This piece originally appeared in the New Atlantis.
Ever since Derek Thompson introduced the term “abundance agenda” in his 2022 Atlantic article “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” the idea has spun out into a network of new think tanks, conferences, and newsletters — and of social circles that often begin online. At a recent abundance-themed happy hour, I found myself in a room with a hundred people whose names I recognized from Twitter. But the idea has also captured the interest of a number of elite tastemakers, from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein to Silicon Valley giant Patrick Collison. Abundance seems to have gained traction.
The abundance agenda first emerged as a response to Covid-related supply-chain failures. Many commentators remarked on the prolonged shortage of Covid tests well over a year into the pandemic: How was it that the United States still had people standing in lines for rapid tests costing $15 or more, while Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom were selling them at corner stores for less than a dollar a pop, or handing them out for free? In a country as wealthy as ours, many reasoned, this sort of scarcity must be a policy choice.
By 2022, examples of scarcity were everywhere. Housing, nuclear plants, semiconductor manufacturing — all of these were areas where the United States had once succeeded but now struggled. Advocates of the abundance agenda attributed this decline to two main factors: a regulatory state that had become increasingly sclerotic, and decades of underinvestment in domestic industry. These issues, they argued, had made it very difficult to make and build things in America. And in Thompson’s view, just as our problems did not stem from any particular political party, solving scarcity would require sourcing ideas from across the political spectrum:
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.
This is the abundance agenda.
Thompson’s is a vision of a common political cause. Despite our different priorities, progressives, conservatives, and libertarians can all surely agree that scarcity is a problem worth solving.
