The Best Things in Life Are Free (For Everything Else, There’s Abundance)

Why Oren Cass’ Critique of the Abundance Movement Is Important and Wrong

By Ted Nordhaus

Last month, I attended a debate between Oren Cass and Matt Yglesias at Abundance 2025 titled “Is Abundance Just Neoliberalism?” The conversation was wide ranging. But for me, the most interesting discussion came right at the top. Cass opened by suggesting that,

“[F]or purposes of this discussion, instead of using the word abundance, we use the word stuff. Yes. We could use more stuff, better stuff, but I think it would help to separate the actual useful concepts from the marketing if we focus less on how nice it sounds and more on what it is actually talking about, which is simply consumption is good, more consumption would be better, and I would simply suggest that if there is one thing we have gotten a lot of since 1980, it is stuff, and we need more stuff, as the diagnosis of our problems is unlikely to get us where we need to go.”

Marshall Kosloff, the moderator of the debate and an Abundance partisan, pushed back a bit. “So before I go to Matt real quick,” Kosloff interjected, “I just want to push you on something. What I don’t like about stuff is it suggests that there’s a consumerist [sic]. If we had an abundance of toys, if we had an abundance of like X, Y, and Z, everything would be better. But I think if you listen to the conversations this morning, we’re focused on housing, we’re focused on energy, like things more tangible than stuff. So I’d just be curious how you think about that.”

“Well, you might say things less tangible than stuff,” Cass responded, “but those are all, of course, forms of stuff. If you want to use things... I’ll take that. I’ll defend things. Things it is. More things, better things, large things, fast things, all acceptable.” Cass goes on, later, to argue that the focus on housing, energy, infrastructure, and the like is nothing new. Clinton, Obama, even his old boss Mitt Romney, focused on these things in the neoliberal era. Yglesias largely agreed, arguing that policy-makers have endeavored to deliver more of these goods for decades for good reason. The fact that these goods have long been a fixation does not make them any less important, even if there is nothing particularly new about it.

The conversation went on to cover many adjacent topics, from tariffs to predistribution. But I personally found both Cass’ and Yglesias’ treatment of the question unsatisfying. Clearly the point of the Abundance movement is not the production of more trinkets. Nor is it the case that Cass actually has a problem with trinket consumption. To the contrary, Cass’s concern is not actually that Americans consume too many trinkets but that they produce too few. Cass has been supportive of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs and efforts to reverse America’s trade imbalance.

So if not trinkets, what, exactly, are Cass and Yglesias arguing about? On one level, both are arguing about how best to assure Americans more purchasing power. Yglesias defends free trade and criticizes tariffs because he argues that the former brings a range of cheap consumer goods that benefit all Americans while the latter raises prices for all Americans while only raising wages for the small minority of workers in the trinket business. Cass argues that while this approach has buoyed American consumers’ ability to purchase trinkets, it has also marginalized America’s working class in a variety of other ways economically.

This is also an old debate, not a new one, pitting those who argue that it is better to achieve purchasing power with higher wages and, resultingly, higher prices against those who observe that you can achieve the same end with lower wages and lower prices. Ironically, Yglesias, coming from the center left, takes the latter position and Cass, coming from the center right, takes the former, a reversal of traditional alignment of this argument ideologically.

The debate between these two positions is, in varying ways, adjacent to the abundance debate. But it is not the abundance debate. For that, you need to look to the issues that Kosloff raises—energy, housing, infrastructure, and similar. At the same time, Cass’ raised important questions about what sort of political agenda might more effectively address the many challenges facing the American project that do not have much to do with either “stuff” or “things”. But while Cass may have a formula for solving all those non-stuff problems, it wasn’t readily apparent across the 90 minutes he spent arguing with Yglesias what they were.

Abundance = Productivity and Growth

It is not accidental that Kosloff’s “things,” to use Cass’s suggested vocabulary, are the stuff that the abundance movement has focused on. Whether derived from a high wage, high price trinket economy, or a low wage, low price trinket economy, purchasing power doesn’t go that far for most people if energy, housing, and transportation are scarce or expensive. You can outsource trinket production to places where they are cheaper to produce. But you can’t outsource housing or infrastructure construction.

Moreover, whether produced in a high wage high price economy or a low wage low price economy, and whether derived from trinkets or, say, megabits, higher rates of economic growth produce greater surplus to reinvest in public and private infrastructure. Cass’ framing of all this economic activity and growth as mostly involving “stuff” is, ironically given his very different ideological commitments, the same move that a lot of greens make, conflating economic growth with consumerism and material consumption, “toys” as Kosloff (and President Trump) put it, despite the fact that most economic activity, growth, and surplus in modern economies isn’t derived from trinkets of any sort.

To the contrary, economic surplus in the US and other advanced developed economies is overwhelmingly derived from services of one sort or another—health services, professional services, energy services, transportation services, financial services, food services, and so on. All of those services have a material component, the poles and pavement, screens and scanners. But from an economic perspective, the really important stuff is the infrastructure and technology that allows labor to deliver better services more broadly and efficiently, and that, in turn, is ultimately the source of all that economic surplus—multifactor productivity growth, in the parlance of neoclassical economists, being the primary driver of long term economic growth.

Cass reduced this in his remarks to the production of surplus that neoliberals then propose to redistribute, contrasting this with his preference for predistribution. And insofar as predistribution obviates the need for redistribution, a tradeoff between predistribution and economic growth is, perhaps, justifiable. But just as it is not correct to reduce all economic activity and growth to material goods and consumption, it is also not correct to reduce the public uses of economic surplus to redistribution. There are a range of public goods, from biomedical research to roads and bridges to the electrical grid that are in whole or in part dependent on public investment of economic surplus that are not, strictly speaking, redistributive.

This suggests, further, that not all “stuff” is created equal. Reducing it all to trinkets elides distinctions that matter. Potato chips, as the Information Technology Innovation Foundation’s Rob Atkinson has long reminded us, are not the same as computer chips. Even if making potato chips was as profitable for both labor and capital as making computer chips, one is a general purpose technology that brings enormous productivity benefits across the entire economy, the other is, well, a potato chip. You might be fine outsourcing all your potato chip production to a geopolitical rival like China. But you wouldn’t want to outsource all your computer chip production.

Of course, in the peaceful, frictionless, pareto optimized models of neoclassical economists, you can, in fact, outsource all your computer chips and electric vehicles and solar panels to China, and all your oil production to Russia and Saudi Arabia and everything works out just fine. Everybody gets cheap energy and computing, and the multifactor productivity gains that come with them, as well as trinkets and potato chips.

But in this world, outsourcing all the key kit necessary to operate a technologically advanced economy, and not incidentally, fight a modern war, to one’s geopolitical rivals is generally a bad idea. I’m not sure that Yglesias and Cass really disagree very much that tariffs to protect these sectors of a domestic economy, industrial policies to develop them, and subsidies to promote them might sometimes be necessary. They part company on broader application of tariffs and restrictive immigration policies. But both issues are, arguably, marginal to the central debates that surround the abundance movement and its points of departure with opponents on both the right and the left.

In fact, part of what made the debate somewhat unsatisfying for me is that what most distinguishes Yglesias and Cass is the arguments that they have with Democratic and Republican partisans respectively, not with each other. Yglesias is a neoliberal reformer within a center-left political coalition that in recent years has turned away from the New Democrat reform agenda that rescued the party from the political wilderness in the Reagan era. And Cass is a full throated advocate for industrial policy within a Republican Party that, until recently, rejected such measures as fundamentally unAmerican.

If you put those things together, what you actually get is a cross-partisan abundance movement that wants to reform productivity- and innovation-killing regulation, remove self-defeating obstacles to delivering public goods cost-effectively and expeditiously, invest in developing and commercializing transformative technology, and assure that America remains at the cutting edge of geopolitically important economic sectors. And while both Yglesias and Cass have other fish to fry with each other, I doubt that either of them would much disagree that any of the above is important and necessary.

What About the Non-Stuff Stuff?

When all was said and done, I thought that the various disagreements that Cass and Yglesias ventilated about classical economic theory were far less interesting than Cass’ core critique, both because it gets at the issues that are arguably defining the American political landscape at the moment and because he didn’t appear to have any better answer to those problems than did Yglesias. There was a moment at the end of the panel that really crystallized this for me and spoke to the limits of both the abundance discourse and a particular category of criticism of it. Cass returns to his theme from the beginning. What is really different about all this abundance talk than what Obama and Clinton were up to? And he uses the example of an Obama advertisement from the 2012 campaign:

“The Life of Julia question is a fascinating one for folks who did not have the pleasure of following politics in 2012. The Obama campaign put out this wonderful little illustration of how their policies would, in fact, you know, cover the cost of Julia’s preschool, then make sure she goes to a good school. Her mom has support to go back to something else and get a degree. She graduates and then gets help being able to buy a house, and then has some support for her kid, and then she retires to tend a community garden.

And I guess just the question is, would we say that Julia lived an abundant life? I think back to the start of Ezra and Derek’s book with the narrative of the person waking up in 2050. They are cooled by renewable energy and the drone drops off the star pills and so forth. It has a sort of life of Julia vibe in that it is describing what seems like a very pleasant life, certainly, without engaging in any of the concerns I at least have for the ways that our politics and economics have failed to consider what besides an easy life and ensuring that you have lots of everything is in fact core to to human flourishing. So I don’t know, what does abundance think of Life of Julia? Is she living an abundant life or are there concerns with that model?”

This is Cass’ primary criticism of the Abundance movement as far as I can tell and it is arguably the central question that all post-industrial societies across the West are struggling to answer. After the end of scarcity, at a moment when virtually everyone in advanced developed economies has enough “stuff,” what is the point of life? What is a nation’s purpose? Steve Bannon, some years ago, opined that the nation needed a good war. Something to fight for. National conservatives offer family, faith, and country. Greta Thunberg has acknowledged that her climate strikes and activism were in part a strategy to escape severe depression in her early adolescence. The pro-Abundance techno-libertarians suggest that pro-natalism is the answer.

Abundance on this front is unsatisfying precisely because it gives a small-l liberal answer to that question, which is that the job of government and public policy is not to provide meaning in people’s lives but to provide people with the means to find whatever sort of meaning they choose—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the resources and agency to make whatever sort of life they want, so long as it doesn’t infringe upon anyone else’s ability to do the same. That’s a lot more than trinkets. But it falls far short of the “human flourishing” that Cass is looking for. Having the ability to pursue meaning and purpose in one’s life is no guarantee one will find it. For the small-l liberal, the actual meaning making is private, not public, business.

But is that enough? The original neoliberals—Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith and Montesquieu—were great believers in market economies, private property, the propensity to truck, barter, and trade, and limited government because, after centuries of religious wars that had raged across Britain and the European continent, they believed that replacing the religious passions with economic self-interest was a recipe for not only prosperity but peace. Capitalism and private property, enabled by a limited sovereign, made possible economic autonomy and mutually beneficial transaction. Everybody didn’t have to like everyone else, worship the same god, or hold the same definition of a good life. They just needed the freedom to pursue their own version of it.

But three centuries later, in late modern, advanced industrialized economies, the passions are back. In the trinket sense, we all have enough stuff. What we fight over materially are mostly status and positional goods. Not who has enough but who has what and how much.

More broadly, in the absence of material scarcity, the political sphere becomes a screen upon which to project identity and meaning—passions, not interests. As a result, the stakes in politics become materially lower but psychically higher. Politics becomes zero sum not because there is not enough stuff to go around but because prevailing on these questions, that revolve not around material concerns so much as what makes a good life and a great country, and who deserves to be part of it, seemingly requires defeating those who define those things differently.

Cass’s predistribution, in one sense, is a material proxy for the ways in which the new Republican party proposes to select new political winners. Predistribution, in this context, is arguably the wonkier, more academic version of President Trump’s cruder efforts to tilt the benefits of federal largesse and policy toward the constituencies that elected him—red state, working class, non-college educated, and rural voters—and away from those that opposed him—blue state, coastal, college educated, and urban.

And while there is a strong argument that the latter have benefitted disproportionately from the neoliberal era, it’s also not clear to me how predistribution via tariffs, immigration restrictions, higher wages, and higher prices actually addresses the question that Cass keeps asking. What, besides an easy life and more stuff after all, does Cass’ alternative to neoliberalism offer Joey, who now works in a booming trinket factory in a revitalized midsized city in the industrial midwest and earns a better wage thanks to restrictive immigration and tariffs, that Obama-era neoliberalism didn’t offer Julia?

Joey and Julia both now live an abundant life. But I’m not sure how any of this might reasonably address the other things that are core, as Cass puts it, to human flourishing. Indeed, insofar as predistribution and other non-neoliberal theories of economic distribution are intended to level up and assure that those left behind in the neoliberal era achieve similar levels of comfort, affluence, and agency as those who benefited from the prior era, those policies should arguably be expected to make the existential crises of post-industrial, post-scarcity economies worse, not better—ease of life and a surfeit of stuff being, ostensibly, the cause of the problem.

If more stuff is the problem, then neither Yglesias’ neoliberalism nor Cass’ alternative offer much of a solution. Joey and Julia will both end up addicted to booze, drugs, gambling or porn in an effort to fill the void created by living a comfortable life devoid of struggle, meaning, or purpose. Or rage tweeting about the collapse of western civilization or the looming climate apocalypse or oligarchs or gender therapy or Palestine. Or, for that matter, the neoliberal “billionaire-financed” Abundance movement.

And even were it true that scarcity, struggle, and hardship were the answer to the various crises of meaning, loneliness, and purpose that too often plague citizens in affluent economies, democratic polities are typically not inclined to impose those conditions upon themselves, whether under the guise of national greatness, degrowth, a climate emergency, or something else, at least not intentionally. We aren’t going back to the culture, community, and collectivism of older forms of social and economic organization. Even if we could, you don’t get that lost culture and community back without bringing poverty and precarity, provincialism, and patriarchy along for the ride in ways that most people have, historically, found to be stifling, not revelatory.

Ultimately, you can’t put the modernization genie back in the bottle. We become different beings after modernization than before. For this reason, a lasting solution to the psychic and spiritual dislocations and crises of modernity will need to go through post-modernity and post-scarcity rather than attempting to undo them. In the face of material abundance, imposing limits and boundaries volitionally is healthy and good. Imposing them externally, unwillingly, or from above is a recipe for both passivity and abuse. One requires and nurtures what psychologists call an internal locus of control, the other imposes an external locus of control. Creating the conditions for the former and resisting demands for the latter is, in my view, what the Abundance movement ought to strive for. Abundance, autonomy, and agency, in this sense, are the worst solutions to our post-modern malaise except for all the others.