The concept of “abundance” has gained considerable traction in academic and policy circles in recent months.
An essay on the website of the Niskanen Center think tank explains the goal of the abundance movement as “producing housing, infrastructure, energy, and scientific innovation more rapidly, in greater volumes, and at lower cost. …The diagnosis of what is standing in the way typically points to some combination of anti-competitive rules and processes driven by concentrated interests on the one hand, and an absence of state capacity to design and manage large projects on the other.”
Michigan Law Professors Nicholas Bagley, the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law, and Alexandra Klass, the James G. Degnan Professor of Law, have both become active in the abundance movement. They have published essays with the Niskanen Center. Klass has written an article on "The Law of Energy Abundance"; Bagley has written a paper on “The State Capacity Crisis,” is working on a book, and will teach a seminar on abundance in winter 2026.
They sat down recently to discuss the topic.
How did you become interested in abundance?
Bagley: The big idea of abundance is that you don’t want supply constraints on things that people really need. One of the big problems with supply constraints these days is a lack of state capacity to deliver what it is that people want or need.
I’ve been writing for a long time about problems with American administrative law and the way that it makes it very hard to govern. As that set of ideas about weak state capacity took hold in more and more quarters, I became part of a small coalition of people who started coming together to talk about this set of ideas. The discussions were broadly concerned about housing and renewable energy and the tattered infrastructure of the country and our inability to build in the physical world.
Klass: Energy abundance, at least as I define it, is what I’ve been writing about for a long time. Nick and I are both part of the Abundance Academic Network, which is trying to promote research and scholarship in these areas. I got involved with the network because I thought that having someone with some energy expertise would be helpful, since a lot of the development of the movement has been in the housing area.
I believe it’s vital to define energy abundance as building a lot of carbon-free energy. It’s really important to build alignment with environmental protection advocates, who often end up being the villains to some abundance advocates. I think there is an opportunity to bridge those two movements.
The ideas behind the movement seem to appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. What are the implications of that?
Bagley: This is a big question for the abundance movement. Does it have a political future? At this point, it’s mostly an elite-level consensus. It’s not clear there’s a constituency clamoring for it anywhere on the political spectrum.
Right now, it does appear to be on the left in the sense that there is plasticity in the Democratic Party right now. There’s openness to new ideas. There’s a sense that part of the reason Trump is so appealing is because housing is so expensive and energy costs are about to spike.
On the Republican side, there are some ideological overlaps that are quite compelling. Less regulation can appeal to that sensibility. The trouble is the Republican Party right now, at least the version that’s in national office, is not committed to a positive, forward-looking agenda for rebuilding the United States. It’s a grievance project, and you could do nothing more anti-abundance than firing at random huge chunks of your workforce and making it less capable of getting work done for the public.
So I hope that there is a core of the Republican Party that can embrace the ideas and move productively forward. I know there are people like that. Whether there’s a movement there, I don’t know.
Klass: I think it also differs from the federal level to the state and local level, and also what we’re talking about building. It seems like there is more potential for bipartisanship around housing, which is really not a federal issue.
You’re seeing reforms in places like California. And Minneapolis was the first city to have a comprehensive plan getting rid of single-family zoning. But there’s also been housing reform in Montana.
Twenty years ago, we did have that bipartisan approach on energy, with Iowa and Texas being the centers of wind energy. But unfortunately clean energy has become politicized in a way that it was not when I first started teaching energy law.
In addition to housing and energy, are there other big sectors that fall under the abundance umbrella?
Klass: Transportation. Obviously, it would be nice if we had a working city or regional light-rail system like other modern countries do. Why do we not build those? There’s been a lot of work on that.
Bagley: Yes, housing, energy, and transportation are three threads. The transportation people have realized they have a lot in common with the housing advocates and a lot in common with the folks who are trying to get transmission lines and renewable energy projects built. That formed the understructure.
On top of that has been scientific infrastructure. Supporting development of science is a big part of what it means to progress. Occupational licensure could also be seen as a problem for abundance. If we want more abundant doctors or more abundant lawyers or more abundant plumbers, we might want to think about that as well.
Klass: Or pharmaceutical access, which has been an issue for a long time.
What are the biggest obstacles to moving these ideas forward?
Klass: On the energy side, the current Trump administration is a huge obstacle, even more than people thought. We knew that wind and solar on public lands and new offshore wind was not going to happen, but what has been even more destructive is shutting down projects that are almost complete. What I would call weaponizing the administrative state to shut down privately funded projects on private land just because it helps the fossil fuel industry is going to cause energy prices to skyrocket and cause all sorts of problems.
On the state and local level, a lot of states are trying to do innovative things to build more quickly. But there are legal changes that would help, like changing some of our eminent domain laws and creating expedited permitting processes for carbon-free energy generation. There just needs to be the political will to do it.
Bagley: The problem of having a movement organized around breaking incumbent power is that incumbents are powerful. They tend to be pretty well organized. They tend to be intensely committed to the status quo. And the benefits that you get from expanding housing supply or building more renewables or building a better infrastructure are so diffuse that people don’t agitate for them. That’s just a tough nut to crack.
You need a broad-scale social consensus filtered through elected officials again and again and again over a sustained period of time. That is going to have to be bipartisan if you want it to happen nationwide.
