A Note on Abundance
And Why We're Still Talking About It
About six months ago, Abundance was released to countervailing waves of commendation and criticism. Declarations of a bold new-liberal platform of economic growth and prosperity. Denunciations of empty policies failing to address the underlying structural problem. The response has been the reflection of a persistent centre-left debate, building over the last few years and boiling over in the wake of the 2024 election. Abundance is less of a book and more of a political bellwether. Easy to read and light on substance at a mere 200 pages, it was always more about what readers brought to the book than what was on the page. So, where do we stand now that the dust has settled?
The Book Itself (An Overdue Review)
Before turning to the politics, it’s worth starting with the book itself. This is not a long or difficult read. Unlike Piketty’s Capital, readers cannot plead intimidation by scale; there’s little excuse not to pick it up and engage with the material.
Abundance is not structured as a dense policy proposal but as an overview of the obstacles holding back American dynamism. It moves briskly through a few case studies of housing, healthcare, energy, and infrastructure, arguing that primarily supply constraints, from zoning restrictions and regulatory bottlenecks to institutional inertia, are the primary culprits behind American stagnation. The prose is deliberately simple, sketching a vision of what a more innovative, growth-oriented liberalism might look like without weighing itself down with too much technical detail. Rather than explicating a grand theory of politics, the book offers a series of illustrative vignettes and small policy fixes, inviting readers to imagine how broad-based prosperity might be rekindled if the eponymous “abundance agenda” were taken seriously.
Put simply, my main contention is that the book correctly identifies many of the barriers to growth, but it fails to offer a robust prescription for the present moment. Its faith in supply-side interventions is overstated, with little attention paid to the political economy that would determine whether such an agenda is feasible, let alone could actually deliver the promised abundance. An emphasis on relatively small tweaks is appealing but does not provide a salient or particularly moving structural critique, instead offering up a few bad actors and poor incentives as the problem. This puts the authors closer to the “Nudge” tradition of policymaking than an expression of a meaningfully transformative politics.
Further, the book also seems to avoid and even jettison relevant historical-technological developments and continuity that it deems too politically burdensome to fit into what ends up being a relatively narrow definition of material abundance, often dodging relevant questions of social welfare and inequality. The New Deal for example, a program built on vast infrastructure expansion and the provision of material rights and benefits espoused by the others, goes largely neglected in the discussions of state capacity. This leads to a recurring theme in the discourse around distribution and an internal incoherence around the role of government as an active participant in this process.
The book usefully traces the timeline of regulation, litigation, and activism that brought us to the present, but it does so without unpacking the countervailing interests and conditions that produced these imperfect institutional arrangements in the first place. Again, a failure to engage with questions of power and political economy is a persistent weakness, such that the environmental activist is framed as not only a greater threat than the polluter, but a greater institutional obstacle to societal wellbeing.
The expression of legal-regulatory changes over the last few decades as a force chipping away at our economic freedom is not a wholly inaccurate picture as both public and private projects get bogged down in town hall meetings and environmental review, but it’s not wholly accurate that health and human safety protections emerge arbitrarily or at little cost to those fighting for them. Regulatory overreach and the not-in-my-back-yard ideology are a boogeyman of the Abundance discourse, and I find the book inadequate in its distinction of what constitutes legitimate regulation, with a tendency to flatten all zoning, environmental regulation and community input into a single uniform obstacle.
Yet, there is something compelling in its call for a politics of possibility. By clearing the board and envisioning a liberalism grounded in broad-based growth and innovation, politics less tethered to its antecedents, the book offers, if nothing else, a hopeful new formulation. A ‘liberalism that builds’ has been a common slogan to represent this movement, a stark contrast that implies a new sense of agency for our liberal institutions. All this is to say, I found the book unremarkable, a few anecdotes of interest for specific points of policy reform, but the content itself is hardly worth remarking on half a year later.
The Discourse
This brings us to the paratextual politics of Abundance, where its authors and movement sit politically, and why we are still writing about it.
The timing of its publication, only months after the Trump inauguration, shaped both its popularity and its critical reception. The Democratic defeat in November reflected a deep discontent with the party’s ability to deliver material improvements in people’s lives, despite holding institutional power. Biden entered office with a mandate for bold economic reform, but by the midpoint of his term many of his signature initiatives had stalled or been pared back: Build Back Better collapsed in Congress, student debt relief overturned by the courts, and the cost of living remaining a crisis in cities across the country.
Against a backdrop of stalled reforms, electoral failure, and rising discontent, Abundance found an eager audience. Its appeal lay less in its policy specifics than in its positioning: arriving when Democrats were searching for a new story to tell about growth, innovation, and the role of the state. Therein lies the issue: a book to fill the space but lacking the contents to sustain itself.
At the heart of the Abundance discourse is a mismatch, the book is sometimes treated as an agenda-setting political manifesto, yet in substance it is little more than a collection of policy-brief footnotes. Its politics are inseparable from the electoral environment and the policy disappointments of the Biden administration. For Democrats searching to rebrand themselves as the party of growth and dynamism after sluggish progress on housing, climate, and infrastructure, Abundance provides a ready-made narrative. For the critics, it represents a continuation of the repeated failures that brought us to this point.
The thinness of the text becomes a feature rather than a flaw. Its interpretability allows different factions of the centre-left to project their own priorities onto the varieties of the “abundance agenda.” Already-held beliefs refracted through a convenient slogan, reflected in the socialism of “Left Abundance” and accelerationism of “Dark Abundance”. For more technocratic moderates, it signals regulatory streamlining; for younger progressives, a revival of state-led investment. Something for everyone, no?
In this way, Abundance serves as a bridge. A convenient policy language that lets the left borrow the pragmatic moderation of the center, and the center adopt some of the dynamic rhetoric of the left. But it provides vocabulary without architecture. That flexibility explains why the book lingers in the conversation; it has become shorthand for aspirations unfulfilled during the Biden years, a vessel for frustrations with a government that promised big investments but delivered only partial victories. But drastic policy divergences emerge in practice.
New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani embodies this contradiction. On one hand, his push to streamline permitting for food vendors and cut red tape for small businesses fits neatly within the “abundance” frame: deregulation as a path to growth and dynamism. On the other hand, his proposals for city-owned grocery stores, broadened tenant protections, rent control, and free public transit represent a vision rooted in material abundance via redistribution and state provision, but are policies that sit uneasily within the market-oriented contours of the Abundance movement.
This highlights a tension between the technocratic deregulation and socialist expansion of public goods at the center of the discourse. The persistence of the Abundance debate is therefore less about the strength of its ideas than about the development and contestation of a new ideological frame on the centre-left, one that might reconcile the failures of the past administration with the looming demands of the next electoral cycle.
In Conclusion
There is a future to this movement and I think that it is in the best interest of a new Democratic coalition to adopt some of the obvious pro-growth proposals, but I didn’t find the book nearly compelling enough for Abundance to be the central pillar of any meaningful coalition or party platform. The emphasis on the cost of living is the latest iteration of the kitchen-table political agenda, but it takes more than just identifying the issues to build a political movement.