Abundance Means Trading Veto Rights for Government You Actually Trust

Critics say abundance means steamrolling advocacy groups. But what if we're asking the wrong question? Instead of "how do we stop bad projects," why not ask "why does government want to build them?"

Some people think abundance is just deregulation and disempowering groups.

They point to the abundance book's lack of focus on why environmental groups stop projects, or claim that abundance is inherently anti-union. (It’s not. Pro-union Paris can build metros for only $450 million per mile while NYC's cost is over $2 billion.)

The core of abundance isn't a stab at advocacy groups. It's noticing that we built a government people don't trust.

When people trust that the government looks out for people, they no longer need a veto to force the government to listen.

I see this tension in my own advocacy work. As road deaths activist, I realize abundance might help the government make highways straighter, wider, and thus easier to speed on. But the solution isn't a government that can't do this. I want a government that doesn't want to do this. I want a responsive government, like the Dutch and Canadian governments that did away with speed-centric road goals.

Once we stop attacking abundance for taking away veto points, we get to the core question: what's a better way to empower advocates that still allows the government to keep its promises? How do we build a government focused on human well-being and isn't beholden to inertia or corporate interests (like the car industry)?

When we focus on building a trustworthy government, we start asking different questions

What's the deeper bottleneck that led the government to not want to prioritize clean energy, safe roads, housing, or trains? By shifting the question to: "why don't I trust the government to build transportation infrastructure?," I focus instead on the deeper systemic issue.

After years of advocacy, I've learned that lower levels of government and grant structures often continue the 1960s-era goals of "build highways" and "help cars go faster". The solution isn't to take away these agencies’ power, but to explore how to update their mandates to something like "get people to where they want to go safely." Then, the government might want to make businesses within walking distance and would not want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on straightening highways.

When we dig into the actual mandates driving bad outcomes, we start rebuilding trust.

If other democracies can have high levels of trust in government, so can we.

We've had it before. America’s public trust in the 1960s was above 70%. It's been below 25% since 2010. When public trust goes down, you get a disengaged public who are less invested in democracy.

Credit: Pew Research Center

This method of governance, by veto, has contributed to average people, who aren’t engaged in government, to feel let down. This makes good politics even harder.

This low trust has also shaped how advocacy works—we've learned to assume the worst and act defensively.

Instead, we can focus on fixing the deeper problems that make each group feel they need a veto in the first place. The pathways are still clear, but they're harder to explain and don't make headlines like fights do.