Abundance is another book I picked up thanks to it appearing on one of President Obama’s reading lists. I’ve heard of the authors before, but haven’t read much by them. After reading this, I am quite impressed. Abundance is filled with ideas of how we can make the world a better place, but also points out how, with the best of intentions, those of us on the left often make it impossible to achieve anything.

There are a number of areas where we are coming up short in this country. One of the biggest problems facing us in the 21st century is a lack of housing, especially affordable housing. This is just one topic where Klein and Thompson show that the number of regulations surrounding the building of housing has made it prohibitively expensive. Between a push for minority or woman-owned businesses to give them a boost and the sheer amount of paperwork involved in verifying that a company has followed all of the regulations it agrees to when it takes government money to build housing, it’s become a slow and encumbering process.

These are the kinds of problems they tackle when talking about trying to advance our society. It’s not just political gridlock of the right versus the left, but laws that have been written that add layer upon layer to trying to find solutions. I’ve often said we pass too many laws that are reactionary. Something bad happens, and we decide that it should never happen again, so we pass a law about it. However, sometimes accidents happen in life. There’s not really a way to place blame or say it could have been prevented. Yes, when you are looking at something after the fact, sometimes the solution seems obvious. That’s not always the case when we’re in the moment. The laws pile up, though, and soon we are placing a burden on thousands or millions of other people on the off-chance that a freak accident will happen if we don’t.

This is the case for many examples that Klein and Thompson talk about. We need to take a hard look at many of the regulations that have been passed with the best of intentions and see if they can be streamlined so society becomes more innovative.

One of the big examples they talk about is the California high-speed rail. While so many other countries are building high-speed rail, it’s stagnated here in the United States. Only California has made a serious attempt at it, and that has become bogged down. The delays cause the project to become more expensive. What was once dreamed of as a high-speed rail line connecting northern and southern California has become much smaller in scope, simply because, as the project has been delayed by all of the regulations, costs have gone up.

They talk to the people on the front lines, including contractors who are working on the various projects they shone a light on. While they admit that some of the regulations are good (fifteen minutes of calisthenics before beginning work has led to fewer injuries among their workers), there are many that seem to be there just to generate paperwork. They better get it right, though, or they won’t get paid.

The authors read the book themselves, and it works quite well. Nowhere is this more noticeable than when Klein is forced to admit that Operation Warp Speed, which produced the COVID vaccines, is a prime example of government getting it right. The government partnered with private companies for the development, production, and distribution of the vaccine while providing these companies with financial incentives to get it done, and they removed many of the regulations that would have held it up.

Some of the solutions seem a bit too simplistic, which is my one real complaint. The book opens with a description of a futuristic utopian society that seems to have everyone happy and provided for with minimal environmental impact. It’s pretty unrealistic. Do we have the ability to accomplish much more than we currently are? The answer is a resounding YES. That is what the Abundance of our society is. However, we are failing in using that knowledge and technology to actually make the world a better place, and there are a wide number of reasons for it.

I appreciated Abundance for what it is: the opening salvo in urging people to change how we do things to accomplish more in a faster timeline. However, like many on the left, the authors seem to always craft their ideas with the things always going right and there being no setbacks. There are many reasons good ideas might not be implemented. Some of them might be important, and some might be ridiculous. I find the general solutions a bit too simplistic, but it does make for a great starting point.