From Cheap Intelligence: What Freedom Looks Like When Labor Is Free — a short book on why freedom on paper isn't freedom in practice, and what cheap AI does to the gap.
If you liked Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025), read these next: Seeing Like a State (Scott, 1998) for how planning fails, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Gordon, 2016) for whether the good years are over, Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (Acemoglu & Robinson) for the institutions underneath, Power and Progress (Acemoglu & Johnson, 2023) for who technology actually serves, and Utopia for Realists (Bregman, 2016) for the optimist's case. Each one takes up the gap between what a system promises and what it delivers.
Disclosure: one of the books mentioned below — Cheap Intelligence — was written by Spencer Shulem, who runs this blog. It is not in the numbered list; it sits in a clearly-marked section at the end. The seven ranked picks were chosen for one reason: how squarely they answer the question Abundance leaves you with.
The short version
| Book | Who it's for | The one idea |
|---|---|---|
| Seeing Like a State (1998) | Anyone who liked the "we forgot how to build" thesis | Top-down schemes fail when they erase the messy local knowledge that made things work. |
| The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) | Data people who want the long view | The great century of growth may have been a one-time event. |
| Why Nations Fail (2012) | Readers who want the root cause | Prosperity comes from inclusive institutions, not geography or culture. |
| The Narrow Corridor (2019) | Those asking "then what keeps a state honest?" | Liberty survives only in a narrow balance between a strong state and a strong society. |
| Power and Progress (2023) | Tech skeptics and optimists both | Technology only shares its gains when power is contested, not automatically. |
| Utopia for Realists (2016) | People who want the hopeful version | Big, "unrealistic" ideas were once every reform we now take for granted. |
1. Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott (1998)
Read this if you're the reader who nodded hardest at Abundance's claim that process and central planning strangle good outcomes.
Scott's book is the ancestor of half the ideas in the current "why can't we build" conversation. He shows how states impose legibility — grids, cadastral maps, scientific forestry, planned cities — and how those simplifications kill the very complexity that made systems productive. The through-line to Abundance is exact: a plan that looks rational on paper collides with the world and fails to deliver.
"The great state simplifications of the early modern period were… a purely fiscal lens."
Drawback: it's an academic book from 1998, dense with forestry and Soviet collectivization case studies. If you want brisk and contemporary, start elsewhere and come back. See the Yale University Press page.
2. The Rise and Fall of American Growth — Robert J. Gordon (2016)
Read this if you're unconvinced that abundance is even still on the table — and want the numbers.
Gordon's argument is the pessimist's counterweight to Klein and Thompson. The transformation of American life between 1870 and 1970 — electricity, sanitation, the car, antibiotics — was a unique burst that will not repeat. Recent innovation, he contends, is narrow and its productivity gains have faded. Where Abundance says we chose stagnation through bad policy, Gordon says some of it may be structural.
"Some inventions are more important than others."
Drawback: it's long (700+ pages) and its pessimism can feel airtight to a fault — critics argue it undercounts what's coming. The Princeton University Press page has the full scope.
3. Why Nations Fail — Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson (2012)
Read this if you're asking the deeper question: why do some societies deliver and others never do?
Written by two of the 2024 economics Nobel laureates, this is the foundational argument that nations prosper through inclusive institutions and fail through extractive ones — not because of geography, weather, or culture. It reframes Abundance's domestic frustration as one case of a universal pattern: promises fail when institutions serve insiders instead of the many.
"Nations fail today because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate."
Drawback: the single-lens theory can feel over-applied; critics note it explains everything and therefore risks explaining nothing. See the authors' companion site at whynationsfail.com and Acemoglu's MIT page.
4. The Narrow Corridor — Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson (2019)
Read this if you're convinced by Why Nations Fail and now want to know what keeps a capable state from turning against its people.
The sequel's central image is a corridor: liberty exists only where a strong state and a strong, mobilized society stay locked in balance. Too little state and you get chaos; too much and you get despotism. This is the missing half of Abundance — Klein and Thompson want a state that can build, and Acemoglu and Robinson explain what stops that same capable state from becoming a cage.
"Liberty originates and is preserved not by a balance of power but by a balance between state and society."
Drawback: it's sprawling and repetitive, and the "corridor" metaphor gets stretched across a lot of history. More at Penguin Random House.
5. Power and Progress — Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson (2023)
Read this if you're wondering whether technological abundance actually reaches ordinary people.
Acemoglu and Johnson (both 2024 Nobel laureates) argue across a thousand years that technology does not automatically raise everyone's wages. Its gains are shared only when workers and citizens have the power to demand a share. It's the direct rebuke to techno-optimism: more output is not the same as more delivered. That is precisely the promise-versus-delivery gap Abundance circles.
"There is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity."
Drawback: the historical sweep is enormous and occasionally thin on any single episode. The MIT economics faculty pages and PublicAffairs have details.
6. Utopia for Realists — Rutger Bregman (2016)
Read this if you're the reader who wants the hopeful, agenda-driven flip side of the stagnation story.
Bregman's short, punchy case is that the biggest gains in human history — the weekend, universal suffrage, the end of slavery — all looked utopian right up until they happened. His policy triad is basic income, a shorter workweek, and open borders. It shares Abundance's core move: name what a rich society could deliver and hasn't, then refuse to accept "unrealistic" as an answer.
"Utopias offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions."
Drawback: it's more manifesto than evidence, and skeptics will find the policy prescriptions asserted more than proven. More at rutgerbregman.com and Little, Brown.
If you only read one?
Start with Seeing Like a State. It's the book Abundance is quietly arguing with, and once you have Scott's framework — plans fail when they erase local knowledge — you'll read every headline about a stalled housing project or a delayed transit line differently.
But match the book to your itch. Want the data on whether growth is over? Gordon. Want the root-cause theory of who prospers and why? Why Nations Fail, then The Narrow Corridor. Suspicious of the AI-will-fix-it story? Power and Progress. Want to leave hopeful? Bregman.
Rule of thumb: pick the book that answers the question Abundance left ringing in your head, not the one with the most citations.
How I chose these
One test, applied to every title: does it take up the gap between what a system promises and what it delivers? Abundance is about why rich countries can't build. Each pick shares that shape — the promise of the plan versus the reality on the ground, the institutions that decide who gets the payoff, the growth that may or may not still be coming.
I left out books that are adjacent but off-target — general economics primers, and inequality accounting like Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which is about distribution more than delivery. Every book here is real, correctly attributed, and dated. That sounds like a low bar. In this corner of the internet it isn't.
The one I wrote
Cheap Intelligence — Spencer Shulem (2026).
Fair warning, so you can weigh it accordingly: I wrote this one, and it does not belong in the weight class above. It's a short argument — around 15,000 words, readable in one sitting — not scholarship. It's a provocation, more polemical and far briefer than anything on the list.
The reason it's here at all is the shape. Where Abundance asks why rich societies can't build, Cheap Intelligence asks why rights that exist on paper aren't rights in practice — why declaring something a guarantee doesn't make it one when the cost of delivering it collapses. Same gap between promise and delivery, different subject.
Drawback — and read this plainly: if you want depth, evidence, and a theory you can lean on, read Acemoglu and Johnson's Power and Progress instead. It covers the technology-and-power question with a thousand years of research; mine covers a slice of it in an afternoon. For a serious reader on that specific subject, theirs is the better book, full stop. Mine is for the reader who wants the argument sharp and fast, then wants to go find the heavier books to fight it with.
If the promise-versus-delivery gap is the itch Abundance left you with, that's the thread we keep pulling here. Subscribe to Context Limit and I'll send the next idea worth fitting in your head.