Author: Ezra Klein
_Ezra Klein_
Reading time: 22 minutes
Synopsis
The New Prosperity (2025) asks why modern societies are getting worse at doing important things. This is happening even though they have knowledge, money, and technology. These important things include building homes, improving infrastructure, and making the government work better. The book also asks what we can do to change this. How can we start doing things again, instead of just managing, protecting, and blocking them? It’s a call for a culture that allows progress to happen again.
What this means for you: A surprisingly hopeful invitation to take progress seriously again.
In The New Prosperity (2025), we look at a strange problem: Societies have a lot of knowledge, technology, and money. But they seem stuck and can’t move forward. There isn’t enough affordable housing. Big building projects are slow. Fighting climate change is not moving fast enough. New scientific discoveries don’t reach people’s lives quickly, or sometimes not at all. Instead of taking action, many places just manage things, play it safe, and delay decisions. We see that a lack of resources is often seen as normal. But often, it’s caused by decisions, rules, and daily habits.
Blink 1 – How prosperity for everyone is possible.
Imagine a near future that sounds smart and reasonable, not like a dream. Energy is clean and cheap. It’s no longer a political problem. Cities grow without becoming too crowded or broken. Homes are not just investments. They are once again a stable start for a good life. Diseases that kill people today will no longer be scary. This is because research moves faster from labs to real-world use.
Then you look at today and wonder why all this feels so far away. One housing crisis follows another. Pandemics make social divides worse. The climate crisis is still not solved, even with all the promises. In rich countries, homelessness, poverty, and overloaded systems are growing. We have warnings, knowledge, and even technology. What’s missing is the ability to actually make things happen.
What if scarcity is not destiny? What if it’s the result of many decisions made over years and decades? Homes could be built, but they are not. Clean energy could be available faster, but it isn’t. Research could focus more on big breakthroughs. Instead, it often gets lost in applications, checks, and safety measures. The lack of things then seems like a natural law. But it’s actually created by political choices.
So, how can we rethink prosperity? Certainly not as just more products or constant buying. A lot of goods can hide what we really lack: affordable housing, reliable energy, good infrastructure, medical progress, and an effective government.
Growth also gets a different meaning when we look at it this way. It’s not just a number. It’s about whether a society can speed up its own future. If there isn’t more land, raw materials, or workers, only one thing remains: better ideas, new methods, and new technologies. Productivity decides if a society moves forward or gets stuck as it is. But this belief in change has become weak. Instead of brave new plans, managing what already exists is more common.
It’s also important to imagine what a better, more sustainable future could look like. And what we need to do to make it real. Many things don’t exist yet: building materials that don’t harm the climate, new energy storage, medical breakthroughs, or smart systems that adapt well. These things are missing not by chance. It’s because of what we support, allow, and prioritize.
Finally, there is a simple but uncomfortable question: If prosperity means having enough of what people need for a better life – like housing, energy, transport, and health – why do we accept so much scarcity? And what needs to change so that possibilities finally become real?
Blink 2 – Housing and Building
Cities used to promise a better life. People who moved there found jobs, ideas, closeness, and opportunities. They lived closer together, but also better. Today, many cities feel like closed clubs: creative, lively, successful, but too expensive for most people. Even with high salaries, it’s often hard to live a normal life there. Housing has become a barrier to entry.
But cities are more important than ever. They bring talented people together, speed up new ideas, and make teamwork possible. Being close isn’t just an old idea; it helps people be more productive. Many ideas that shaped our world came about because people met – by chance, regularly, and persistently. Many companies now want people to come back to the office after the pandemic. This quietly admits that new ideas grow best when people meet face-to-face.
Yet, we have made these places out of reach for many people. In the USA, about 30% of adults spend more than a third of their money on rent or owning a home. They are called ‘housing cost-burdened’. In very active areas, this number is much higher. The effect is bad: If you can’t afford to live in productive cities, you lose not only a place to live but also opportunities. So, moving around – once a promise of a better life – now makes inequality worse.
Where housing is very scarce and expensive, homelessness goes up. California is a strong example of this. Only about one-eighth of the US population lives there, but 50% of the country’s homeless people are in California. This is not because people there are ‘different.’ It’s because too few homes have been built over many years.
Why does this happen? Because housing is both a basic need and an investment. The value of a home often goes up when housing for others remains scarce. What seems logical for individuals stops building for the community. There’s also a thick jungle of rules, processes, and ways to object. You can build, but slowly, carefully, and after many expert reports. If it’s as easy to stop a wind farm as an oil refinery, then the result is not protection, but no progress.
This is very clear with big infrastructure projects. Approvals take years, sometimes decades. Costs go up a lot, not because of materials, but because of all the steps and rules. For example, the biggest wind farm in US history needed more than 60 national, state, and local approvals. From the first application to its planned completion in 2026, 18 years passed.
An example from San Francisco shows it could be different: A housing project for people who used to be homeless was built faster and much cheaper than similar projects funded by the government. This happened because private money helped avoid many official rules. This is not a success. It shows how poorly the officials are doing.
Blink 3 – Science and Invention
Cement sounds like a building site, not the future. But it helps decide if we can control climate change. Making cement creates a lot of CO2, almost as much as entire industrial countries. Other small but important problems are: fuel for airplanes, ways to store renewable energy, and medicines for deadly diseases. We cannot solve these problems by just making more rules. Only new inventions can help.
Inventing means working for years on something nobody wants. This is because no one knows if it will ever work. Katalin Karikó did exactly that. In the 1990s, she worked on messenger RNA. Many people thought this idea was too unstable, too risky, or too theoretical. She applied for funding again and again. Almost all her applications were rejected. Karikó lost her job at the university. She only had her belief that this technology could work.
Decades later, a new virus stopped the world. Suddenly, mRNA was not just a side note in science. It was the basis for the fastest vaccine development ever. What normally takes years or decades happened in ten months. Millions of lives were saved. The breakthrough seemed like a miracle. But it was the result of hard, persistent work that the system did not want for a long time.
This story is not unique. It shows a bigger problem. Research systems prefer to fund projects that are likely to succeed. They reward projects that fit in, not risky ones. People looking for truly new things spend most of their time writing applications, progress reports, and explaining budgets. Up to 40% of their work time is spent on this. The skill to do well in this system is called „grantsmanship“. This skill doesn’t say much about whether someone has a good idea.
Science needs people to be allowed to be wrong. Systems that try to avoid failure also avoid progress in the end. They grow from strong interests, from wrong turns, and from curiosity. A hormone from lizard venom led to medicines for diabetes and obesity decades later.
Another weakening factor, which is quieter but very deep, is the loss of talented people. For decades, open immigration systems attracted smart people. Today, long waiting times, unsure visas, and official rules stop many people. Karikó could enter the country quite easily in the 1980s. Today, her path would be much harder.
A system that only celebrates breakthroughs after they happen, but hardly supports them while they are being made, relies on luck. If we want to solve today’s big problems, we must take invention seriously again. It is a vital engine for progress.
Blink 4 – Governing and Decision-Making
It was a normal day in Philadelphia in 2023 when a fuel truck crashed under a busy bridge. The truck caught fire. The heat was so great that the steel beams of the bridge were badly damaged. It quickly became clear: this bridge was no longer safe. About 160,000 cars use it every day. It’s one of the most important roads in the area. The only solution was to pull it down and build a new one.
Normally, a long time would start now. It would include expert reports, bids, environmental checks, and time for people to object. But this time, something different happened. The governor declared a state of emergency. Many rules that normally slow down public building projects were put on hold. As soon as the crash site was cleared, work began. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. A live camera showed the public how fast it was progressing. After only twelve days, the new bridge was finished and open to traffic again.
What was remarkable was not just the speed, but the effect. Relief. Amazement. And the quiet question: why can the government do something in an emergency that seems impossible in normal times?
For decades, government actions became more and more tied to processes. Rules were meant to stop misuse, ensure transparency, and make corruption harder. But this caution created a system that blocks itself. Projects are seen as right if they follow the rules, not if they solve problems. Being responsible often means not doing anything wrong. Even if nothing gets done in the end.
So, a government grows that checks a lot but achieves little. Liberal politics trusts government action but also ties it up with more and more rules. Conservative politics calls for a small government but also builds powerful security and surveillance systems. Asking for „more“ or „less“ government is not enough. What’s more important is if the government can act and focus on results.
This is very clear with large projects. They are overloaded with so many goals that they get stuck. Protecting the climate, saving species, social fairness, public involvement – every concern is valid. But if everything must be done at the same time, everything gets delayed. Processes are made longer, but rarely shortened again. Time is lost, even though it’s urgently needed. And it’s expensive too.
The emergency shows that things can be different. Not because responsibility suddenly doesn’t matter, but because good judgment becomes more important than perfectly following rules. People react well when their government acts clearly. Being seen as right then comes not from laws, but from results.
Blink 5 – Technology and Energy
Technology decides not only what is possible but also how a society feels. How people experience energy – as scarce or as a normal part of daily life – shapes political talks, business choices, and social problems. In a world with scarce, dirty energy, arguments are different than in a world where electricity is clean, reliable, and affordable.
For a long time, environmental policy was seen as against economic growth. But this idea is not true. In Germany, for example, CO2 emissions per person have fallen a lot since the late 1970s. At the same time, wealth and economic output have continued to grow. Fewer emissions did not mean a worse quality of life. They became possible because technology changed: more efficient industrial processes, cleaner energy sources, and stricter rules that forced new ideas instead of stopping them.
The link between technology and climate policy is most clear where it doesn’t work yet. Cement, for example, is plain, gray, and everywhere. But it’s a huge issue for climate policy. About eight percent of global CO2 emissions come just from making cement. If cement production were a country, it would be among the biggest polluters on Earth. This problem cannot be solved by building less. It can only be solved by building differently: with new materials, different chemical processes, and technologies that don’t exist on a large scale today.
Clean energy changes more than just emission numbers. Coal and oil release harmful substances that make millions of people sick or kill them every year. Air pollution is not a small issue. It’s one of the biggest health problems worldwide. This is especially true where energy is scarce and there are no other choices. Solar and wind power, however, don’t sting your eyes, don’t choke cities, and don’t make growth automatically dirty. With the right technology, protecting the environment no longer means giving things up.
At the same time, another development increases the need for action: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Data centers, apps that use a lot of data, and new digital services greatly increase the need for electricity. Without cheap, clean energy, AI quickly becomes an extra burden on power grids and prices. But with clean energy, AI could help speed up research, use energy more efficiently, and manage complex systems better. Whether AI becomes a driver for progress or a problem depends not on its code, but on the power outlet.
Energy has become the main bottleneck of our time. Solving this problem pushes the limits of what’s possible. Cheaper, cleaner electricity means not only fewer emissions but also more room to act: for industry, for transport, for housing, for medical care. It reduces fights over resources, because there will be less scarcity to argue about.
However, technology doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Which ideas are followed, which are made bigger, and which are forgotten, is always also the result of political decisions. A society that slows down clean energy also slows down its own prosperity, not just climate protection. A society that allows new ideas to happen creates more possibilities for its future.
Blink 6 – Strategies for the New Prosperity
Crises have a strange effect: They force societies to make decisions that would normally be put off forever. Suddenly, speed matters more than perfection. Results matter more than processes. Money is gathered, responsibilities are combined, and risks are accepted. What is often missed is this: whether something is seen as a crisis is not a simple fact. It’s a political choice.
We could treat heart disease as a national emergency. Then, research, approval, and implementation could be greatly sped up. We could also treat climate change like a real emergency, not just talk about it. This would mean simpler permits for clean energy, new standards for infrastructure, and clear deadlines. This rarely happens, not because we lack knowledge, but because of our priorities. Attention is limited, and so is political will.
The change in perspective is to see scarcity as a problem, not as a starting point. Not: Who gets how much of the little we have? But: Why is there so little – and does it have to stay that way? This change completely changes political discussions. It moves the focus from arguments about sharing what’s available to questions about production, new ideas, and getting things done.
Instead of offering a set list of solutions, this way of thinking organizes politics around questions. What should be plentiful but isn’t? Which processes slow things down more than they protect them? Where do institutions block progress, even though they were created with good intentions? And what decisions would be made today if we looked at them from a point of view of possibility, not fear?
A government that thinks this way measures its success not by how many rules it follows, but by whether it solves problems. It accepts that not every decision is without risk, and that doing nothing is often more expensive than making mistakes. In this way, politics becomes less about stopping things. It becomes more about what we can make happen – and what it costs not to do it.
Conclusion
Prosperity can happen where ideas are seen not as risks, but as necessary for progress. It also needs the will to act: the courage to build, invest, invent, and make decisions. Societies that want to create prosperity don’t just manage scarcity. They overcome it. The main thing is: none of this is out of reach. It’s up to us whether we leave opportunities unused or create the space for them to become real.
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/de/books/der-neue-wohlstand-de