Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?

ABUNDANCE, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

In 1833, John Adolphus Etzler, a German engineer who immigrated to Pittsburgh, announced that earthly paradise was suddenly in reach. Economic growth and modern technology were changing everything. Coal might run out, but humanity would harness wind, tidal and solar power. A trillion or more people could call this planet home, constructing islands across the seas to make room. And, as you built up land, you could drink directly from the ocean: Etzler was a follower of the wonkish French utopian Charles Fourier, who promised that the scientific reinvention of nature would transmute the saltwater into lemonade. After millenniums of austerity and poverty, the age of limitless “superabundance” was at hand.

Two centuries later, we remain so, so close. As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in “Abundance,” a guide for liberals shaken by an age of factional polarization, the United States can still blaze the path to progress, but only if progressives get out of the habit of putting obstacles in their own way. “If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen,” the authors write, “they need to offer the fruits of effective government.” But how?

Klein, a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, and Thompson, a journalist for The Atlantic, are the best in the business at digesting and synthesizing expertise from a host of fields. “Abundance” expands on their previously published work over the last decade or so, and Klein and Thompson have no shortage of policy proposals on affordable housing (build more!), renewable energy (go nuclear!) and sustainable agriculture (vertical farming?).

But their book comprises more than a set of concrete steps to fix specific socioeconomic problems in America. It’s mainly a sharp cry against myopic Democrats who block new ideas and govern through checklists, leading to what the authors call “an endless catalog of rules and restraints.”

Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.

Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.