Narrator: What if a collapsed highway, a vital artery for 160,000 cars a day, could be rebuilt in just twelve days? When a section of I-95 in Philadelphia crumbled in 2023, experts predicted months of chaos. Yet, with Governor Josh Shapiro declaring a state of emergency, the normal rules were suspended. Bidding processes were bypassed, regulations were streamlined, and crews worked 24/7. The result was a stunning display of what’s possible when the goal is simply to get something done. This wasn't a miracle; it was a choice.

In their book, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that this exception proves a devastating rule: America has become a country that chooses scarcity over abundance. It has built systems that make it incredibly difficult to build, invent, and deploy the things it needs. The book is a deep dive into why this has happened and presents a powerful argument for a new political vision, one centered on a simple but revolutionary idea: to have the future we want, we must start building it again.

Narrator: The authors argue that America’s most pressing crises, particularly in housing, are not inevitable but are the result of deliberate policy choices. They point to a phenomenon they call "lawn-sign liberalism," where communities that champion progressive values in their front yards simultaneously use local government to block the very development that would make those values a reality.

San Francisco serves as a prime example. A city filled with signs proclaiming "Kindness Is Everything" and "Black Lives Matter" has, since the 1970s, enacted some of the country's most restrictive zoning laws. These policies, which make it nearly impossible to build new apartment buildings, have driven housing costs to astronomical levels. The consequence? The city's Black population has plummeted, and homelessness has soared. Research by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern confirms this isn't a coincidence; they found that across the country, the single greatest predictor of mass homelessness isn't poverty or mental illness, but a severe lack of available housing.

This wasn't always the case. After World War II, places like Lakewood, California, were built at astonishing speed, with a new home finished every seven minutes at its peak. But starting in the 1970s, a new anti-growth sentiment took hold. The "Petaluma Plan" in California pioneered growth caps and urban boundaries, a model that spread across the state and the nation. Homes transformed from places to live into financial assets, and homeowners organized to protect their investments by ensuring scarcity. The result is a self-imposed trap where the dream of homeownership for some relies on making it an impossibility for many others.

Narrator: If the problem is a lack of supply, why doesn't the government just build more? The authors diagnose a core dysfunction in modern governance, particularly on the left, which they term "everything-bagel liberalism." It’s the tendency to load every single project with every conceivable social and political goal, until the project itself becomes impossibly complex and expensive.

The tragic story of California's high-speed rail project is the ultimate case study. Approved by voters in 2008 with a budget of $33 billion and a 2020 completion date, it was meant to be a landmark achievement. Instead, it became a national punchline. The project was buried under endless negotiations with hundreds of stakeholders, decade-long environmental reviews, and competing political demands. For instance, a decision to route the train through the Central Valley to improve air quality in poor communities, a worthy goal in isolation, sacrificed the project's core purpose of connecting major population centers. Today, the estimated cost for just a small, isolated segment has ballooned to over $35 billion, with no passengers expected before 2030.

This paralysis isn't unique to rail. The authors show how even critical legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act, designed to boost national security by reshoring semiconductor manufacturing, was layered with dozens of secondary requirements for everything from childcare access to diversity plans. While each goal is laudable on its own, their accumulation creates a system that is better at checking boxes than at achieving its primary objective. The result is a government that has become excellent at stopping things but has forgotten how to build.

Narrator: Beyond building, the book argues that true progress requires inventing entirely new solutions. Yet here, too, America's systems are failing. The authors identify the "Karikó Problem," named after Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó, whose foundational mRNA research was rejected for decades by the scientific establishment.

Karikó’s story reveals a deep-seated bias in science funding, particularly at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), against risky, novel ideas. Scientists now spend up to 40% of their time on administrative tasks and grant writing, a skill the authors call "grantsmanship." A 2014 Harvard study confirmed this bias, finding that peer reviewers systematically gave the worst scores to the most novel proposals. The system is designed to produce safe, incremental progress, not the improbable, high-risk breakthroughs that change the world. It filters out the very people like Karikó who are unwilling to play the political game and are focused on the science itself.

This stands in stark contrast to an organization like DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA empowers its program managers to act like venture capitalists, making big, counterintuitive bets without the fear of failure. This model is responsible for the internet, GPS, and, crucially, early funding for Moderna's mRNA technology. The lesson is clear: to accelerate invention, we need to reform the institutions that fund it, embracing risk and trusting visionary individuals over slow-moving bureaucracies.

Narrator: Perhaps the book's most critical argument is that invention alone is not enough. The authors attack what they call the "eureka myth"—the belief that a single moment of discovery is what drives progress. The real work, they argue, lies in deployment: the messy, industrial-scale process of turning an idea into a widely available product.

The story of penicillin is a powerful illustration. Alexander Fleming's discovery in 1928 was the "eureka" moment, but for over a decade, it remained a laboratory curiosity. It was only when the U.S. government mobilized a massive, coordinated effort during World War II—bringing together competing companies, solving production bottlenecks, and funding mass manufacturing—that penicillin became a world-changing medicine. This was an industrial triumph, not just a scientific one.

America, the authors contend, has forgotten this lesson. It invented the solar panel at Bell Labs in 1954 and led research for decades. But in the 1980s, the government slashed R&D funding, and the domestic industry collapsed. Germany and China then took over, focusing on manufacturing and deployment, and ultimately made solar power cheap for the world. The U.S. had the invention but failed to deploy it. To achieve abundance, the government must act as a "bottleneck detective," using tools like Operation Warp Speed's pre-purchase agreements to de-risk and accelerate the deployment of critical technologies, from clean energy to AI.

Narrator: The central message of the book is that abundance is a choice, not a destiny. It's a "lens, not a list"—a way of approaching problems by asking a different set of questions: What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have? This shifts politics away from a zero-sum fight over what exists and toward a positive-sum mission to create what is needed.

Ultimately, the book is a powerful call for institutional renewal. It argues that a "liberalism that builds" must be willing to confront its own self-inflicted wounds—the complex regulations and procedural obsessions that, despite good intentions, have created paralysis. The challenge isn't a lack of resources or ideas, but a lack of will to reform the systems that stand in the way. It leaves the reader with an urgent and inspiring question: Can we unlearn our habits of scarcity and once again become a society that builds the future?