Okay, well, it looks like the abundance book isn't going away as quickly as I had hoped that it might.

If you haven't seen it, this is a book by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic.

It has spent months now on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.

David Brooks calls it spectacular. Fareid Zakaria

calls it terrific. Ezra Klein was recently a special guest at a retreat for Democratic senators,

and the Wall Street Journal reports that Democratic politicians are rushing to embrace the new mantra of abundance laid out in

the book. And in fact, not one but two congressional caucuses have recently formed to push legislation

advancing the ideas laid out in the book. And politics nerds around the country are even starting abundance clubs.

So what is abundance exactly?

The book's promotional copy touts it as a once-in-a-generation paradigm-shifting call to renew a

politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance,

and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.

Now, the book is a kind of manifesto, the gist of which is that we could live in a wondrous utopia

if we removed bottlenecks that are stifling innovation and the production

of plenty. Now I think I'm only being slightly hyperbolic there because the book really does

begin with a description of a literal wondrous utopia in which there are no pandemics, no

homelessness, and no financial crises.

In this fabulous future factories in space produced miracle drugs.

The work week is brief and all the cars are electric.

And Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson say that for years, human beings simply didn't build this utopia because we constrained our ability to solve our most important problems.

And then they spend the rest of the pages of the book, kind of laying out a series of constraints like zoning rules, grant paperwork for the National Institutes of Health,

environmental impact reviews, racial equity requirements for government contractors,

...