Abundance for consumers could easily mean misery for workers

We need policies that aim to generate good jobs and don't just ensure that markets are well supplied

- DANI RODRIK is a professor of international political economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of 'Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy'.

The surest way for policy advocates to lose a progressive audience is to talk about the economy's supply side, the importance of incentives and the dangers of overregulation—ideas typically linked to conservative agendas. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance aims to change all that.

As the authors point out, the left has traditionally focused on demand-side remedies. A key tenet of the New Deal in the US and social democracy in Europe is Keynesian management of aggregate demand to ensure full employment.

Klein and Thompson rightly underscore that it is improvements in supply that are the source of broad-based prosperity in the US and other advanced economies. As productivity rises, low- and middle-income families reap the benefits of cheaper and more varied and plentiful goods and services. However, increasingly, the US economy's ability to build things has been hobbled, the authors argue, by environmental, safety, labor and other regulations, and by complex and time-consuming local permitting rules.

These rules and regulations may be well-meaning, but they can also be counterproductive. When governments and communities place obstacles in the way of investment and innovation, they undercut prosperity. Public transport lags behind, productivity in housing construction plummets and the deployment of renewables falters.