How Abundance Has Failed and Succeeded

Derek Thompson (0:06)

It's been a year and a half since Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Ezra Klein came out. And 18 months later, I think this is a good time to ask some important and hard questions about the project. Questions like, is Abundance a big fat failure? In June, Vox published an article about how Abundance quote lost the democratic war of ideas. In October, Semaphore asked if Abundance was, quote, dead. When you think about the most popular Democrats introduced to a national audience in the last year, I think, for being honest, a lot of them have been left-wing populists or self-described socialists, like Zoran Mamdani or Abdul El-Sayed or John Ossoff, an Obama-ish figure whose favorite A words are more likely to be affordability, or avarice, or authoritarian, rather than abundance. What's more, every few months or so, someone will do a Ctrl-F search for the word abundance on my Twitter, and finding it too sparse for their liking will accuse me of having abandoned the project entirely. So today's episode takes the question head on. Has abundance failed?

I think answering that question accurately requires a brief reminder of what abundance was. Completed before the 2024 election, our book was meant to be tough medicine for liberals and Democrats. We wanted to understand what made America and blue cities and states in particular so bad at building things like houses and clean energy and infrastructure. We argued that in the last half century, Democrats have become so sensitive to real abuses of power, like corporations that break the law and destroy the environment, that the parties become too insensitive to the cost of absent power. That is, governments who can't do or build what they promise to do and build. Because of this, we argued, liberals have developed a reputation as a slow-footed party of procedure-obsessed bureaucrats, a party that associates success with how much money it authorizes to spend, rather than define success by what it actually accomplishes. Houses built, broadband rolled out, and infrastructure developed. We called for a new orientation of liberalism that paid close attention to the supply side of everything, emphasized outcomes over procedure, and valued speed over delay.

A year and a half later, you can find plenty of articles arguing that abundance has failed politically, that it hasn't taken over the Democratic Party, that there's no abundance faction sweeping the Democratic primaries. But this is the paradox. At the very moment that political commentators are writing obituaries for abundance, lawmakers across the country are passing some of the most significant abundance style reforms in decades. In Washington, Congress passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, one of the most significant bipartisan housing laws in generations. The law uses a variety of policies to make it easier and faster for communities to add housing. In the last few weeks, four senators, two Republicans and two Democrats, introduced a sweeping permitting reform bill designed to make it easier and faster to build energy projects and infrastructure. The same sort of thing is happening across the country at the state level. From California to Virginia, states are passing laws to make it easier and easier to build houses and clean energy. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has changed environmental review laws to accelerate housing and infrastructure. New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani, yes, a Democratic Socialist, has proposed reforms designed to shave months and in some cases, years off the process of approving new housing.

These policies are not identical and I certainly don't want to pretend that the word abundance or the book abundance caused all of them. But what makes this moment so interesting is that beneath the headline showdowns between Republicans and Democrats, lawmakers in both parties are converging on a remarkably similar conclusion. America has made it too damn hard to build the things America needs. There's a couple of different ways I think to understand this development. And because this is a Ringer podcast, I'm going to attempt to make a sports metaphor here, God help me. In the early 1950s, the NBA had a problem.

When teams got a lead, they could simply hold on to the ball. They would dribble around, pass the ball back and forth, they'd run out the clock. So in 1954, the NBA introduced a 24-second shot clock. An average scoring went up immediately.

I think you could say, without overstretching my metaphorical license here, that American liberalism has developed a bit of a dribble-dribble problem of its own. Coming out of the 1960s and 1970s, out of the environmental and psych-growth movements of that era, America passed a lot of laws and adopted a lot of customs that made it easier for people to slow down government and business. Many of those laws weren't just well-intentioned. I think some of them, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act that exist, are perfectly wonderful. But the environmental and preservation laws of that period, including NEPA and California's CEQA, purposely slowed down the construction process with procedure. Over the decades, we built layer upon layer of process. Delay itself became one of the most reliable veto points in American government.