388. Derek Thompson with Clayton Aldern: Abundance

From bestselling authors and journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a call to renew a politics of plenty, face the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

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. Authors Klein and Thompson contend that 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.

In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and pre­serves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.

Co-author Derek Thompson joins us at Town Hall for a talk about his book, our current challenges, and the path forward.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of the podcast Plain English. He is the author of the national bestseller Hit Makers and On Work, an anthology of his writing on labor and technology. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Clayton Page Aldern is a senior data reporter at Grist. A neuroscientist turned environmental journalist, he holds a master’s in neuroscience and a master’s in public policy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. With Gregg Colburn, he is the author of Homelessness Is a Housing Problem. His book The Weight of Nature, on the effects of climate change on brain health, is out now from Dutton.

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Abundance (Hardcover)

Third Place Books