Does Gen-Z Want ‘Abundance’?
It has become more apparent to Americans that their politicians and the current political system is not improving their day-to-day lives. People are searching for alternative methods and proposals in order to achieve an improved quality of life. One alternative, ‘Abundance’, has recently made lots of noise. In Abundance, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer a new way forward for the Democratic party through diagnosing the problems which everyday Americans face: housing costs, access to healthcare, adequate public transportation, and more.
The Abundance movement aims to center politics around identifying what we need more of — housing, transportation, better healthcare, etc. — and how to get it. Klein and Thompson posit that we simply don’t have enough of the things we need in society. The authors of Abundance believe that the regulatory environments many liberal cities have fostered make it difficult for development to occur. They advocate for supply-side progressivism, which emphasizes increasing the supply of essential goods and services, like housing, resulting in said goods becoming affordable. To increase this supply, Abundance advocates believe certain regulations that artificially restrict the supply and drive up costs of essential goods need to be done away with. By removing red tape and bypassing the bureaucracy, housing developers, for example, will have reduced costs and be able to flood the housing market with new homes, increasing supply, and decreasing price. These savings for the developers, according to Klein and Thompson, will trickle down to the consumer.
Students for Abundance
Klein and Thompson, despite getting pushback from many across the political spectrum on their proposed solutions, appropriately identify what people are struggling most with today: housing costs, access to affordable healthcare, reliable public transit, and a need for clean energy. Much of these issues hit close to home for Gen-Z. It is no surprise, then, that a student movement supporting Abundance has sprung up at a number of college campuses.
Students for Abundance was launched by a group of college students from Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley on September 3, 2025. Led by Victoria Ren, Matthew Meyers, and Maxwell Stern, this group aims to spread the Abundance message across college campuses. Ren, a senior at Stanford University studying data science and sociology has been organizing on campus with Stanford Abundance. Meyers is the Abundance Coordinator at The Niskanen Center, with previous experience working in the Senate and the Treasury Department. Stern is a senior at UC Berkeley studying political economy and has worked on a house committee and in the California State Assembly. They believe that society doesn’t have enough of the things we need most in order to build a good life. Housing, infrastructure, and healthcare are all lacking, and the way to remedy the situation is to eliminate the roadblocks that prevent us from building more of these necessities. These roadblocks, according to the group, are policies which manufacture scarcity, institutions that can’t deliver, and a complacent, risk averse culture.
Prior to Students for Abundance, Ren created Stanford Abundance at Stanford University. There she hosted events where students could discuss topics such as reforming governments and the housing crisis. Less than a year after starting, and in time for Fall semester/quarter, she founded Students for Abundance with 10 additional chapters at universities across the country. The Abundance movement is gaining steam with Gen-Z, but what has been the source of this momentum? Taking a look at the various individuals and institutions involved with Students for Abundance paints a more complete picture.
The Students for Abundance advisory board consists of Misha Chellem, Marshall Kosloff, Steve Teles, and Jen Pahlka. Chellem is one of the founders of the Abundance Network, of which, Pahlka serves as a Senior Advisor. The Abundance Network is a lobbying political organization which aims to pass specific policy outcomes relating to economic growth and prosperity. This political organization is far from small, receiving over $2 million in contributions from private entities and grants from the Federal government in 2023. Further, Kosloff and Teles, as well as the founders of Students for Abundance, are a part of the Niskanen Center – a think tank which advocates for “a government that provides social insurance and essential public goods, fosters market competition and innovation, invests in state capacity, and does not impede productive enterprise.” Eclipsing the financial backing of the Abundance Network, Niskanen has garnered over $18 million in funding from various billionaire-backed philanthropic organizations such as Arnold Ventures.
Beyond the big money institutions with direct ties to Students for Abundance, the Abundance movement in general has incredible financial backing. In March of this year, Open Philanthropy announced the Abundance and Growth Fund where they will spend “at least $120 million over the next three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress while lowering the cost of living.” They plan on doing this, in part, by investing in movement building (funding organizations and individuals that support their agenda) for Abundance.
Due to the immense financial backing behind the group, it is difficult to describe Students for Abundance as a grassroots movement. It is largely funded by wealthy donors that have employed savvy marketing techniques to rebrand neoliberalism using new buzzwords. As a result, supporters of Abundance have become excited about the same policies of deregulation that have been employed by Democrats and Republicans for the past 40 years all the way to Obama and Trump. These policies have resulted in the massive wealth gains for the very people behind the push for Abundance.
'Abundance' Isn't The Answer
Proponents of Abundance, knowingly or not, are not advocating for a groundbreaking vision and a new way forward for America. Put simply, Abundance wants to deregulate in order to allow the private sector to build uninhibitedly, to provide an abundance of the necessities Americans require. This has more or less been the dominant political ideology since the Ronald Reagan administration. In essence, Abundance is nothing more than a fancy new word for the neoliberalism ushered in during the 1980s. Historical examples can help to understand the pitfalls of the supply-side progressivism that Abundance pushes.
Abundance pushes to lift zoning restrictions and strip away regulations and red-tape that limit a developer’s ability to build housing. These regulations increase their costs and cause new builds to be stuck satisfying bureaucratic requirements. Proponents for this change often omit the reality that many of these regulations can be environmental, like the California Environmental Quality Act, and are in place to protect our planet. But beyond that, the data does not back this proposal. In 2019, Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to end single-family exclusive zoning. In the six years since, only 72 duplexes and 37 triplexes — resulting in 255 individual units — have been built. A study from the Urban Institute of land-use reforms across 1,136 cities from 2000 to 2019 found that cities increased housing supply by only 0.8 percent within three to nine years of zoning reform passage. In critiquing the recent heavy focus on eliminating zoning restrictions, urban policy expert Alan Ehrenhalt states: “...developers won’t be flocking to build cheap housing on these properties. They will lean toward housing for the affluent, on which they can charge higher rents.” In profit-driven society, developers (unless heavily incentivized by the Federal or state government) will opt to build the types of homes that make them the most money. This has led to an abundance of luxury apartments, and a massive shortage of affordable homes.
Additionally, true abundance, where enough exists for everyone to have something, is not realistic under our current economic mode in America. While profit motive still determines production, the commodities, goods, and services that produce most profit will be prioritized. Abundance believers want to flood the market with an increase in supply of the things we need most, however, in order to keep profits high, capitalism forces artificial supply constraints. For example, we live in a time where we do have an abundance of food. However, the profit motive results in massive waste at all points of the supply chain, all the way to the supermarket. Un-consumed food is not given away to those who need it, but rather thrown away, lest the cost of food (a commodity under capitalism, not a human right) decreases, resulting in the loss of profit for our poor billionaire grocery chain owner.
Finally, one key point for Students for Abundance is improving our energy capacity. They assert that “climate change forces us to mobilize clean energy faster than we’ve ever built before,” but do not reckon with the existing gas and oil lobby in America, which prevents a swift transition to clean energy. On top of this oversight, the Abundance Movement’s call to build en masse would create massive emissions. Globally, we have already passed the 1.5C warming limit, with those in the global south already feeling the effects. If we are serious about combatting climate change, we cannot do what Abundance suggests in flooding the market and drastically increasing emissions.
The Abundance movement offers some solutions that move us toward the goal of equity, such as lifting zoning restrictions and removing things like arbitrary caps on the amount of doctors within the healthcare system. But their focus is strictly on changing incentives for the private sector while ignoring the biggest incentive of all: profit. The proposals put forth by Abundance are only a first-step, constrained within the confines of the market and not about long-term solutions.
An Alternative Proposal
The problems Gen-Z faces today are dire: inaccessible housing, insufficient healthcare, and a climate catastrophe all require swift action. Action alone, however, is futile if all we try are the same old tactics sold to us in a new flavor. To envision a different future, we must think beyond our current scope. We must work toward a decommodification of housing with well-funded, publicly owned living spaces, like we see in Vienna. Implementing universal healthcare would save the American people hundreds of billions of dollars while eliminating an unnecessary profit-driven private insurance industry. For the planet, we need to enact a combination of building renewables and phasing out fossil fuel usage. To assist in that transition, cities must be designed for people, not cars, with a vast public transit network fueled by clean energy.
Of course, none of these things will happen overnight. In fact, none of these changes will occur at all unless we eliminate the power private money has in politics. The car, gas, and oil lobby actively inhibit actions that will save our environment. The insurance lobby makes sure any healthcare reform that will hurt their profits never sees the light of day. In short, we need to make it illegal to bribe our politicians.
Students for Abundance have valiant aspirations, but the Abundance movement they align with is misguided. It places too large an emphasis on regulation and red tape without acknowledging the role of the profit motive in the industries they hope to fix. Abundance understands what people need the most right now, but co-opts the desire for change and redirects that energy toward solutions that have not worked historically. Absent an analysis regarding the motivations that drive our economy, any attempt to diagnose why we lack the things we need to build a good life falls short. If Gen-Z wants to see a different world, we need to think bigger. We cannot rely on the establishment politicians and think tanks that are backed by billionaires to find the answers to our problems. The problem itself stems from the billionaire class and the inequality that neoliberal policies have enabled. The good-intentioned billionaire will not save us, and most importantly, doesn’t exist. The Abundance Movement’s reliance on this class, their proposed Band-Aid solutions, and an overlooking of climate change will result in Abundance falling short of its goals. Instead, we must redistribute the resources which already exist in addition to building what is required.