Klein's "Abundance" is Obama's Audacity
Chapter Two: Build
In March 2025, New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson published their #1 NYT Bestseller Abundance. This essay is the third of seven that evaluates the book for the facts, fallacies or falsehoods of its premises and prescriptions. This installment will focus on Chapter Two: Build, but the premise for that was established in Chapter One: Grow.
The authors complain that the growth of government is being restrained by regulatory power and the enforcement powers of dozens of new federal agencies: “In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building.”
Primarily, they are referring to interstate highways. And to their credit, Chapter One ends by stating
Anti-growth politics could, and often did, tip into the kind of misanthropy aimed at newcomers. Those who already lived in a place were its stewards, its guardians, its voice. Those who wanted to move into that place were recast as a consumptive horde.
In other words, grow the size and scope of government to reverse the growth of government power that puts limits on the size and scope of government. The contradictions are obvious - and reading these recalls then-Senator Barack Obama’s political speech turned New York Times Bestseller, The Audacity of Hope.
But audacity only makes sense when you have no good alternatives and hope only makes sense when outcomes are beyond your control. The premise is that world is chaos, life is catastrophe, people are helpless, and government is omniscient. Therefore, government omnipotence must be allowed.
Yet, the primary unit of any collective is the individual. And government only makes sense as retaliatory force in the defense of every person’s right to live in the pursuit of happiness. And to that end, the courage and wisdom of the Serenity Prayer – a philosophy that respects the elegance of reality and the possibility of contradictions built into man-made systems.
As before, I will start with what Abundance gets right and divide my analysis into themes: Economics, History, Ethics and Reality.
Economics
For some of the good economic premises and facts of Chapter 2: Build, here is a list:
“But you can’t both compensate residents of rich countries for lost growth and cut growth in those same countries.”
“Energy is the nucleus of wealth.” (It’s not, but its up there)
“The price of oil, gas, and coal, after adjusting for inflation, is about what it was 40 years ago.”
“Desalination is a major contributor to water supplies in Israel.” (It was brilliant minds with economic freedom)
“Decarbonization sees wind and solar installations . . . roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.”
“Liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money.”
“The work we do today takes hundreds more people in the office to track and bring to completion.”
“The more organized groups you have, Olson says, the more fights over distribution you’ll have, the more lobbying you’ll have, the more complex regulations you’ll have.
“Each is an environmental impact assessment and project permitting nightmare.”
It bears repeating, economics is 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.
So, how does Abundance denigrate free markets and talent? It’s a clever trick. Klein and Thompson repudiate pre-Christian primitivism, Christian selfishness, and postmodernism’s “degrowth” return to primitivism. Apparently, “humanity” has always been wrong about everything – except these guys.
Degrowth . . . is an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity’s promise of dominion over nature.
Never mind that classical Greece with its many gods and religions created the finest art and philosophical system that is truly humanistic. Or that Christianity promised other-worldly abundance – just like Abundance and its discovery of materialism. What was the epiphany? They won’t say. I will.
History
Abundance ignores the individual as the prime mover for wealth creation and government as an instrument of force with this gem,
Those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists.
More holistic? What motivates Klein and Thompson to reverse the truth about capitalism and dualist philosophy? Clearly, they choose to misrepresent both.
First, no one sought to “pave the way for capitalism.” John Locke and others fought for individual rights and political liberty. Yet, Klein and Thompson are repudiating both when they denigrate capitalism this way. Second, the mind and body dichotomy holds that the mind and body are not only separate and distinct features, but that consciousness is primary to existence - reality is what you think it is.
Essentially, this dualism was a secular attempt to marginalize the scientific method and restore the other worldliness of Platonic Christianity at a time when religion was being ushered out by the Renaissance. And in their attempt to throw Classical Greece and the Age of Reason on the ash heap of history, Abundance declares:
The problem is not simply greenhouse gas emissions or microplastics. It is Cartesian dualism and American-style capitalism . . . We do not have decades or centuries to convince the world to act on climate change.
Heavens! The men who deny the integration of natural law with human consciousness will label you a “climate denier” if you question their own brands of primitive dualism: Theory vs. Practice and Values vs. Facts. But to rational people with active minds, good theory is good practice, facts are values – and the mind are body are an elegant, integrated whole.
Ethics
Chapter Two is titled “Build,” but its 42 pages make no effort to discuss the true nature of building. There’s a good reason for that. Klein and Thompson do not know. However, what they do know is that government has a marvelous track record for punishing builders – and they’re going to do something about it, by golly: “The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds.” Like Israel?
If we restore the meaning of “liberalism” to its true definition: rights respecting liberty and voluntary trade, it is easy to understand the cause of number 4 above: Israel’s development of fresh water through desalination technology.
But how is it possible for a tiny country with no energy resources – one surrounded by primitively violent cultures that despise their independence - to have the most prosperous and tolerant society the region has ever known? The economic freedom of independence. How is it possible for the real price (inflation adjusted) of concentrated energy (hydrocarbons) to be the same as 140 years ago while demand has risen by geometrically staggering amounts? The economic freedom of independence.
Based on these economic realities cited in Abundance, one would think that Klein and Thompson are advocates for independence, but they are not. “It is the government’s job, after all, to balance society’s many competing perspectives. They need to do more than turn a profit or satisfy shareholders.” Effectively, they are repudiating the abundance afforded by rights and liberty and replacing it with a feudal monarchy by the divine right environmental aristocrats.
Reality
Audacity only makes sense when you have no good alternatives and hope only makes sense when outcomes are beyond your control. But money is not stupid, prices are information, markets are elegant, earned profits are justice. And self-righteous central planners can have none of that. Instead, what Chapter Two aims to build can be found in the second sub header: Electrify Everything.
Electric cars accelerate faster . . . Inductive stoves boil water in a fraction of the time . . . New technologies are more expensive . . . subsidies need to be generous . . . advertising needs to be everywhere . . . making these replacement decisions needs to be a no-brainer . . . a billion more machines . . . where is all that electricity coming from?
To answer the last question, see number 5 above. Wind farms and solar arrays are economic and environmental disasters, yet Klein and Thompson are silent. To them, cattle and pigs are the greater threat. Regardless, great new technologies require great amounts of capital owned by great investors with skin in the game. And of the few new technologies that become a big hit, they become very cheap, very fast without the help of “expert” rule makers who create nothing.
Yet again, Abundance ignores that fact, plus these: no capital formation = no new technology = no new machines = no cheap electricity = no abundance = no wealth for government to loot = no subsidies. Yet the audacity of dopes solution is to wreck capital formation. The next installment in this series will analyze Chapter 3 of Abundance - Govern. To learn more, please click this link for The Moneyball Method.