BOOK OF THE MONTH: What Abundance Reveals About Why Societies Get Stuck

For HEC Paris finance professor Olivier Darmouni, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book is a reminder that many solutions already exist. The challenge is to build them.

© Daniel BROWN

EDITOR: Published in 2025, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson makes a case for a politics of plenty in an age of scarcity. The book asks why wealthy societies that can identify problems with increasing precision often struggle to solve them, from housing and clean energy to infrastructure and public capacity. For Olivier Darmouni, Associate Professor of Finance at HEC Paris and Pierre Andurand Chair in Sustainability, the book's appeal lies in its pragmatism. Shifting attention from ideology to deliver it asks a simple question: if many of the solutions are already visible, what prevents societies from putting them into practice?

A Pragmatic Case for Building

I was drawn to Abundance because it says something very elementary, but with real force: if we want to improve the world, we need to build more things and better things. This was something I had felt before, but the book helped me see the extent to which, if we decided to act differently, we could build a much better world.

What makes the book compelling is not only the optimism of the title. It is the way Klein and Thompson document the bottlenecks. From housing to clean energy, sovereignty, and support for people at the bottom of the income distribution, they show that the barriers are not always where people assume they are. We often think first of ideological polarization. The book suggests that the more important obstacle may be the failure to apply the solutions we have before us.

A New Jersey Bridge With Fewer Levers

That is why Abundance feels both hopeful and demanding. It is hopeful because it argues that many solutions are already in front of us. It is demanding because it invites us to apply these simple solutions. If the problem is not only that the other side blocks progress, then the question becomes more practical: how do we get officials, citizens, and businesses to share the understanding that better outcomes are possible?

The authors give examples of what happens when society decides something has to be built. One that struck me concerns a bridge on a major highway in New Jersey, close to where I used to live. After an emergency, it was rebuilt in a fraction of the usual time. The point for me was that, when priorities are clear, processes can change. A lot can be solved with a few levers if people agree on the need to act.

What Europe Can learn

Although Abundance is focused on the United States, I think the diagnosis applies very well to Europe. In the US, it is easy to explain gridlock by pointing to polarization, the party system, or constitutional rules. In Europe, party systems are more fluid and political divides can be less rigid. But if the real obstacle is not only ideological conflict, Europe should not feel exempt.

The first issue is zero-sum thinking: the belief that the only way to make life better for some people is to take away from others. That is a limiting way to understand progress. Historically, many of the biggest improvements for people at the bottom of the economy have come through technological progress, better infrastructure, and the ability to produce and deliver more of what people need.

The second issue is what Klein and Thompson call the “everything bagel”. A project starts with one clear objective, but then every desirable aim is added to it. Suppose the goal is to support clean energy. We add subsidies, but also requirements for small businesses, minority contractors, local biodiversity, and many other priorities. Each of these aims may be legitimate. But if every project tries to solve every problem at once, nothing happens. Opponents can use each clause to slow it down or block it.

The authors also address the question of prioritization. If the goal is to decrease the carbon content of electricity production, then make that the goal, deliver on it, and build credibility. Once government shows it can deliver one priority, it can move to the next. But the willingness to have the everything bagel at every meal creates problems.

A passage that changes the frame

The passage that stayed with me most comes from, of all people, Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. He speaks about repairing damage to air, land, and water, and about restoring nature as a cause beyond party and faction. What interested me was not Nixon himself but the surprise of the example. A conservative Republican president was presenting environmental action as a common cause. That helped me flip the narrative. Issues such as climate, infrastructure, and long-term investment are not naturally owned by one side of the political spectrum. They are practical problems societies need to solve.

I would recommend Abundance because it is hopeful in a serious way. It asks us to distinguish complexity from excuses. For students, researchers, and decision-makers, the book is a reminder that diagnosis is not enough. Seeing a problem clearly is not the same as building the solution. If our capacity to see problems has sharpened, then our ability to solve them has to catch up.

Go to the HEC Breakthroughs podcast with Olivier Darmouni for a lively exchange on lessons for finance, public policy, and the energy transition.

This series is in collaboration with the HEC Learning Center. Abundance is this month’s featured book selection, available to all students and staff.