Abundance

Klein and Thompson's thesis is that America's biggest economic problems, unaffordable housing, slow clean-energy build-out, decaying infrastructure, are not failures of markets or money but of self-imposed process: permitting, zoning, environmental review layered until building anything becomes heroic. Scarcity, they argue, is a policy choice, and a politics of abundance would measure success by what actually gets built.

The book became the rare policy bestseller that reframed a national debate, spawning an 'abundance agenda' movement across think tanks and statehouses. Its examples are concrete: why a San Francisco public toilet was budgeted at $1.7 million, why high-speed rail dies in environmental review while highways sail through, why the countries that decarbonize fastest are the ones that permit fastest.

For readers of a finance blog, the practical relevance is direct: housing supply is the single largest line item in most household budgets, and energy costs flow into everything. Understanding why supply is constrained, and which policies would unconstrain it, is understanding the deep forces behind your cost of living and several major investment themes of the decade.