Is Abundance the Answer to What Ails Blue Cities?

In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted. 

Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-founder of The Abundance Network, that new progressive policy agenda – centered on how to unleash the power of government, particularly in blue cities, to build more housing and infrastructure and deliver better quality-of-life results – soon followed.  

Since then, Abundance has gone national. Earlier this year Klein and Thompson published their New York Times #1 bestseller on the topic, sparking an enormous (and ongoing) new wave of discussion – and in some corners sharp push back – among left-of-center elites about what Klein had previously dubbed “supply side progressivism.” 

So what exactly is the Abundance agenda? Is it the technocratic answer to what ails blue cities? Or is it the same old, failed neoliberalism with a cosmetic, progressive-sounding makeover, as some of its critics within the movement left claim? To explore these questions, and to discuss where the still nascent Abundance movement is heading, we invited Misha David Chellam, who writes on Abundance topics at the Modern Power Substack page, onto Blue City Blues. 

Chellam described Abundance to us as a “non-ideological, truth-seeking exercise to improve governance,” and added, “We should pursue a model of governance that holds liberal values and pro-government values, but also holds a high bar for institutions to deliver and solve problems.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

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