What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

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What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

April 28, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Video

What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

It’s been a big year for the abundance movement, but what has it really achieved? Ezra Klein talks with his “Abundance” co-author Derek Thompson and with Marc Dunkelman, the author of “Why Nothing Works.”

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The New York Times

What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

It’s been a big year for the abundance movement, but what has it really achieved? Ezra Klein talks with his “Abundance” co-author Derek Thompson and with Marc Dunkelman, the author of “Why Nothing Works.”

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode

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It’s been a little over a year since Derek Thompson and I published the book “Abundance.” While the book didn’t begin what I consider the abundance movement, it did mark a kind of kickoff of the idea as both an object in the discourse — something people are fighting over and creating factional wars over — and something politicians are trying to turn into policy.

Being a part of this has been a bit of a wild ride on a bunch of levels. It has created fights — as well as opportunities — I didn’t expect. It can be a very weird experience.

But I’ve wanted to come back to “Abundance.” I’ve been a little distracted from it by the million things Donald Trump is doing, but if abundance is to become something more than a synonym for efficiency — if it were to become part of a vision for a better world — I think there’s some success to build on, but also a whole lot more that actually needs to be done.

So I wanted to have on some other folks from within this intellectual hothouse to talk through what has happened, what we’ve learned from the arguments, critiques and coalitions that are forming and fracturing, and what we think needs to happen next.

Derek Thompson is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He’s not only the co-author of “Abundance,” he’s also the author of a

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