Building a law of abundance

The idea of abundance is everywhere. Prominent new books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Marc Dunkelman, and Yoni Applebaum bemoan the artificial scarcity created by sclerotic institutions and explore paths out. New York Times columnist David Brooks has declared an era of abundance to already be sweeping through the intellectual world: “Over the past several years, various versions of something called the abundance movement have been growing at libertarian-leaning think tanks like the Niskanen Center, at right-leaning tech hubs like Andreessen Horowitz and at a wide array of left-leaning think tanks.” As he notes, new political formations may follow.

Law, broadly understood, is at the core of the abundance movement’s analysis of what has gone wrong in the American economy. Most of the thinkers associated with the movement agree that producing housing, infrastructure, energy, and scientific innovation more rapidly, in greater volumes, and at lower cost is the goal. The diagnosis of what is standing in the way typically points to some combination of anti-competitive rules and processes driven by concentrated interests on the one hand, and an absence of state capacity to design and manage large projects on the other. Both of these obstacles to abundance are rooted in fundamental changes in American (and perhaps “Anglo-American”) law that picked up steam in the 1970s and have reduced the productivity of both the private and public sectors ever since.

What we need to move decisively toward a world that puts within reach the fundamental goods that are necessary to a middle class life — not to mention national growth and power — is a “Law of Abundance.” This collection of articles and essays came out of a conference in the Fall of 2023 run by the Center for Economy and Society at the Johns Hopkins University, supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. The Niskanen Center is excited to make short summary essays available here, along with links to full articles (some of which are currently in white paper form, but which will be updated when they reach final publication).

All of the authors collected here agree that getting to abundance will require major changes to formal laws, but also changes in legal culture and education. The “Law of Constraint” that emerged over a half-century ago is deeply rooted not only in statutes and regulations but also in how lawyers are trained and how we understand what it means to do lawyering in the public interest. Moving toward a “Law of Abundance” will require that we think about law systemically, focusing on how different collections of practices either generate what Nick Bagley has called a “procedure fetish” that impedes new initiatives or, alternatively, a bias toward action (even where that means taking on greater risk). We hope that this collection will help policymakers, scholars, activists, public interest lawyers, and grant-makers think a bit more clearly about the scope and direction of the changes that need to happen if we are to build new forms of governance that will allow the United States to start growing again.