Abundance “hasn’t caught fire,” they said. Abundance is “politically insufficient in a big way,” they insisted.
And yet, even amid worsening political polarization and populist ferment, abundance-oriented policymaking is quickly becoming standard operating procedure at national, state, and local levels. The ROAD to Housing Act was one of the only major pieces of bipartisan legislation passed during the 119th Congress. As of this writing, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) is on the cusp of passage, culminating years of energy abundance advocacy. Hundreds of housing and energy permitting bills have passed in state legislatures across the country over the past two years.
That’s the track record as we approach Abundance 2026, the third annual Abundance conference for which I’m a producer. In about a month, dozens of abundance organizations and hundreds of attendees will gather, once again, to celebrate our movement’s successes and deliberate over its future.
We’re also, of course, on the heels of the 2026 midterm elections, which delivered even-better-than-expected results for the Democrats.
On the one hand, these midterms affirmed—again—the thermostatic nature of American politics, a whiplash for which cross-ideological abundance policymaking is not only compatible but optimized. On the other hand, the coming years will bring the first open presidential primary for both parties that has occurred since the abundance coalition emerged after the pandemic. I believe significant progress towards the abundance agenda is possible regardless of either the setting of the thermostat or the occupant of the White House. But the exact nature of that progress is certainly contingent on political trajectories.
So although reports of the death of the abundance movement are greatly exaggerated, we remain a young movement, with much to decide and discover about ourselves. As we navigate an uncertain future, there are five unsettled arguments I would urge my fellow abundists to reckon with:
1. Who is going to build the future?
For the doubters, I am here to affirm that abundance has absolutely already evolved from a Discourse to a Movement. But it’s definitely still early days. And while there are reasons to expect abundance philanthropy to grow healthily in the coming years, big questions remain as to how to expand and organize the movement itself, and how that movement will shift the mass public on infrastructure and technology sentiment, and on institutional trust.
Now, we should feel some sense of accomplishment over the syncretic work already done to launch this nascent movement. The covid-era rollercoaster of supply shortages and miracle vaccines, and the spike in inflation that followed, gave rise to new ways of thinking about old ideas: YIMBYism, ecomodernism and energy abundance, progress studies, state capacity reforms, deregulation, full employment, and beyond. These new ways of thinking were synthesized in the writings of Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Jerusalem Demsas, Eli Dourado, Marian Tupy, Marc Dunkelman, Nicholas Bagley, and other public intellectuals; the founding of multiple new abundance and progress organizations like, well, the Abundance Institute and the Institute for Progress; and the launching of the Abundance conference in 2024.
All of that is great, and has already yielded real, concrete policy accomplishments in the world, like the passing of major state housing supply laws, the founding of the Build America Caucus, the coordination of the Abundance Electeds Network of state and local elected officials, the encouraging progress made on nuclear regulation and commercialization, and so on. If the abundance movement wants to notch more of these kinds of wins, it needs to sustain and accelerate this shift from idea synthesis to yet more efficient political organizing and policy entrepreneurship.
I can’t think of anyone in the movement who would disagree with this. But it’s easier said than done, and I can imagine two particular failure modes. The first is stasis: all of us in the abundance movement continue our coalitional, analytical, and discursive work, but without much growth in size or ambition. The second is reversion: “abundance” is, as the critics already warn, a flash in the pan, and it turns out YIMBYs and nuclear bros and state capacity reformers can’t or won’t ultimately collaborate in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is the future augured by a public that’s turning against data centers as well as solar farms, new housing construction as well as aluminum smelters.
Avoiding those failure modes will require, I think, more organizations, more policy campaigns, more cross-issue collaboration, and more funding.
That’s not to express disappointment in the leading philanthropic benefactors of the abundance movement. On the contrary, my point is that the abundance movement today is, if anything, highly productive relative to our total funding. While The American Prospect’s latest flailing attempt at an exposé pegged abundance philanthropy somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars annually, this is frankly trivial compared to other movements. Estimates of philanthropic support for the democracy movement, the women’s movement, and the climate movement sit at approximately $3 billion, $7 billion, and $9 billion, respectively.
Rather, the growth of the abundance movement may be more of a demand challenge than a supply challenge. If Nan Ransohoff is right, the IPOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX alone could yield as much as $100 billion in new philanthropic capital—almost a 20% increase in total US charitable giving. Much of this capacity would be held by individuals and trusts predisposed towards abundance and progress organizing. The challenge, in other words, may not be so much in finding the money, but in finding productive things to do with it.
Effectively channeling all that funding will require figuring out how to attract and cultivate the issue publics—largely outside of philanthropy and think tanks—who are showing up to support the abundance agenda. YIMBYs are obviously the most successful abundance faction when it comes to building an issue public, though there are reasonably well-constituted constituencies for building renewables and even nuclear energy. But really ameliorating the housing crisis, quadrupling energy supply, reforming our civic institutions, and constructing the Machine God (more on that below) will require a more significant sea change in public attitudes about infrastructure development and institutional trust. Mobilizing the boots on the ground that will build the abundant future remains an unsolved problem for the abundance movement.
2. What is the ultimate role of abundance philanthropy?
Dylan Matthews published a piece in The Argument a few months ago in which he explained why he has become relatively more supportive of private philanthropy after critiquing it as a journalist for many years. It’s a thought-provoking piece, not least because both the scope and shape of philanthropy are in the midst of upheaval.
I’m not a disinterested party here. I am absolutely, positively talking my own book when I say that the abundance agenda merits at least a tenth the amount of philanthropic funding the climate movement sets on fire every year to watch global carbon emissions tick upward anyway. But the status of the funding landscape also raises a subject Matthews addresses in his essay: the role of billionaire capital in the abundance movement.
Groups like the Revolving Door Project regularly accuse the abundance movement of being in thrall to its “billionaire benefactors.” But as the above figures indicate, all such nonprofit coalitions are largely funded by billionaires, and often highly reticent to disclose where their funding comes from. This hypocrisy matters and it should lead you to downgrade your estimation of these abundance critics. But it is also simply true that the abundance movement is often aligned with the interests of capital.
This loose compact between abundance civil society and industrial capital does require a clear-eyed sense within the abundance coalition that economic growth, the proliferation of startup founders, returns to capital, and, indeed, the generosity of billionaires are not things to apologize for. If these outcomes are not exactly the concrete goal of every abundance organization, they are at least a correlate of realizing the abundance agenda.
These congruences may actually intensify in the years ahead.
Long before there was a recognized need for an abundance agenda, there was the Great Stagnation—the understanding that, among other things, government- and university-funded scientific research was generating diminishing social returns compared to the heyday of the Manhattan and Apollo eras. Today, in an era of eroding confidence in scientific research and the AI-fueled disintegration of the university system, philanthropies and focused-research organizations are stepping up to supplement the faltering institutions of scientific discovery and public health improvements. Just this summer, the payments conglomerate Stripe announced a $500 million philanthropic project to eliminate respiratory infection.
So it’s not just that billionaire philanthropists are funding the policy think tanks and upstart activist groups pushing for upzoning and permitting reform. It’s that capital, increasingly financed by the returns to AI in particular, is building whole new institutions that act as direct providers of research and other public services.
This line of thought can almost certainly be taken too far. As Jennifer Pahlka reminded us this summer, even a dramatic surge in abundance philanthropy would pale in comparison to the financial largesse of the US government. And as Daniel Stid responded, there are big implementation questions when it comes to the materialization and application of all this new philanthropic capacity. When it comes to technological innovation, infrastructure deployment, and the expeditious provision of services, we shouldn’t count on billionaires as the sole and/or direct providers.
Nor does the general pro-development posture resolve any of the other attendant issues: the proper rate of corporate taxation, the role of money in politics, the scope of regulatory interventions, and, indeed, the tax deductibility of charitable donations. As I’ve written before, there are ways in which outsourcing public services to the nonprofit sector actually undermines democratic accountability and impedes the efficacious delivery of outcomes. And there are both more dirigiste and more laissez-faire visions of an abundant future (“Red Plenty” and “Dynamist” Abundance, respectively, in Steve Teles’ taxonomy).
All that said, coalitionally speaking, it’s not just that capital is going to finance our movement like it does every other movement in America today, but also that developers, investors, executives, financiers, and other capital institutions are plausibly as much a part of the abundance agenda as the policy entrepreneurs and the local activists. In an increasingly populist turn against capital and taxation alike, that’s a complicated and challenging argument for abundance advocates to take on. But take it we must.
3. Who’s in the abundance tent?
There’s a loose consensus within the movement that housing and energy/infrastructure are the two most established pillars of the abundance agenda. There are then a disorganized variety of opinions on what should qualify as a third—or fourth, or fifth—pillar. Should it be immigration, to achieve abundance of labor? Or maybe health care, to cut red tape and regulations that drive up the costs of basic health? Or should we center pro-natalism, in an effort to support family formation, rebalance the increasingly lopsided age distribution of the American population, and underwrite the tax base that funds the rest of the abundance agenda?
There’s no formal parliamentary mechanism to make these decisions, and maybe there should be. It’s probably not the case that everything should fall within the abundance agenda, even if the frameworks of abundance, progress, and state capacity are broadly useful policy tools. An organized movement arguably requires the discipline to set issue priorities.
But even if we establish the long tentpoles of abundance, that leaves the question of who’s inside and who’s outside the tent.
Sometimes these decisions will be made for us. I’ve been a bit surprised to see, for instance, that the fiercest critics of abundance are not the environmentalists whose imaginaries of pristine nature are threatened by growth and technology, but the neo-Brandeisian movement, which in principle should actually support the abundance movement’s efforts to break up concentrated bottlenecks on economic opportunity.
That helps establish the conditions of anti-monopoly politics within the abundance movement, though not definitively. The Roosevelt Institute stands out as an organization working to bolster antitrust enforcement while also developing its own YIMBY and permitting reform agendas, and making explicit overtures to the abundance movement. But as a whole, the positive-sum abundance movement is at odds with the zero-sum antitrust movement.
And as I said, the environmental movement contains even more such edge cases. I’ve advised caution on consorting with the solarmaxxers, who I think often want to make nice with abundance liberals to achieve an abundance of solar energy but not much else. Though neo-Brandeisian organizations like Public Citizen are some of the fiercest opponents of permitting reform, even the environmental organizations who have voiced vague support for permitting reform are showing up to obstruct BAAJA. But there are other, subtler proto-abundances within the environmental movement.
Grant Mulligan recently published an interesting landscape analysis titled “Environmentalists aren’t anti-abundance,” which was hard not to read as a direct rebuke of Ted Nordhaus’s speech at Abundance 2024, titled “Environmentalism Is Antithetical to Abundance.” And one way to synthesize these opposing viewpoints is simply to note that while environmentalism as a worldview is broadly opposed to technology and growth, there’s a growing faction of self-identified individual environmentalists who are partially or fully on board with the abundance agenda. I would argue these folks are actually ecomodernists at heart, but we’ll have to get to the bottom of that another time.
For now, I’m pleased to say that Breakthrough is not the only environment-focused organization in the abundance movement. At Abundance 2026 at least, we have Breakthrough, the American Conservation Coalition, the Environmental Policy and Innovation Center, and the Property and Environment Research Center—groups from across the political spectrum dedicated not just to building a clean energy future but to protecting the landscapes and animal populations in between all this awesome new infrastructure.
The other obvious example of a coalition on the edge of the abundance tent is organized labor.
Coming from the environmental world, I’ve long considered labor an ally to ecomodernists. Industrial unions were the first formidable opponents to 1970s degrowth environmentalism. Unions have tended to support nuclear energy, permitting reform, farm mechanization and GMOs, and other ecomodernist priorities. But the reality is perhaps a bit more complicated on the ground across the broader abundance landscape. As Josh Barro has reported, labor unions’ interventions have prevented efficiencies in transit construction and operation, obstructed hotel development, and, yes, impeded cost reductions in new housing. As I understand it, carpenters’ unions are a bit of an outlier here, perhaps because their work depends uniquely on significant non-union labor. But even though the building and maintenance of housing and infrastructure should in principle create more work for unions of all stripes, many in organized labor oppose various abundance reforms.
That’s to say nothing of the public sector unions that organize not only to protect sclerotic and proceduralist government institutions, but also lobby on superficially unrelated issues, like when the SEIU and the California Teachers Association have opposed reforms to state-level environmental review and housing expansion.
There are a few other dimensions along which the usefulness of abundance is contested. Some issue advocates attempt to pursue abundance with proposals to subsidize demand, whether for solar panels or childcare centers, while most of us in the tent understand abundance to be more focused on clearing bottlenecks on supply. The lines between abundance, progress, and state capacity are often blurry, and lead to similar coalitional questions, such as whether local governance reforms like education or public safety fall under the abundance umbrella.
At bottom, these discrete coalition questions reduce to a core conundrum: is abundance primarily a swiss-army-knife mindset for an endless variety of policy problems, or is it a structured and disciplined issue-oriented advocacy movement?
4. Can abundance transcend partisanship?
Much of the discussion of abundance has centered on the fights within the Democratic Party. The negative spin on this, for Democrats, is that economic and material shortages are worse problems in blue states. Red states tend to have cheaper housing, more affordable and diverse supplies of energy, lower infrastructure costs, and even demonstrate more progress on issues like education reform (e.g. the so-called “Mississippi Miracle”). The more positive spin is that Democratic strongholds like California and New York are epicenters of economic activity. Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Manhattan would all be expected to have a higher cost of living given the concentration of population and wealth that, along some margin, is guaranteed to drive up prices.
Even when Republicans pursue abundance agenda items, they tend to use different terminology, like “energy dominance,” “deregulation,” and, indeed, “making America great again.”
Meanwhile, in the expensive Democratic enclaves where abundance reforms are in a sense most needed, many progressive organizers are trying to box out the abundance movement in favor of a Democratic Socialist cohort often more focused on frankly performative campaigns against oligarchy and the state of Israel. Some of the more vocally pro-housing figures in the Democratic Party now come from the DSA politicians like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Los Angeles Mayor-Elect Nithya Raman, but even these leftists face criticism from those even further to their left.
All of which is to say that while we in the abundance movement may think we have the best response to populist anxieties over the cost of living and institutional upheaval, the self-identified populists don’t always agree.
The remaining question, then, is whether abundance will mostly take root as a reform political movement within a Democratic coalition, or as a cross-partisan social intellectual movement self-conscious of its broadly counter-populist policy agenda.
Without raising any existential dilemmas for the groups and leaders currently in the abundance coalition, this choice does present different paths forward for the growth of the movement.
On the one hand, whatever language is used, there really are policy and political lessons that Red America can teach Blue America (and, yes, vice versa). Abundance, again, is syncretic, combining strains of market liberalism, state capacity, technological determinism, and more. Quarantining the abundance agenda to the interests, values, and demographics of Blue America could forfeit considerable policy ideas. And any reforms advanced on a bipartisan basis will likely prove more durable.
On the other hand, the nationalization of politics and the sorting of the American electorate can make cross-partisan coalitions and policymaking feel impossible these days, especially at the federal level. And with the first open presidential primary for both parties since 2016 ahead of us, the political returns to bipartisanship may prove elusive.
I have my own preferences in this argument. I think that BAAJA-style bipartisan compromise is not a concession but an ideal. But the reality is that much of this will be decided by events outside the control of the movement itself. Both parties are internally fractious right now. The postwar fusionism that characterized the Republican Party is disintegrating, as increasingly secular and market-skeptical factions of young conservatives displace the social conservatives and national-security hawks that came before them. Likewise, the Democratic coalition has become more urban and culturally progressive than it was in prior generations. This sharpens the contrasts with the party’s more growth-friendly moderate and labor factions, while also concentrating the pain of housing and infrastructure shortages within this younger, progressive cohort.
But as strong and unpredictable as these political currents are, abundance advocates will have no choice but to navigate them.
5. What to do about AI abundance?
There’s a divergence of views within the movement over whether abundance is in service of, or exogenous to, deeper pursuits of spiritual meaning-making. And the way I think this dispute will come to a head in the coming years is over the issue of artificial intelligence.
At the first Abundance conference in 2024, Matt Yglesias expressed skepticism that abundance should even become a movement at all, as doing so would risk the coalition taking on omnicause commitments instead of remaining doggedly focused on tractable policy bottlenecks. He expanded on that sentiment in a debate with Oren Cass at Abundance 2025, arguing that abundance is useful for unlocking material opportunities, while deeper sources of meaning should remain outside the abundance framework.
The day of that debate, Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition published an essay in American Affairs, in which he argued that “absent from Klein and Thompson’s view of the future is a robust orientation around human flourishing and the institutions that serve it: faith, family, and tradition.”
To Yglesias, abundance is at most the necessary precondition to pursuing these deeper sources of meaning. To Barnard, abundance is the means to a much more particular end and, in fact, could lead American society astray if abundance advocates lose sight of these foundational cultural and religious commitments.
I would make two countervailing interventions here. The first is to encourage all sides of this dispute to engage it in good faith. Whether you’re a globalist secular neoliberal or a trad-Cath foundationalist, your abundance interlocutors do actually agree with most of your economic policy priors. That’s not a reason to ignore the disagreements; it’s a reason to take your ideological counterparts’ ideas seriously.
The second is to suggest, at least provisionally, that the contradictions here are not as steep as they may appear. Most of the abundance advocates I interact with are thoughtful, if not in full agreement with each other, on issues of natalism, walkable neighborhoods, online gambling and pornography, screen time for children, and other issues that intersect with the advance of material abundance and technological change. Harmonizing the seemingly discordant forces of liberalism, traditionalism, and technology might not prove as intractable as partisans on various sides of these debates would have you believe.
But I also think that these harmonies will be disrupted by AI.
Now, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a general openness to artificial intelligence within the abundance coalition, and a related eagerness to solve the technical and policy puzzles inherent to the build-out of data centers, chip fabs, and other compute infrastructure. The abundance advocates I know are broadly optimistic about the possibilities of government procedural reforms unlocked by LLMs and other AIs.
But the consensus mostly breaks down there. There are deeply held disagreements within the abundance movement over the need for AI safety regulation and control, the property rights over AI-generated content and returns to capital, the realistic risks AI poses to humanity, and, indeed, whether AI should ultimately augment or replace the human species.
It’s one thing for different abundance advocates to set aside pre-political spiritual and cultural values to collaborate on reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act or local zoning requirements. It’s quite another to imagine everyone agreeing to disagree on AI acceleration. And given the momentum and significance of the AI industry itself, I think it’s these disputes more than any others that are likely to cause irreparable rifts in the abundance coalition.
I don’t know exactly how these disputes can be adjudicated. But AI is both the first real novel issue to appear since the emergence of the abundance movement, and the issue most likely to destabilize the ex ante technology and policy agendas of everyone involved. It may be worth an attempt to align on what humanist commitments, if any, most or all of the abundance movement can agree upon.
Among other things, such an exercise might help settle the question: is our work in the abundance movement about what we do, or about who we are?