Yes in My Back Yard (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abundance: How We Build A Better World. By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. ISBN 9781805226055

This book has caused quite a stir. It has even made Chancellor Reeves’ summer reading list, and been cited – in passing – by Robert Peston. It is part of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) trend. Its central theme is that government regulation is choking the capacity for effective action to generate wealth, and that instead the liberal left has been concentrating on the parcelling out of scarcity, rather than trying to improve the overall material wealth of society.

The authors mention the expensive failure to build a high-speed railway in California, citing environmental laws and litigation as the reason: alongside the excessive bureaucracy to plan the route. They also note California has higher rates of homelessness than comparable cities in Texas, and attribute the blame to zoning and to authorities loading environmental, building and labour standards into permissions, making building uneconomic for developers.

In their narrative, they do discuss the nature of landholding and the fact that residents’ houses are also financial assets, only to skip blithely over them to discuss bureaucratic complexity again. In so doing, and returning to their theme that it was the failure of efforts to restrict the power of public authorities that is to blame, they ignore the role of private property.

The state is restricted in order to secure the power of private property. The litigation is there to protect property rights. It’s there to protect economic interests (and some firms do benefit from regulation). The complex funding arrangements and financial regulations are there precisely to keep the interests of wealth superior to state power. This is a political choice, and one that those who fund the political parties will continue to demand.

At points, the authors seem to indicate that it would be better to allow constructors to build slum housing than to continue allowing homelessness. They also suggest reducing quality controls and demands on construction: in essence, they are allowing that the working class cannot afford decent housing. Although their ‘lens’, as they say, is increasing supply, they ignore the lack of effective demand for the majority.

They find time in their conclusion to reference Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto talking about unfettering productive forces to produce abundance. But they ignore what those fetters of capitalist society are: the law of no profit – no production, and the law of no profit – no employment. The growth of income streams alongside the capacity to produce so much that profit margins would be reduced to zero.

Absent an understanding of the role of private property and the class struggle from their narrative, they are reduced to a simple call for de-regulation coupled with bold state action. They do not see that the litigiousness they decry is meant to exclude a thorough-going democratic control that includes all voices. The abundance they seek can only come from the common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth.

Pik Smeet