Who Is The Abundance Agenda For?
Abundance technocrats make a persuasive case and could be placing themselves on a collision course with fellow liberals and American democracy itself.
Let’s not be dramatic. Federal Democrats are not banished to the wilderness, but the party does need to revamp their brand and offer a compelling alternative to the Republicans’ nationalism. Federal electoral margins are tight and with minimal effort and by not being the Republicans, they’ll likely find their way back to at least a House majority. The conventional wisdom within the left-of-center commentariat has reverted back to the premise that what Americans really want is progressive economic populism after its detour into identitarianism. But another faction thinks differently. While this faction is onboard with redistribution and egalitarian ends, they believe the path to getting there lies in one word: abundance.
The term refers to a broader agenda that could be described as neoliberals who believe neoliberalism needs greater purpose and more tenacity if they’re going to compete with populist brands, but also progressives and leftists who recognize the political and functional limits of their vision. Abundance has been a topic of conversation among policy folks for a little while now but has since been reintroduced to the masses by
, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and , an opinion columnist at The New York Times. Together, they’ve written a new book titled Abundance. As a side note, I will say I’ve been following these guys for years and while I do not always agree with them, they are outstanding talents in media. Thompson, in particular, who is comparatively lesser known, has a terrific podcast called Plain English which I’ve been listening to since the beginning.I read—well, listened to—Abundance, and while this post isn’t a review of the book, it does overlap with some of what the book discusses. If you’ve been following Thompson and Klein’s content, you won’t find radically new insights in the book, but you can still appreciate the authors’ effort in organizing these ideas, the research and the stories into a tight volume that makes their case in an eminently approachable and shareable way.
Like others, I could probably write a few thousand more words about abundance ideas and the assumptions undergirding it, but I’m going to aim to keep this relatively brief because there’s always an opportunity to revisit the topics. So here I’m going to focus on an angle that is the subject of this newsletter and one neglected within the broader discourse, and that is abundance’s implications for American democratic federalism.
The aim of the abundance agenda is to increase the supply of things America needs, like housing, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure through a combination of deregulation, industrial policy, public research, and progressive tax-and-spend policies. Unlike the democratic socialists they all but vanquished in the battle for Democratic thought leadership in the late 2010s, these neoliberals believe in and acknowledge measurable progress. They are techno-optimists and New Deal-scale thinkers. They are very online, educated, upwardly mobile, urban-dwelling, rationalist public policy wonks motivated by brute efficiency and quantitative outcomes. This crowd is not afraid to criticize blue states and cities for stifling growth through burdensome regulation—in fact, Klein and Thompson have made a point to emphasize that the book is directed at liberals in these states to ask what went wrong even when there were (nor are) Republicans standing in their way to governing. Its mission to reduce costs—not merely cover costs through reflexive redistribution—has earned it credibility across the political spectrum within elite circles.
Abundance is a fairly recent phenomenon, gaining steam locally a few years ago among ferociously pro-housing YIMBYs and nationally among well-connected policy experts. Housing is the abundance enthusiasts’ signature issue, which they see as a major piece to not just unlocking housing affordability for people but driving economic growth through densification and urbanization. More people in tighter spaces means closer connections, less time commuting, and more time brainstorming about and building the future.
The core premises of the abundance agenda’s take on housing are now laced within economic reporting the way nods to racial impact were at the height of “wokeness.” Its self-assured and sweeping approach to economic policy was unmistakably present during the Biden administration despite the execution famously falling flat—well, except for the stimulus that was cheerled by most neoliberals and progressives and that exacerbated the severity and duration of the inflation crisis, but I digress.
But to at least Thompson and Klein’s credit, they have interrogated the extent to which liberals fixate on how much money is thrown at any given program with less regard for the investments' results. For example, Thompson highlighted Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s recent announcement of an $11 billion investment to build 10,000 affordable housing units, or $1.1 million per unit, as the kind of waste liberals need to steer away from.
Thompson, Klein, and company do have a point—several, in fact.
Zoning laws can limit supply and drive up the cost of housing. The same applies to clean energy, where long permitting processes, legal challenges, public opposition, and environmental reviews delay nuclear, solar, and wind projects. Public investment has fueled breakthroughs like the internet and mRNA vaccines, yet bureaucracy slows medical advancements. Occupational licensing laws create barriers in a number of fields while restrictive immigration policies limit workforce growth in key industries.
One peculiar thing about abundance advocates and YIMBYs is the emphasis they place on how much opposition their agenda attracts, including from traditionally liberal constituencies. Environmental, indigenous, and labor groups, but also homeowners and home renters in high- and low-income neighborhoods alike, see the frantic activism to approve residential and industrial development as handing outsize power over intimately local decisions to politically connected Goliaths. This reflects a rift between liberal enthusiasts of government power, rooted in the New Deal tradition, and liberals skeptical of government, stemming from the Civil Rights era.
This could just as easily be understood as that between technocracy and democracy. “Abundancism” is compatible with the latter but is fundamentally a creature of the former, representing a kind of “far-center”: a benevolent anti-institutionalist, expert-driven post-liberalism from the past plated in chrome and promising to deliver the future via drone delivery. In its one way the far-center takes the fervor of the democratic socialists and pragmatism of the neoliberals and instead of targeting immigrants or oligarchs, it targets both government and provocatively the people themselves.
That’s part of the reason why among the broader public, Abundancism could widen a rift between the New Dealers and the New Lefties. From Thompson and Klein’s book, they seem fully aware that there are difficult conversations to be had. That is, if the axis of division among the Democrats winds up being less between the optics of moderation and progressivism and more between traditional liberals and their latest laser-eyed model—between anti-trusters and pro-business liberals, between environmentalists and accelerationists. The hope for the Abundance crowd is presumably that they can persuade the old guard and consolidate support to buttress a sustainable Democratic majority at the federal level while reforming themselves enough in the bluest states to avoid risking losses there. An equally or more plausible outcome is that the liberals of the Democratic Party splinter with a fraction converting to technocracy, another fraction withdrawing from politics, and another defecting to the GOP’s weirdly heterodox circus tent—all of which would be in keeping with the political realignment we’re amidst but that would give Abundance Democrats a chance to gain new converts among traditional conservatives and Independents friendly to the pragmatism of the program. But that’s a whole other essay.
Within the intellectual realm, Abundancism seems to have also earned clout among leftist wonks who are engaging in realist analyses of its ideas, recognizing that abundance’s capitalist posture can be directed toward socialist ends. But instead of merely redistributing the wealth created by capitalist enterprises toward expanding the welfare state as the Scandinavians do, it’s an American version that aims to drive down the cost of things by enabling private enterprise to make more things: more housing, more doctors, more energy infrastructure, more pharmaceuticals, and so on. From a democratic federalist perspective, this maybe taps into the more illiberal aspects of technocracy: no steadfast limiting principles to how much or how little one ought to rely on the market or the government necessarily—or even whether there should be a barrier between corporations and the government. If one captures the other, it doesn’t matter provided the the two together can do big things fast. The means don’t matter because the urgency to achieve specific ends is too great for us to get bogged down in debates over institutions, processes, norms, or the role of the federal and state government. The goal is good results and removing barriers to good results.
If Thompson, Klein, and I were elected to the Texas legislature, we would be in the same party and almost certainly in the same caucus. If we were all elected to Congress, I’m not so sure. That’s mainly because how democratic and legitimate abundance is perceived will depend on at what level of government its ends are pursued.
Federalism is the bedrock of the American system of government. This newsletter began to address the chasm between how integral federalism is to Americanism and the absence of it from political discourse.
On two issues in particular, housing and energy infrastructure, the abundance agenda could be on a collision course with American democracy because it seeks to aggressively tackle issues that are partially or fully within the domain of state and local government. Now, Thompson and Klein do not opine precisely as to what level and to what extent each level of government should be involved in advancing housing construction or energy infrastructure. In their book, their emphasis is on diagnosing the problem and prompting a conversation about the barriers to progress. But one does get the sense that their emphasis on outcomes over process invites an offensive against federalist structures.
Apart from the authors, it’s not difficult to find a hostility toward democratic localism among YIMBYs and policy wonks on social media. Other vocal critics, like Jerusalem Demsas, another brilliant abundance-aligned writer at The Atlantic, have lashed out against local democratic institutions and deference to community input for the national housing shortage. Others, like Steven Teles of the Niskanen Center, are among an insular group of academics who’ve hopped aboard the bandwagon of scapegoating federal barriers to vast exercises of power, like the Constitution’s equal suffrage for the states in the U.S. Senate, the filibuster, the Supreme Court, and voter restrictions. In a recent essay, he blames public-sector unions for entrenching what he views as “minoritarianism” at the local level—another example of how abundance supporters may clash with traditionally liberal constituencies.
On housing, Thompson, Klein, and others located on the coasts often conflate New York and California’s distinctly dysfunctional regulatory states with the rest of the country, where housing markets vary widely rendering the extent to which there is a housing shortage across the country and in specific localities always changing.
Pro-development advocates are correct that increasing supply puts downward pressure on rents and that zoning reform can expand housing stock. But numerous factors other than zoning drive housing costs, too, making antagonizing residents over zoning counterproductive, whether through local changes or indirectly via coercive federal grants. Construction costs, property taxes, interest rates, investor speculation, domestic migration, institutional investors buying up homes in high-demand cities, and economic viability all influence affordability. Social trends—longer life expectancies, seniors aging in place, remote work, rising single-person households, an overwhelming preference for low-density lifestyles, plus short-term rentals in hotspots —are larger forces influencing prices that zoning reform alone cannot resolve.
In California, a law effectively banned single-family-only zoning, yet supply increased only modestly due to high development costs and building having already been legal under existing law. In Austin, where I live, rents have declined at least 10 percent year-over-year, depending on where you lay down the marker. Yes, increased supply is a major factor—particularly high-demand single-family housing in the metro’s suburbs. Less discussed, however, is that annual population growth in Austin has slowed to its lowest rate in over 70 years. Developers who thought the pandemic hype in Austin would continue unabated turned out to be wrong. The story in Austin is astonishing. Three years ago, YIMBYs feared it’d become the next San Francisco. Today, Austin overbuilt supply and is struggling to fill vacancies, which it eventually will. Renters aren’t complaining and for now they’ll have lower rents and a break from an influx of people who have poured in faster than the city’s infrastructure could keep up.
For these multi-faceted, often overlooked, and highly localized reasons, abundance enthusiasts should resist federal intervention in housing. They’d be wise to focus their activism at the level of government where they’ve already seen success in expanding ADUs, minimizing parking requirements, and shrinking lot sizes. A decentralized approach would limit the risk of blowback from traditional liberals who understandably see the kind of accelerationism that abundance represents as leaning into the kind of cronyism with special interests and corporations that has attracted scrutiny in recent years.
Or consider the construction of clean energy. That’s an idea even conservatives can get behind if it isn’t crammed down their throats first. In 2022, Congress advanced a bill to streamline clean energy projects. In reality, this was a step toward federalizing and centralizing the United States’ antifragile, decentralized power grid, by initially granting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission unprecedented power to override state objections to interstate transmission lines. States would be forced to accept projects and help fund infrastructure they didn’t ask for and didn’t need. But that top-down approach ignores how clean energy has actually made progress in the U.S.—through a mix of state-level policies, private investment, and regional cooperation. That model allows for innovation while managing risk and preserving democratic accountability. Texas is a prime example. Despite being a deeply Republican state, it has become a leader in wind and solar energy. Why? Because its federalist autonomy let it pursue energy policy on its own terms, free from the ideological baggage that often bogs down national politics. Instead of being forced into a culture war over clean energy, Texas made practical decisions that aligned with local interests—proof that federalism can foster real-world progress where centralization might trigger backlash.
Thinking about all of this reminds me of a scene from the television series 1923, where a salesman visits the Dutton ranch to pitch modern appliances like a washing machine. While the woman shows interest, Jack Dutton pushes back, arguing that buying it would mean working to pay for it, essentially “working for” the salesman. He sees the supposed convenience as a trap that trades self-reliance for debt and dependence. The scene underscores the Duttons’ skepticism of modernity and their desire to preserve autonomy amid a rapidly changing world.
Now, while we can all appreciate the convenience of home appliances, this does speak to the extent to which prizing efficiency—from smartphones to denser living—will make us as happy in practice as it suggests on paper. For the last three years, we’ve seen a consumer disconnect between what a great economy looks like on paper and how it is perceived by people in the real world.
In the housing realm, it’s clear to me that the rose-tinted lenses of Klein’s characterization of urban living in the book, is not exactly shared by everyone. Klein makes a good case for how urbanism can make collaboration logistically easier, but this broader ideas among urbanists that more people in a given space means more people waltzing about town gleefully hanging their arms off light poles is as misleading as anyone who romanticizes the agrarian life.
I love the crowds of cosmopolitanism, the amenities, the fusionism in the culinary and arts realms as much as anyone, but there is something to be said for how the cosmopolitan cultural exports of New York and Los Angeles have begun to make other cities feel the same in their diversity, where a resistance to any local resistance erases identity markers that make places like New Orleans, Santa Fe, Savannah, Charleston, Asheville, or even Philadelphia special. Despite being among the most densely populated countries in the world, Japan notably faces a loneliness epidemic. It’s also the case that loneliness in big cities is a recurring theme across literature, film, music, and art, often portrayed as the quiet ache beneath the hum of urban life. Despite being surrounded by millions, characters in these works grapple with isolation, anonymity, and the emotional distance bred by fast-paced environments. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, films like Lost in Translation, and songs like “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” by LCD Soundsystem or throwbacks like “You Belong to the City” by Glenn Frey all became both a backdrop and accomplice to disconnection in cities. It’s a paradox at the heart of modern life—being alone, together. Unlike many of the issues on the abundance agenda, happiness may not be a policy choice.
So, abundance faces not just challenges among liberals but challenges among people who may well resist modestly cheaper housing if it enables the upheaval of their neighborhood — often ones with racial minority single-family homeowners who have benefitted tremendously from the gentrification of their urban neighborhoods.
Right now, it seems to me that abundance’s biggest contributions will be at the state and local levels of government on matters of housing and clean energy, and at the federal level in running a leaner machine that does more within its defined jurisdiction but with less. It’s largest federal contribution may well be in research and development and the implementation of artificial intelligence in sharply reducing the government’s spending on healthcare. But to the extent the abundance agenda becomes a shadow of uniformity hovering over an increasingly diversifying union of states, it should be met with resistance, if not critique.
Sustaining a pluralistic democracy may mean incumbent homeowners have to sacrifice modest changes to their surroundings to meet housing demands—and by the way, many of them do. But pluralism also means not just allowing dissent, but accepting it in legally binding terms. It means providing multiple avenues for policy recourse and not just one presidential and congressional election every four years.
Abundance is aimed at the major obstacles and reforming the processes that could meaningfully alleviate the cost of living in America, and some of its remedies can achieve consensus, provided they are pursued in good faith at the most approachable and direct forms of government. But the lens through which technocrats view progress—efficiency and affordability on paper—aren’t always reflective of how the people view progress. In an era defined by the ends justifying the means, if the U.S. wants to remain both democratic and pluralistic, its political and thought leaders need to recognize that the means still matter because the means will ultimately determine the integrity and durability of progress by any measure.
