I spent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly to make of it all.

The main policy argument of Abundance is that the administrative burdens placed on construction are too high. This argument is familiar to anyone who has followed debates about housing policy over the last decade. It’s the exact same thing but applied to transportation and energy infrastructure too. The secondary policy argument of Abundance is that the innovation system in the United States is broken in a number of ways, including too much risk aversion in science financing, high administrative burdens on scientific research, and too little support for converting scientific discoveries into efficient mass production.

The authors seem to think these two arguments, and the dozens of sub-arguments flowing from them, all fit together because they relate back to “abundance,” a word that appears to just mean growth and innovation. But I find myself agreeing with Mike Konczal’s point that bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling. Lots of problems relate back to growth and innovation, but that does not mean they all avail themselves to similar analysis and solutions.