What *Isn't* Abundance?
The new idea is having a moment. And the people behind the idea are blowing their opportunity.
I guess I would call myself “Abundance-curious.”
There is a version of the Abundance agenda that I quite vocally agree with. My interpretation of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s central argument was something along these lines:
Government should have a strong hand in establishing, directing, and funding social priorities.
In the course of setting these priorities, government should endeavor to get out of its own way.
Klein and Thompson are pretty firmly in favor of government intervention and industrial policy. They aren’t just saying “growth is good and we should all cheer for developers!” They are instead saying something more along the lines of, if the government thinks something – housing, clean energy, etc – is a priority, then the government should proactively support that goal. Put money behind it. Don’t leave everything to the “will of the markets.” And, oh yeah, if the government wants to build high-speed rail or housing (etc etc) then the government should get out of its own damn way and make it can actually fulfill those promises.
I pretty enthusiastically agree with all of these points. We ought to rebuild administrative capacity and get back into having government make governance decisions. Government ought to be both proactive and responsive. And often the best way to make a better future possible is to devote public money towards promoting public goods.
I also quite like several of the people operating under that banner, and quite like some of their ideas as well. (Specifically: government should fund more things, we should have more administrative capacity, and the accretion of procedural checks-with-no-balance has had plenty of regrettable consequences.)
And hey, they’re having a moment. Good for them.
The term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier, though. Tesla’s new master plan boasts of “sustainable abundance.” The Silicon Valley variant of the abundance agenda is just warmed-over techno-optimism — less “let’s rebuild the administrative state and make government work again!” and more “the government should hand big sacks of money to tech startups and exempt them from taxes and regulations. Let our genius builders build!”
The Abundance 2025 conference is happening in DC this week, and the speakers range from pro-housing YIMBYs to a guy arguing for “deportation abundance.”
Yikes.
Steve Teles has taken a good-faith shot at sorting through the mess:
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity.
He goes on to define the central unifying idea:
At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Abundance says “we should solve problems by creating more,” and invites the competing political coalitions to draw their own conclusions on what constitutes a problem. (And, also, more of what, exactly?)
Syncretic terms like this run the risk of falling apart though. If DOGE is part of the Abundance movement, and the people DOGE is illegally firing is also part of the Abundance movement… If the Green New Deal is Abundance but oh hey also the Claremont Institute is Abundance too, then Abundance ceases to mean anything at all. The term is already washed.
(Q: Are Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan, and the other Network State neomonarchists part of the Abundance movement? A: yes, that’s “dark abundance.”)
I can empathize with the instinct to try to build the broadest possible coalition. I can see why making your new “movement” seem like the one big cross-partisan idea right now feels like a win. But it is a temporary, pyrrhic victory.
Strategy is a verb.1 The act of strategizing involves making choices that help you accomplish goals and wield power. The Abundance movement does not appear to be making any choices whatsoever. That’s the fast track to irrelevance.
Just saying, if *I* was part of the Abundance movement, I would be cautioning people that it sure would be nice to accomplish something, anything at all, before the idea gets entirely co-opted and loses all meaning. If the Abundance folks insist on advancing a syncretic proposal so broad that it pointedly has nothing to say about what problems ought to be solved, then they are quickly going to find that their clever-new-phrase means nothing at all.
The fate of every successful political movement is that they eventually fact co-optation and counteraction. But usually you want to rack up some actual victories before it happens.
What a waste.
h/t Marshall Ganz
A lot of the 'abundance' discourse seems to be really trying to do that watery centrist blogger thing of not actually having any sort of politics at all. The sort of ephemerality of 'we should have things....somehow' that you note is a feature that enables them to sell books to the 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' PMC set but doesn't really indicate who should be doing what.
There's a version of abundance that's basically 'all that New Deal infrastructure stuff seemed to work great, let's do that again' and, hell yeah. But that would entail doing the New Deal tax, regulatory, and financial stuff that had kleptocrats in the '30s planning literal coups, and again, if that's the plan is, hell yeah. But if that's the war you're prepared to fight, you need to come out and say it so people know to show up. But it's been a couple months and 'abundance' has already been completely assimilated by the usual suspects assuring you that if you just leave their giant pile of cash dressed as a picture-sharing website or a taxi service or whatever alone they'll invent a Santa Claus machine for the good of all mankind.
Which, surely we can just come out and say at this point, they won't.
When it gets reduced to that summary, most people except folks coming from really straightjacketed foundational ideological postures of some kind say, "Sure, yes: we need government to mobilize solutions, there is capacity to produce 'abundance' that is going vastly underutilized in normal market-driven systems, and that regulatory power is NOT how governments should mobilize and coordinate the expansion of capacity." It's very commonsensical.
The problem is first what you describe--it's like effective altruism, every vapid 'thought-leader' is diving into the pool headfirst, which effectively empties all the water out of it. But second it's that the originating text underimagines two key things: 1) why is there slack or capacity that is going underutilized and 2) historically, why has government 'gotten in the way' of its coordinating potential so much? The most important part of that underimagination is that they simply do not imagine that abundance as they describe it has enemies, that abundance is not in the interest of a lot of deeply emplaced institutions, many of which are not government as such, and also that there are people and institutions that are morally, intellectually, psychologically, invested in the production and maintenance of scarcity.
So the authors of Abundance walk into a familiar kill shoot here--they have a good idea! Everybody should like this good idea! It's obviously good! It's technically possible, it's turnkey-ready, let's go! And they don't imagine it as a political project that needs to mobilize supporters and needs to prepare for a fight against its enemies. And I just don't see the point of stirring ourselves up to embrace a nice-sounding idea that the primary proponents can't understand in those terms. Either they don't understand what's necessary or they don't care because they're just trying to sell a book and get a lot of invitations to speak at high rates of pay at the venues that have the money to pay for trendy conventional wisdom as the keynote.