Abundance agenda

Working Definition

The abundance agenda is a political and policy program arguing that the most acute scarcities afflicting wealthy democracies—housing, clean energy, high-speed transit, physicians, and scientific bottlenecks—stem not from a lack of money or technological know-how, but from an institutional inability to build. Its operational thesis is straightforward: instead of subsidizing consumer demand for goods whose physical supply is legally throttled, the state must dismantle the supply bottlenecks it has erected over the past half-century and rebuild its own administrative capacity to deliver projects. In everyday political shorthand, it boils down to the slogan “build more”; in its analytical form, it is the diagnosis that post-1970s procedural liberalism—environmental impact statements, citizen lawsuits, multi-layered local vetoes—has mutated into a veto-ocracy whose costs fall heaviest on the working-class and younger citizens it was meant to protect.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The concept crystallized in American center-left policy journalism and think tanks between 2021 and 2025. In a September 2021 New York Times column, Ezra Klein called on Democrats to embrace “supply-side progressivism”; that same month, the Niskanen Center published Cost Disease Socialism by Samuel Hammond and Daniel Takash, supplying a fiscal diagnosis showing how pairing demand subsidies with restricted supply fuels runaway price inflation in housing, healthcare, and education. Derek Thompson coined the phrase abundance agenda in a January 2022 essay in The Atlantic, uniting urban YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) housing reform, clean-energy permitting reform, immigration of skilled workers, and biomedical innovation under a single banner. Klein and Thompson’s co-authored book Abundance (March 2025) synthesized these threads alongside Marc J. Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works (2025), offering a historical narrative of how 1960s and 1970s public-interest lawyers and environmentalists—reacting against the bulldozers of Robert Moses and unregulated industrial pollution—constructed a legal architecture designed to stop the state from acting. Intellectually, the agenda draws on urban economics, the state-capacity literature, and classical productivism. Almost immediately, it was pulled in competing directions: free-market conservatives hailed it as a belated progressive concession to deregulation, anti-monopoly leftists attacked it as neoliberalism rebranded, and tech and energy lobbies adopted its vocabulary to push their own permitting wish lists.

Central European Lineage

We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe.

Why Now

Three converging pressures between 2021 and 2026 turned the abundance agenda into a defining fault line of Western domestic politics. First, climate policy entered its physical construction phase: after the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act and European industrial packages unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-tech subsidies, policymakers discovered that the binding constraint on decarbonization was no longer capital or solar-panel prices, but multi-year permitting queues for high-voltage transmission lines, wind farms, and grid interconnections. Second, housing affordability in major metropolitan areas became an explosive electoral issue across North America and Europe, backed by empirical housing-economics research proving that single-family zoning and local planning vetoes drive wealth inequality. Third, the Democrats’ defeat in the November 2024 US presidential election triggered a fierce intra-party battle over why blue states like California and New York had become unaffordable to live in and incapable of completing flagship public works such as high-speed rail. When Klein and Thompson’s Abundance appeared in March 2025, it immediately became the manifesto of one camp in that struggle—and its rapid translation into other languages (including its 2025 Polish edition, Dostatek, published by the left-wing press Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej and debated simultaneously by conservative-republican circles such as Klub Jagielloński around megaprojects like Poland’s Central Communication Port, CPK) showed that the anxiety over state capacity to build extends far beyond the United States.

Explanatory Power

The concept makes visible how scarcity in an affluent society can be actively manufactured by legal procedure rather than resource limits or market monopoly alone. First, it explains the paradox of progressive governance in high-cost jurisdictions: California suffers from the highest housing costs and homelessness rates in the United States not in spite of its dense thicket of environmental and community-review laws (such as CEQA), but largely because those laws give incumbent property owners a low-cost veto over multifamily construction. Second, it clarifies why demand-side welfare programs—housing vouchers, student-loan subsidies, tax credits—repeatedly evaporate into higher prices when supply is inelastic: pouring money into a market where new entry is illegal simply transfers public revenue into the pockets of incumbent asset owners. Third, it exposes the institutional irony of twenty-first-century environmentalism: procedural statutes written in 1970 to stop highways and coal plants are today the single most effective legal weapon used to delay solar arrays, geothermal wells, transit lines, and lithium mines. Across all three domains, the framework shifts the policy question from “how much public money are we spending?” to “who holds the legal right to say no, and at what cost to everyone else?”

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The least examined blind spot of the abundance agenda is its institutional geography. Born in coastal American metropolises paralyzed by neighborhood lawsuits, fragmented municipal zoning, and judicial review, the agenda prescribes concentrating executive authority, shortening appeal paths, and fast-tracking strategic projects—assuming a state that knows how to plan rationally, but is legally prevented from executing. In Central and Eastern Europe, the institutional pathology is often the exact reverse: for two decades, governments in Poland and across the region have routinely bypassed ordinary planning, environmental, and property rules through special-purpose fast-track statutes (specustawy for roads, flood embankments, terminals, and megaprojects), while suffering from weak spatial planning, politicized civil services, and low institutional trust. Importing an anti-procedural gospel into a state that already rules by specustawa risks accelerating white elephants rather than solving bottlenecks. A second regional contrast is historical memory: in societies that lived through the chronic shortages of the pre-1989 planned economy—analyzed in Hungarian economist János Kornai’s classic Economics of Shortage (1980)—the word “abundance” (dostatek) rings very differently than in California. Kornai showed how chronic shortage arises from soft budget constraints and bureaucratic hoarding; Klein and Thompson show how shortage arises in rich capitalist democracies from hard procedural vetoes and incumbent rent protection. Putting the two side by side reveals that modern economies have invented more than one institutional way to make goods scarce.