The Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building at 102 stories, was completed in 1931. Building that majestic structure, later called one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, took just one year and 45 days. Contrast that with just about anything we try to build now. And it’s not just speed. In the 1970s, 1.7 million new homes were constructed each year. Since 2021, with a population that’s more than 50 percent larger and an ongoing housing crisis, we’ve built only 1.4 million new homes a year. Or consider major legislation. Medicare was signed into law on July 30, 1965. Less than one year later, sign-ups were already available, with elderly beneficiaries just needing to mail back a single card. In our time, Medicare was expanded in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to allow for the negotiation of common prescription drug prices. However, the new prices for the ten drugs it will cover won’t come fully online until 2026, just in time for President Trump to take credit for them going into the midterms.

Something has changed. Whether it is transit and infrastructure projects that seem to take forever or new laws that take years to go into effect, the government now moves much more sluggishly than in decades past.

Two new books argue that these aren’t just isolated problems but instead reflections of a broader ideological dysfunction within left-liberal and Democratic coalitions. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, argue in their book Abundance that liberalism has lost its ability to carry out great projects, and that it’s not just an economic, but a political, vulnerability. In Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, explains this crisis through the lens of a historical fight within progressivism between those who want to exercise power by consolidating it and those who want to limit power by constraining it. Both books argue that we can’t address the major challenges of the twenty-first century, like the housing and climate crises, without a reorientation in ideas. Worse, they claim that the failure to execute has created a broader distrust in public action that amplifies those challenges. As Dunkelman concludes, “A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.”

Abundance begins with a science-fiction thought experiment: It’s the year 2050, and there’s clean energy and water, innovative food production, sustainable transportation, and shorter working hours driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and drones. Readers are then asked to look back at the early twenty-first century, marked by housing and homelessness crises and climate collapse, and consider how these hardships might one day be viewed as a distant memory: “For years, we knew what we needed to build to alleviate the scarcities so many faced and create the opportunities so many wanted, and we simply didn’t build it.”

We can’t get from today’s grim reality to the authors’ copacetic future, in other words, without dramatically changing our ways. As they summarize:

To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need…. The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

From there, Abundance provides a concise overview of the academic literature and public arguments that have been developed in recent years. It explains how housing scarcity has been fueled by restrictive zoning, regulations, requirements, and community veto, which collectively prevent housing from being built where it is most needed, sending housing prices skyrocketing. The book also highlights the sad irony of environmental regulations intended to stop the use of fossil fuels now inhibiting the large-scale deployment of clean energy alternatives. Efforts to build this infrastructure—from solar panels to the transmission lines needed to connect them to electrical grids—face fierce opposition, including from the same local stakeholders empowered in decades past to block housing projects.

Abundance builds upon articles, podcasts, and columns the authors wrote and recorded throughout the years of the Biden Administration. The book’s narrative momentum is propelled by recent examples of obstruction, including a striking instance where the only way to build new supportive housing in San Francisco was to forgo all government funding and rely instead on private philanthropy to get it done.

Dunkelman’s book takes a longer historical look, tracing the path we took to get here. Why Nothing Works is built around three arguments. First, progressives have always been defined by a mix and conflict between two worldviews: one Hamiltonian, focused on “pulling power up” into a form of authority that can execute reform more easily from above, and the other Jeffersonian, aimed at dispersing power and limiting centralized authority. Second, as the book shows at length through narrative examples from across the twentieth century, these two worldviews have historically acted in a symbiotic way, continually pressuring and refining each other.

Dunkelman’s animating point is his third one: that progressives’ distaste for power has led to ineffective governance, weakening the movement politically and causing widespread frustration within it. He argues:

[T]he balance that’s emerged since the late 1960s—the excessive tilt toward the Jeffersonian—is a seminal political liability for the progressive movement…. The cultural aversion to power hasn’t just tied government in knots—it has diminished the movement’s broader appeal. It is at the root of contemporary progressive exasperation.

Why Nothing Works follows a history in which progressive energy moved from the New Deal administrators who built up a Hamiltonian state capable of deploying federal programs and infrastructure to the New Left activists who used Jeffersonian arguments to shackle and weaken the state’s ability to act. Though any one of those limitations on state action made sense to protect communities that might otherwise be harmed, as they continued over the years, their cumulative effect was to weaken the state’s ability to function overall.

Why are these arguments gaining strength and attention now? The authors’ own motivations for following these topics are telling. In the opening of the Atlantic piece that launched the term “abundance,” Thompson wrote in January 2022 about waiting in a long, cold line for a COVID test, which should have been cheap and easily available. Klein’s New York Times articles on the housing crisis in California and the inability of the state to build high-speed rail were his on-ramp. Dunkelman opens his book rereading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, about Robert Moses’s unchecked power to remake the New York urban landscape, while commuting into New York’s Penn Station, wondering why it was so dilapidated and why it was so difficult for New York to build more transit. As one executive described the difficulty of building clean energy in 2017, “You could have Robert Moses come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit,” a quote that serves as an epigraph for Dunkelman’s book.

Based on the authors’ own stories, there are clearly a number of reasons that this conversation is picking up steam these days. But the most important one has to be the housing crisis. Adjusting for inflation, housing prices have risen about 65 percent since 2000, compared to around 15 percent for median household incomes. Productivity in construction has flattened for a generation, as seen in the increasing costs and delays of government projects. New supply of housing collapsed following the financial and housing crises of the late 2000s and early ’10s, as five million foreclosures and a glut of underwater mortgage debt put a headwind on new construction. When demand slowly came back online, increasingly in expensive urban cores, the cost of housing skyrocketed.

Though estimates vary, experts put the U.S. housing shortage at somewhere between 3.7 million and 6.8 million homes. More research has emerged over the last few years showing the link between our housing shortage and higher costs, as well as the role of incumbent homeowners in holding back construction. Many writers, among them Jerusalem Demsas, Conor Dougherty, and Richard Rothstein, have shed national light on these issues, including the exclusionary motivations behind many zoning laws, and a small but growing movement of activists has already had major successes in updating state and local zoning rules to allow for more housing.

The pandemic and its aftermath provide another clear reason for the growing interest in government capabilities, from managing test kit distribution to vaccine deployment. Following the reopening of the economy, the breakdown of supply chains and lack of availability of specific inputs that drove the ensuing wave of inflation also became a focus of public policy. Social media and podcasts increased the public attention paid to these interconnected issues.

But there are also longer-standing forces driving this conversation. U.S.-China trade relations have grown increasingly tense, raising new questions of how essential manufacturing and production can best take place in the United States. There was the “China shock” of rapid deindustrialization in the early 2000s, leading in part to the surprise 2016 election of President Trump. In addition, the consolidation of power around Xi Jinping in 2017-18 led many in Washington to stop equating trade liberalization with political liberalization, which forces the question of how important it is that essential products be made in America instead of being concentrated solely in China.

The other long-term factor is climate change. For decades, putting a price on carbon was seen as the best way to slow carbon emissions, and in the mid-2000s this seemed like a bipartisan affair. However, the 2010 failure by Congress to price carbon through a “cap-and-trade” mechanism paused that push. The idea fell completely off the radar with the French “yellow vest” protests of 2018 against, among many other targets, high taxes on fuel. The climate movement turned toward expanding the supply of clean energy rather than raising the cost of dirty energy. But attempts to actually build out that clean energy have suddenly run into a whole world of new execution challenges. Companies’ ability to engage in permitting across state lines runs exactly into the localism that has proven its power to shut down housing projects.

Alongside all these economic and geopolitical developments, the abundance arguments have also benefited from an intellectual shift in the academic debates over the concept of “neoliberalism.” This is a term used in academia to discuss the changing background economic ideas that guided state and market policy from 1980 through the 2010s. This literature emphasizes the way market ideology has been deployed by the state to extend markets and to limit democratic actions that might interfere with or constrain market activity. And until recently, it almost always highlighted the role of classical liberal (or libertarian) thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and how their ideas became part of the conservative movement that took power in the 1980s and shifted the center of political gravity.

But a new wave of scholarship has traced those changes further back in time, emphasizing how the ascent of market ideology and limits on state actions were in fact woven into the mid-century liberal state. One sign of this turn has been a focus on how much economic deregulation started under President Carter (frequently noted in retrospectives following his passing). But it goes back even earlier. For instance, Elizabeth Popp Berman’s book Thinking Like an Economist finds that the ascent of economic theory in public policy was shaped in part through firms like RAND under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as those Administrations tried to manage the Cold War, the Great Society, and Vietnam.

The book most influential here is Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens, which finds that many of the Reaganite, libertarian attacks on big government and the administrative state were first foreshadowed by the environmental and good-governance movements of the 1970s. Sabin writes that books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities—all published in the 1960s—criticized the actions of the administrative state as it had evolved from the New Deal and expanded in mid-century America. These criticisms, in turn, inspired movements that put early constraints on government action through law and created a political network designed to sue and slow down state action, with consequences ultimately similar to those of the more direct attacks the conservative movement would unleash in the 1980s. Tracing the history this way shows that this is a long-simmering debate within the Democratic Party that it now needs to address.

Both Abundance and Why Nothing Works frame this as a debate within liberalism and ultimately one about balance. Neither wants to throw away the achievements of the environmental movement, for example, and both view the problem not as “big government” but instead unbalanced government. This is the right starting point—there really were problems with the government’s mid-century ability to act unchecked (there is no better symbol of this than the aforementioned Moses). Yet instead of rebalancing, we’ve moved too far toward inertia.

Some will assume that the proposed remedies are mostly about slashing the government, but the debate is more about how the government acts than its raw size or presence. As Abundance notes, “The big government-small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.” Many of the solutions involve finding the right level at which local decision-making should be preempted to break through coordination problems. The economist Zachary Liscow and his colleagues have found that construction expenses are driven by environmental reviews and other regulations; at the same time, they have also found that hiring more government workers to expedite reviews can bring down costs. Liscow notes that, when it comes to building, we have a system with the worst trade-offs: Construction is slow and expensive, with little to show for it in terms of our environment and health. He proposes a “green bargain”: increasing front-end political participation but reducing back-end litigation, which again doesn’t fit easily into a big-versus-small framework.

But the approach these books take also has its limitations. Folding so many developments and trends under one rubric, from federal research to administrative rule-making to local zoning regulations, can obscure many of the individual challenges. These are genuinely distinct problems, each demanding its own solution and each facing its own coalition of resistance.

Abundance, for instance, treats requests and requirements in the semiconductor grants dispersed under the Biden Administration’s CHIPS and Science Act as an example of an “everything-bagel liberalism,” akin to onerous local zoning ordinances where multiple requirements suffocate the ability of the programs to work. However, as of early January, CHIPS has awarded more than $32 billion in grants, and the United States will be the only country with all five of the world’s leading-edge semiconductor companies operating in it. Early results from the TSMC semiconductor fabrication plant in Arizona are showing the superior levels of efficiency associated with the company’s Taiwan facilities. Unlike with zoning, each deal was negotiated directly with the companies with flexibility in mind, in order to figure out how to get to yes. Beyond the specific results, this is a model for the kind of administration we should be working toward: more interested in end goals than bureaucratic box-checking. The process is still beginning, and the results under the Trump Administration aren’t foretold, but the idea that the CHIPS Act’s ambitions were going to be killed by too many regulations hasn’t panned out so far.

The absence of the conservative movement also stands out in both books. For instance, the focus on excessive procedures and processes in administrative law that the books critique was in fact the historical response by liberals to courts and a conservative ideology that had been hostile to public administration. Right now we face aggressive new Supreme Court decisions attacking administrative agencies and their ability to function, and more fundamental incoming attacks on the legitimacy of New Deal agencies like the National Labor Relations Board. These would exist even if liberals had had different motivations or struck different compromises within their coalition. And an abundance agenda designed around securing less back-end litigation of state action has to contend with this new assault.

Moreover, much of the conservative project revolves around taking federal responsibilities and programs and privatizing them or devolving them down to state and local governments in ways designed to ultimately undermine them. However, many of the abundance arguments are based around preemption, or moving power and decision-making up to the level that can best solve the problem of coordinating actors. That will be a challenge with so much of the conservative movement in opposition.

The books want to emphasize recent failures of federal projects and programs for good reason. But there are also recent successes that we can learn from. When the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, was enacted, experts projected that federal health-care spending would be 0.9 percent of GDP higher than it is now. Bending the cost curve, getting health care to more people, and saving hundreds of billions of dollars is the definition of abundance. The efficiency of social insurance sits uneasy in the authors’ framework. In this light, the call for the expansion of Medicare and public options to save larger costs—with similar or better outcomes—might be the most important abundance intervention.

Moreover, criticisms of administrative inefficiency and capture were top of mind when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. Consumer protection had previously been split among at least five financial regulators, leaving no single agency with the incentive, staffing, or expertise to do it well. The CFPB’s structure and funding were purposely designed to protect it from capture, and it has successfully returned more than $21 billion to consumers and produced rules addressing issues such as abuses in mortgage markets and student debt. Precisely because of these successes, ones that reformers can learn from, dismantling the CFPB has been a central goal of President Trump and Elon Musk.

These examples complicate the narrative that Democrats just can’t get anything done. But that doesn’t mean we should duck from a more serious conversation about government action. It remains unclear what comes next for liberals and progressives, and there is a desperate urgency to figure out what ideological frameworks might fill the void. The Trump Administration’s plans for retrenchment, isolationism, tariffs, and deportations risk putting us on a path to severe stagnation, akin to the one the UK has suffered since Brexit. Liberals must offer an alternative, and one path is to put forth a vision built around future-oriented growth. While it isn’t clear either way whether abundance is a good electoral strategy, the priorities it flags have gone missing in recent decades. And if we can’t offer a more prosperous future while also delivering on the things we promise, why should voters trust us?