Why I Started the DC Abundance Community Even Though I Hadn't Read the Book
Sometimes you have to act first and read later.
In politics, we're told to "never waste a crisis." But it's equally important to never waste momentum. When Ezra Klein popularized the abundance framework in early 2024, I recognized something bigger than a book launch. I saw a rare political reframing in real time.
For months, I'd been obsessed with government dysfunction. FDA approval bottlenecks that delay life-saving drugs. Environmental reviews that take longer than the infrastructure projects they're reviewing. The fact that the Forest Service devotes 40% of its time to regulatory paperwork instead of preventing wildfires.
But whenever I criticized these systems, I sounded like a libertarian.
It didn't matter that I was critiquing them because I wanted better outcomes for people—more housing, faster medical breakthroughs, infrastructure that actually gets built. The political framing made my concerns sound anti-government rather than pro-competence.
Then Klein made the same critiques resonate with progressives.
Suddenly, there was a path to amplifying important bottlenecks that get in the way of life-saving vaccines, government crisis response, and trust in institutions - all of which lead to people giving up on democracy.
I launched the community immediately because windows like this don't stay open long without support.
What I Got Right (And Wrong) About the Book
Klein had given a name to what I'd been documenting: meta-science bottlenecks that keep promising research unfunded, the lack of moonshot efforts to understand aging, the demotion of mRNA's inventor because she couldn't get funding.
But reading the book later, I realized how people mischaracterize it—and where my own thinking was incomplete.
Critics claim abundance is anti-union, but Klein shows that countries with stronger unions, like Canada and Portugal, build infrastructure cheaper than the US. Our regulatory complexity is so Byzantine that most construction firms stay small because they need hyperspecific knowledge to navigate each project.
The book also forced me to confront a harder question: what happens when we remove the safeguards?
When the I-95 bridge collapsed in Philadelphia in 2023, Governor Shapiro declared an emergency, bypassed normal rules, and rebuilt it in weeks instead of the usual 12-24 months. It worked beautifully. Shapiro said the key was public servants who "were empowered to be decisive, take ownership and make a call when necessary." But sometimes, empowering public servants can lead to fraud allegations that lower public trust.
The Trust Problem Will Be Sticky
This gets to Klein's most uncomfortable insight: abundance requires giving up some power and trusting government to make good decisions.
I feel this tension personally. As a road safety activist, I benefit from environmental review processes that slow down highway straightening projects that make roads more dangerous. Without that process, traffic engineers would more quickly build roads that prioritize car speed over human life.
But Klein's point isn't that we should eliminate oversight—it's that we need different oversight. Instead of a government so constrained it can't function, we need one that doesn't want to build dangerous infrastructure in the first place. Like the Dutch government that redesigned its transportation system around ensuring school children can still walk and bike to school.
The difference is trust in institutions' underlying values, not just their procedures.
Klein traces our current dysfunction to the 1970s, when "liberal lawyers, inspired by the civil rights movement, turned to the legal system to make sure government actually worked on behalf of the people." We built "adversarial legalism"—using "lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits" instead of the competent bureaucracies that govern other democracies.
We chose accountability over competence because we couldn't trust government to make good decisions. But those same accountability mechanisms now prevent the government from becoming competent enough to earn trust back.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
I used to think the solution was just to remove broken processes. But abundance requires rebuilding institutional trust that's been eroding for decades, a much harder task.
Environmental reviews exist because industry actually did pollute rivers and cut forests when unchecked.
The hard part will be proving that streamlined institutions will serve the public rather than private interests. That means years of grinding through technical details that will never make headlines. Every zoning board, peer review committee, and procurement process needs specific fixes and political fights.
I agree with Matt Yglesias that politicians can't win elections campaigning on "abundance." The work is too vague and the trust deficits too deep.
But community groups can start this work, like YIMBY groups did with housing. Our DC abundance community brings together people willing to spend Saturday afternoons talking through Paperwork Reduction Act reform and NIH funding structures.
It's not glamorous. But democracy depends on people willing to rebuild institutions piece by piece, even when it doesn't make headlines.
Our next DC Abundance meetup is Sunday July 27! RSVP here.
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