The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how that’s destroying our country. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox and now a columnist for the New York Times; Thompson writes for the Atlantic.)

Abundance’s core thesis is almost impossible to dispute: it costs mind-boggling amounts of money and time to build bridges or trains in the United States; this isn’t true elsewhere in the world so it’s clearly not inevitable; and their inability to build keeps progressives from providing the safety net, climate action, and affordable housing that they say they want.

Since the central thesis is hard to argue with, most of the arguing about the book has been about the authors. (Are they secret........

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