Is "Abundance" the new scarcity?
Welcome to The Ink Book Club. Some thoughts to get you started
Hello! And a special welcome to those who’ve just joined to read with us. We’re glad to have you on board for this new adventure, and thanks to everyone for making the launch of The Ink Book Club — a brand new book club about democracy — a triumph! Here’s what we’re looking forward to:
Under the direction of the editor and critic Leigh Haber (who ran Oprah’s book club for a decade), we’ll select a new book each month. We’re already working to line up titles for the months to come (if you have ideas, drop them in the comments below).
To direct our reading, we’ll publish a discussion guide, with prompts and questions posted each week, on Wednesdays and weekends. Throughout the month, you’ll get opportunities to share your thinking with your fellow readers: we’ll offer discussions in our chat, in the comments sections of our Book Club posts, and in Live conversations, including with authors.
The first book we’ll read is Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, a book that offers not just a critique of where America has gone wrong, but a progressive plan for building the future — and a book that has invited a lot of controversy and retort, which we are also excited to dive into.
We’ll be hosting Ezra and Derek for a live conversation about the book and the future of the abundance agenda on Wednesday, May 21, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern.
The interactive Book Club experience — the reading guides, the group chats, the events with authors and other experts — is for paying subscribers of The Ink, one of many benefits of joining this community.
So if you haven’t joined yet, we hope you’ll sign up for a subscription today! And last call for a special half-off deal for one year.
While we’re not getting under way in earnest until next week, when more of you have your books (more on that below), we thought we’d offer a few ideas and questions to keep in mind as you get started.
The premise of Abundance isn’t complicated. As Klein and Thompson write:
This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.
In the book’s introduction, the authors envision a scene from the year 2050, when we’ve accomplished that. They describe a humane, ecologically balanced Eden, where clean energy is prevalent and cheap; water is plentiful because it can be easily desalinated from the ocean; land has been rewilded, and locally grown fruits and vegetables are widely available to all, steps or a short e-bike ride from comfortable, solar-powered apartments in walkable communities. Poverty has been reduced, and most have shorter work weeks. It’s a vision of a cleaner, healthier, richer, and crisis-free world that seems radically different from our current moment.
And it seems like a momentous, if not impossible, jump. But first, how did we get here? Klein and Thompson write:
In this era of rising right-wing populism, there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism. In their book Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy, the political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government — and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”
Can people on the left, progressives and liberals, take some responsibility for the rise of Trump? And is there a kernel of truth in what Trump and the conservatives who came before him were saying in accusing liberals of hobbling innovation and growth with regulation? Even if Trump’s chaotic destruction of the economy and embrace of austerity now stand in the way of the abundance agenda?
How do we attain the future Klein and Thompson imagine?
Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.
Can we give up on our “scarcity” mentality, forged by a “right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it,” and solve our current housing, climate, and income inequality crises by implementing an “abundance” agenda? What do we need to change about the way we think, and what do leaders need to do differently?
And lastly, what does “abundance” mean to you? Let us all know in the comments below.
Thanks for participating in our book giveaway!
More than 1,000 of you signed up to win one of 100 free copies of Abundance, from our friends at Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. We’ve now closed the entry form and wrapped up the giveaway. We’ll be informing everyone by email today, tying up any loose ends on mailing addresses, and working with the press to get those books out to everyone as soon as possible.
Thanks so much! We can’t wait to start reading together.
A programming note: More Live conversations this week!
This Friday, May 2, at 12:15 Eastern, we’ll be talking to Leigh Haber about The Ink Book Club and all that we’ve got planned for readers. Then immediately afterward, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. You won’t want to miss it!
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for me, it's impossible to think of abundance without also thinking of costs, to the planet in particular. Haven't read the book yet, but any discussion of abundance must also include balancing human needs with that of other species and the environment. Because only that balance will ensure that the human species has a future here. No one's going to Mars anytime soon except in their fantasies. Relatedly, the idea of abundance must be separated from the idea of perpetual growth. Such a hard thing for us to separate ourselves from -- that we must continue to be bigger, better, faster, than we were last year. The corporatist fear that having exactly what we need = a loss of profit, that fear seems like the obstacle to an argument that we already have enough for everyone. (which ima guessing is what "abundance" is about)
As a person who has studied housing, interviewed buyers + builders + city planning folks in areas of serious wealth and racial division that is only really understood when you walk neighborhoods, this book avoids examination of the entrenched power players that refuse to build workforce affordable housing and multigenerational housing despite demand.
The free market of transit + housing + community building fails by design in American, and the constant lies about European “socialism” ignores the facts of how housing grew out of alms housing for the elderly - it was an act of faith to care about the members of your community. They then tried multiple supports and market designs and still review what needs tweaking. They did not just abandon people and access to basic standard of care.
Abundance means that people have a living wage where only 25% of their earnings goes to shelter. They can save, have a family vacation, access basic healthcare and not be afraid of old age.