The word “abundance” is all the rage in policy circles, with a book of that title by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson reaching the top of the bestseller charts.
Troubled by soaring housing costs, climate change concerns, and the sense that the pace of scientific breakthroughs has slowed, the authors prescribe a kind of supply-side progressivism.
“Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford,” Klein and Thompson write. But now a new prescription is needed, they say: a “liberalism that builds,” one that takes seriously the barriers set up by well-meaning policymakers that now constrain the ability of society to provide a rising standard of living for many.
Their prescription will sound familiar to many on the right, who have been preaching a version of supply-side economics since the Reagan administration. But while directionally correct, an “abundance mindset” on the right can sometimes be misapplied, blithely ignoring tradeoffs rather than shifting our assessment of them. When it comes to family-oriented policies, such as reducing the cost of child care, it is possible for conservatives and libertarians to get a little carried away with the deregulatory impulse.
Klein and Thompson face an uphill battle convincing the party of big government that, in order to achieve its ends, the prescription in some policy areas may well be less government, rather than more. It’s a message that fits more naturally in the conservative coalition, which hardly needs convincing that reducing regulatory red tape, repealing or updating outdated laws, and relying on more bottom-up innovation, rather than sclerotic bureaucratic mandates, can be a recipe for productivity growth and a more dynamic, prosperous economy. Indeed, as the Deseret News recently reported, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has leaned into this framework, posting on X that “Few things make me more excited than conservatives and liberals fighting to own the abundance agenda.”
So is “abundance” the hammer to bring to every policy nail? Well, somewhat. Boiling Klein and Thompson’s thesis down to the insight that boosting the productive capacity of the economy often requires getting rid of red tape as much as adding it is a fundamental insight of most economics textbooks. And many conservatives would be happy to take a scalpel (or even a chainsaw) to regulation in the name of it being a time to build.
One difference between progressive and conservative versions of abundance is that the former mindset envisions freeing up the state to direct more productive investments, whereas conservatives would prefer clearing out red tape and letting the free market work its magic. But as a starting position, both require scaling back regulation and red tape. The zoning barriers that prevent new market-rate housing from being built, for example, also prevent more progressive-coded goals, like a homeless shelter, affordable housing projects or public housing.
In the goods-producing sector of the economy, “abundance” is the correct watchword. We should supercharge our production of housing of all types, something that red states tend to do better on than blue states. We should change our permitting regimes to expand energy production of all types — something the Trump administration has tackled to various degrees.
But applying the concept to services like child care requires a little more careful assessment of the tradeoffs involved. For a particularly vivid example, look no further than the state of Idaho.
Earlier this year, lawmakers were on the verge of passing legislation that would have effectively wiped virtually all state regulation of the childcare industry off the books. It would have allowed each childcare facility to develop its own standard of how many staff were needed to be present per child, requiring that only one adult employee be present at any given time. And it would have proactively prevented any cities from enacting their own regulations for childcare operators.
Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and the final bill was amended to soften, rather than eliminate, staffing requirements. While we should look for opportunities to reduce the high cost of child care, there is a limit beyond which children are inadvertently put at risk. Staffing regulations exist to protect small children from accidental neglect, recognizing that asking one adult to care for 10 or 12 infants is asking them to perform at a superhuman level.
Some red tape should absolutely be slashed, from regulations over the number of blocks in a communal play area, to mandatory diversity trainings, to how many college degrees employees at a childcare center need to have earned. But that’s not the same thing as saying the state should just trust parents to assess the attentiveness and care taken by a childcare facility during the hours when they are, by definition, not there.
A better abundance-type approach to improving childcare affordability is being considered in Oregon. The bill, based on similar legislation that has been enacted in Austin, Tex., and New Hampshire, would essentially override local zoning rules that seek to push home-based daycare centers out of neighborhoods.
Many parents prefer the less formal and often cheaper approach to child care provided by friends or neighbors operating a childcare service out of their basement. Ensuring that those small businesses are able to operate without being shuttered by local zoning boards is a pro-free-market move that will expand capacity in the childcare market and could help lower prices for parents.
Klein and Thompson’s near-utopic vision of progressive abundance has some lessons for conservatives who want to claim the concept for their own purposes. Unleashing the economy is the right instinct, but it doesn’t eliminate the need to ask the question of what public policy should be aiming at.
An “abundance” approach to family policy should seek to expand the options that parents can choose between. In some cases, that could even look like a capacity expansion grant, where state money goes to childcare providers looking to expand or retrofit their space to serve more children. Using that framework requires us to be smart about identifying where bottlenecks exist and trying to address them, rather than ripping up the rule book and trusting the market will sort it all out.