The Cost of Building Progress

• Book Review of: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress–and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman,; and

• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

This time, however, the developer refused to take “no” for an answer. Since a voluntary exchange wasn’t going to work, the developer went to the state instead. Specifically, he turned to the state’s Casino Redevelopment Agency, which sought to use the power of eminent domain to kick Coking out of her house against her will. A new parking lot, the developer argued, would better serve the public interest than an old, single-family home. And if it happened to serve the developer’s private financial interest along the way, well, that was just a one of those happy accidents along the road to progress.

Luckily for Coking, her case attracted the attention of the public interest law firm, The Institute for Justice. With their help, Coking was able to secure a modest victory in court. She kept her house, not because the court rejected the principle of eminent domain altogether, but because in this particular case, the state’s plan put “no limits” on what the developer could do with the land, in the words of Superior Court Judge Richard Williams. The developer, one Donald J. Trump, would have to park his customers’ limousines somewhere else.

I was reminded of the Coking case while reading two recent books, both of which argue persuasively that America has made it too difficult to build new things, and that making building easier again could unleash a new wave of prosperity and growth. Those books, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, are noteworthy in many respects, but not least because of their rather surprising political orientation. Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman all identify as progressive liberals, and their books are aimed at convincing the center-left to adopt the kind of pro-growth position that is more often associated with the political right. To a liberalism that has devoted much of its energies to arguments about how to divide the economic pie more equitably, Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman seem to suggest that we focus instead on how to make that pie bigger for everyone.

That suggestion—which I should stress is only implicit in the two books—echoes a point that has long been made by conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians. And, indeed, there is much else in these books for such readers to appreciate. As the authors demonstrate with a vast range of specific examples, a big part of the reason why Americans haven’t built as much as we could and should have is that government has gotten in the way. Left to their own devices, free markets are generally amazing in their capacity to discover innovative, efficient, and scalable ways to produce the things that people want. But when government rules impede markets’ ability to build new housing, we wind up with a crisis of affordability and homelessness. When government puts up barriers to the development and marketing of new pharmaceuticals, we wind up waiting decades for cures that could have been delivered in years or months. In these and a host of other similar cases, unleashing abundance means cutting back on the size and scope of government and letting the creative destruction of free markets rip.

However, cutting back on government regulation of the market, according to the authors, is merely a necessary step toward abundance. It is not a sufficient one. The problem is not merely that government has hobbled markets; it is that government has also hobbled itself. A variety of factors, including the “rights revolution” of the second half of the twentieth century and an increasing emphasis on rigid proceduralism, have left government crippled in its ability to get things done. However well-intentioned these developments may have been, their effect was to establish a host of new “veto gates,” each capable of bringing projects to a grinding halt. And thus we find ourselves in a situation where extending subway lines in New York City takes decades and winds up costing twenty times as much as similar projects in other cities around the world, where the projected costs of a clean energy project in Maine almost doubled seven years after its approval without a single mile of line ever being built, and where California has been struggling to even start a functioning high speed rail line that was first approved in 1982.

If we want to start building again, something must change. But what, exactly? Economic growth is a tremendous good, but as the case of Vera Coking shows, we don’t necessarily want economic growth at any cost. So, what sort of framework do these books offer for understanding the nature of our problem, and for distinguishing good growth from bad?

For Dunkelman, much of the problem can be traced to the rise of “Jeffersonianism,” a philosophy of governance driven by a skepticism of large, centralized institutions, and which seeks to protect individuals from overbearing authority by pushing state authority down and out. It is this Jeffersonian philosophy which supported the creation of a vast new array of rights over the course of the 20th century, rights designed to protect individuals, communities, and the environment against the oppressive power of both big government and big corporations alike. Some such protections are necessary, Dunkelman concedes, but a central claim of the book is that Jeffersonianism has been carried too far, and what is needed now is a corrective swing back toward a more “Hamiltonian” philosophy of centralized, expert authority.

Dunkelman’s distinction captures two broad public attitudes toward political authority, but those public attitudes fall well short of the coherence we might expect from rigorous philosophical systems. And this limits their utility in understanding—let alone guiding—political decision making. For example, Dunkelman recounts how, in the 1970s, progressives and police unions during joined forces to limit the discretionary power of police chiefs. The goal of the movement was to protect officers from various abuses of power, which sounds Jeffersonian. But by limiting the discretionary power of police chiefs, the reforms wound up increasing the discretion of beat cops, thereby leaving ordinary citizens more vulnerable to the unchecked authority of the police.

A similar pattern can be found in many other Jeffersonian reforms. Laws enacted to protect the natural environment from exploitation by big corporations necessitate the creation of large new government bureaucracies to define, adjudicate, and enforce those rights. In each case, we can describe the change as decentralizing power in a sense. But often, attempts to abolish power simply redistribute it, and the framework of Jeffersonianism vs Hamiltonianism doesn’t tell us much about the net power wielded over individuals. Nor does it provide a useful guide for thinking about how power ought to be distributed in order to promote either economic growth or the other values we might wish to pursue.

Klein and Thompson offer less in the way of an overarching theoretical framework than does Dunkelman. But one theme that runs clearly throughout their book is the idea that abundance has been thwarted by an overemphasis on proceduralism. Proceduralism, in this context, means the conviction that governmental legitimacy is to be earned by compliance with an “endless catalog of rules and restraints.” Laws and regulations prove their merit by surviving notice-and-comment sessions, environmental reviews, court challenges, and so on. These procedural constraints are designed to serve two legitimate goals—legitimacy and accountability. But the actual result, according to legal scholar Nicholas Bagley, on whose work Klein and Thompson draw, has been a system that “frustrate[s] the very government action that progressives demand to address the urgent problems that now confront us.”

Instead of focusing on procedures, Klein and Thompson argue, we should focus instead on what actually matters to people—outcomes. No one cares how many reports were written in the process of approving the construction of a new bridge. What they care about is whether the bridge gets built, safely, cheaply, and quickly.

All this sounds like common sense, except for one big problem: governments have no way of directly selecting outcomes. Governments can create institutions; they can create laws; they can create taxes and subsidies. And they can hope and intend that these creations will ultimately generate certain outcomes. But whether those outcomes materialize or not is a matter that depends on a whole host of factors, the vast majority of which are outside of government’s direct control.

Consider an analogy. I might want my son to become a talented runner. But he won’t make much progress toward that goal by simply focusing on the outcome. (“To-do today—become a great runner!”) It simply isn’t actionable. A good coach will break the outcome down into concrete steps or procedures. Focus on your form, control your breath, and put in the miles. Trust the process. A good process doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. But it makes that outcome more likely by making clear the steps you need to take to get there. The same is true for government. Procedures are a way of focusing the government’s attention on the things that are under its control, in order to make the outcome which is not under its control more probable.

Procedures are not only helpful, but they’re also unavoidable. The only way to achieve an outcome is through some kind of process. The only question is whether we’re going to clearly and carefully define that process or leave it up to chance and the discretion of the parties involved. Ill thought-out procedures will not only make the desired outcome less likely; they also create opportunities for the process to be captured and manipulated by groups seeking to promote their own special interest at the expense of the common good.

All this leads to one of the most surprising omissions of the two books. For all their focus on the failures of government policy—either to build things itself, or to properly incentivize and support market actors in doing so—there is shockingly little discussion of the field of study which has developed the most systematic account of the nature and causes of government failure: public choice theory. With the exception of Klein’s brief discussion of Mancur Olson’s classic, The Rise and Decline of Nations, there is precious little discussion of rent-seeking, agency capture, or the underlying structural incentives that generate the many pathologies that Dunkelman, Klein, and Thompson observe. And without a clear diagnosis of the problem, the authors struggle to provide a cure that is clear, compelling, and politically realistic.

Many of the core findings of public choice theory were usefully summarized in Peter Schuck’s 2014 book, Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better. Schuck draws particular attention to the problems of information and incentives that bedevil so many government undertakings. In brief, government officials often lack the detailed, context-specific, and rapidly changing knowledge necessary to produce socially desirable outcomes and often are under-incentivized to pursue those outcomes anyway, even if they knew how to do so. Moreover, these defects are not temporary or easily corrected. They are, according to Schuck, rooted in an “inescapable, structural condition: officials’ meager tools and limited understanding of the opaque, complex social world that they aim to manipulate.”

Schuck’s concerns especially apply to Klein and Thompson’s call for a more expansive government role in fostering innovation. Klein and Thompson claim that the popular idea that government is “lousy at picking winners” is a myth that “bears little resemblance to history.” Drawing heavily on the work of Mariana Mazzucato, they argue that the American government has in fact played an expansive role in developing many of the technologies and conveniences that shape our modern world. From the iPhone to shale drilling to federally subsidized mortgages, there is hardly any aspect of our lives that is untouched by government “picking.”

But the story told by Mazzucato is not without its critics. A greater familiarity with the public choice literature, or with Alberto Mingardi and Deirdre McCloskey’s detailed criticism of Mazzucato’s book, might have led Klein and Thompson to at least take these criticisms seriously. Unfortunately, there is little in the way of acknowledgement of these objections, let alone critical engagement with them.

It is shocking, for instance, that the words “cronyism” or “rent-seeking” do not appear a single time in the pages of Abundance. If government is to be in the business of identifying and subsidizing potential “winners” in the economy, we will of course hope that it will do so based on the best available scientific and economic insight. But both theory and ample experience (do we still remember Solyndra?) show that this is far from certain. Government favors will often be awarded not to the most deserving but to the most politically well-connected. And the bigger the prize, the fiercer will be the competition to forge those connections. The outcome of such a competition will almost certainly not be favorable to the poor, the small, or the outsiders.

Innovation is a process of trial and error, and both markets and governments will produce plenty of failures. But there are massively important differences between the nature of these failures. Private businesses are gambling with their own money, giving them an important incentive to carefully balance risk and reward; when governments invest, they’re playing with other people’s money. Private businesses fail in a way that tends to be small and localized; government failures occur on a much larger scale. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the failures of private businesses are temporary—failing firms are driven out of the market by the ruthless process of market competition. Government failures, in contrast, face no such screening process. Even the most abject failure of a government program tends to benefit some small, concentrated interest group, and that interest group has much stronger incentives to fight for the preservation of that program than anyone else does to end it.

The point of these criticisms is not to discredit the abundance agenda. To the contrary, the overall vision offered by Dunkelman, Klein, and Thompson is grand and inspiring. It is an agenda that has the potential to unite progressive liberalism’s traditional concern for advancing the interests of the poor with classical liberalism’s emphasis on the creative power of free, competitive markets—a brilliant adaptation of what Brink Lindsey called the “liberaltarian” agenda. It is, moreover, an agenda that channels our energies in a positive-sum direction, one that yields compounding dividends over the long term.

For introducing and popularizing this agenda, the authors of these two books deserve our praise. Where they fall short is in the question of how—what are the concrete steps we can take from here to meaningfully and sustainably promote abundance? Answering this question will require a deeper engagement with the methods of comparative political economy—methods advanced by scholars like Peter Boettke, Mark Pennington, and others. Many difficult questions and challenges lie ahead. But if we are lucky, the abundance movement is just getting started.

[1] Marc J. Dunkelman. Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress–and How to Bring It Back. Feb. 2025.

[2] Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance. Mar. 2025.

[3] Nicholas Bagley, “The Procedural Fetish.” Niskanen Center, 7-Dec-21

[4] Peter Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Princeton: 2014).

[5] See Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (Anthem, 2013).

[6] See Alberto Mingardi and Deirdre McCloskey, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (AIER, 2020).

[7] See, for discussion, Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis (Three Rivers Press, 1994).

[8] See Brink Lindsey, “Liberaltarians”. Cato Institute, 04-Dec-06. In an interview with Lindsey, Steve Teles describes the connections between the abundance movement and liberaltarianism. See “Steve Teles on Abundance: Prehistory, Present, and Future,” 11-Jun-25.

[9] As such, the abundance movement has natural affinities with the “longtermist” branch of effective altruism. On longtermism, see William McAskill, What We Owe the Future (Basic Books, 2022). On the overriding long-term importance of economic growth, see Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (Stripe, 2018).

[10] The sympathetic critic Noah Smith makes a similar point. See his “Progressives Take their Best Shot at Abundance (But It Falls Short),” 17-Jun-25.

[11] See Peter Boettke, “The New Comparative Political Economy,” 12-Dec-05; and Mark Pennington, Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy (Edward Elgar, 2011).

*Matt Zwolinski is a political philosopher at the University of San Diego who teaches and writes about issues at the intersection of philosophy, politics, economics and law. He is director of USD’s Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy, co-director of USD’s Institute for Law and Philosophy, and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.