Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
New homes dot the landscape in Middlesex Township, Pennsylvania, April 2023.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
The past few years have seen a widespread move away from free-market dogma, as policymakers search for new economic perspectives. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 proved to be a crossroads for economic orthodoxy. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a Democratic administration did not entrust its economic policy exclusively to adherents of Robert Rubin’s philosophy, for whom the solution to any economic issue was usually “Be less of a Democrat.”
Instead, the Biden-Harris administration trusted progressives as a coalition partner, rather than an electoral faction that had to be dealt with, not worked with. The Biden administration attempted true industrial policy for the first time in over a generation, rekindled enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and didn’t shy away from stimulating the economy when it was foundering. And while Biden’s term has been a rousing success on most macroeconomic measures—the electoral loss turned in part on global inflation and the rollback of the temporary pandemic safety net—progressives’ increasing power within Democratic politics has caused some moderates to become enraged that they’re now expected to settle for the position of senior partner, and denied near-total control.
Enter the “abundance agenda,” an attempt to generate new messaging for a new political era in which neoliberalism has fallen rapidly out of favor. The term has been floating around for years, but has more recently become a rallying cry for a whole array of deregulatory causes. The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history. The Biden administration has started to usher in a post-neoliberalism, with more heterodox ideas competing for acceptance. Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.
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What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset. The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws—which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives—but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.
While there are efforts to create abundance-oriented factions within both parties—in effect recreating the Republican and Democratic establishments that dominated politics throughout the 1990s and 2000s—the near-term focus is the Democratic Party. And, in their move to stake out partisan influence, abundance is explicitly seeking to weaken progressives. With that in mind, it’s worth understanding who exactly makes up the abundance movement.
The coalition includes many prominent centrist organizations, but also corporate interests and conservatives that MAGA pushed out of power within the Republican Party. Many components of this faction have financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.
In October 2024, a number of organizations held the Abundance 2024 conference. The event was sponsored by Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together.
- While at times heterodox, Arnold Ventures funds a sizable network of neoliberal think tanks, including $3 million to the libertarian Reason Foundation and at least $1 million to the pro–pension privatization Retirement Security Initiative, which has led to founder John Arnold (a former Enron executive) comparing himself to the Kochs. Arnold serves on the board of Meta. The Arnold Foundation has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing for school privatization.
- Open Philanthropy was co-created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. It has close ties to AI firm Anthropic, which was founded by Daniela Amodei, the wife of Open Philanthropy co-founder Holden Karnofsky. Open Philanthropy is also closely associated with effective altruism, donating millions to Sam Bankman-Fried’s favorite philosopher Will MacAskill.
- Renaissance Philanthropy was founded by Tom Kalil with money from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was started with an explicit focus on AI, and Kalil himself is on the board of Sherpa.ai. Schmidt is also on the board of multiple AI companies and has invested in crypto. He believes that, rather than try to mitigate the damage of climate change, policy should double down on AI in the hopes that it will come up with a solution. Renaissance is extremely close with Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s own foundation. Many Renaissance staff come from Schmidt Futures, including Kalil and their Economic Mobility Fund program director, partnerships manager, chief of staff, operations manager, and head of strategy and partnerships.
- Stand Together is one of the primary institutions within the Koch network, and was created by Charles Koch. Like Arnold Ventures, Stand Together funds the Reason Foundation. It funds a wide range of conservative nonprofits, including the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Its current CEO, Brian Hooks, is concurrently the president of the Charles Koch Foundation and previously was the executive director of the libertarian Mercatus Center.
Arnold, Moskovitz, Schmidt, and Koch have other ties to the broader abundance movement. For instance, the Utah-based Abundance Institute, whose chief economist spoke at the Abundance 2024 conference, is closely related to Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity (almost their whole staff comes from the Center), which was established by a joint donation from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Huntsman Foundation (i.e., the Utah Republican family). It’s also part of the State Policy Network—a network of facially distinct, but actually deeply connected and coordinated, conservative think tanks bankrolled by billionaires like the DeVos family, the Walton Family, and, of course, Charles Koch. (The crown jewel of the SPN, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, was run for 15 years by Brooke Rollins, Donald Trump’s nominee for agriculture secretary.)
There are too many organizations pushing for the abundance agenda to break down comprehensively, but here are several that have connections to corporate interests:
- The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI), which co-hosted Abundance 2024 and is listed as a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, was seeded by Charles Koch and is part of the State Policy Network. It has a track record of attacking unions. Politico reported on its work around a Silicon Valley conference as part of a “Venture Capital-Fueled Ideology.”
- Institute for Progress (IFP), which co-hosted Abundance 2024 and is listed as a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, has a bevy of corporate ties. In 2022, IFP received $110,000 from FAI and has FAI’s executive director on its board. One of the founding funders of IFP was Emergent Ventures, which is a project of the Koch-backed Mercatus Institute at George Mason University. Emergent itself was launched by a grant from Peter Thiel. (Thiel is a right-wing billionaire with a vast influence network at the intersection of techno-futurism and anti-democratic thought who has called technology an alternative to democratic politics to “unilaterally change the world.” Vice President-elect JD Vance is a known scion of Thiel.)
- Both co-founders of IFP also formerly worked at Mercatus. Another of IFP’s board members is a program associate at Mercatus. Other funders include Open Philanthropy, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, and Schmidt Futures—and used to include Sam Bankman-Fried. IFP is extremely pro-crypto; one of its founders suggested distributing unemployment benefits via crypto wallets, and the other has peddled Bitcoin as a solution to people being underbanked in the developing world.
- Niskanen co-hosted Abundance 2024 and is listed as a key institutional partner by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative. In 2023, Niskanen received money from Google, Stand Together, and Arnold Ventures. Two Niskanen fellows also published the manifesto urging for the creation of an abundance faction within the Democratic Party.
- Chamber of Progress, which self-identified its work as a part of “a growing ‘abundance’ policy movement,” is a trade group started with Google seed money by Google alum Adam Kovacevich. Kovacevich proudly touts his college activism of leading an effort to cross the United Farm Workers picket line. Chamber of Progress’s partners (read: funders) include a16z, Circle, Coinbase, Google, Kraken, Ripple, and Waymo. (Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, is a venture capital firm heavily invested in AI and crypto. Co-founder Marc Andreessen believes that technology is the solution to every problem. He is also on Meta’s board.)
The abundance agenda is championed by figures like Ezra Klein (who, with Derek Thompson, will be releasing the book Abundance in the spring of 2025) and Matt Yglesias (a Niskanen senior fellow). It’s the “liberalism that builds” that Klein called for in The New York Times to replace what he derided as “everything bagel liberalism.” As the Prospect’s David Dayen noted at the time, though, growth and building require buy-in from key constituencies to amount to a durable movement. And the abundance faction is eager to sacrifice elements of the Democratic coalition. A key part of the Klein-Dayen argument was about not including pro-union conditions in things like semiconductor build-out.
Klein and Thompson’s forthcoming book will argue that “one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s.” In other words, the abundance faction argues that overregulation is the biggest issue standing in the way of progress.
That’s certainly true in some instances—again, we’re anti–restrictive zoning. But it’s not true across the board. Moreover, it fails to recognize the role of powerful incumbents who seek to limit abundance for their own purposes.
Skipping regulatory approvals is certain to speed up building timelines, but it will do nothing to ensure we aren’t falling for the same trap Klein focuses on: creating the next generation’s problems. Cities can and should be a lot denser, and that can be done without doing away with, for example, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). That’s not to say that abundance advocates would oppose the ADA or fire code, although libertarians have long been troubled by the ADA. But it is to say that there are important trade-offs whenever you look to deregulate. And a big part of why neoliberalism needs to be repackaged is because of how deregulation made people’s lives worse and failed to deliver promised gains from its focus on growth. That’s especially true for people lower on the socioeconomic ladder who cannot literally or figuratively self-insure themselves away from the downsides of deregulation.
We’re living in a time where the bipartisan enactment of agencies like the EPA seems unimaginable. So we should take a careful approach to eliminating regulations, since we might never be able to restore them. Democrats may want to be wary before doing neoliberalism redux, especially if this time it includes crypto and AI.
