Could abundance solve the country’s problems?

Building an abundance faction to deliver on society's promises.

Next:Economy Newsletter "A politics of abundance could solve many of our problems." Generated with Adobe Firefly.   Abundance may be the next great political program "We believe the root cause of American political dysfunction is that our public institutions have stopped helping most people make meaningful progress in their lives. To get back on track, we need one of our two parties to incubate a new set of ideas aimed at renovating our institutions, such that they work again." Abundance, argues author and Abundance Network founder Misha David Chellam, may be the "next great political program." In "The What, How, and Why of Abundance," from his Modern Power newsletter, Chellam offers a primer on the incipient abundance movement: We want abundant housing, such that fewer people are rent-burdened and more people can afford to move to areas with economic opportunity. We want abundant clean energy, so we can avert climate change while increasing quality of life — everything from reduced electricity bills to enabling desalination, which could get us to abundant water. We want abundant good education, such that opportunity exists for every kid, regardless of birth zip code. We want abundant good jobs, such that people are able to provide for their families and feel dignity and security. Fundamentally we want to make it easier for regular people to build good lives for themselves and their children, and we think we can do it by making the things above, and many other things in society, Abundant. But *how* can we do this? The "how" of this, according to Chellam, is two-pronged. One: reduce supply-side constraints, powered by narrow interest capture. Think of the power of NIMBYs to constrain housing supply or the endless roadblocks to moving to the green infrastructure we need to avoid a climate collapse and enjoy abundant energy. Two: build state capacity so our government can actually achieve its policy goals. Our dysfunctional political system means that putting an abundance agenda into practice will be tough. But this month the Niskanen Center shared some ideas for kick-starting an abundance movement in its online journal, Hypertext. (And more will continue to be added.) As Niskanen's David Dagan notes in his introduction to the series , these essays explore how abundance boosters might work to "build power around [the movement's key propositions]." We round up some of the main arguments below, but we recommend diving deeper when you have time. Abundance is an important concept that could help us tackle some of the entrenched problems holding us back both as a society and as a nation. + Derek Thompson and former Congressional candidate Suraj Patel discussed the abundance movement on the Center for New Liberalism's New Liberal podcast.   "Abundant vs. Moderate" Don't confuse the abundance movement with a plea for political moderation. Misha David Chellam compares the world view of self-described "moderates" with that of "abundants," explaining that while both "share the belief that common sense solutions to a range of political issues exist," they "diverge. . .on the depth of the problem and thus the types of solutions needed": Abundants believe the problem is fundamentally about product, not marketing. Our problem is not how we talk about issues. It's how we don't deliver on them. In the Abundant theory of the case, extremism is downstream of broken institutions that fail to deliver for regular people. In our estimation, moderation is a reaction to extremism, but extremism is a reaction to brokenness, not moderation. For moderation to succeed, it needs to tackle brokenness.   "The Rise of the Abundance Faction" "Moderation itself is a dead end," say Steven Teles and Rob Saldin, political science professors and coauthors of the 2020 book Never Trump. Instead of positioning ourselves by watering down populist conservatism or progressivism, Abundance has its own quite sweeping package of reform that envisions a wholesale program of state-building—building housing, clean energy, and infrastructure by reforming our creaky, captured systems of governance at all levels, and building a simpler, more effective and democratically legitimate welfare and regulatory state. And that will require fostering "intra-party factions" through political advocacy at all levels. But executed successfully, an abundance faction could reinvigorate the Democratic party in the short term and make inroads with working-class voters who have grown disenchanted with both political parties. + Teles dived deeper into some of these ideas in a recent episode of The Realignment podcast.   "From Stakeholder Capitalism to State-Capacity Capitalism" Didi Kuo, a Center Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), reassesses the role business should play "not only in the economy but in democracy more broadly." Examining the failures of the "stakeholder capitalism" movement as well as the history of corruption in the 19th century, Kuo finds that "capitalism and democracy work best when they work together, rather than when they are at odds." But today, she argues, "a half-century of neoliberal economic orthodoxy underpinning globalized, financialized capital has created an unsustainable combination of unresponsive democratic government amidst worsening social and political conditions." As a result, "businesses once again need to rethink their interests, broadly construed, and to realize that the pursuit of economic advantage alone may not be in the long-term interests of democracy and growth."   "Stop Making People Do the Wrong Jobs" Jennifer Pahlka has been tirelessly championing the kind of changes that can deliver on the promises government makes. As she notes in her book, Recoding America, and in her newsletter, Eating Policy , state capacity doesn't transpire in a vacuum. It's the result of not just hiring the right people but having the right job in the first place. If most civil service jobs are defined by (and get their power from) stopping things from happening, we get a government that churns a lot of cycles (and gets very big) but doesn't actually do much, and doesn't achieve the policy goals set by elected leaders. We need to craft a government with the right balance of go energy relative to stop energy, and ultimately relieve public servants of some of the burdens of bureaucracy so they can actually do the jobs they were hired to do . While not part of Niskanen's abundance series (although Pahlka is a senior fellow there), Pahlka's work reminds us that an abundance movement can only be implemented through the hard work of our civil servants—so we should ensure they're set up for success. + More from Pahlka at the Niskanen Center: "Culture Eats Policy." (Disclosure: Jennifer Pahlka is married to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly.)   —Tim O’Reilly and Peyton Joyce This message was sent to alexvarboffin.abbb@blogger.com. 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