Having said that the Democratic Party needs a vigorous agenda which both is and reads as a break from the past, I have had an eye on the “Abundance” movement around the proposals of the Abundance book by the journalists / commentators Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson. It is the kind of thing I think the Dems need to do.
Even considering that K&T have done an extensive promotional tour, it has generated a surprisingly vigorous constellation of commentary, which I take as a sign of the appetite for ideas which I think the Dems need to offer.
Abundance calls for a government agenda of more active intervention to make more resources available. It seems unmistakable to me that this attempts to articulate a next generation of the post-neoliberal Dem policy agenda which Biden was moving toward but did not name.
For Klein, the central policy exemplar is housing and urban infrastructure. He is a YIMBY who wants to reduce the cost of housing by eliminating roadblocks which prevent us from building more of it, and wants to support that with investments in transit and other resources. Having lived through the damage left-NIMBYism did to the San Francisco Bay area, that’s music to my ears. But I have fundamental ambivalence about Klein. I first encountered him in the early blogosphere days, and while I admire his serious interest in policy wonkery, I have a distaste for his transparent careerism seeking a place as a political insider.
Thompson I understand less well. He seems to be the driver of the Abundance note of starry-eyed “tech” industry optimism, which arouses my skepticism, and him doing an interview with repugnant racist Richard Hananina about Abundance demonstrates mortifying bad judgment.
I have not read the book, but I have wound up listening to a lot of interviews with K&T about it while doing chores, and looking at a lot of commentaries which I have been threading on Bluesky.
I am not just wary of K&T; Abundance has other supporters I like even less. And I doubt that most policy domains suffer the same problems I know about from housing & urban infrastructure.
Despite those reservations — despite standing well to the left of K&T — I feel a contrarian impulse to stand up for Abundance because most of the critiques I have seen from lefties have been gawdawful. I see a lot of people calling it just a fresh coat of paint on Reagan-ish neoliberal deregulation, which is risibly false if one looks at anthing K&T actually say. As even many of the critiques I link to below admit, there are a lot of things to like about the Abundance agenda.
I find a lot of criticisms of K&T’s take on specific policy domains more persausive. Jeff Hauser summarizes those by snarking …
I finally figured it out: Abundance is to economic policy what “Invade Iraq in order to bring democracy to the Middle East” was to foreign policy.
It’s baseless optimism as strategy, and then mocking the cautious people pointing out the downsides of, eg, natural gas plants to fuel AI data centers.
… which I think is too strong, but not wrong. Even just at the level of a podcast discussion, even given Klein’s knack for making policy proposals he likes sound more sophisticated than they are, it seems obvious that Abundance over-generalizes from SF Bay Area administrative NIMBYism. So while K&T do not have the Reagan-ish neolib presumption that all de-regulation is good which critics misread them as offering, they do seem to imagine that most domains are burdened with policy cruft that clear-eyed people could easily tidy up. I am very skeptical of so much low-hanging fruit.
Worse, the Abundance movement is too cozy with support from bad actors on the right. A few days before I assembled this post, there was an Abundance conference including several speakers Paul Crider calls — rightly — “fascist ghouls”.
On Bluesky, Starshine sums up the state of the Discourse:
i think part of the reason it gets such strong reactions is no ones talking about the same things. theresand then anti abundance is
- yimbyism + green energy
- trojan horse for thiel/yarvin/collison/manhattan institute/heritage policies
- leftist affect nimbyism
- people sketched out by 2
Maybe I’m posting this right at the point when this has become a dead letter, but if one is catching up:
Niskanen
Varieties of Abundance
How can Abundance be one thing, but also many? 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. This vision is not inherently hostile to redistribution—my version certainly is not, and in fact, I think a strong system of social insurance is essential to an abundant future. But what makes it Abundance is an obsession with reducing zero-sum conflicts by creating more—more energy, more housing, more high-quality schools, more scientific discovery, more world-leading firms, and more, cheaper healthcare. Abundance seeks to create a surplus rather than divvy up a shrinking pie.
How do you get that bigger pie? All varieties of Abundance believe the path goes through two chief obstacles. The first is the problem of asymmetric power between concentrated incumbent interests and diffuse challengers. Yesterday’s winners, whether they are homeowners seeking to block new housing or doctors using licensing to prevent competition, have a strong incentive to organize to obstruct new entrants by gaming the rules to their advantage. When enough of these interests have captured the laws that govern the economy, the consequence is the seeming paradox of slowing growth and increasing inequality.
Abundance advocates seek to intervene in this toxic cycle of economic decline by changing the rules to favor market entrants over incumbents, to empower builders, whether public or private, over blockers. They also try to create new forms of participation that mobilize those who would benefit from a societal surplus. In doing so, they take inspiration from the YIMBY movement, which cracked what seemed like an impossible collective action problem by organizing those in favor of new housing over the NIMBY interests that social scientists were certain would always dominate politics.
The second challenge Abundance advocates agree on is helping the government regain its ability to manage complex tasks competently and decisively. This problem of diminished “state capacity” is both a cause and an effect of the power asymmetries identified above. ⋯
The article offers a taxonomy of different strains in the movement:
- Red plenty — “Abundance for those who dream of state-led economic development aimed at publicly determined goals”
- Cascadian Abundance — “combines deep environmental commitments, especially around the need for rapid decarbonization, a commitment to urbanism, and a faith in technological solutions to environmental problems”
- Liberal Abundance — “wants government to do big, ambitious things (just as the varieties to its left do) but thinks that this is a project of restoration through idealistic reform, rather than revolution”
- Moderate-Abundance synthesis — “victories require defeating ‘the groups’ in the Democratic Party, both to deliver on Abundance policy goals and to avoid thermostatic electoral backlash”
- Abundance dynamism — “syncretic with libertarianism [⋯] interested in spurring mostly decentralized, privately managed, and financed innovation”
- Dark Abundance — “seeks to wield national power to disrupt deep-seated institutions in American life to spur economic growth and revive American hegemony”
The Atlantic
A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems
Thompson’s original 2022 article which led to the book.
Zoom out yet more, and the truly big picture comes into focus. Manufactured scarcity isn’t just the story of COVID tests, or the pandemic, or the economy: It’s the story of America today. The revolution in communications technology has made it easier than ever for ordinary people to loudly identify the problems that they see in the world. But this age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress.
[⋯]
In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.
New York Times Editorial
The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting
Ezra Klein’s 2021 argument for “supply-side progressivism” linked by Thompson above.
I don’t think these various policies have cohered into a policy faction, a way progressives think of themselves, at least not yet. But I’d like to see that happen. Political movements consider solutions where they know to look for problems. Progressives have long known to look for problems on the demand side of the economy — to ask whether there are goods and services people need that they cannot afford. That will make today fairer, but to ensure tomorrow is radically better, we need to look for the choke points in the future we imagine, the places where the economy can’t or won’t supply the things we need. And then we need to fix them.
The Nation
The Abundance Debate Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
Progressive skepticism of the contemporary abundance framework often stems from how closely it appears to echo the Atari Democrats and neoliberals of the 1980s. But the abundance coalition fundamentally diverges from the Atari Democrats on key ideological grounds. While today’s abundance advocates similarly highlight efficient governance, market-oriented reforms, and streamlined regulatory frameworks, their agenda isn’t merely a neoliberal revival: its proponents clearly frame their project as restoring robust state capacity, expansive public infrastructure investment, and effective governance—rather than deregulation or corporate dominance alone.
While the Atari Democrats distanced themselves from New Deal–era labor protections and Keynesian social spending, courting suburban professionals and embracing deregulation, many of today’s abundance proponents draw directly from a New Deal–inspired vision of active government, especially through ambitious public investments in infrastructure and industrial policy.
Yet this encouraging side of the abundance vision remains vulnerable to legitimate skepticism, given some of the prominent people floating around the movement. ⋯
Niskanen | Hypertext
What left-wing critics don’t get about abundance
While most of the reviews have been positive, there is a particular and peculiar line of left-wing critique. As a figure in the academic discussion, I haven’t been surprised by this reaction, but I have been somewhat surprised by how uncurious these reviews are. They seem to have studied one or another of the new books, but done almost no reading beyond the four corners of the work they are reviewing. That’s not a criticism of the books but of the readers; the books incorporate a lot of ideas by reference and do not take the form of party platforms. Instead, they are efforts to either address specific policy areas (Stuck, On the Housing Crisis) or to provide a broader ideological orientation (Abundance, One Billion Americans). A critic should make an effort to familiarize themselves with the broader milieu in which the book sits, to click through some of the links. Most of these reviews don’t. As a result, it’s worth noting what the reviews miss.
The UnPopulist
Abundance Offers a Sounder Way Forward for the Left than Degrowth or Redistributive Progressivism
Abundance, perhaps unsurprisingly, has attracted a slew of left-of-center critiques. Some have been measured; others have analytically relied on targeting the authors’ class position (“the abundance vision … [an] upper-middle class experience that might well reflect the authors’ lives … reads like a rich suburb gone green.”) or on subsuming Abundance within Silicon Valley reactionary futurism (“Abundance is a de facto book-length companion piece to [Marc] Andreessen’s pandemic-era essay ‘It’s Time to Build.’”), despite Klein explicitly disavowing key planks of that perspective in print. One consistently leveled charge is that the book is neoliberal: it celebrates the market and denigrates government — or, as a swarm of angry people will yell at you if you mention Abundance on Bluesky, “Abundance is just rebranded Reaganism.” Despite Klein and Thompson’s repeated defenses of government, there is a certain crowd that is convinced that Abundance is just a stalking horse for a familiar Republican program of deregulation and tax cuts.
[⋯]
A suspicion of the authors on a personal level appears to be at the core of much of the criticism. But then, if you announce that you are coming to slaughter the sacred cows, you should not be surprised when the cows object. But this is the big political bet of Abundance: that Klein and Thompson can go around the progressive intellectual gatekeepers and speak directly to the progressive base, to ordinary people. This is not a matter of speculation; they discuss the place of Abundance in a hoped-for political realignment in some detail in the concluding chapter.
[⋯]
But in all this I have not answered a simple question: Is Abundance right? In the broad strokes: absolutely.
[⋯]
What I disagree with is Klein and Thompson’s confrontational strategy. But progressives are right: Corporate power is also a problem! Wealth inequality is also a problem!
[⋯]
This is the power of a master narrative to shape intellectual terrain. If your narrative is about disciplining capital, then anything that looks like capital discipline seems good — even if it strangles the green energy we desperately need. On the other hand, the abundance narrative is not immune to such seductions. If your narrative is “regulations are hampering growth,” then anything that looks like a regulation might be a candidate for attack — even if there’s no evidence that it’s the source of our problems. It does not take much imagination to understand how this can serve right-wing ends.
Jacobin
Abundance for the 99 Percent
Perhaps the most common charge that Abundance is neoliberal rests upon its alleged promotion of “deregulation.” But this is either a willful misrepresentation or, more generously, a result of not reading the book.
[⋯]
If Klein and Thompson are only offering a new version of “warmed over neoliberalism,” they go to great lengths in the book’s conclusion to argue the opposite. They situate their “abundance” framework as a contender to replace the crumbling “neoliberal world order,” deploying the analysis of historian Gary Gerstle. They also point to the state-led expansion of solar technology in the 1970s — an effort crushed by Reagan’s form of slash and burn neoliberal austerity — as a lost opportunity for a more abundant future.
Another common critique from the Left is that Klein and Thompson’s approach is explicitly opposed to the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor and working class. But more accurately, they are simply pointing out that redistribution alone is not enough unless the public sector can actually reliably deliver and build real public goods cheaply and efficiently. As Klein recently put it in an essay for the New York Times, “If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist; if they are taxing people to build electric vehicle chargers, those chargers should get built; if they are promising lower drug prices in Medicare, those lower prices should show up quickly.”
[⋯]
We applaud Klein and Thompson’s advocacy of a “liberalism that builds” through effective capacity. But they underplay the extent to which capitalism and class power will prevent their agenda from yielding the political fruit they envision. ⋯
Washington Monthly
The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong
In late March [2025], the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein went on the Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast to talk about his new book, Abundance, which Klein had co-authored with journalist Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic. The book’s thesis is that over the years Democrats, often bowing to left-wing interest groups, have encouraged various forms of red tape — from federal environmental statutes to local zoning rules to minority contractor set-asides — that have gummed up the workings of government to the point that it is no longer possible to build things the country desperately needs, like new housing and clean energy infrastructure, in a timely and cost-effective manner. To illustrate his point, he regaled Stewart with a tragicomic tale of the government failure to expand rural broadband access.
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In a subsequent New York Times column, Klein admitted that he had gotten some of the facts wrong—that “portions of [BEAD’s] 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans.” But rather than concede the broader argument, he doubled down, saying that after further talks with “various people who’d been part of the broadband program,” he discovered that “much of the process was worse than I’d known.” One official, he wrote, told him that “he’d wasted 40 to 50 percent of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project,” though Klein didn’t name the official or the specific requirements the official was referencing. Similarly, Klein’s coauthor, Derek Thompson, acknowledged in an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan that Klein initially “got some things wrong” about BEAD, but insisted that “rules we’ve put in our own way” (he didn’t specify which) had derailed the program.
So, what’s the real story here? Was it liberal proceduralism or corporate power that incapacitated Biden’s rural broadband effort?
[⋯]
To resolve this question, we spoke with nearly two dozen government officials and outside experts who were involved in the design and implementation of the BEAD program, pored over hundreds of pages of program documentation, and researched rural broadband policies of previous administrations going back to the 1990s. What we found is that while abundance liberals are certainly right that some infrastructure projects have been slowed or stalled by regulations and public engagement processes put in place by Democrats to placate progressive interest groups, that is simply not the case with Biden’s rural broadband initiative. Rather, the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed. And this misjudgment by abundance liberals is not a one-off mistake, but part of a pattern.
Techdirt
ARPA Is Delivering The ‘Abundance’ Ezra Klein Claims To Be Looking For
The primary culprit of bad regulation isn’t progressive reform. It’s corruption and regulatory capture. It’s careerist revolving door regulators who stopped caring about the public interest a decade earlier, assuming they ever did. It’s a Congress so heavily lobbied by corporate interests it’s literally too corrupt to function or pass even the most basic reforms (see: our lack of internet privacy laws).
As somebody who has studied and written about telecom policy for several decades, corruption is at the very heart of that sector’s bureaucratic dysfunction. If you’re talking about abundance and you think corruption and consolidated corporate power is some kind of afterthought in the conversation of why the government consistently fails to deliver, I’m going to have a hard time taking you seriously.
Boston Review
The Real Path to Abundance
The strongest argument I have seen that K&T’s book is too enthusiastic about deregulation.
The authors back these claims with anecdotes of regulations and bureaucrats supposedly stifling development. This is not rigorous argument, however, but a “story,” as the authors themselves put it on the last page of the book. The problem is that stories can be deeply misleading. Where this one doesn’t give a mistaken impression through sins of omission, it simply gets things wrong. It often blames government for bad outcomes where it should be blaming the whole structure of the market—including other government policies (among them too little regulation of the private sector) and, especially, the nature of private investment (even when spurred by government subsidy).
Jacobin
To Get Abundance, We Need to Discipline Capital
I think this article rests too much on an assumption that Abundance “really” means neolib-ish assumption that private industry can be “unleashed” from regulation, but it offers an instructive warning about the financial logics of private development.
Proponents of abundance sometimes couch their fundamentally deregulatory project as an effort to shore up “state capacity.” These claims shouldn’t be taken at face value, as some on the Left seem all too willing to take them. Rather than interrogating the assumptions underlying abundance, some on the Left are allowing themselves to be led down a primrose path. Despite the occasional nod to, say, bringing outsourced project consulting back in-house, what abundance advocates mean when they invoke “state capacity” is not a powerful state steering, directing, and commanding private capital, or investing and provisioning on its own. Rather, abundance advocates offer a rather more constrained vision: what economist Daniela Gabor has called a “derisking” state.
Liberal Currents
Is Abundance based?
As a testament to this agenda’s appeal, some conservatives argue they are the natural home for abundance. Conservatism is supposedly best suited for promoting abundance and prosperity through its focus on free markets and disinterest in the supposed things that hold back the American economy: regulations, “wokeness”, and an obsession with trying to solve problems by throwing money at them.
While this may have been true in your father’s conservatism, the unfortunate reality is that conservatism today is difficult to reconcile with the Abundance Agenda. ⋯
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This is not to say that people on the right cannot be allies in the Abundance Agenda. But abundance must be led by those who prioritize material concerns, common dignity for all people, and a “live and let live” approach to social values.
The sort of folk you might know as liberals.
Liberal Currents
Abundance Does Not Offer A Viable Electoral Strategy
Klein and Thompson establish early on that abundance will be the way for Democrats to come back from the political wilderness. They argue that this will happen if, on the state level, Democrats model what successful governance looks like. “A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movement is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of successful governance.” Make abundance work in California and Massachusetts, and voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia will want that too. This logic on its own is not wrong. When Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, much of his argument was showing that he could bring his success in New York to the entire nation. But that depends on voters linking those specific policies to the Democratic government in charge.
Liberal Currents writer & editor Samantha Hancox-Li disagrees with that critique:
part of being a home for mere liberalism means accepting a diversity of viewpoints--which is to say, sometimes we publish pieces i do not agree with. so, in the spirit of collegial disagreement, some remarks on why i think glick is wrong.
to start: glick argues that yimby reforms will lower housing prices, leading to an electoral loss. i think this is wrong both economically and politically.
on a political level, we don’t need to speculate--we can just look to jurisdictions that have made yimby-style reforms. the Minneapolis 2040 plan, for example, radically upzoned minneepolis--but did not lead to an electoral wipeout for its authors. scott weiner is a popular senator!
likewise, glick argues that harris campaigned on abundance and lost. this is true … but it’s also true that harris ran a good, persuasive campaign and lost. she did better in the areas she campaigned in! she lost because of association with biden and inflation--as were incumbents across the west.
more deeply, as demsas and broockman discuss here, the “homevoter hypothesis” doesn't appear to be true. nimbys are ideological, not cynical. they'’e not in it for housing prices--they want to save the neighborhood / the environment / etc. and the thing is, the economics of yimby reform are more complicated that the simplistic homevoter hypothesis allows. most homeowners are also landowners. while yimby may decrease the price of housing, it should increase the price of land. where that balance falls for any given tract is … complex.
and this is setting aside the boon to home equity (and one’s economic fortunes generally) that should follow from overall increased growth
fundamentally, as i argued here, blue states and cities should be the showroom floors of the democratic party. and they are, demonstrably, not well governed. we need to unfuck our own house if we want america to trust us!
Abundance is a book for an alternate timeline
I don’t have a grand solution to that problem. But my main critique of the book — or at least the publicity tour surrounding the book — is that Abundance is being treated as a big, ambitious solution to the woeful current state of the Democratic Party. And it really is only partway there. We’re also going to have to do something about the tech billionaires and the private equity ghouls who have amassed such power and accept no social responsibility. We’re going to have to face up to the malicious propaganda machine that is the conservative media ecosystem (the topic of Ezra’s previous book, incidentally). We’re going to have to fight the antiscience ideologues head-on, rather than hoping a grand social vision will win them over to our side.
No single book ever has all the answers. And Klein and Thompson at their best are really quite good. In the alternate timeline where we weren’t dealing with the collapse of the goddamn Republic, I think this would be a vital-but-incomplete book, setting the table for some quite-necessary conversations. But we do not live in that timeline.
Critical Point with Kevin Riggle
Climate, Energy, & the Future — How Infrastructure Works — Deb Chachra — The Future is Literally Bright
Video of an interview. (There’s also a transcript.) I greatly admire Chachra’s book How Infrastructure Works, which Riggle praises thus:
She does the ‘abundance’ pitch from a place of deep knowledge and understanding