“Abundance” for Whom?

Why Liberalism Still Can’t Face Power

“Abundance” for Whom?
Why Liberalism Still Can’t Face Power

By Cecyl Hobbs, The Black Lotus Brief

Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” has been making the rounds lately—especially among the center-left crowd hungry for a revitalized narrative of American progress. The book stakes out a vision of “supply-side progressivism” rooted in the idea that more innovation, more housing, more infrastructure, and fewer regulatory constraints will solve our collective malaise.

It’s a compelling pitch—but one that skips the part where we confront who actually benefits from the current system.

Klein and Derek Thompson (who’s been echoing many of these themes in The Atlantic) call for a new kind of liberal leadership—one that builds, dreams big, and clears the way for abundance. What’s missing from this vision is a serious confrontation with the beneficiaries of the current system—the ultra-wealthy and institutional players who’ve profited most from neoliberalism while offloading the costs onto everyone else.

This version of leadership doesn’t ask billionaires to divest from extractive industries or shift power away from corporate monopolies. It doesn’t challenge the financialization of housing, healthcare, or education. Instead, it’s starting to feel like the economic equivalent of telling consumers to recycle while fossil fuel companies rebrand themselves as green.

Klein’s framework tends to present systemic dysfunction—regulatory capture, bottlenecks in housing and energy—as fixable with better permitting and a more optimistic ethos.

“Technocratic optimism can be refreshing—but it can also be a form of denial.”

That technocratic optimism can be refreshing, but it also glosses over the deeper structural causes of these failures. Namely: entrenched concentrations of power and capital that shape what gets built, where, and for whom.

Klein’s vision operates within a kind of Hobbesian Field of Dreams—a belief that if we simply build more, justice will arrive. But Thomas Hobbes had it right: without reckoning with power, the natural order doesn’t dissolve—it hardens. Infrastructure doesn’t redistribute power. It often cements it.

To see the limits of this technocratic optimism, consider the contrast between two books Klein himself engages with: Cities of Amber by Jacob Anbinder and *The Color of Law* by Richard Rothstein.

Anbinder’s analysis (a dissertation forming the basis for his forthcoming book, NIMBY Nation), which Klein draws on, argues that America’s urban dysfunction stems from mid-century planning decisions that have locked our cities into rigid, low-density, car-centric forms. In Anbinder’s telling, bureaucratic stasis and institutional design—not individual bad actors—are the primary culprits.

But Rothstein offers a crucial counterpoint: those urban forms were not just the product of miscalculated efficiency. They were actively constructed through state-sponsored racial exclusion, real estate profiteering, and corporate capture.

“Segregation wasn’t an accident. It was the blueprint.”

Klein’s appeal to Anbinder’s framework allows him to position “abundance” as a policy failure fixable with better permitting and more coordination. But without Rothstein’s lens, he sidesteps the reality that the system’s inertia is not neutral—it’s a legacy of power hoarded and protected.

In this sense, *Abundance* risks becoming a reboot of mid-century technocracy without the necessary reckoning. It calls us to build, but not necessarily to repair. It urges us to clear bureaucratic barriers, but not to confront the economic and racial hierarchies those barriers were designed to preserve.

To be clear, I support the notion of abundance and human progress gained through innovation. But if we’re going to talk about building a better future, we need frameworks that center equity, sustainability, and power—not just efficiency and scale.

That’s why I recommend reading “Doughnut Economics” alongside “Abundance.” Kate Raworth’s model challenges the very premise that “more” is always better. It asks us to define the outer bounds of ecological sustainability and the inner core of human dignity—and to build within those boundaries. It’s a radically different starting point than “let’s streamline permitting.”

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Sidebar: What Is a “Hobbesian Field of Dreams”?

The “Hobbesian Field of Dreams” is a phrase I use to describe a seductive but misguided belief at the heart of some liberal optimism: if we build enough—housing, infrastructure, clean energy—justice will come.

It mashes up the mythic line from “Field of Dreams” (“If you build it, they will come”) with the hard political realism of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that without power’s restraint, human systems tend toward violence and domination.

In urban development, this means that abundance alone doesn’t redistribute power. Often, it deepens inequality unless paired with structural reckoning.

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A Call to Leadership—Beyond Technocracy, Toward Trust

If liberalism is going to regain moral and political momentum, it can’t keep skipping the part where we ask the most powerful to yield—whether that means taxing extreme wealth, breaking up monopolies, or structurally reinvesting in communities long excluded from the so-called abundance already circulating.

Here’s where corporate executives, board directors, and institutional investors come in.

“We can’t permit our way out of inequality.”

We can’t just optimize for faster permitting or smoother capital deployment and call it leadership. We need a different kind—grounded not just in innovation, but in **Trust Capital**.

Trust Capital isn’t PR. It’s not brand equity.

It’s the reservoir of legitimacy an institution earns when it consistently acts beyond narrow self-interest—when it realigns its business model with long-term public value and helps repair the social fabric its profits depend on.

Trust Capital grows when leaders:

• Name and confront the systems of privilege and profit they’ve inherited and sustained.

• Reinvest in the foundational economy—the civic, care, and community systems that markets often undervalue.

• Divest from models that treat labor, land, and neighborhoods as expendable.

• Advocate not only for innovation, but for redistribution and repair.

If abundance doesn’t mean shared power, what’s it for?

If abundance is to mean anything in this century, it must mean shared power—not just surplus production. It must mean systems that regenerate rather than extract. That’s a different blueprint for leadership—and one we urgently need.

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We Already Live in a World of Abundance

The problem isn’t scarcity. It’s distribution—and the power structures that lock it in place.

And until we confront the power structures that hoard and protect that abundance, every new call to build risks reinforcing the very systems we claim to outgrow.

Progress demands more than a permission slip.

It demands accountability.

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Want to Go Deeper?

These two books offer critical lenses on the urban legacy Klein invokes—but doesn’t fully confront:

• The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

An essential account of how racial segregation in American cities wasn’t accidental—it was the result of federal, state, and local policy. Rothstein shows how housing and zoning laws systematically excluded Black families and shaped inequality into the physical landscape of the U.S.

• Cities of Amber by Jacob Anbinder

An incisive chronicle of how postwar America built itself into bureaucratic and infrastructural stasis. Anbinder reveals how 20th-century technocracy created cities that are hard to adapt, despite rising climate, housing, and equity challenges. But behind the amber lies an architecture of power that still shapes who gets to live, move, and thrive.

Read together, they reveal why reforming urban systems requires more than better policy—it requires confronting the deep legacy of exclusion and extraction that built them in the first place.