‘Abundance' Review: Supply-Side Liberalism

Wall Street Journal

16-04-2025

About once a year for the last decade, some prominent liberal intellectual—Mark Lilla, Yascha Mounk, Susan Neiman—has published a book expressing revulsion at the excesses and follies of the contemporary American left. Few of these critiques engage in self-criticism or admit past error. None seriously considers the possibility that postwar liberalism's critics on the right had a point. Some, with maximum chutzpah, pin the blame for the left's lunacy on Republicans (Ronald Reagan is a frequent target). A half-century ago Irving Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. Reported muggings are way down.
The latest in this genre is 'Abundance,' by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The book's overarching argument is that resources in a modern capitalist economy are not limited in the way liberal redistributionists assume them to be, and that liberal aims are achievable in ways the left hasn't appreciated.
Twentieth-century liberals' morally laudable goals—clean water and air, affordable housing, education and medical care—led them, the authors contend, to enact policies that, however effective at an earlier time, now prevent both government and the private sector from meeting the public's needs. Governmental grant-making procedures hobble scientific research with paperwork and delay; zoning regulations make housing in large cities hopelessly expensive and worsen the problem of homelessness; lawsuits filed by environmental groups make urban development more costly and time-consuming; and so on.
Messrs. Klein and Thompson—the former a columnist for the New York Times, the latter a staff writer for the Atlantic, both of them popular podcasters—favor scrapping outdated laws and regulations that hinder construction, retard innovation and stunt economic growth for no good reason. Here and there readers of a conservative disposition will scrawl 'duh' in the margins.