As a nation, we face many problems. Extreme wealth inequality, rising authoritarianism, an affordability crisis, climate change and its various impacts, and more. These problems have many causes, but largely they’re the result of years of policy that have allowed huge amounts of wealth to concentrate in the hands of a small number of people — people who have used that wealth to take over both major political parties and the government for their own benefit. 

To hear Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tell it, though, the problem is simply a failure of Democratic leaders to have a big vision of abundance. Their recent book of the same name diagnoses the core of this problem as regulations that slow progress and prevent innovation and growth. 

While there certainly are examples of big projects that fail (California high-speed rail, for example), Abundance‘s deregulatory prescription misses the biggest drivers of our social and economic problems. Klein and Thompson’s approach embraces the same neoliberal (free market, growth-at-any-costs) economics that helped drive the problems to begin with. 

Moreover, their vision is one rooted in a never-ending faith that future technology and innovation can solve all societal ills. But this gives politicians an easy excuse to push off hard but necessary political choices today. 

On major issues like climate change, we can’t put our faith in failed policies or the hope that someone in the future will get us out of this mess. We need bold and urgent action now. 

Here are four reasons why Klein and Thompson’s Abundance fails as a political frame and what we need instead.

1. Abundance Fails to Address the Root of Our Problems: Concentration of Wealth and Power

Over the last five decades, a defining force in our lives has been the increasing wealth concentration among a handful of people who increasingly control our politics and economy. The power flexed by these business, media, and economic titans nearly completely explains the stagnating or declining quality of life of the vast majority of Americans. Yet if you read Abundance, you’d hardly know this. 

Instead, the book ascribes low trust in government and a lack of affordable housing, energy, and other things to a flawed regulatory mentality. It provides a few examples of extended environmental reviews delaying projects, but totally ignores the root causes of the affordability or inequality crises — a few powerful people and corporations hijacking our political system. 

For example, Abundance states that “fear of socialized medicine” explains why we don’t have universal health care. Yet it fails to mention consistent public polling showing support for such a program or the millions of dollars spent by the health and pharmaceutical industry in lobbying and campaign contributions to make sure it never happens. 

The book claims zoning restrictions and environmental reviews are the reason for the lack of housing, but ignores foreign ownership of housing in the United States or private equity’s role in buying housing stock. 

It claims that too many project requirements, like hiring union workers and promoting energy efficiency, lead to less construction. But it doesn’t examine what would be possible if the uber-wealthy stopped avoiding paying their fair share in taxes and we had more public money to invest. 

In short, Abundance is long on diagnosing problems of scarcity, but totally ignores the main drivers of that scarcity for the vast majority of Americans. 

2. Abundance Argues for De-Regulation, Ignoring the Harms

We need a progressive politics that builds. We need solar, wind, batteries; we need the means of getting this clean energy from place to place; we need more efficient appliances and cars, safer and more resilient buildings to withstand climate change, and more.

To build the things we want and need, though, Klein and Thompson prescribe slashing through “red tape.” This approach relies on a laughable hope that, if corporations were even more unrestrained, they’d put our needs above their profit. 

The reality is, the U.S. has had a progressive politics that builds in the past, and deregulation wasn’t part of the equation. During the New Deal Era, strong social programs, industrial policy that encouraged building, and robust antitrust policy that curtailed corporate power laid the groundwork for mid-20th-century prosperity. 

But starting in the 1970s and escalating in the 1980s, U.S. leaders like Ronald Reagan dismantled these policies. They allowed companies to merge, industries to consolidate, and power over our economy to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

This only allowed companies to exploit us. In almost every corner of our lives, large corporations can now offer worse quality and higher prices, while avoiding accountability. This has led to everything from higher utility bills to predatory lending practices to costly airline fees. 

Low- and middle-income families have been hit the hardest, facing rising costs without higher wages or protections. These policies have widened inequality and shifted economic power away from everyday Americans toward powerful corporate elites. 

Klein and Thompson position their ideas as new and innovative, but they’re just another chapter in the disastrous deregulatory policies of the past 50 years. 

3. Abundance Envisions A Magical Techno-Utopia Rather than Proven Solutions

Abundance opens with a vision of the 2050 techno-utopia that would be possible if only we got rid of pesky regulations and invested in more scientific research. It’s a world where nuclear power plants power big machines that remove carbon from the air, where desalination plants provide more than half the country’s drinking water, and lab meat replaces traditional animal agriculture. 

But these techno-”solutions” are just fantasies that fail utterly to meet the urgency of crises like climate change. They often create more problems than they solve and are, in fact, gifts to the very corporations wrecking our planet.

Take direct air capture, for instance. Capruing just a quarter of U.S. current carbon emissions would currently require all the electricity the U.S. makes. Relying on carbon capture and storage would be 9-12 times more expensive than a 100% transition to solar and wind. Moreover, the fossil fuel industry is promoting this technology to extend the use of oil and gas.  

The truth is, we don’t need techno-fixes for many of the greatest threats to our food, water, and climate. Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford, for example, has outlined how we could — right now — power our entire electricity sector with 100% solar, wind, geothermal, and existing hydropower. 

Relying on future technology to solve current problems merely gives leaders an excuse to avoid undertaking the principled and necessary work of rejecting corporate influence, like that of the fossil fuel industry. We’re not facing a failure of technology or innovation, but rather a failure of political will and courage on the part of our leaders.

4. “Abundance” Isn’t Popular — Fighting Corporate Power Is

Klein and Thompson are right in asserting that political leaders need to project a big and inspiring vision. But the abundance agenda is not a political winner. 

Recent polling finds that populism resonates more than abundance. Demand Progress found majority (55.6%) support for a populist platform compared to 43.5% for an abundance platform. Notably, Republicans were more likely to support abundance, but Democrats and Independents favored populism. 

According to Emily Peterson-Cassin, corporate power director at Demand Progress, Americans are clear about what they want: “a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption.” 

Abundance doesn’t grapple with the fundamental problems that people see in the world and their lives. It doesn’t address inequality or the extreme control that a small number of obscenely wealthy people have over all aspects of our society. 

Klein and Thompson even praise the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as a “walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together.” We’d argue that Musk is a walking advertisement for the power and corruption that have ignited the ire of so many Americans. 

Still, many supposedly progressive leaders have vocally embraced abundance, including California Governor Gavin Newsom. And that includes embracing techno-fixes like carbon capture and nuclear power. At the same time, Newsom is pivoting away from regulating the fossil fuel industry that’s driving the climate crisis. 

We need a big vision for a just society that inspires people. But that big vision needs to be grounded in reality, and it needs to address the fundamental drivers of the many crises we currently face. Abundance fails because its vision doesn’t address the root causes of social ills or provide a clear path for addressing them.