The real threat to liberal democracy isn’t just autocrats – but a lack of effective action by so-called progressives. After decades of zooming on consumption and too many fights focused solely on distribution, the US needs to get back to building and inventing with innovative ideas. “This is the story of chosen scarcities, of  America, in the twenty-first century, and for that matter, of the UK and much of Europe” Ezra Klein, journalist with the New York Times, and Derek Thompson, who works for The Atlantic, claims.

The chief ingredient of America’s economic engine – government support for innovation – is astropying.

It isn’t just innovation but how it gets deployed that matters for productivity and growth. Here US has ceded ground to China. The cost of solar panels had fallen 90 per cent because of innovation through iteration that happens on factory floors in Asia, not the US. The provisions were never primarily about jobs but about rebuilding this muscle of innovation through sleeves-up doing and learning on factory floors.

Darpa, the US much heralded  defence research and development agency, is doing plenty of that by partnering with the so-called primes  the handful of big defence contractors that control our defence industry – without being swallowed whole by them.

According to authors “America have the means to build an equitable world without hunger, fuelled by clean energy. Instead, we have a politics driven by scarcity, lives defined by unaffordability and public institutions that no longer deliver on big ideas. It’s time for change.

America’s inability to make trade-offs and a “Procedure Fetish”, for all the attestations that housing is a human right, our richest and most progressive cities have made it impossible to build homes thanks to an explosion of zoning laws, with safety regulations, parking requirements, amid growing piles of paperwork, compliance checks, and the added employees these things entail. A system too complex that the skill most rewarded simply the ability to navigate it – not the ability to build anything new.

From healthcare to housing, infrastructure to innovation, they lay out a path to a future defined not by fear, but by abundance.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Profile £16:99/ Avid Reader Press $30, 304 pages.