Abundance of Meh

Abundance is now the cool “new thing” among policy wonks, especially the under-40 crowd, as evidenced by the sold-out Abundance 2025 conference that wrapped up Friday in Washington, DC (with an evident scarcity of press passes).

The movement has no official home, but think tanks such as the Abundance Institute carry its banner, and if it has an intellectual bible, it is the best-seller Abundance by journalists Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. Word of warning: It’s almost always a bad idea to take policy advice from journalists, who by nature are generalists focused on appealing communication, not experts focused on actual analysis.

But whatever. The “movement,” if one can use that word, has gained enormous momentum. It focuses on an amalgam of policy concerns all ostensibly connected by the thread of abundance or lack thereof. At its core is the idea of solving problems by making it easier to build more things. Okay, that sounds good. Then it’s on to reducing regulatory barriers to producing more supply. Eh, not so sure about that; depends on the specifics. Abundance champions then argue for taking more risk with government science funding. Sure, why not? And finally, they want more clean energy. Could be good, but not if it costs a lot more.

Besides its overall intellectual shallowness and internal inconsistencies, I have two main beefs with Abundance. The first is that it is small beer. Its agenda will not make a dent in ensuring that the United States is more powerful than China in the existential techno-economic trade war we’re fighting. It won’t boost breakthrough innovations other than perhaps at the margin. And it will do little to boost the current anemic rates of U.S. labor productivity growth. (Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?) The United States is running out of time. We don’t have a decade to waste dabbling in Abundance only to find that we have reduced housing inflation a tad, built some more solar farms, and boosted productivity growth by 0.1 percentage point. It’s time for a real growth and competitiveness agenda.

Second, building new things doesn’t necessarily create abundance because there are opportunity costs. If society builds a house or a solar farm, then by definition it can’t build something else—or, if it does, then consumption has to down. Workers building a house mean workers are not doing something else. There is no free lunch. The only real metric is cost/benefit. If the net-present-value benefits of construction exceed the capital investment and operational costs (including the cost of capital), then it might be worth building. But otherwise not. This is why we have not built six-lane highways in rural areas, even though it would lead to an abundance of highways there. Likewise, building lots of expensive solar farms does not create abundance unless the levelized cost of their energy is cheaper than alternatives, which it is not now.

In fact, the whole term “abundance” is dumb. It implies we can repeal the laws of supply and demand, and somehow if government just got out of the way on regulation and got more in the way on spending, we’d be in the abundant Garden of Eden. But we are never going to get abundance, as the term implies supply that exceeds demand. Let me know when we get north of $1 million median per-capita income in the United States. Maybe then we can talk about abundance. But that will only happen with massive productivity improvements that are sustained over a century, which would require a coherent agenda in which government thinks like an enterprise. Fixing zoning and other regulatory problems that limit build things, while necessary—let’s start with Congress repealing NEPA on non-federal lands—is at the end of the day small potatoes.

In other words, the only thing that produces things in the direction of the never-to-be-achieved abundance is productivity. And there is little sign the abundance movement actually understands or focuses on this. Perhaps if the movement was called “Build” rather than Abundance, I wouldn’t be so curmudgeonly.

Instead, it marches on defiantly: As a jumbled mix of libertarian and clean energy progressives, you know the backers have to call for more immigration. By definition, they argue, that leads to abundance, because GDP goes up. According to Roger Pielke’s write-up of the conference, there was a lot of discussion of how America needs more low-wage immigrants. If we are to build more houses, then we need more low-wage immigrants to build them, especially if we want them affordable. Did these folks not take economics? Immigrants do not solve economy-wide labor shortage issues because they are both workers and consumers, and their consumption creates labor demand and so you are back to square one.

Nonetheless, the abundance movement also wants large cadres of low-paid, low-educated immigrants taking care of our kids, our parents, and our lawns, picking up our dry cleaning, delivering our Door Dash meals, and more. In their line of thinking, that is abundance. Yee-hah! Life won’t be so great for the unabundant servant class. But at least they will be able to ride on subsidized mass transit to get out to the abundant suburbs.

In fact, the reason why there might be a left-right agreement on abundance, at least as Pielke describes it, is that the right gets deregulation and the left gets redistribution (and some more renewable energy). This gets to another key point: At the end of the day, much of this is in fact redistribution, not growth. Building more houses doesn’t produce abundance, it simply shifts wealth from some (current homeowners) to others (homebuyers). On net, society is no better off. To be clear, as a homeowner with no mortgage, I would love to see home prices in the DC region fall through more construction. I would lose, but my two kids, who I really want to be able to afford a home in the DC region, would win. But again, that is not abundance.

The abundance movement wants to lower health-care costs by eliminating constraints on the education of doctors. This might generate more doctors, but they would probably be less qualified, since the best of the pool are already in medical school. And while having more doctors might lower prices, what really matters for abundance are lower costs. Without that, patients would have more abundant health care, but doctors would get squeezed. Same thing with calling for lower transportation costs by subsidizing buses. The result would be lower prices for passengers, but higher costs for taxpayers, since transit is never self-supporting through fares. Similarly, eliminating occupational licensing on nail salon workers might reduce the costs for ladies getting their nails done, but it would reduce abundance for salon workers. Building more clean energy certainly won’t produce abundance given that dirty energy, especially for base load power and industrial power is still cheaper. But it will raise prices for electricity (or it will raise taxes, if we subsidize it).

The abundance movement has become hodgepodge of all sorts of far-flung ideas. For example, some conservatives want family abundance—i.e., more fertility. Meanwhile, movement godfather Ezra Klein reasons that since Harvard is so good (it likely is not; it just attracts the “best” students), why not double its size? And voila, twice the abundance of high-quality graduates. You can’t make this stuff up. Where would Harvard get its new faculty from? Brown and Swarthmore? If so, then they would produce fewer students with overall education levels comparable to Harvard’s.

Klein also tells Tyler Cowen that, “We could have had the GLP-1s decades ago, but there are a lot of reasons within the system that it would have been costly to try that out.” Really? Such as what? What scholarly evidence do you have for that? Do you really want the FDA to be a lot looser on approving drugs? Why not just go full libertarian and repeal the FDA? We didn’t have GLP-1s because discovering drugs is hard and expensive, and most of that expense is because science and discovery and testing. How about calling for significant increases in FDA funding and quadrupling funding for the NIST Manufacturing USA Institutes focused on biopharma process technology? Nah, that’s too conventional.

At the end of the day, other than the parts wanting more low-skill immigration and some overly extreme deregulation, little of what I have seen the Abundance movement calling for seems objectionable. Much of it is good. But a whole movement built around this small beer? Wake me when we get to the real stuff: how to not lose the techno-economic war to China, and how to double U.S. labor productivity. In the meantime, I have to get back to work on these problems.