Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Previously overtaxed rivers, such as the Colorado, have surged back now that we don’t rely on them to irrigate our farms and fill our coffee mugs. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, previously parched cities are erupting in green foliage.

?

Out the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich, especially when we discovered that key molecules were best synthesized in the zero-gravity conditions of space. But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth, where it’s saved millions of lives and billions of healthy years.

Lol

Electric cars and trucks glide down the road, quiet as a light breeze and mostly self-driving.

Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.

Sigh

This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.

We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes.

We say we want better health care, better medicine, and more cures for terrible diseases. But we tolerate a system of research, funding, and regulation that pulls scientists away from their most promising work, denying millions of people the discoveries that might extend or improve their lives.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.

But the idea that tax cuts routinely lead to higher revenues is, as George H. W. Bush said, “voodoo economics.” It has been tried. It has failed. It has been tried again. It has failed again. These failures, and the Republican Party’s dogged refusal to stop trying the same thing and expecting a different result, made it vaguely disreputable to worry about the supply side of the economy.

When Americans in 1978 heard that “government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision,” the words didn’t come from Ronald Reagan. They came from President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in his State of the Union address.2 This was a preview of things to come. In 1996, the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, announced that “the era of big government is over.”3 The notion that the US government cannot solve America’s problems was not unilaterally produced by Reagan and the GOP. It was coproduced by both parties and reinforced by their leaders.

Too much money chasing too few doctors means long wait times or pricey appointments. This leads to the standard Republican riposte: Just don’t subsidize demand. Keep the government out of it. Let the market work its magic. That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice. If virtual-reality headsets are expensive, well, so be it. It is not a public policy problem if most households cannot afford a VR headset. But that cannot be said for housing and education and medicine. Society cares about access to these goods and services, as well it should. Democrats and Republicans passed policies into law that, collectively, spend trillions of dollars helping people afford them. But giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.

the average annual cost of tuition and fees was $394 at public colleges and $1,706 at private colleges.

Inflation adjusted?

In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

Flat screen in 1960?

We papered over the affordability crisis9 with low prices for consumer goods, soaring asset values that kept richer Americans happy, and mountains of debt: housing debt and student-loan debt and medical debt that kept the working class semi-afloat.

This makes some sense of the last few decades of our economic debates: a crisis of housing debt, a huge new program to subsidize health insurance costs, debates about making college free and forgiving student loans, endless rounds of tax cuts, proposal after proposal for the government to pay for child care and preschool, a bubble in crypto that attracted so many investors in part because it seemed like a rocket ship into wealth that anyone could ride.

Some of these are supply side solutions

Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church. When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations.

Now imagine dozing off for another thirty-year nap between 1990 and 2020. You would wonder at the dazzling ingenuity that we funneled into our smartphones and computers. But the physical world would feel much the same. This is reflected in the productivity statistics, which record a slowing of change as the twentieth century wore on.

Our era features too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now—artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and gene editing—at the center of a post-work, post-scarcity vision.11 “What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time—from climate change to inequality and ageing—we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?”12

AI?

AI that molds itself to the needs of children who learn and think differently.

Lol

Markets will, we hope, proffer some of these advances. But not nearly enough of them. The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must. But let us not be naïve. It is childish to declare government the problem. It is just as childish to declare government the solution. Government can be either the problem or the solution, and it is often both.

Between 1973 and 2024, the country started and finished only three new nuclear reactors. And it has shut down more nuclear plants than it’s opened in most of our lifetimes.16 That is not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risk.

Other issues?

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.

We are both liberals in the American tradition. The problems we seek to solve are mostly problems that exist within the zone of liberal concern. We worry over climate change and health inequality. We want more affordable housing and higher median wages. We want children to breathe cleaner air and commuters to move easily on mass transit systems. We have many disagreements with the modern American right. But we focus, in this book, on the pathologies of the broad left.

Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too. In 2023, California lost 342,000 more residents than it gained; in Illinois, the net loss was 115,000; in New York, 284,000.26

COVID?

The problem is not just political. Young families are leaving large urban metros so quickly that several counties—including those encompassing Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50 percent of their under-five childhood population in the next twenty years.28 Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving.

The datasource shows declines everywhere and families have always left cities. Their source updated 2025 to show it stopped.

There is a word that describes the future we want: abundance. We imagine a future not of less but of more. We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good.

Lizabeth Cohen calls “A Consumers’ Republic.”31 It has been remarkably successful. Catastrophically successful. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We are interested in production more than consumption. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy.

“More Americans have changed their status by moving to the city than have done so by moving to the frontier.”2

And that land reveals the problem America faces now. A young family can still follow Horace Greeley’s advice and find a cheap home in the rural West. What they typically cannot do is follow Horace Greeley’s example and build a life in Manhattan, where the median home now sells for $1.1 million. Or in San Francisco, where the median home sells for $1.3 million. Or in Los Angeles, where the asking price hovers around $1 million. Or in Seattle, where the median home is over $900,000. Or in Boston, where it’s $830,000. Housing follows the laws of supply and demand. When supply is thick and demand is light, prices fall. The average home in Cleveland sells for about $115,000. When supply is tight and demand is hot, prices rise. That is the story of the pricey, blue cities listed above. America used to be adept at building homes. In 1950, the US Census Bureau reported that America had added 8.5 million units in the previous decade, even with the interruption of a world war.

But in the late 1970s, home construction started to fall behind the pace of population growth. New permits per capita declined in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. After the Great Recession, the housing market crashed, and home construction in the 2010s was obliterated. Today, the average number of dwellings per thousand people in the developed world is about 470, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). France and Italy have nearly 600. Japan and Germany have about 500. The US has only about 425.6 Where did all the houses go? The answer is that they were never built at all.

Comments like Bloomberg’s are common: if you cannot afford to live in the city, don’t. Every so often, social media will convulse over some urbanite claiming they can’t afford a middle-class lifestyle on $450,000 a year or some similarly princely sum. A common retort, even among self-styled progressives, is that they opted out of a middle-class lifestyle the moment they opted into an apartment on the Upper West Side. They chose to spend their money on an unattainable luxury, no different than if they’d purchased a speedboat or begun collecting pricey art.

450k is fine in nyc lmao

We need to find the colleagues and the friends and the competitors and the antagonists who unlock our genius and add their own. “Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas,” Glaeser writes. “These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account.”

While remote and hybrid work have stabilized at a much higher level than before COVID, it is notable that in August 2023, the videoconferencing company Zoom announced that they were demanding employees be in the office at least a few days each week. Eric Yuan, Zoom’s CEO, explained that it was too hard to build trust without nearness. “Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow.”

Boo

Cities play two roles. They are engines of innovation and engines of mobility. High housing costs have blunted their role in innovation, but only modestly. The richest firms and most productive workers can still afford to locate in expensive zip codes.

Productivity != wealth

Chetty’s team also found that children who moved to a high-innovation area when they were young are much likelier to patent inventions of their own when they matured. The effect was specific to the specialty of the place: “Children who grow up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class,” they write.26 But that depends on their parents being able to move to high-innovation areas. In the past, higher incomes would attract them. In the present, sky-high cost of living repels them.

Wealth doesnt play a role?

Consider the fortunes of janitors and lawyers, Ganong and Shoag write. Janitors and lawyers have long made more money working in New York than in the Deep South. As a result, many migrated from the Deep South to New York. But as housing costs in New York rose, the benefits of migration crumbled, at least for the janitors. The lawyers still came out ahead, but the janitors saw housing consume more than 50 percent of their paychecks.29 It used to be that both high-wage and low-wage workers moved from poorer areas to richer ones. By the 1990s, poorer workers were moving away from high-income areas—and from the opportunities they once offered.

We made mobility into an engine of inequality, and we did it on purpose, using policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford. But the “we” here is hiding some uncomfortable culprits. It is liberals—and particularly a strain of liberalism that began to develop in the ’60s and ’70s—that bears much of the blame.

Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. The Tea Party–era sign saying “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is perhaps the most famous example of this divided soul. Americans like both the rhetoric and reality of low taxes, but they also like the programs that taxes fund. They thrill to politicians who talk of personal responsibility but want a safety net tightened if they, or those they know and love, fall. This dynamic is so well known, so easy to see, that we miss how often it gets reality backward. In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk twenty feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. San Francisco’s Black population has fallen in every Census count since 1970. Poorer families—disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant—are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing, and street homelessness.

In the 1800s, no American city had zoning rules, the economist William Fischel writes in his aptly titled book Zoning Rules! In the early 1900s, Los Angeles adopted a small package of regulations that divided the city between zones for industrial buildings and residential construction. New York City followed, and soon enough, so did almost everywhere else. “Eight cities had zoning by the end of 1916,” Fischel writes. “By 1926, 68 more cities had adopted it, and between 1926 and 1936, zoning was adopted by 1,246 additional municipalities.”32 The concept of zoning, unheard-of in 1900, covered 70 percent of the US population by 1933.

Fischel’s explanation begins with trucks and buses, which forever changed the spatial geometry of the city. Before big, gas-powered vehicles took over the streets, it was easy to keep the different functions of the city separate. If you didn’t want to live near a manufacturing plant or the masses of workers who worked in it, you could always live (or build) somewhere else. Trucks and buses changed that. “The truck liberated heavy industry from close proximity to downtown railroad stations and docks,” Fischel writes.33 Factories could now be located anywhere. Buses liberated urban workers, too. They didn’t have to live within walking distance of their jobs or on a streetcar line. They could reside anywhere, and working-class apartments could be built anywhere. Homeowners could no longer rely on geography to protect them from the people and producers they wanted to avoid. If distance couldn’t keep them safe, rules would have to do so instead.

No suburban development epitomized this go-go era more than Lakewood, California, a planned community built on open farmland just north of Long Beach. Between 1950 and 1953, more than 17,000 homes went up.35 At its most furious pace, the city’s builders finished a new home once every seven and a half minutes.

On March 24, 1950, thirty thousand people lined up to check out the inventory at Lakewood’s grand opening. In July, the first resident—a Navy veteran named Jim Huffman—moved in with his family.37 Through the end of the year, twenty more families bought a Lakewood home, on average, every day. By the spring of 1954, a sparse farmland for sugar beets and lima beans had been transformed into one of California’s twenty largest cities.

Petaluma also saw its population bloom after the war. But unlike Lakewood, the city became famous for stopping growth rather than for welcoming it.

A slew of new zoning laws in Westchester County, New York, reduced the maximum permissible population of the county by 1.4 million people, largely by banning forms of home construction other than large-lot single-family houses. Bergen County, New Jersey, made it illegal by 1970 to build apartments on all but 131 acres of land.

California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population, 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population.

Climate and bussing plays a role here

But then why is homelessness so much less prevalent in Houston, where the winters are yet warmer?

Because its hostile and fucking hot

So what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing. When Colburn and Aldern begin testing these variables, their charts, which had just been masses of disconnected bubbles, coalesce into lockstep lines. As the cost of rent rises, so too does the number of homeless. As the vacancy rate plummets—meaning that the housing market is tight, with too many buyers and too few sellers—homelessness rises.

All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia.

The writer Matthew Yglesias,

Neolib