Abundance
To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough. Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished. Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed.
Stats for nerds
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45mentions
40people
2025–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- I recommend reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. This permitting we have today is in response to very real problems of unrestricted growth in the past. It led to horrible pollution and squalor.
The pendulum has swung so far we cannot build anymore. We can't solve the problems of today because our regulations that are responding to the problems of yesterday. I'm hopeful there's a better way but I haven't seen it yet.
- covid was the largest money printing and wealth transfer event in history. When rich people get money they buy assets. We have had extreme asset inflation since then. Metals, equities, real estate etc. Watch Gary's Economics on youtube.
We get out of it by building more, read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Its extremely simple.
- Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tackle this specific example (along with others) in their book Abundance that came out last year. It's a pretty easy read, and a really interesting examination of why projects like this struggle.
But as other commenters have pointed out — a lot of it is NIMBYism (plus a heavy dose of overregulation).
Conservatives tend to point at projects like this as examples of why our incompetent government shouldn't be allowed to build large projects.
But other countries can do this (including a good chunk of Europe), so I think it's really valuable to dig in and understand why we struggle.
- I just got through Abundance by Ezra Klein and thoroughly enjoyed it.
- The larger issue, of course, is that eccentric individuals and niche special-interest groups are able to use the planning process and the legal system to jam up all sorts of infrastructure projects in America, from simple turn lanes all the way to high-speed rail. This is not the only reason America has trouble building infrastructure, but it is an important reason. See Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson‘s new book Abundance for a long-form analysis of this… or for a contrast with the US’s “lawyerly society” (and, of course, the disadvantages of leaning too much in the other direction) Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future that just came out.
Both are excellent books and will probably appeal to a lot of Hacker News folks with an engineering/builder mindset.
- This is basically the entire theme of "Abundance" by Klein and Thompson, for those looking for a longer read on this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
