Excerpts: “The problem is that if you subsidize demand for something that is scarce, you’ll raise prices or force rationing” (p. 8).

“The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had” (p. 13).

“Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class” (p. 24).

“Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way” (p. 64).

“Neither side focuses on what scholars call ‘state capacity’: the ability of the state to achieve its goals. Sometimes that requires more government. Sometimes it requires less government. But it always requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way. In the absence of that focus, absurdity reigns” (p. 105).

“One way of understanding the era we’re in is as the messy interregnum between political orders; a molten moment when old institutions are failing, traditional elites are flailing, and the public is casting about for a politics that feels like it is of today rather than of yesterday” (p. 207).

Klein, Ezra and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance. New York: Simon & Schuster, LLC.