A Conservative Vision for Abundance
There is a welcome and growing consensus around the need to build faster. In the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats are taking serious efforts to streamline environmental procedure and permitting. In an abrupt pivot, Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom has worked with bipartisan members of his legislature to reform the infamous California Environmental Quality Act. Much of this movement has been championed under the “abundance” mantle, especially since the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book by the same name.
In Abundance, Klein and Thompson stake out their thesis: “To have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need.” They argue for supply-side liberalism, emphasizing the need to streamline regulation, foster innovation, and boost state capacity to produce the things that matter. But to the authors, abundance isn’t omnidirectional. Rather, abundance serves to create more of the particular goods that will enable their ideal vision of the future. Klein and Thompson open the book by describing theirs: cool bedsheets in an air-conditioned home powered by cheap wind and solar; miracle drugs manufactured in space, with doorstep drone delivery; and powerful AI that has reduced the need for human work.
Klein and Thompson self-consciously orient their vision for the future around the values of modern liberalism. They are concerned with an abundance that increases median wages, mitigates climate change, and ultimately creates “a fairer, gentler, more sustainable world.” The authors are correct to emphasize that abundance policy should serve a particular idea of the future. But their vision—guided by the moral gestures of utilitarianism and choice maximization—is incomplete.
What Abundance misses is a concern for the permanent things. Absent from Klein and Thompson’s view of the future is a robust orientation around human flourishing and the institutions that serve it: faith, family, and tradition. An approach to abundance that is morally agnostic toward these transcendent goods could easily lead to a dystopian version of the authors’ utopian vision through the unconsidered proliferation of technologies and commodities that erode human goods. Even if they live in affordable apartments cooled by cheap clean energy, a sterile, chatbot-dependent, and space drug-addicted people would be far from the flourishing future a pro-human abundance could deliver.
Conservatives must outline an alternative framework to animate our abundance politics: one that builds to serve public virtue, national dynamism, and the faith and family institutions that provide structure and purpose for society. While marriage and childbirth rates fall, teenage depression increases, childhood participation in sports decreases, and technological breakthroughs remain largely relegated to the world of bits, the abundance agenda can and should address these challenges head-on. That will involve much more clean energy, housing, AI infrastructure, and more.
The mechanisms of abundance should integrate conservative principles. Abundance advocates from the right-of-center tradition should embrace federalism and learn from the success of (primarily red) states like Florida and Texas. Federal action will be necessary, but abundance policy at this level should primarily work to empower the states and private industry with deregulatory steps and targeted investment, not crowd them out. And rather than imposing a sweeping, rationalist top-down vision, abundance should serve a constrained vision to serve human flourishing, being especially attentive to the needs of families and children.
Here, I will focus specifically on what and how we must build, and what we must avoid, to cultivate advancement in three critical spheres: the family, public virtue, and the spirit of adventure and stewardship. My ambition isn’t to detail a comprehensive manifesto. Conservatives will need further discussion to develop an idea of abundance that isn’t blindly reliant on imported labor, boosts American manufacturing, and encourages automation to support rather than diminish human work, among other priorities. Rather, I seek to demonstrate how an abundance of material goods can serve an abundance of human goods.
Cultivation of the Family
America’s falling rates of marriage and childbirth might be one of the largest challenges facing the country today. Since 1970, marriage has declined by 65 percent and even states that have led in fertility like Utah are seeing large drops in birthrates. Abundance can help address this challenge if Americans are allowed to build the things that support family life. But creating an abundance of those goods might include different points of emphasis from the liberal vision of abundance.
Housing, the poster child of the abundance movement, might be the best example of this phenomenon. As Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies has identified, housing costs are as influential on young Americans’ decision to give up on starting a family as infertility and undesired singleness. But according to the same study, young Americans overwhelmingly prefer a specific kind of housing for family formation: single-family units in safe, walkable neighborhoods. This is not an outcome typically championed by the abundance Left, which tends to emphasize other forms of housing, like rental apartments and townhomes.
To be sure, municipalities should make it easier to build all kinds of housing, and increasing the supply of housing generally will help keep costs low for families. But a conservative abundance politics concerned with family formation would also focus on making it easier to build the particular housing and neighborhoods many young Americans want.
As Wilcox identifies, state and local governments can begin by focusing on reducing minimum lot requirements, reducing parking mandates, and encouraging sidewalks to build more family-oriented housing. This will allow communities to increase housing of all kinds while also making it easier to build more single-family units on less land. While cities take broader steps to relax zoning requirements, governments must be sure that they aren’t reducing the supply of single-family units through demand-side policies such as tax benefits for rental apartments. Instead, expanding child tax credits and making funding for daycares available for kin caregivers, as Vice President J.D. Vance, Senator Jim Banks (R-IN), and Congressman Riley Moore (R-WV) have proposed, will empower families to spend more of their money on the things they need. A pro-family housing agenda will result in more reasonably priced houses for American families, more power for families in the housing market, and conserved open space.
A pro-family abundance agenda would also prioritize public order. Largely absent from the liberal abundance discourse is a concern for public safety, which according to Wilcox’s study, is the most important neighborhood trait for young Americans. And as it turns out, policing has a supply problem that can be addressed with abundance approaches.
Across the country, major cities are facing police staffing shortages. This year, the Los Angeles police department is set to hit a thirty-year low and in Washington, D.C., the police force is at a fifty-year low, largely due to low recruitment and high retirement. While both departments have increasingly leveraged technology in the face of shortages, officials in both cities cite low staff rates as a driver of staff overextension, compromising the ability of officers to deter crime.
Streamlining the recruitment process to increase the supply of officers could help address this challenge. One study on the Los Angeles Police Department suggests that simply having applicants complete more than one assessment per day increases the quantity and quality of police recruits. Implementing policies like these could help address the police shortage, increase jobs available for the American working class, and improve safety in communities. But doing so will require an abundance movement concerned with public safety.
Correctly done, a conservative abundance agenda can help create an abundance of families with children, supported by the goods children and families need. But equally important will be ensuring those children grow up in an America where they have an abundance of tools to cultivate virtue.
Cultivation of Public Virtue
The advent of artificial intelligence offers an opportunity to produce more goods and solve more problems that advance human flourishing. From unlocking energy abundance to advancing climate solutions to developing breakthrough medicines, AI can help address major challenges.
The abundance discourse of the Left and much of the Tech Right correctly identifies the importance of AI for these purposes. But AI, especially through the misapplication of chatbots, also contains the potential to significantly erode public virtue. With its focus on maximizing choices for individuals, modern liberalism lacks the robust vision of the good life needed to design an abundance that ensures AI elevates rather than endangers public virtue.
Conservatism has long been concerned with cultivating virtue in the citizenry. John Adams saw citizen virtue as foundational to the American project, writing that “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Freedom aligns with human goods when those who wield it are formed with a robust vision of the good life. And families, communities, and governments have a responsibility to ensure children are equipped to use their liberty for the benefit of themselves and their neighbors. Unfortunately, we have already seen how a morally agnostic approach to powerful technology can erode that ability.
Look no further than the effects of smart phones on America’s children. In Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024), he argues that the distraction of smartphones and social media has rewired young people, driving mental health declines, particularly for girls, and academic underperformance, particularly for boys. Children are underparented in the digital world and overparented in the physical world, encouraging them to eschew their physical environments.
The result has been an increasingly atomized and inwardly focused generation. Americans from the ages of eight to eighteen spend over seven hours on screens each day; they are spending less time than ever with friends, and they are foregoing serious romantic relationships. For many young people, hiking with friends has been replaced with Tik Tok and dating has been replaced with online pornography. If there are any lessons from the era of abundant smartphones for the era of abundant AI, it is that an amoral approach to technology that mimics social interaction, especially for children, can reap poor outcomes.
Already, tech companies are beginning to design “companion” chatbots to be as engaging as possible, including loosening guardrails around explicit content. Journalists have recorded social media chatbots engaging in sexual roleplaying with accounts registered for thirteen-year-olds. ChatGPT has encouraged ritualistic bloodletting in response to apparently innocuous informational prompts on pagan gods. A recent study from Northeastern University found that the safety guardrails of the largest chatbots are easily bypassed, with all offering detailed instructions on suicide and self-harm when asked.
American teenagers are already developing relationships with AI chatbots, with over 70 percent reporting social conversations with models designed to serve as “digital friends.” Reports of “AI psychosis” and romantic relationships with AI chatbots illustrate where this trend might lead. The personalized nature of a chatbot, often encouraging action and continued engagement, makes the information it shares substantively different from an online search engine. One can easily imagine a future where AI-powered virtual friendships, pornography, and entertainment further erode the desire to engage in human relationships.
Blind social integration with AI chatbots isn’t the recipe for cultivating public virtue, but the solution isn’t anti-AI Ludditism either. In his recent article for this journal, “Beyond Safetyism,” Brad Littlejohn proposes requiring parental consent for children to use chatbots as a first step toward directing AI for the common good. He outlines how the sycophantic and always available nature of AI chatbots especially threatens children and teenagers who aren’t disciplined or formed to use them wisely. Implementing this policy would only extend the age-gating principle behind longstanding laws that prevent children from driving cars, drinking alcohol, and buying guns. And it would build on recent state-level policies already on the books to protect children from digital technologies like age verification for social media and online pornography. Similarly, age-gates for AI should learn from state experiments with other digital age-gates and adopt a federalist approach.
Commonsense steps like these would put the burden on chatbots to demonstrate their utility for serving human goods. AI tools to help children learn academic subjects could very well be leveraged for education, for instance. But preventing children from freely accessing foundation model chatbots would help conserve public virtue. It would also help prevent us from relying on the attention of children to finance the development of AI. Instead, policymakers should take steps to encourage rapid development of pro-human AI. These policies will be critical to support tools that serve human flourishing and compete in the AI arms race.
Incentives for AI should focus on applications that affect the world of atoms, primarily focused on basic research and strategic industrial policy. States can support AI buildout by streamlining regulations and incentivizing AI applications for local projects like cloud seeding, reindustrialization, or genuine educational purposes. With its broad research operations, the federal government has a role to play too. The Department of Agriculture could finance loans or R&D for AI applications to increase crop yields and manage forests. Investments from the Department of the Interior could encourage the use of AI tools to assess the vast energy and ecosystem resources on public lands. The Department of Energy could expand the Loan Program Office and its research arms to finance AI applications for streamlined permitting or energy manufacturing, whether for domestic solar or small modular reactors.
Advancing pro-human AI applications can educate our children, help provide for their needs, and spare them from moral malformation and isolation. AI tools can also help them cultivate and enjoy the physical world, another end that the abundance agenda can serve in its own right.
Cultivation of Adventure and Stewardship
The first chapter of Abundance suggests that the idea of the American frontier, and its importance for the future of the country, is a largely antiquated myth. Instead, Klein and Thompson suggest that cities are the source of innovation, economic output, and social mobility. Abundance, they argue, should increase the supply of goods needed to make cities accessible to strivers. As noted above, cities are indeed indispensable sources of innovation, and abundance principles can and should improve them. But dismissing the frontier misses the opportunity for abundance to cultivate adventure and dominion by stewarding nature.
The frontier is foundational to America. From the first people who made a home on this continent during the last ice age to the Old World arrivals in recent centuries, Americans have built our culture and civilization by confronting new and dangerous terrain. Leaders like Theodore Roosevelt have long recognized that strenuous activity in the natural world is critical for the vitality of the citizen—and by extension, the nation. Conserving that sense of frontier will be critical to the future of the country. Rather than lull our people into complacency with the mere elimination of scarcity or manufacturing of distraction, abundance can support the human goods of adventure and national dynamism; it can do this by adopting ambitious projects to steward and conserve nature.
Human stewardship over nature can strengthen our ecosystems and recreational access, but to do so, policymakers must reject the precautionary emphasis on process and litigation in the status quo. Federal forest management, for instance, is often mired in years of delay that inadvertently damage natural places. Of all projects facing litigation over National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) compliance, forest management represents the most severely burdened. The resulting delays lead to years of fuel accumulation. And when wildfires spark in a forest awaiting treatment, they rage more intensely. Look no further than the August Complex fire, which burned over a million acres and likely impaired northern spotted owl habitat after a project that would have mitigated the fire faced over six years of delay. When procedure and litigation prevent management, forests lose biodiversity, and people lose recreation opportunities.
Likewise, frivolous procedure and litigation in the name of the environment impede critical energy projects. For projects that require the NEPA Environmental Impact Statement, the most rigorous form of review, assessments take over three years to complete, on average. But even after NEPA review is done, projects are often exposed to litigation risk. A recent analysis of NEPA appellate cases from the Breakthrough Institute shows that energy projects are the second-most litigated kind of NEPA case. This includes fossil exploration and clean energy projects, delaying project implementation by almost four additional years, on average. Despite this, courts side with the federal agency and energy projects in over 70 percent of cases. The result is millions of wasted dollars, scarcer energy, and minimal, if any, environmental benefits.
Instead of wasting money on frivolous lawsuits and regulations, fast decisions on energy and forest management projects would make more resources available for conservation. Policymakers can begin by financing conservation with fair use fees charged to fast-tracked AI and energy projects on federal land and water. The Land and Wildlife Conservation Fund (LWCF) can serve as a model to collect and fund these conservation efforts. Since the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act in President Trump’s first term, the $900-million-dollar LWCF has been financed by energy royalties in the Gulf Coast. This program, the largest general conservation funding mechanism in the United States, supports projects at the federal and state levels focused on public access and ecosystem management, and nature is more abundant for it.
Implementing similar financing programs while fast-tracking permitting will let America build faster while conserving nature. Streamlining permitting for AI data centers and energy development, especially those built on public land, could be accompanied by fair royalties or fees to finance conservation. This would create a win-win for energy, AI, and nature. Developers would spend less resources on litigation and conservation would benefit from buildout. The result—rapid deployment of critical infrastructure with additional financing for conservation—would create more opportunities for people to enjoy the natural world and advance the tools we need for national strength and prosperity.
Innovating and applying new environmental technologies would also support national dynamism by restoring the landscapes and natural resources that have supported people on this continent for generations. State-led cloud seeding with advanced drone technology could help refill the Great Salt Lake. Local experiments in ocean restoration with tools like iron enrichment could help revive salmon fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. And using technology to reintroduce megafauna like mammoths and bison could restore historic landscapes and reinstate longstanding cultural connections to those ecosystems. Whether running cloud-seeding drones, predicting algal blooms, tracking natural disasters like hurricanes, or mapping wildlife genomes, AI applications will be critical to realizing each of these real-world projects of natural abundance.
Together, projects of dominion like these would make more nature for Americans to explore and use while creating an abundance of water, biodiversity, and wild food. They would also support the traditions of America, stewarding and restoring the landscapes, wildlife, and plants that have sustained people on this continent for hundreds and thousands of years.
Realizing that vision will require a substantial departure from the precautionary and anti-human impulses of the mainstream environmental movement. Thankfully, we’re seeing a return to the classical framework around nature that centers human stewardship and enjoyment.
President Trump’s Make America Beautiful Again executive order directs federal land agencies to improve public access and recover fish and wildlife by promoting active management and innovative tools. The order, signed to “protect our Nation’s outdoor heritage for the enjoyment of the American people,” also echoes Theodore Roosevelt’s view that conserving American landscapes serves the nation. By making local, proactive management easier and encouraging technological innovation, abundance can enable both more conservation and more dynamism, if it’s oriented around these goals.
Abundance for Human Flourishing
While the Left becomes increasingly comfortable with supply-side economics and the Right becomes increasingly comfortable with state capacity, there are new opportunities to align coalitions behind building more, quickly. But what we should build more of is far from settled.
A robust understanding of human flourishing must inform our answer to that question. Human goods are more than the choice maximization championed by modern liberalism. They include family formation, public virtue, and the spirit of adventure and stewardship. If abundance builds more housing suitable for families, energy and AI tools that support public virtue, as well as healthy natural landscapes that inspire adventure, that will be a success. But if it accelerates decadence by eroding responsibility and creating addictive technologies, that will be a failure.
Fortunately, both Republican and Democratic leaders are gesturing toward a pro-human vision of abundance. Spencer Cox, the Republican Governor of Utah, signed on to “A Future for the Family,” an open letter published in First Things that outlines a moral framework for technological innovation. He has also advanced policy to double Utah’s energy production, has supported a family-focused housing approach in his state, and has introduced age verification laws for social media and online pornography. Likewise, Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) has supported the abundance agenda in the House while also raising concerns about the social dangers of AI, saying “we can’t let AI be social media 2.0.”
Channeling these impulses toward policy solutions will require coordinated efforts at all levels of government. With appropriate support at the federal and local levels, states are well positioned to lead. States have already implemented pro-family housing abundance policy and have trailblazed in digital safety laws that AI age-gates could be modelled after. Of course, a federal effort that streamlines regulations and encourages innovation to empower states and industry is critical too. The federal government will need to reduce red tape that holds back forest management projects on public land. It’s also well positioned to make strategic investments in AI development to support national security priorities and locally led innovation projects geared toward natural stewardship. As noted, the various federal agencies, from DOE to DOI to USDA, will have important roles to play in achieving these national objectives.
To realize an abundance that serves human flourishing, conservatives across the country must imagine the future we want: one that centers the family, public virtue, stewardship, and national dynamism. The growing energy on the left around abundance offers an opportunity to develop durable and bipartisan solutions, but to create the abundance of the right things, conservatives must orient our vision around a robust sense of the good life. The future we want is not simply an abundance of goods for the sake of maximizing individual choice, but rather one where the people and nation are fully free to pursue their unique purposes. It’s time to build that future.