Ambitious ... Klein and Thompson’s influence is one good reason to see these books as blueprints for a political movement. Abundance is a fair-minded book, and it recognizes some of the trade-offs that come with redesigning government for dynamism.
A sharp cry ... Dramatizing the innovator’s plight, Abundance occasionally reads like the brief of a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities who are mainly upset by clogged transit and red tape ... Klein and Thompson have no answers for how to get the masses back their mojo, and Abundance does not seriously confront a big reason for Democratic aversion to dreaming big: neoliberal globalization.
A potent political manifesto ... It’s a bit like discussing how you’d like to redecorate your house while your neighbors strip the copper wiring from your walls. Still, if the book’s vision of a world after abundance seems distant, its optimism is also compelling, even joyous ... It suffers at times from a lack of clear structure. But Abundance is unabashed in synthesizing good ideas ... The book’s core lesson, convincingly delivered, is that liberals ought to make it easier to do the things they want to do.
Has some real flaws ... Klein and Thompson sometimes elide the genuine tradeoffs between their vision and progressive ideology ... Slipperiness may make Abundance more palatable to progressives, but also invites distrust ... With any luck, Abundance will bring us a little closer to such a consensus.
There is much to admire in this book ... Their aims and concerns are also laudable ... The greatest strength of Klein and Thompson’s book is in how clearly they bring...issues to the reader’s attention ... But what about their solution? ... Klein and Thompson explicitly avoid getting into the weeds by claiming that they are offering 'a lens' to think about problems rather than 'a list' of recommendations ... Another rub: their environmental assumptions ... [Their] Pollyannaish vision ignores the messy realities on the ground ... An unrealistic vision that fails to engage with hard choices ... Fails to recognize the deep dissatisfactions of millions of Americans ... A core limitation of this book is that it expects too much of technology ...
Just as Klein and Thompson have little to say about rural areas, they are remarkably mum about income inequality and the shrinking of the American middle class ... If Klein and Thompson’s aim is to force liberals to accept their portion of responsibility for the challenges facing the nation, then this book is a useful provocation, even if it lacks details about how to reconcile the public good with reduced red tape ... But to expect these changes to be the basis of a new political order is to overstate what technology can accomplish and to ignore the fundamental political divides fracturing the US today ... Ultimately, Klein and Thompson offer a vision of the United States’ problems that speaks mostly to the political concerns of urban elites and political donors—and not to the vast majority of American citizens.
Klein and Thompson’s case studies are described with the clarity, accessibility and rigour that characterises their policy journalism ... Abundance ducks the most difficult issue. In assembling a brief against creaky and costly aspects of the status quo, it leaves unanswered the question of what should be kept ... Abundance is a utopian project. In order to show what could be, it conceals the hard parts.
Here and there readers of a conservative disposition will scrawl 'duh' in the margins ... Messrs. Klein and Thompson appear to have only contempt for American conservatism, their knowledge of it confined to what liberal journalists and academics have written about Reagan, the Tea Party and Donald Trump ... Deals mostly in concepts that sound swell in the authors’ epigrammatic prose but have minimal contact with the world of people and things.
