Concept

Abundance

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Abundance

Abundance is the political argument that the central problem of the rich democracies is no longer how to distribute scarce goods but how to produce enough of the things that matter — housing, energy, transit, medicine, skilled labour — and that progressives in particular have built a politics preoccupied with demand (subsidies, vouchers, rights to a good) while neglecting supply (whether the good actually gets built). Named by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their 2025 book Abundance (book), it reframes shortage as a policy choice rather than a natural limit.

The argument

A demand-side liberalism gives people the money or the legal right to obtain a good — a housing voucher, a subsidy for solar, a guarantee of care. But if the underlying supply is throttled, the subsidy inflates the price and the right goes unmet: more housing vouchers in a city that will not permit new homes simply raise rents. The abundance case is that the binding constraint has shifted to supply, and that much of what blocks supply is self-imposed — permitting regimes, environmental review, procurement rules, and litigation that accumulate until building anything becomes slow, dear, and uncertain.

The programme is therefore to clear the path to production: reform the rules that stop homes, clean-energy infrastructure, and public projects from being built, and treat the ability to build as a first-class progressive goal rather than an afterthought.

Mechanisms it names

  • Everything-bagel liberalism — the tendency to load every public project with so many secondary goals (labour standards, local hiring, community review, environmental conditions) that the primary goal becomes unachievable.
  • Dark abundance — Steve Teles’s term (invoked in the episode) for abundance that arrives by neglect or accident rather than design, and so is unevenly distributed and politically unowned.
  • Procedural throttling — the accretion of process and veto points (the same failure the State Capacity argument anatomises from the delivery side) as the concrete cause of undersupply.
  • A floor without a ceiling — the healthcare framing Klein offers: guarantee everyone a baseline, but do not cap the supply or price out of ideological neatness.

Relation to state capacity

Abundance and State Capacity are two views of the same knot. State capacity asks why a government with money and authority cannot deliver; abundance asks why a society with wealth and technology cannot build. Both locate the answer less in a shortage of resources than in accumulated procedure — the difference is mainly the vantage: capacity looks from inside the administrative state, abundance from the level of markets and physical output.

Where mainstream views differ

  • From the left. Critics read the agenda as deregulation in progressive clothing — a route to stripping environmental and labour protections that exist for good reason, and a distraction from concentrated corporate power as the real cause of high prices.
  • On what is actually scarce. Sceptics argue the binding constraint in some sectors is genuine (land near jobs, trained clinicians) and not merely procedural, so that clearing rules yields less than the thesis promises.
  • On coalition. Because it asks the left to fight parts of its own coalition (incumbent homeowners, some unions, some environmental litigants), opponents doubt it is politically deliverable — which is part of what Klein and Cowen spar over.

See also