What Worries Me Most About 'Abundance'
About this episode
One year after 'Abundance,' Klein revisits the book's arguments with his co-author Thompson and critic-turned-friend Dunkelman. The central question is what they got right and wrong: they defend the book's diagnosis that scarcity in housing, energy, and infrastructure is a policy choice driven by process fetishism, but concede they underestimated how quickly permitting reform could move and how much of the agenda depended on Democrats winning — which they did not. The conversation ranges over the bargain that traded Democrats' ability to build for procedural protections, the rise of state-level permitting reform, what Trump's second term reveals about the limits of deregulation without competent government, and whether abundance can be a bipartisan project. Dunkelman pushes back on whether process liberalism can actually be undone, and the three debate whether the book's reception was distorted by critics who cast it as an attack on equity rather than on procedure.