Even more abundant

When politics and civic life too often feel small and mean, broad optimism and promise is deeply refreshing. The core premise of Abundance, the new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (that it seems everyone I read is reading including a really great dialog with Matt Yglesias out this week), is that the zero-sum thinking so ingrained in our Western, neoliberal, secular culture, so effective in driving competition, so fundamental to our assumptions about value and wellbeing – has actually contributed to a pervasive scarcity mindset that is dramatically holding society back in all of the most important dimensions necessary for humanity to evolve and grow and thrive. 100% agree.

Then on top of this premise, they offer a singular, clear provocation: what if we don't have enough of what we need by choice? And the implicit corollary: what might be possible if we made different choices? Embedded in these essential questions are two other ideas that combined with the belief and animating ambition of an abundant mindset that can help us start to surface the underlying values that animate Ezra and Derek's more productive "liberalism that builds."

The "we" in their provocation points toward a collective culture-making and collective action that presupposes that we've left behind another lie deeply embedded in American mythology: the myth of self-reliance. In nature, humans are snacks for other things. We are interconnected, interdependent community beings whose superpower is collaboration at scale through stories that build global cultures and systems.

Additionally, even the possibility of a state of "enough" is anathema to one of the core defining assumptions of modern market economics: the principle of nonsatiety. That for the right price people will always buy more of a good. This concept underlies our "growth is a moral good" orientation to consumption and wealth and encourages an infinite-growth expectation and a positive-feedback-loop-seeking design mentality (especially in venture-backed companies) that produces deeply extractive, exploitative, unnatural business and systems models.

Believing that we can all thrive, where we all live free, creative lives in a kind, just society, where everyone has enough demands a very different relationship to wealth, growth, and equilibrium that is currently at odds with the sustainability-washing themes that dominate the latest "healthy capitalism" iteration of neoliberalism. Embracing a new posture toward growth and equilibrium might push us toward a more satisfying but more complex relationship to social capital theory and to the vibrant civic life it might make possible. If we can open our thinking to the limits of our current assumptions, this new posture might could teach us how to value more types of effort and choose different units for measurement for wealth alongside the dramatically expanded capacity to build and support more of what people need to participate in modern life.

The core provocation of Abundance might just be the prompt we need to dig deeper into the nature of a refreshed idea of liberalism, of why we believe what we believe, and the conviction that humanity needs to grow in new ways that do not undermine small "d" democratic culture, freedom, and justice. But we need to take the provocation and keep going: the provocation is not enough on its own. The key to Abundance is the iron-clad conviction that we cannot be more if don't seek more: if we continue to choose the small, low-ceiling of scarcity, it will continue to define our policies, our systems, and our experience – especially with regard to the systems that shape the underlying conditions for daily life in the form of housing, food, transportation, energy.

We must be as clear about the underlying principles (note: more to come on a reimagined social contract) and about the foundational practices (note: more to come on how we re-enchant our civic life) they inform that drive us toward that more abundant horizon as we are about the ambition to reach for it. It's the reshaping of the underlying assumptions that Ezra and Derek's refreshed liberalism implicitly calls into question – and that we need to make explicit features of our approach, our narratives, and our work – that will reclaim our civic life and renew America. Delivering on that promise is guaranteed by the moral clarity of the principles and practices that define how we pursue that abundance, not just our desire for it. The provocation, the optimism and possibility of abundance is a beautiful invitation to begin at the beginning of with the "we" and the "enough" questions, but not the path. So let's begin and make some paths.

Last updated: 10 Apr 2025