The next phase of abundance will depend on deeper evidence across policy domains
A recent Yale panel featuring Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias highlighted how building a research foundation now will determine whether ideas translate into action later.
The abundance agenda has a research problem, according to two leading voices in the debate. In some policy areas, the ideas are well developed and heavily debated. In others, they remain thin, fragmented, or only loosely defined.
That issue was at the center of a conversation between Jerusalem Demsas, founder and editor of The Argument, and Matthew Yglesias, author of Slow Boring, moderated by Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan and Zachary Liscow of Yale Law School. The panel took place during the Law of Abundance conference, co-hosted by Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy and the Niskanen Center.
The panelists agreed that while calls to build more, faster, and at lower cost have become a familiar feature of policy debates, what is less settled is how prepared policymakers are to act on those ideas across different sectors.
Bagley and Liscow framed the discussion around the movement’s uneven development. Liscow, who organized the conference, asked where abundance thinking is already backed by careful evidence and where it remains more aspirational. If political windows open, will researchers have done enough work in advance to make reform actionable?
The panelists argued that the next phase of the agenda will depend less on refining familiar debates and more on building a broader body of evidence across multiple domains.
What's Next for the Abundance Movement: A Conversation with Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias
Abundance as an approach, not a platform
From the outset, both speakers emphasized that abundance should be understood less as a fixed political platform and more as an approach to problem-solving, one focused on identifying and reducing forms of artificial scarcity created by policy and institutional design.
For Yglesias, the challenge is not a lack of ideas but an uneven foundation. To illustrate the imbalance, he pointed to a familiar image circulating online: a drawing of a horse in which the front half is rendered in careful detail while the back half fades into rough, incomplete lines.
That, he suggested, captures the current state of abundance thinking. On the housing side, we have lots of insight, knowledge, and understanding—noting that the nuance and arguments in this area are well-developed. Yet in other areas, like energy, there’s just “some stuff.”
The problem, he argued, is not conceptual ambition but depth. In sectors that shape everyday life, including health care delivery, energy, and public administration, the evidence base remains thin. Building it out will require sustained research to clarify which reforms improve outcomes and under what conditions.
The risks of over-promising and the limits of coalition politics
Demsas warned against tying the abundance agenda to promises it cannot realistically deliver on, especially in the short term. Affordability pressures, she noted, are real and urgent, but many of the policies most closely associated with abundance operate over longer time horizons. “There’s a real risk of tying abundance to promises that it can’t deliver on,” Demsas said, “and then undermining the entire movement as a result.” When talking about economic growth and long-run prosperity, she noted, you have to be honest about what these policies can and can’t do, in both the short and long run.
Both speakers were skeptical of efforts to fold abundance into what Demsas described as an “omnicause” style of politics, in which every policy goal is expected to advance every other social objective. While acknowledging that issues like housing, climate, and inequality are often interconnected, she argued that trying to make abundance serve too many purposes at once risks diluting its analytical clarity.
Instead, Demsas emphasized the importance of truth-seeking over coalition management, given people’s different beliefs about how to make the world a better place. “You can only figure that out if you’re willing to say what you think,” she said, even when those views cut against existing political alliances.
Bagley asked whether abundance is best understood as a political agenda or an orientation for structuring debates, noting tensions with groups often central to Democratic politics, including unions, environmentalism, and suburban homeowners. He pressed on whether a viable coalition exists for abundance-style politics over time.
Filling in the gaps: research before political windows open
Liscow asked how scholars can be most helpful to having good policy discussions and producing good policy.
Even if political windows open for reform, Yglesias argued, meaningful progress will depend on whether the groundwork has been laid in advance. That includes developing evidence, building networks of expertise, and clarifying tradeoffs before decisions are forced by crisis.
Yglesias emphasized the importance of movement-building, network-building, and research, noting that “if we don’t do that work ahead of time, we’re not going to be able to act when that time comes.”
The Tobin Center, which sponsored the conference along with the Niskanen Center, has long been interested in a research agenda that can produce actionable learnings on bolstering state capacity or uncovering supply-side or “abundance” policy solutions to issues in affordability. Beyond funding individual projects, such an agenda aims to identify where evidence is strong, where it is thin, and where new research could most productively inform policy design and implementation at the state and local level.
As the panel made clear, the success of the abundance movement may hinge less on agreement across every issue area and more on whether its core ideas are supported by careful analysis. Filling in the unfinished parts of the sketch will be essential if abundance is to move from an appealing diagnosis to durable policy change.
The Tobin Center’s work on abundance and state capacity
The panel builds on a growing body of work focused on state capacity and supply issues often referred to as ‘abundance.’ In recent years, the center has supported influential research on infrastructure costs, permitting reform, and public sector capacity, while also working directly with state partners to translate evidence into practice.
As part of this agenda, the Tobin Center is bringing together policymakers, researchers, and philanthropic leaders to help build a more coordinated research agenda on abundance and state capacity, focused on producing evidence that policymakers can use to design, implement, and refine reforms in practice.
The Law of Abundance Conference continued this effort by bringing together scholars and practitioners to explore how research can better inform policy design and delivery, and how governments can build the institutional capacity needed to achieve concrete results.