Abundance

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of increasing inaccessibility and scarcity. After years of refusing to build enough housing, the entire country faces a national housing crisis. After years of cutting immigration, we do not have enough workers. After decades of offshoring industrial production, we have shortages of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of warnings about the consequences of climate change, we have built nothing that comes close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that is now coming into focus has been building for years—because we have not built enough.

Progress requires the ability to see promise, rather than just peril, in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct for designing systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book that explores how we can move toward a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and show how we can adopt an abundance mindset, rather than a scarcity mindset, to overcome them.