Abundance agenda

The abundance agenda is a policy and political framework arguing that the United States’ core economic problem is artificial scarcity — in housing, energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and childcare — created by well-intentioned but growth-blocking regulation, and that the remedy is a liberalism that builds: supply expansion, permitting reform, and technological deployment rather than redistribution of shortage.

The canonical statement is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (March 2025), a New York Times bestseller. ¹ Their thesis: since the 1970s, American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad development than enabling good development — zoning codes, environmental review (NEPA, CEQA), and process-laden procurement — and the result is blue-state stagnation, high costs, and voter defection. The book deliberately positions itself between a progressive movement it sees as afraid of economic growth and a conservative movement allergic to government action, and it is explicit that abundance is meant to defuse the appeal of both the “socialist left” and the “populist-authoritarian right.”

The movement around the book

The book crystallized an ecosystem that predates it: Open Philanthropy has funded abundance-aligned work since 2015; Arnold Ventures, Stand Together, and the Abundance Network (Misha Chellam, Zack Rosen) run conferences; an “Abundance Elected Network” launched in September 2025 with 120 lawmakers. Gavin Newsom invoked the book when signing CEQA rollbacks for housing in June 2025. ² The framework’s first large federal statutory expression arrived in July 2026 with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — a 59-section supply-side housing law (single-stair guidelines, NEPA infill exemptions, manufactured-housing deregulation, growth-conditioned CDBG allocations) passed by overwhelming bipartisan margins, though with no funding authorized. ³

The internal tension: growth vs. shared sacrifice

Gary Winslett’s 2024 thread — the sharpest statement of the framework’s internal problem — argues that abundance liberals will struggle with progressive activists not over policy details but over moral psychology. ⁴ His anecdotes: a senior-center audience member disappointed that climate tech means nobody has to line-dry clothes; an NPR listener who hoped masks would never go away because “they’re me taking care of you”; a housing attendee who wanted community-spirit spare-room rentals instead of supply. His claim: “People with a more socialist mentality don’t really get excited about [inventing a better world]. They crave the feeling of community and shared sacrifice.” To that mentality, technological progress that makes sacrifice unnecessary is “kind of a disappointment” — for activists, persuading people to live differently is winning. Cooperation isn’t impossible, Winslett concludes, but abundance liberals should not expect activists to be “jazzed about sacrifice-free, growth-oriented solutions.”

This maps onto Winslett’s broader “Up-Left vs Down-Left” frame (from his review of Abundance): Up-Left takes progressive values and delivers them via growth, science, and technology (YIMBYs, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith); Down-Left prioritizes equity, localism, and limits over growth (Naomi Klein, Jason Hickel, degrowth). ⁵

Criticisms

Reception of Abundance was mixed. ⁶ Zephyr Teachout argued the zoning/NEPA focus won’t move housing supply and underestimates monopoly power, warning of Reagan-style deregulation rebranded. Samuel Moyn questioned whether abundance reinforces consumption-as-goal. Eric Levitz noted the disconnect between regulatory minutiae and the contemporaneous political crisis. Even sympathetic reviewers (Grabar, Wallace-Wells, Kazis) noted the book avoids naming which procedural barriers to cut and dodges the trade-offs when abundance conflicts with other progressive goals (labor standards, inequality, AI profit distribution) — Winslett’s own review argues cost-of-living must be the priority even when abundance doesn’t advance those other goals.

A sharper internal critique comes from within the framework’s own “Up-Left” camp: Matthew Yglesias — named above as an abundance-aligned writer — argues in “The real reason nobody feels good about technological progress” that the abundance celebration of everyday contrivances collides with revealed preference. ⁷ Dworkin’s Ordinary Abundance flatters our intuition precisely because the depicted apartment has no television; but the dominant actual use of the internet’s abundance is algorithmic short-form video, which people “really, really enjoy” yet “doesn’t make for a very appealing vignette.” For Yglesias the last generation’s technological progress is concentrated in “computers and internet,” and the dominant business model is serving streaming video — so the felt gap between material abundance and malaise is not ingratitude but a real channeling of progress into compulsive consumption. This is the demand-side shadow of the supply-side agenda. See attention-economy.

Open questions

• Does the abundance coalition survive contact with cases where building and progressive values genuinely conflict (gig labor, AI profits, NIMBY vs. neighborhood character)?
• Is the shared-sacrifice psychology Winslett describes a durable bloc or a loud minority? Polling on cost-of-living framing (his Chamber of Progress work) suggests the agenda sells better as “housing/energy/childcare cost too much” than as “abundance.”
• Can it scale past housing? Winslett’s own cost-of-living agenda extends it to energy, infrastructure, healthcare, and childcare — the hard test cases.

Related pages

• degrowth — the explicit antithesis: planned contraction vs. supply expansion
• limits-to-growth — the 1972 scarcity model the abundance frame rejects; Winslett’s “Down-Left” lineage runs through it
• post-scarcity-economics — the longer-run version of the same wager
• early-1970s-structural-break — abundance’s origin story starts in the same 1970s inflection
• environmental-land-use-regulation-esa — a concrete instance of the regulatory-supply mechanism (ESA listings cut housing permits ~10%)
• road-to-housing-act-2026 — the framework’s first major federal statute (PL 119-101, July 2026)
• bullshit-jobs — Graeber’s rival diagnosis of what the economy is for; the two frameworks disagree about whether the problem is scarcity or manufactured work
• scientific-idea-diffusion-decline — supply-side thinking applied to ideas themselves
• moral-economy-price-tag — another case of a market mechanism colliding with a moral economy (fixed prices vs. haggling)
• data-center-backlash — the abundance agenda’s hardest live test case: supply-side answers meet a public whose objection is recognition, not price

Sources

• 2024 — Gary Winslett — abundance liberals vs progressive activists thread
• 2025 — Abundance (Klein and Thompson book) — Wikipedia

Footnotes

1. 2025 — Abundance (Klein and Thompson book) — Wikipedia ↩

2. 2025 — Abundance (Klein and Thompson book) — Wikipedia ↩

3. Congress.gov / Congressional Research Service 2026 — H.R.6644 — 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (All Information) ↩

4. 2024 — Gary Winslett — abundance liberals vs progressive activists thread ↩

5. 2024 — Gary Winslett — abundance liberals vs progressive activists thread ↩

6. 2025 — Abundance (Klein and Thompson book) — Wikipedia ↩

7. Matthew Yglesias 2026 — The real reason nobody feels good about technological progress ↩