Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson (born 1986) spent over fifteen years at The Atlantic explaining economics and technology to general readers — his book Hit Makers (2017) dissected popularity itself — before moving his flagship writing to his own newsletter and podcast, Plain English.

Abundance and its stress tests

Abundance (2025), co-written with Ezra Klein, became a #1 New York Times bestseller and gave a name to a liberal politics of building more — clean energy, housing, science, and the productive use of AI. Thompson’s optimism about the technology is hands-on: he leans on AI research tools daily, while noting their limits (“One thing that AI can’t do is point out the flaws in my questions”).

What makes him distinctive among AI optimists is that he audits his own side. Through 2025 and 2026 his newsletter ran a serialized investigation of the AI buildout’s financials — hundreds of billions in annual capex, “a new Apollo program… every 10 months” — asking openly whether AI would follow railroads and broadband: rise first, crash second, and change the world anyway. He has argued both “Why AI Is Not a Bubble” and “Yes, AI Is a Bubble,” updating in public as revenue data shifted.

His bottom line is that bubble and breakthrough are different questions: an infrastructure mania can go bust without the underlying technology being any less important. As he told policymakers on X, there is no off-ramp where AI doesn’t matter.