The Abundance Agenda

An exciting and nascent movement

In many ways America leads the world. So why is building new things here often so hard and slow?

• There’s a “crisis in U.S. housing affordability.”¹ Why?

• American rail projects are twice as expensive per mile versus other developed countries. Why?

• It took twenty years to build a bus lane in San Francisco. Why?

The Abundance Agenda has no official definition, but broadly it aims to diagnose and fix problems like these.²

(Update: After publishing this piece, I created AbundanceMap.org which has a roster of 100+ abundance organizations and also an even tighter definition of abundance.)

The Abundance Agenda in Two Sentences

There should be more high-quality supply and lower prices for:

• Housing,

• Transportation,

• Energy transmission and generation (especially from clean sources),

• Healthcare, and

• Education & Childcare.

High-quality supply of all these things is blocked by too little government effectiveness, which stems from problems such as:

• Incentives that favor risk aversion over progress, for elected officials and government staff;

• Special interests that use government to entrench themselves;³

• Too many veto points that drag out timeframes or kill projects entirely;

• A buildup of processes that slow progress to a crawl.⁴

The Abundance Agenda could be unifying

It might be too optimistic to hope that anything can avoid today’s extreme partisanship, but the Abundance Agenda at least has a chance, because it has benefits for multiple factions:⁵

• Left: Improve human welfare and government effectiveness, and oppose rent-seeking special interests.

• Right: Improve national greatness via growing wealth, improving living conditions, and providing clean and safe public spaces.

• Libertarians: Eliminate bad regulations.

• Business community: Support growth, building, and innovation.

Also, Abundance gets at what I believe most “moderates” want; an efficient government that makes evidence-driven cost/benefit trade-offs to make the country a better place to live. Organizing under an Abundance banner might be successful, whereas organizing “moderates” has mostly failed.⁶

Making Abundance Happen

As a nascent movement, there is little infrastructure to drive the Abundance Agenda. Most work thus far has been fleshing out the agenda itself, though some organizations are beginning to build explicitly Abundance-focused political power.

Most of the political muscle behind abundance issues is in single-issue organizations such as those focused on housing or transportation.⁷ One way to imagine new possibilities is by looking at existing political infrastructure, for example:

• Run for Something of abundance (Candidate recruitment and training)

• ALEC of abundance (Model legislation)

• Indivisible of abundance (Local abundance-focused chapters)

• AIPAC of abundance (Bundling for aligned candidates)

• Govern for America of abundance (Placing skilled grads as staff for aligned electeds)

Abundance infrastructure will take some novel shapes. Two examples show early signs of cost-effective success:

• Greenlight America mobilizes clean energy supporters in communities with upcoming permitting decisions. Founded by Indivisible co-founder Matt Traldi, Greenlight America won four out of six campaigns in its pilot phase.

• Abundant SF has showed that a locally-focused donor circle can move the needle by spending $1-2 million to hire staff and support aligned electeds.

Fulfilling the Abundance Agenda requires power at all levels of government; local, state, and federal.

More Abundance infrastructure is bottlenecked on both funding and entrepreneurs, in a chicken-versus-egg way. There are only two or three major funders of abundance work right now.

Conclusion

Please reach out to me if you have thoughts about how to develop and advance the Abundance Agenda.

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Appendix: Where to learn more

The most detailed articulation of the Abundance Agenda just came out in August 2024 at http://bringcostsdown.org. Its author Prof. Gary Winslett calls it a “Cost of Living Agenda” because the term Abundance is so unknown. I made a list of essays aiming to define the Abundance Agenda.

Two leading abundance practitioners both write great newsletters:

• Modern Power, by Misha Chellam

• Eating Policy, by Jen Pahlka

Public intellectuals who often cover Abundance themes:

• Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring

• Noah Smith, Noahpinion

• Ezra Klein, New York Times

1. Quoting a JPMorgan report of Nov 2023.

2. I believe the term Abundance Agenda was coined by Derek Thompson in this article. More descriptions are at the bottom of this essay.

3. There are many examples; one that galls me is “TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free.”

4. Here’s how some smart people make this point:

• “We haven't figured out how to “meta-maintain” -- that is, how to avoid emergent sclerosis in the stuff we build.” - Patrick Collison

• “[O]ut of a desire… to make sure that bad things don’t happen, you wind up with a lot of measures put into place that stop anything from happening, including good things.” - Pete Buttigieg

• “[Government workers] start to hire a team, but the Office of Personnel Management tells them they’ve used the wrong authorities, or used them incorrectly, and they need to start over. They need to collect information from grant applicants, but the Paperwork Reduction Act review process takes an average of nine months. They need to hire a firm to build an online application, but it will take far longer to get to a contract than it will for the firm to build the form.” - Jen Pahlka

5. This list is heavily excerpted from Derek Thompson’s original abundance agenda article.

6. A plurality of Americans self-identify as “moderate,” but efforts to organize this group haven’t found much success. That’s because the term “moderate” has no shared definition, and also because moderation has often been presented as a brake pedal, rather than a path to a better future. Misha Chellam wrote about the substantial overlap between abundance and moderation, as well as some distinctions.

7. Expanding coordination of these groups has already been a fertile area for impact. Abundant SF has found success in coordinating these groups’ efforts in a single area; Welcoming Neighbors Network has been successful by seeding and coordinating YIMBY groups across geographies.