Independent Thinkers Are Allowed to Appreciate Good Things

Eleven Thoughts on Abundance DC

I’ve already shared some broad ideas on the Abundance DC conference, the value of the movement, and where I see it going. Here are some additional thoughts I had while attending and reflecting on the event.

1. A friend mentioned to me recently that he was really excited about the abundance movement. I admitted I was too, but that I was kind of afraid to admit it. Why was this? I figured out it’s because this is the thing that everyone is talking about. I’m most comfortable having a take on the news that is unique and different. What value am I adding to the world if I just say “You know this thing all sane people agree is good and is the main thing discussed in the NYT? It’s actually good!”? Maybe as a natural skeptic, my role is being able to credibly tell you when the discourse is basically correct. Housing and infrastructure costs are a major problem. The abundance people have identified this, and through academic work and journalistic investigation have come up with credible theories to explain why, and these theories are consistent with some of the most well-established ideas in economics and public choice. Not everything has to be rocket science. Markets are good and too many bureaucratic barriers to building are bad. Someone says let’s unleash markets and get rid of bureaucratic barriers. They write a book and engage in discourse with influential people and members of the educated public, who accept their ideas because they make sense. They then do good things, which work because the beliefs that led to the policies being adopted were true. That’s it! No need to come up with a saucy take on how this is somehow actually bad. I will try not to be ashamed of being excited going forward.

2. I was impressed by how many national and local politicians were there. The headliner for one of the nights was Utah governor Spencer Cox, and members of Congress showed up. But I also randomly ran into a few members of city councils and the mayor of Chattanooga. This indicates that people who care about policy and ambitious politicians just starting out their careers have received the abundance message, and will be implementing it in a decentralized way.

3. The bipartisan success here is due to Klein and Thompson doing an excellent job of solving the coordination problem in politics. Abundance has something for almost every major political constituency: free marketers, techno-futurists, traditionalists who worry about the fertility rate and family formation, wokes who care about racial justice, leftists who want to help the poor, and those with a general desire to see things move in the world of atoms as a sign of progress (a not insignificant constituency!). The only people left out are their rivals for power on the left who reject markets as a matter of principle. The antimonopoly crowd is smart enough to realize that abundance is a direct threat to their view of politics, which centers around scapegoating the wealthy and giving a great deal of regulatory power to people like themselves. This is why the abundance debates have been so bitter, which leads to the next point.

4. The fact that there are deep philosophical and political differences at stake is understood on the abundance side of the debate too. The most negative thing I heard about another faction in American politics from the main stage was aimed at the Revolving Door Project and its report connecting abundance to billionaires and conservatives. The speaker assured us that this report was wrong, and that this actually is a movement in touch with the American people, rather than one astroturfed by elites. I have my doubts. Abundance is a technocratic movement that is likely to appeal to the highly educated and informed but few of the kinds of regular Americans who have been attracted to politicians like Trump and Sanders. It doesn’t hit any of the keys that usually inspire people at a truly mass level: leader worship, scapegoating an enemy, simplistic stories with heroes and villains, etc. Some speakers kind of understood this, and would argue that you win people over by showing them results. Fair enough. But this is a different theory of democratic representation than the one populists have, which has the underlying assumption that the people actually know what the right policies are, or at least who their real enemies are, and it is up to politicians to follow their wishes.

5. Speaking of the Revolving Door people, they often paint me as the leader of Abundance. See this Bluesky search. As this was the first liberal political conference I had ever been to, I wondered if I would encounter any hostility. I have to say just about everyone who recognized me was a fan or well-wisher. Hopefully this will bring a lot of pain to the Bluesky crowd. On the first day, an Ivy League professor told me that one of his students wrote a paper inspired by some of my work. It’s still nice to hear things like that.

6. From Twitter and right-wing media, you would think that everyone on the right is a MAGA drone, conspiracy theorist, or Groyper. I agree that these are the numerically dominant factions. At Abundance DC, however, it was nice to be reminded that there are right-leaning think tanks with smart young people doing good work, as unrepresented as they may be in online discourse. I met several from the Foundation for American Innovation, a few of them being seated next to me at dinner on Thursday night. They don’t make a lot of waves in the public imagination, but they are still there, having an impact and ready to once again play a more prominent role on the right if the Based/populist/MAGA menace is ever destroyed.

7. I went into the conference thinking that abundance might not have enough emotional charge to motivate large numbers of people. I contemplated this view upon talking to a young woman who was a local politician and spoke with enthusiasm about her ambition to eventually run a finance institution connected to the government of her state, where she could help deal with climate change. This made me realize that people seek different kinds of meaning. For a certain type of personality, they need to imagine witnessing a revolution or helping usher in utopia, while others can feel contentment with a life of public service that involves making things incrementally better. What differentiates these two types? I think mental stability plays a large role here. People who feel particularly empty or with megalomaniac tendencies need to fantasize about extreme changes to soothe their unease. I hope the girl I talked to eventually reaches her goal.

8. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if Klein and Thompson just wrote a book about housing instead of “Abundance.” Housing is by far the most prominent issue in writings on the topic and at conferences like the one I attended. In fact, other than land use reform and the need to allow more building, there aren’t that many things that everyone who identifies with the Abundance movement agrees on. Other than that, there’s a general nod to “state capacity” and a few other concepts. At a broader level, talking about abundance rather than just housing brings in a certain number of aesthetic, epistemological, and philosophical principles, like openness to markets and a rejection of cancel culture era guilt by association.

9. On this point, the contrast between abundance and other ways of seeing the world was made clear in a discussion between Oren Cass and Matt Yglesias. The topic of the conversation was “Is Abundance Just Neoliberalism?”, which I thought was kind of odd. Instead of debating substantive ideas, it was about whether something resembles something else? I was told afterwards by a friend that the interview was for Cass’ podcast, so I guess he chose the topic. This same person pointed out to me that he comes out of a conservative subculture – on display at National Conservatism, which Cass also attended and overlapped with abundance – in which just saying something is like something else is how you win. At NatCon, declaring that an idea is one that Obama or Romney embraced, that it is not new or fresh or speaking to contemporary anger, is enough to make a point. This was an awkward fit at a conference where people actually want to understand the world and talk about ideas themselves.

   

   Cass asked whether Yglesias hoped to just go back to the Romney-Obama election. He responded that abundance had more of a focus on state capacity, and made a few other points I forgot. To me it seems obvious that the main items on the abundance agenda were simply not on the radar in 2012, most notably the difficulty of building housing. At one point, Cass also asked what Abundance has to say to people as workers or citizens. Did Abundance have anything to offer beyond giving people more stuff? Here, he brought up the Life of Julia meme and asked if that was all there was to the agenda. Yglesias responded sure, I guess she’s happy, which drew laughter from the audience. He followed up by granting that while it is true there is more to life than material goods, Cass’ movement doesn’t provide people meaning by just making them poorer. Here I think is the essence of the difference between Abundance and Cass’ project, which is that while the former has straightforward solutions to real problems, the latter uses economic reasoning as a tool to justify certain aesthetic preferences regarding what the world should look like and implement a kind of 4D chess program that involves a bunch of unstated assumptions about the relationships between economic policies and non-economic outcomes. Cass couldn’t straightforwardly engage with ideas, which is why he chose this weird framing built around owning Yglesias without having to debate economics with him, in which case he would lose.

10. Although I couldn’t attend NatCon, I heard about what was happening there and thought about how it differs from abundance as a movement. NatCon is less interested in details or finding broad appeal, while being more about giving people a grand vision that will alienate some while providing an organizing principle for others. On policy specifics, it’s deeply confused and all over the place except with regards to being anti-immigration and thinking Trump is awesome. It’s aesthetics or principles focused over being empirically focused. I guess it’s fine to care about principles first and foremost and then secondarily think about the empirical consequences of various policies, but the problem here is that NatCon empirics and epistemology are in very poor shape, as they’re not even a secondary consideration. Hence their acceptance of crank economic ideas.

11. Spencer Cox spent a lot of time talking about how awesome Utah is. And as someone who has been there and met many Mormons, and has looked at the data, I agree. The Utah Republican Party is in an interesting place, in that it represents the Red State that is most resistant to the hateful chuddification we’ve seen under Trump. Then again, look at Mike Lee’s X feed some time. A hopeful sign is that Romney was replaced in the Senate by the equally sensible John Curtis. One of the more interesting questions in the coming decades in American culture is whether Utah can maintain its political and cultural distinctiveness, but in terms of providing people with good life outcomes and not adopting the resentment-based worldview of MAGA and what is coming next.