Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (2025) argues that housing is too scarce, that infrastructure takes too long to build and that clean energy isn’t being deployed fast enough. Their diagnosis is that liberal governments came to care more about process than results, so zoning, environmental review and procurement rules written to protect people now keep the state from building what people need. Clear the procedures, and the state can build its way out of scarcity.
Both halves of that diagnosis put the problem in the wrong place. Care Isn’t Scarce. It’s Gatekept. argues that much of the scarcity people meet is allocated: the apartments, beds and food exist, and what runs short is permission to use them. Building more doesn’t end a shortage that someone enforces, because the same rules decide who gets what is new. The procedures Klein and Thompson want cleared also do work for somebody. A hearing, a review or a comment period is often the one place a tenant or a neighborhood can make a builder answer for what a project will cost them. Remove it and the cost stays with the people who lost the means to object.
The book’s measure of success is also output: homes built, lines laid, megawatts connected. Output is too thin a standard for a politics, whether for the left that has taken up the book or for anyone else who wants institutions to serve people.
People don’t experience institutions only through what those institutions produce. They also experience them through what those institutions demand. A city can build more housing while its tenants spend their lives commuting. Health coverage can expand while patients are left to act as their own case managers, and government services can move online while the clerical work moves onto the people who use them. Plenty of services are technically available, in the sense that a stubborn person with a printer, a free weekday and some grasp of the appeals process will eventually get them. Whether a society can produce enough is one question. Who has to adapt to the delivery systems is another.
People as unpaid infrastructure
Every institution works from simplified rules, and the people it serves aren’t simple. Someone has to make up the difference. A nurse works around inadequate software, and a disabled worker negotiates a workplace built around someone else’s body. Parents coordinate services that can’t coordinate themselves. Benefits recipients prove again facts the state already has on file, and patients carry records from one clinic to the next. Productivity measures miss all of this, and Bureaucracy Eats the Time People Have Left Together argues those losses belong in the account of how well an institution performs. What looks like efficiency is often an institution’s failure moved onto the people it serves, who pay in time, attention, energy, health, patience and the capacity to care for anyone else. Those stores are finite. Employers, governments, platforms, hospitals and schools have no free claim on them whenever their own arrangements fall short.
Power shows up here in an easily missed form. The powerful are often not the people who make others act but the people who get to stay rigid while others bend. When the agency keeps its categories, the applicant learns to describe a complicated life in its terms.
Authority and cost sit on opposite sides
The temptation is to name one cause. Capitalism, bureaucracy, technology and bad design can each produce this pattern, and none of them explains it alone. Public agencies, universities, hospitals, nonprofits and families all push adjustment onto whoever has the least power to refuse it. What these cases share is a structure. The people with the authority to create a mismatch don’t bear its cost, so they have little reason to fix it while someone else is already coping.
A practical way to find the structure is to ask who’s being made to hold the uncertainty. A retailer that sets shifts a few days out has moved its uncertainty about demand onto its workers. A clinic that can’t say when a result will arrive has moved its uncertainty onto the patient who keeps calling. An agency that treats every applicant as a possible fraud has moved its risk onto the honest ones, who must document everything. In each case the institution could hold the uncertainty more cheaply than the person, and chose not to.
Other habits keep the structure in place. An institution can hit all its targets while running on other people’s coping, because its measures count throughput and headcount and miss the hours spent working around it. Professionals keep categories that make sense inside their field and leave the work of translation to the outsider. Someone who wins an accommodation or an appeal gets relief, and the rule behind the trouble survives unless individual remedies are added up into evidence against it. Software adds a further demand, that people make themselves machine-readable so a model can classify them.
Where the flexibility comes from
A just-in-time schedule looks efficient on the employer’s books because labor matches demand hour by hour. The cost hasn’t disappeared. It sits with the worker who can’t plan childcare, a second job or a class, and who keeps the phone on in case a shift appears.
A family applying for help may deal with a benefits office, a housing authority, a school and a clinic, each with its own forms and its own version of the family’s facts. Each office can be efficient by its own measure while the family integrates them, carrying letters from one to another and correcting each record against the rest. The state has the databases and the staff to do the integration. The applicant has an evening and a phone.
In both places the institution stays stable because somebody with less power supplies the flexibility it lacks. Output measures reward the arrangement, because the flexibility is free to the institution using it.
What institutions leave free
Judge institutions by how much human capacity they leave free, not only by how much they produce.
Abundance then becomes one means to that end, judged like any other. Taken literally, the principle could favor a society that asks almost nothing of anyone, including the demands of care, solidarity, learning and democratic life. A society should keep making them. The target is the needless adaptation people perform to cover for institutions that could have adapted themselves.
For any proposed abundance, an increase in collective capacity has to increase people’s capacity for living. More housing does only if the people who need it are let in. A unit held empty or priced out of their reach frees none of their time. Better transit, cheap clean energy, automation and a public sector that can actually administer things face the same condition. More is not better by definition. If producing or reaching the abundance consumes more human capacity than it frees, the output figures give the wrong answer.
Designing for less adaptation
The principle also changes what good design means. User-centered design usually arrives after the institution’s purpose, categories and architecture are already fixed, and then smooths the person’s path through them. It rarely asks why the person should have to make the journey at all. Sometimes the best form is one the institution fills in from records it already holds, and the best accommodation is removing the default that excluded people in the first place. A more elegant interaction can make a demand that shouldn’t exist feel legitimate.
An institution facing a new demand has four options, to be tried in order. First, eliminate the demand if it is unnecessary. Second, absorb it inside the institution, which has software, staff, records and scale that no single person has. Third, make whatever interaction remains simple. Last, make it cheap for people to get the institution to correct itself when something goes wrong. Most institutions start at the third step, and many start at the fourth.
An institution should spend its own capacity before spending anyone else’s.
Say no without having to stand guard
An institution can seem to fail suddenly when workers work to rule, when caregivers stop filling gaps nobody asked them to fill, or when frontline staff stop improvising around broken procedures. Sometimes the sudden failure shows the institution was already failing and people were hiding it by compensating. Refusal makes the hidden dependence visible and pushes the cost back toward the people with the authority to change the arrangement.
Refusal is costly in its own right. The person with the least money, health, time or security is often least able to say no. Collective organization matters because it can turn a refusal that is dangerous for one person into pressure an institution has to answer.
The democratic answer also can’t be to ask people to participate more, because participation takes time and energy too. A right to be heard that works only if you attend the hearing, file the comment and learn the procedure is a right for people with spare evenings. The capacity agenda puts the duty to get things right on the institution, so the hearing stops being the person’s only protection. If ordinary people must keep watch on institutions to prevent abuse, self-defense has become another form of unpaid labor, and it will fail as soon as they get tired.
People need corrective power without permanent vigilance. That means institutions correcting themselves readily enough that their mistakes don’t become somebody else’s permanent job.
How much life comes back
A capacity agenda has no quarrel with material plenty. It can create the slack freedom needs. With enough of it, public institutions can absorb complexity instead of exporting it, and technology can eliminate labor that was never worth doing. Housing, health care, energy and care that people can reach would let them stop organizing their lives around scarcity.
Klein and Thompson ask whether we can build more, which assumes the shortage is physical and the procedures are the obstacle. Whether the building helps depends on who is allowed to use what already exists, and how much of ourselves we will still have after anything new is built. By this measure, progress is growth in uncolonized capacity: as collective capability grows, ordinary people give up less of their lives to keeping the systems running. A decent society stops asking people for the adaptation its institutions could do themselves.