BUILDING ABUNDANCE
About this audiobook
"My brother and I used to sleep on the roof in summer because it was cooler there. My father would bring up a blanket and tell us the names of the stars. Now there is no roof. There is no father."
So begins Building Abundance — with five children, on five continents, telling the truth about the world adults built for them. A child in Gaza who knows what a dead person smells like. A child in Haiti whose father was taken twice. A nine-year-old in Chicago who has already identified the central question: somebody decided that is how it is. I want to know who decided.
Building Abundance is the answer to that question — and a blueprint for deciding differently.
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About the author
A nine-year-old in Chicago says: "Somebody decided that is how it is. I want to know who decided."
She is asking. So is this book.
Building Abundance is a domain-by-domain blueprint for what the United States — and any society organized by extraction — could build instead. Written by a psychiatrist who has spent thirty-four years serving people with serious mental illness, it examines twenty-nine systems — healthcare, housing, education, mental health, food, criminal justice, disability, aging, immigration, the courts, AI, and more — through a single clinical lens: what does each system produce for the child with no buffer between them and what the system actually does?
The answer, documented across every domain with primary research and policy evidence, is consistent. The system is not failing. It is working as designed. It extracts from the most vulnerable, calls the extraction efficiency, and reproduces the conditions that require further extraction. The author names this dynamic the Extracting Self-Devouring Machine — and shows, chapter by chapter, that the alternatives exist, have been implemented in peer democracies, and produce measurably better outcomes.
This is not a book about what is wrong. Every chapter documents what is wrong in the first section and then builds the abundance alternative: the specific policy, the evidence base, the cost, and the child's experience if the design is changed.
