Abundance – How We Build a Better Future
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Profile Books, £16.99

WHAT do we all desire? Abundance, of course, according to these two New York journalists, turned poundshop philosophers. In a book clearly scrabbled together for US consumption, they offer us a quick fix to society’s problems.

In their introduction they paint a land of milk and honey in the year 2050, in which we eat laboratory-made steaks and chicken breasts, fruit and vegetables are grown vertically on tiered shelves only a few blocks away, energy is virtually free as is healthcare, and drones deliver medicines to our homes. Fresh water comes from desalination plants, leaving rivers and lakes free from pollution and stress, and AI does most of the work.

“The combination of artificial intelligence, labour rights, and economic reforms,” they tell us, will have “reduced poverty and shortened the work week.” All this without a radical political and economic transformation, violent revolution or civil war. Wow, what a beautiful vision!

So why is US society still scarred by mass poverty, scarcity and lack of housing? Nothing to do with the wealthy oligarchs or the capitalist system, according to these authors; It’s all the fault of you lefty liberals for not doing enough.

The authors are both liberals in the American tradition, they aver, and view the world very much through the lens of the US two-party system, defining “politics as a way of organising conflict.” They are agreed that neither of the two main parties is able to solve society’s pressing needs, and tell us that both saw tax-cutting as a means of stimulating growth but that it didn’t work, but neither did “Progressivism’s promises and policies [which] for decades were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something the market was producing.”

“But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of goods and services.” I must have somehow missed that era of money giveaway.

Under the chapter title: Scarcity is a choice, they 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.” Now that really is a simple idea. Why did no-one think of it before?  

“To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it,” they go on, “requires us to remake the world we have built.” Forget ideological battles and class struggle. They are old hat. Just grab your shovel or laptop and start rebuilding.

On the cover blurb, it says: “Liberal democracy is under threat – not just from the autocrats, but from the lack of effective action by so-called progressives.” So there we have it: the crises Western societies are facing has nothing to do with the capitalist system but is all down to “us”.

And with Bill Gates’s endorsement of their manifesto, saying it “helped me understand modern politics better,” the authors must surely have a point?

Well, it certainly hasn’t helped this reader.