Critique of the Abundance Movement
[2025 ended as a year many would just as soon forget, unless the U.S. stock market was your single benchmark. As the backlog of critical needs was building, I followed a series of authors in search of course corrections. One chain of thought that received some traction came to be known as the Abundance Movement. Starting with a book titled Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I followed how other authors responded to the book, and what history and current events had to say relevant to the debate. The result is a series of eight essays that will be posted to Fifty Year Perspective weekly through January and February. Here the third of eight parts.]
The abundance movement and its challenges were reviewed in the previous blog post. Can abundance overcome persistent constraints on progress? Not so fast, says Mike Solana in the September 8, 2025, issue of The Atlantic. He contends that the authority required by “Abundance liberalism” is not compatible with how representative democracy works. If we expect to improve lives by producing affordable housing, improved health care available to everyone, well-built roads, bridges, rail systems, etc., we will need a hierarchy with vision and decision-making power. Solana does not believe that the authority to produce “abundance” is possible without crossing labor, meaning the roughly 14 million American union workers. That base, he says, is not actually voting for abundance. They are voting for steady work at high-paying jobs. “Nobody in any position of power, be they Democrat or Republican, is structurally incentivized by our political system to build.”
Robert Moses and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are credited with great nationwide infrastructural development in early to mid-twentieth century. Moses was not an elected official, but the head of several New York City appointed boards and commissions. His power enabled him to build numerous expressways, bridges and parks, disrupting and destroying established communities along the way. FDR’s Public Works Administration completed more than 34,000 projects. Schools, hospitals, public buildings, airports, bridges and dams were built as the Works Progress Administration employed more than 8.5 million people.
Neither Moses nor FDR were restrained by voters or activists, but they were criticized by influential writers whose books changed the course of urban development. Jane Jacobs’s 1961 critique of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was a direct response to a Robert Moses proposal for a ten-lane elevated expressway through Jacobs’s West Village community. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which documented the harmful environmental effects of pesticides, credited with advancing the global environmental movement. A 1974 biography by Robert Caro, The Power Broker, described how Robert Moses gained unprecedented power, bypassing the democratic process to dominate politics and politicians of his time.
An article appeared in the August 26, 2025, issue of The Economist titled “The Democrats who find ‘abundance liberalism’ threatening.” The Democratic-controlled county council of Montgomery County, Maryland considered a zoning change to permit multi-unit housing in areas previously limited exclusively to single family homes. The county’s liberal suburbanites objected massively to the proposal. The backlash was successful in reducing the scope of the proposed change in density to locations along main thoroughfares. The NIMBYs prevented widespread changes to multi-family housing. Should NIMBYism be confronted?