Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s manifesto Abundance, published in March amid the Democratic Party’s post-2024 soul-searching, has prompted a wide-ranging debate. Much of the discussion has pitted a mostly receptive center-left punditry against a more skeptical left. Although Abundance overtly targets “the pathologies of the broad left” for criticism, its authors have noted their surprise at the volume and range of criticism they have come in for from the left.
One point of contention has revolved around Klein and Thompson’s effort to reorient Democratic politics away from what they say is an excessive focus on redistribution and toward a focus on growth and innovation. Some progressive critics object to the authors’ seeming dismissal of the ecological consequences of unlimited growth, while others point out that without redistribution, most Americans will fail to reap the benefits of innovation—as has largely been the case since the 2008 financial crisis.
In countering Klein and Thompson’s emphasis on growth over redistribution, however, leftists risk endorsing the premise that these two objectives are inherently at odds with each other. Evidence to the contrary comes from a part of the world often viewed as a model by progressives: the Nordic countries. The Nordic experience demonstrates that innovation and redistribution are not only not at odds with each other, but can be mutually reinforcing.
The authors of Abundance are correct to assert that greater state intervention in the economy is necessary; and that government must in particular get back into the business of supply. Finally, state-directed development of new technologies constitutes an essential component of any pathway out of the current impasse.
In order to achieve all this, we must first rebuild state capacity. But how is this revitalization to be achieved? As other critics have pointed out, a disconnect between ends and means pervades Abundance, which begins with a rousing invocation of a near-future techno-utopia in which state-directed initiatives have led a rapid transition from horizontal to vertical farming, launched a fleet of orbital pharmaceutical factories, and achieved the holy grail of fusion-powered nuclear energy. Klein and Thompson promise “real marvels in the real world,” but they provide no real answer to how the state capacity required for such wonders is to be acquired.
State capacity is, at least in democratic societies, intimately bound up with public trust in government. It is difficult to assemble broad public buy-in for major new initiatives when people don’t believe in the ability of the state to fulfill its basic functions. As Klein and Thompson lament, US levels of public trust have suffered a long and rarely interrupted decline since the mid-20th century, from a peak of 77 percent in 1964 to a low of 16 percent in 2023. By comparison, Nordic countries, despite a similar dip after the 1970s, remain comfortably in the 60s and the 70s. What explains this vast difference?
While numerous factors contribute to the high marks Nordic countries receive on measures of not just public trust but good governance and happiness, virtually every scholar agrees that the redistributive policies of their universalist social welfare programs play the decisive role.
“Klein and Thompson are decidedly ambivalent about economic redistribution.”
Considering this fact, it is noteworthy that Klein and Thompson are decidedly ambivalent about economic redistribution. At their most generous, they acknowledge it is necessary, but emphasize that it is wholly insufficient to meet the urgent demands of our troubled age. “The world we want,” they say, “requires more than redistribution. We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” Or, alternatively: “Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.”
At the same time, Klein and Thompson chastise Democrats since Reagan for limiting their economic interventions to “the demand side of the ledger” by “giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford.” The failure of Democrats to intervene on the supply side, the authors note, has resulted in an explosion of costs for many of the basic necessities of life, among them housing, health insurance, college tuition, and child care.
But after seeming to locate the failure of US liberalism in its acquiescence to the market in the provision of essential public goods, Klein and Thompson proceed to obscure the basic distinction between direct public provision of goods and the privatization of such provision. They even claim at one point that “American liberalism” has long “measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark.” Although it would hardly seem necessary to remind policy experts like Klein and Thompson of this, what makes Denmark and the other Nordic countries different from the United States is that critical public goods—healthcare, education, childcare, and eldercare—have been removed from the market, and are provided free of charge, funded by tax revenues.
In other words, Klein and Thompson slip from a seemingly apt criticism of the distorted incentives of America’s semi-privatized welfare system into a broader allegation that US progressives are excessively focused on redistribution. This is a surprising claim, since Abundance is ostensibly about the need for a more active state that is unafraid to enter into the domain of supply.
Perhaps the explanation has something to do with Klein and Thompson’s mostly unstated antagonism toward another tendency within the Democratic coalition that has offered a blueprint for the party’s future. Here we refer, of course, to the program of social-democratic redistribution advocated for, most prominently, by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the single instance in which Sanders’s name appears in Abundance, the authors make it clear that they view the movement he represents as a part of the problem of what they call “scarcity thinking.” This would suggest that they believe a broad commitment to economic redistribution is fundamentally at odds with that which they hold most dearly: innovation and growth, which they present as the linchpins of future abundance.
But as the Nordic experience shows, it is not. That shouldn’t be surprising: The basic fact that Danes need not fear financial ruin from medical or student debt nor choose between career and caring for their children or elderly relatives would surely seem to encourage the kind of risk-taking prized by Klein and Thompson. And while it is no simple task to measure the innovative capacity of national economies, the latest WIPO survey ranked Sweden 2nd, one place ahead of the United States, and Finland (7th) and Denmark (10th) aren’t far behind. Meanwhile, OECD productivity rankings for 2022 had Norwegian (2nd), Danish (4th) and Swedish (7th) workers ahead of their US counterparts (10th).
More importantly, the presence of broadly redistributive social welfare programs, as previously noted, tends to lead to much higher levels of public trust in government, which in turn results in increased state capacity. While there is no exact way to measure state capacity, the EIU’s 2024 Functioning Government Index, which tracks “the extent to which citizens have a functioning government that acts on their behalf,” offers a decent enough approximation. Currently, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark top this ranking, while the United States comes in 47th, having suffered an 18 percent decline since 2006. (It should further be noted that the diminution of US state capacity since Trump took office in January is not accounted for here.)
Klein and Thompson might attempt to explain their relative inattention to redistribution by simply saying that Abundance addresses a different set of problems; or they could, as Klein appeared to attempt in a recent interview, claim that that an insistence on redistribution amounts to an “abstraction” from what is essentially a laser-focused diagnosis of specific practical problems. But such objections are at odds with the authors’ insistence that the book is the first step in the establishment of “a new political order.” They promise the moon, but have no way to get there.
The authors of Abundance are correct about the urgent need to reconstruct US state capacity. The scope of this matter is hardly limited to domestic politics stateside, for it is difficult to see how the human community as a whole might rise to the manifold of challenges we now confront without the active participation of our largest and most dynamic economy. But if the US state is to find its way back to the era in which it “did things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” then it must first see to it that its citizens are no longer denied the same basic social protections the Nordic peoples are fortunate largely to take for granted. Attend to the fundamentals, and the marvels will follow.