to recognize the limits of what we can know, and the wisdom to build systems that are adaptable, responsive, and able to evolve alongside the people they serve. In other words, a Strong Towns approach.