I got round at last to reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and enjoyed the book. It’s a good read and makes its case well. The pro-growth case has traction beyond the US of course. UK ministers have been on about planning regulations hampering growth ever since the July 2024 election, and a John Collison article in the Irish Times recently got the Irish chatterati talking about it.

Did I agree with the case? Yes and no. I do think restarting economic growth – in an environmentally increasingly sustainable way – is essential. Social and political phenomena have many causes so the electoral success of far right populism (anathema to me as an old fashioned woolly liberal) is not caused in a simple way by the absence of growth since the mid-2000s. But that absence is certainly part of the story. My views about this have long been shaped by my PhD adviser Ben Friedman, and his book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. (As for the sustainability component – of course that’s essential, but I can’t think of any far right party/government that is not claiming climate change is a hoax. So significant political change has to come first.)

So Abundance does identify some barriers to growth and describe the implications. But the book is also strangely non-political in the sense that I didn’t find anything about how to get from here to the sunlit uplands of there. The book says, “What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve.” OK, nobody wants another list of 10 bullet point policy solutions in the final chapter. But what is the political economy of getting from today’s polarised and disgruntled world of concentrated power and authoritarianism to the Abundance-land of pro-concrete liberalism, where building new things is welcomed by communities and technology works for everybody?

Top marks for optimism to the authors, and I enjoyed the read, but it didn’t rattle my pessimism about the current moment.