Reviews of recent “abundance” themed books have flowed in recent days. The books – Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, all published this year, and Jerusalem Demsas’ On the Housing Crisis and Matt Yglesias’s One Billion Americans, published in 2024 and 2020 – are an effort to refine and further an ideological trend that has long simmered in academic and policy circles.
Collectively, the books do an excellent job of capturing and reshaping this broader set of ideas. Abundance theorists broadly argue that, contrary to thinkers focused on the “neoliberal turn,” American government at all levels adopted a protectionist mindset and procedural system of regulations in the 1970s and 1980s that hobbled private markets in physical goods like housing and energy, overregulated labor markets through tools like professional licensing, and, crucially, impeded the government itself from producing needed infrastructure and scientific development. Doing so biased distribution upwards, with homeowners in rich regions and protected professions benefiting while economic growth stagnated.
In place of the protection-and-conservation ethos that guided the liberalism of the 1970s, these books broadly argue the goal should be more – more production, more ability to move, more infrastructure. Abundance is both good in its own right and highly conducive to the other goals of American liberalism, like redistribution, social insurance, and economic mobility. To address the problems of today, from the housing crisis to the need for a green energy transition to fight climate change, the ideological moves of the 1970s and 1980s – a fetishization of procedure, a reliance on litigation as a form of regulation, extreme localism – need to be abandoned.
While most of the reviews have been positive, there is a particular and peculiar line of left-wing critique. As a figure in the academic discussion, I haven’t been surprised by this reaction, but I have been somewhat surprised by how uncurious these reviews are. They seem to have studied one or another of the new books, but done almost no reading beyond the four corners of the work they are reviewing. That’s not a criticism of the books but of the readers; the books incorporate a lot of ideas by reference and do not take the form of party platforms. Instead, they are efforts to either address specific policy areas (Stuck, On the Housing Crisis) or to provide a broader ideological orientation (Abundance, One Billion Americans). A critic should make an effort to familiarize themselves with the broader milieu in which the book sits, to click through some of the links. Most of these reviews don’t. As a result, it’s worth noting what the reviews miss.
What about power?
Many of the commentators argue that abundance doesn’t have a theory of power, of the big corporate interests that dominate so much of American life. This is decidedly not true, and a more reasonable reading of the books would have revealed how strange this criticism is.
A central claim in the abundance literature is that power in liberal-dominated areas lies with homeowners and the groups they support. Homeowners, seeking to preserve their housing values among other less savory goals, have supported zoning regulations that have destroyed housing markets. Texas housing markets, where such regulations are looser, really are much more accommodating of the American middle class than the millionaires’ playgrounds of New York or San Francisco real estate. The fact that so many ordinary Americans are moving from California to Texas exposes this reality. The problem has national dimensions as well; well-meaning regulations of housing finance have made it harder to build starter homes throughout the country. There is plenty of economic influence that turns into political power in this story, and it resides with those who already have homes and use regulation to protect themselves and their neighborhoods against growth.
The same thing goes for infrastructure. The central lesson of the growing body of work on infrastructure development is that “citizen voice” has slowed and increased the cost of projects throughout the country. As Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow argue, highways are “squigglier” now, trying to avoid lawsuits and other objections from local potentates. Subway expansions have had to accommodate every labor group and every supporter of parks into their plans, making costs for American projects exceed costs for similar projects in Western Europe by several times. Another lesson from that literature is that greater “state capacity” to plan reduces costs. (One of the reviews amusingly cites a Liscow paper about state capacity as evidence against an argument based on … a Liscow paper about the importance of citizen voice – an almost perfect set-up for a Marshall McCluhan in Annie Hall moment). But this capacity has been hobbled, not only by a failure to hire enough civil servants but also by the procedural limits on the energy of government planners.
One could go through many other issues and largely say the same thing. For instance, occupational licensing protects the interests of lawyers and doctors against the more numerous but less concentrated interests of consumers and people who need medical services. Science funding is heavily bureaucratic and flows to influential older researchers, rather than to younger ones.
All of this is to say that these abundance theorists are deeply concerned with how power influences markets. But the most important forms of power in these areas – some of the most important markets in our economy – are largely in the hands of growth-and-change skeptical professionals. Abundance is an effort to dislodge these concentrated interests.
Many of these reviewers are somewhat antitrust-obsessed. It is true that abundance liberalism doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s a good idea to use antirust to try to break up Google.
But, in the fight against concentration, antitrust is a latecomer in American life. The traditional American response to concentrated economic power has been abundance. From ending rules that kept land transfers within narrow dynasties to the “benefit-offset rule” designed to make eminent domain for railroads easier, American property law has long used “abundance” themed tools to address the power of landed gentry. This is in sharp contrast with the English property law we inherited, which was largely designed to protect the Downton Abbey set.
This point, that abundance is the enemy of concentration, is a central theme in the academic literature. Housing markets dominated by homeowners seeking to stop building have been described as “homeowner cartels.” The power of locally-dominant landlords is challenged by zoning reforms that add more supply to compete with them. The problem of high medical bills is partially addressed by introducing more competition — think allowing more students to get medical training, licensing foreign doctors, and so on. One would have thought that antitrust-interested reviewers would have seen allies, rather than heretics.
Abundance does challenge the way economic power leads to political dominance in some of our most economically concentrated industries. But the villains of the piece are the friends and neighbors of these authors.
Hammers and nails
Another line of criticism is that these authors have one hammer – abundance – and apply it to too large a variety of problems, or nails. We’ll see in a moment that the same critics have exactly the inverse complaint, that abundance liberals do not address enough policy areas
It is surely true that, for instance, reducing occupational licensing of doctors doesn’t tell us how to provide and regulate health insurance. But reducing the cost of providing services would make the traditional tools of liberalism – redistribution and social insurance – a lot easier to deploy. In their essay Cost Disease Socialism, Steve Teles and his co-authors broaden this point to argue that the efforts to cram more subsidies into sectors like health care and housing will never be effective, as they just drive prices up in areas that, without reform, won’t see productivity increases. American liberals have spent the last four decades focused on how to provide health insurance. Abundance-focused writers, Klein and Thompson particularly, don’t argue against these solutions. Instead, we pursue a parallel project: to make the provision of healthcare, through private or public means, more effective and palatable.
In a two-party system, no one ideological move will ever “cover the field” of all issues. The literature is clear that broad ideological tendencies, like liberalism or conservatism, are themselves carefully cobbled-together coalitions of different arguments and movements. Abundance isn’t a replacement for all the ways liberals have addressed all problems. But it is an argument that some ideas should be abandoned and that others should be given more prominence. (Notably, conservative supporters of abundance-like ideas have a similar set of fights inside the broader web of conservative ideology.)
Does it make sense to use abundance ideas to address every policy problem? No. Can abundance-based reforms be a part of the solution in many areas? Yes. Is that using a single hammer to smash all nails? No. Is that using a hammer as a tool to help build many houses? Yes.
Is this all there is?
Another line of criticism, that abundance liberals don’t address the biggest issues in American life, is in direct contrast with the “hammers and nails” critique. And, as I just suggested, there’s something to this line of criticism, as there are issues that are only partially addressed by abundance ideas. But housing, energy, science, transportation, and labor regulations are very important to the economy and our politics. And addressing them will make all sorts of other solutions a lot easier. In fact, the implications of abundance ideas for broader problems are not hard to trace — and in some cases, people have already done the work.
Macroeconomics
Does abundance have anything to say to macroeconomics? Yes. As I have argued, the very basics of macroeconomic management have been undermined by the limits on mobility that are the focus of Yoni Appelbaum’s excellent book. Robert Mundell famously argued that optimal currency areas are defined by their exposure to common economic shocks, their inter-jurisdictional redistribution and, very importantly, their labor mobility. This applies to the “dollar zone” as well as to the Eurozone. Limits on building in economically successful regions, and on labor in regulated industries moving across state lines, reduces the scope and targeting of labor mobility in the U.S., making the job of macroeconomic stabilization harder.
Relatedly, housing economists have been squarely focused on the issue of economic growth, noting that housing restrictions reduce labor productivity by making it harder for people to move to their best job opportunities. This does not mean we should favor the rich regions, but rather reflects the belief that economic growth will ensue if people and firms can choose their locations. When technology and tastes mean people and firms want to move to rich regions, policy should accommodate them, allowing housing growth in downtown San Francisco or New York. Similarly, policy should permit de-concentration — more recently, technological changes and post-pandemic increases in housing demand have led to preferences for spreading out, pushing up demand for housing in exurbs and “Zoomtowns.” Abundance ideas are in direct contrast with regional policy that seeks to freeze in place the location of economic activities, like Ganesh Sitaraman’s arguments in favor of reregulating the airline industry to protect declining regions. The locations of our existing cities are the product of the transportation and production technologies of the past. Using policy to entrench them will just frustrate economic growth and dynamism in the name of nostalgia. Slowing change and keeping people from moving to opportunity in order to defend prior locational choices is as deep a form of conservatism as one can imagine, an odd line for nominally left-wing critics.
Likewise, the stagnating productivity in the construction industry is a macroeconomic problem, given the huge role of the housing sector and building more broadly in the economy. And the fact that there are so many different rules governing building in different jurisdictions is the leading theory for why productivity in these sectors has stagnated.
Granted, abundance ideas don’t tell us whether the Federal Reserve should raise or lower interest rates. But reforms in these areas should make the Federal Reserve’s choices easier.
Foreign policy
Yglesias’s book, which has been weirdly left out of some of these discussions, is focused on the foreign policy dimensions of abundance themes. Academics in this area are largely domestic in their focus, but the relationship between economic growth and foreign influence (and great power competition with China) is pretty clear, Yglesias argues.
Many recent foreign policy arguments have fundamentally been about domestic concerns (consider Jen Harris and Jake Sullivan’s arguments for a foreign policy for the middle class.). Similarly, domestic abundance would give us more options in foreign policy, meaning we can avoid zero-sum foreign policy thinking. Tariffs on lumber, appliances, and steel harm housing production, and are thus are clearly antithetical to goals of abundance, making America weaker in this view of the world, even if they support narrow producer interests.
State and local government
The critiques are also oddly blind to the ways in which abundance is way broader than other ideological currents in liberalism today. Abundance-themed liberals are deeply focused on the choices and challenges of state and local governments, something missing from many other intellectual movements. Housing, occupational licensing, investment in infrastructure, and curbs on excessive or interest-empowering public participation only make up a small part of the congressional agenda (but should be a bigger part). But by their very nature, they are a huge part of the issue agenda of state and local governments. Abundance has something to say about what the New York City Council and the California state legislature should focus on.
This has implications for how state and local governments should be organized, and about state and local democracy more broadly. A central move in the literature is arguing that power in state and local governments has become too decentralized. Decentralizing and localizing authority was done intentionally to stop both housing developers and infrastructure planners. The case for state and local governments having less of a “procedure fetish” and for greater mayoral and gubernatorial authority is rooted in the fact that governors and mayors are actually known to the mass public, despite widespread ignorance of state and local politics in an era of media nationalization.
During a period where liberals are shut out of federal power, and where the failures of blue-state governance have done so much to discredit liberals more broadly, an intellectual movement that has an agenda that applies across governments should be lionized for its breadth, rather than critiqued for its narrowness.
Now, there are plenty of state and local issues about which abundance doesn’t much to say. There’s nothing inherent in abundance ideas about how to control crime, for instance, despite some natural coalitions between crime-control moderates and pro-growth forces. Nor is there much in the abundance agenda about how to best provide public education, except in its discussions of property taxes and occupational licensure of teachers.
But it does make solving those problems easier. A richer place can afford more cops. A more mobile society with less local control over land use regulation will have less inequality between school districts.
Does abundance work?
Some critics argue that policies like zoning deregulation don’t result in more housing. It is true that many efforts at deregulation have been frustrated by other regulatory limitations. Minneapolis’ policy ending single-family zoning, for instance, has largely not worked due to the failure to address density limits and parking requirements; many California reforms have included such strict affordability or labor requirements that they have not led to much housing. But the same places have seen success with other reforms that were unconstrained by overlapping legacy rules or new requirements, such as Minneapolis’ transit-oriented development regime and California’s effort to promote accessory dwelling units. More pointedly, places with more liberal regulatory rules, like Austin or Houston, have the same interest rates and construction technologies as San Francisco and Boston, but see huge amounts of housing growth when prices spike (and then see declines in housing prices due to the increases in supply). International examples, like New Zealand, prove the efficacy of these types of reforms.
Some reviews also argue these books aren’t specific enough. One only needs to look at the agenda of groups discussed in each of these books – from California YIMBY to the Niskanen Center – to see tons of specific proposals. In one weird moment, a critic argues that YIMBYs gets it wrong by arguing in favor of ending single-family zoning instead of favoring housing growth on commercial property. But of course YIMBYs from Minneapolis to California to Florida have been the driving force behind allowing such development. (The same critic should also take a tour of townhouses in Houston and flag lots in Durham, N.C., to see that there is indeed demand for housing on smaller lots!)
Another odd line of criticism is that abundance reforms will create such huge political pushback that it will “set back liberalism for decades.” This is a particularly strange claim coming from those deeply involved with “neo-Brandeisian” antitrust. The successes of antitrust reformers during the Biden administration created huge amounts of blowback, with industries formerly supportive of Democrats turning towards Trump. Personally, I have no strong opinions about antitrust, but it seems fair to say that any substantial effort to change the status quo will produce some blowback.
A central argument of abundance liberals is that the power of those who oppose growth is exaggerated by the litigation-based and heavily local forms of procedure that were created by the “public citizens” of the 1970s and 1980s. Local participation and litigation are favored by a narrow band of rich homeowners and interest groups, but these players rarely make their cases against growth to the general public. Removing power from these veto gates will produce pushback, but it’s not clear how intense it will be.
Maybe this is wrong – predictions are hard – but there’s no evidence yet that zoning reforms or reducing the ability of people to sue to slow infrastructure projects creates fatal political pushback. Abundance and abundance-like reforms have been central to the campaigns of the few center-left candidates who have notched recent wins (or seem poised to) across the developed world, from Britain to Canada.
If these reviews are the best that critics of abundance have, the movement has a solid future.
David Schleicher is Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at Yale University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.