Klein's "Abundance" is Voltaire's Eldorado
The Introduction: Beyond Scarcity
In March 2025, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson published their #1 NYT Bestseller Abundance. For further context, Atlantic and New York Times opinion articles are of the New Journalism method developed in the 1960s and 1970s:
Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is “invisible”; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
With that introduction, this essay is the first of seven that will evaluate Abundance with the objective of discovering the premises and prescriptions for their facts, fallacies or falsehoods. But because abundance is actually good, it deserves the recognition its producers have earned - and that is The Moneyball Method. In that discipline, causality and context will be my primary consideration.
This installment will focus on the book’s Introduction: Beyond Scarcity. For me, reading it recalled Voltaire’s satirical classic novella, Candide, and the story of its utopian society of Eldorado:
You probably don’t have any of our currency, but you do not need any money to dine here. All the inns established to further the trade of this nation are paid for by the government. “What is this country,” said one to the other, “which is unknown to the rest of the world, and where nature operates under laws so utterly differently to ours? It is probably the land where all is well, for clearly such a place has to exist.”
Candide exposes two of the many false premises of Abundance: 1) Evasion of natural law is possible, and 2) Government pays for anything. Or as Klein and Thomson reveal in their Introduction: “It is hard to know where to begin with what this image gets wrong, because it gets almost nothing right.” However, I will start with what Abundance gets right and divide my analysis into themes: Economics, History, Ethics and Reality.
Economics
Besides the large, captive audience that the New York Times and Atlantic give to its authors and the marketing clout of Simon and Schuster, the book’s popularity can be attributed to the economic and social effects it seeks to achieve. But even that is not enough. It vigorously endorses the dominant moral code of the culture as the singular cause for achieving those effects.
Briefly, their effect is “abundance.” Their cause is “we.” And much like the dystopian novella Anthem by Ayn Rand that outlawed “I,” they used “we” 42 times in the Introduction. Regardless, for the Introduction’s good economic premises, here is a list:
1. “regulation that pulls scientists away from their most promising work, denying millions of people the discoveries that might extend or improve their lives.”
2. “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.”
3. “Supply chains had been battered by the pandemic.” (Not by the pandemic, but by the panicked politicians reacting to it.)
4. “The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past.”
5. “When productivity surges, what we get is not more of what we had, but new things we never imagined.”
6. “not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risk.” (It is impossible for government to weigh risk. It has no skin in the game.)
7. “We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants.”
But economics is also about cause and effect. Production creates wealth. Wealth creates demand. Supply lowers prices. Markets create information. Markets reward efficiency. Efficiency creates profit. Profit attracts capital. Capital finds talent. Talent obeys reality. And these worthy goals are attainable with economic freedom.
But force paralyzes talent and Abundance promotes the paralysis with: “the market will not, not its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.” It doesn’t matter to the authors that “social payoff” is subjective, fluid, demands force and never pays off.
History
Not only does Abundance ignore the individual as the prime mover for wealth creation and government as an instrument of force, the “reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them.”
The opening decades of the twenty-first century, which unspooled a string of braided crises . . . A housing crisis . . . A financial crisis . . . A pandemic . . . A climate crisis . . . Political crises . . . For years we accepted homelessness and poverty and untreated disease and declining life expectancy.
Who is we? In some cases, it is their authoritarian comrades, but in most cases, it is society itself. But “society” is merely a mental construct. It is individuals, but of that the authors are unaware that they are blaming you. Every one of the crises in the paragraph above were caused by the force of government - and they all sell books titled Abundance by proselytizers for government as savior.
In that context, Klein and Thompson have determined: “Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.” It is never enough.
Ethics
In case it is not obvious, the ethics of the book is collectivist, meaning you have an unchosen duty to society – for the common good. And the moral code is altruism, meaning sacrifice without reward is a virtue: “For years, we knew what we needed to build to alleviate the scarcities so many faced and create the opportunities so many wanted, and we simply didn’t build it.” Who is we?
And what have these two political science majors turned “new journalists” ever built? Nothing, but have the audacity to declare: “For years, we constrained our ability to solve the most important questions.” Yes, their cohort has constrained those with ability to solve important questions with their manufactured crisis:
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?
In that package deal of gibberish, “inequality” is a predator to be tamed. Singular talent, effort and privately concentrated capital did not create modern medicine. Climate change is the primary threat to civilized society. And Klein and Thompson lecture you: “That’s fine for goods where access is not a matter of justice.” To them, “justice” is subjective, fluid, demands force and is never just.
Reality
Great economics began with the humanism in 16th century Spain’s School of Salamanca. It continued in the 18th century with Adam Smith of the Scottish Enlightenment and his protégé, Jean-Baptiste Say in early 19th century France. And the Austrian school of economics founded by Carl Menger in the late 19th century became the morally and practically defensible system with the publication of Ludwig von Mises Human Action in 1949.
All of that is repudiated by Abundance. Instead, the authors quote historian David M. Potter, “Abundance, he said, is a physical and cultural factor, involving the interplay between man, himself a geological force, and nature.” Their conclusion reads:
It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we had. And so we are focused on the building blocks of the future. Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health. And we are focused on the institutions and the people that must build and invent that future.
Who is we? The State. Better lives by whose standard? The State. Housing, transportation, energy, and health? The State. Institutions that must build that future? The State. Essentially, Klein and Thompson’s economics is materialism: you are programmed by nature or nurture to make irrational choices that determine markets to be unjust. But like the happy inhabitants of Eldorado who disavow gold, you will obey:
The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance . . . Food stamps give people money for food . . . Housing vouchers give them money for rent . . . Pell Grants give them money for college . . . Tax credits give people money for childcare . . . Social Security gives them money for retirement . . . The Inflation Reduction Act began the work of building the green infrastructure necessary to migrate our economy to clean energy. The CHIPS and Science Act dangled tens of billions of dollars to restart semiconductor manufacturing in America.
In reality, the private sector paid for all of that, but cause and effect be damned. And what does Abundance claim that will buy? Small nuclear power plants, geothermal wells, desalination plants, skyscraper farms, cellular meat facilities, four-hour work weeks, autonomous drones, miracle drugs, cheap rocketry, and all-electric machinery.
All while forcing the flow of capital and wealth creation to a screeching halt. But no worries: “Too much supply pooling around too little demand brings gluts, layoffs, and depressions. . . . A new theory of supply is emerging - and with it, a new way of thinking about politics, economics, and growth.” Money is stupid, but Klein and Thompson are not.
Until the 1950s, communists claimed that communism would deliver greater abundance than capitalism. But when it became impossible for the New York Times to make invisible the mass murder and slavery of Soviet Russia and China, the communists turned to environmentalism. With that, promises of abundance gave way to climate justice, carbon footprints and sacrifice.
But now, they are proclaiming abundance again. What was the epiphany? They won’t say. I will. Stay tuned.
Until the 1950s, communists claimed that communism would deliver greater abundance than capitalism. But when it became impossible for the New York Times to make invisible the Soviet and Chinese mass murder and slavery, the communists turned to environmentalism. With that, promises of abundance gave way to climate justice, carbon footprints and sacrifice. But now, they are proclaiming abundance again. What was the epiphany? They won’t say. I will.