Abundance means building a plentiful supply of what we need for a thriving society.
The Abundance Story
America used to be the land of abundance.
If you go back 150 years, the United States had more of the material building blocks of comfort, success, and happiness than anywhere else on Earth. They were not equitably shared - which rightly led to the major social reforms of the 20th century - but from the perspective of production, America had created abundance compared to the rest of the world.
The United States had more food, more public schools and universities, more railroads and canals, more telegraph wires, more doctors, and more inventions. Life expectancy, education level, and wealth were all rising every decade.
If you go back only 50 years, much of this was still true about America, with the addition of more freeways, more airports, more telephones, and more electrical connections. In fact, if you were born into any generation of Americans before the Millennial generation, it was practically guaranteed that you would enjoy a higher standard of living than your parents.
Yet somehow, since the 1970s, we’ve fallen backward. Living standards are going down for more people than they’re going up for, and instead of building a society with even more of what everyone needs and wants, for the first time in American history we’ve accepted a future of less.
There’s a severe housing shortage in California and increasingly across the country. Electricity bills go up because we don’t have enough cheap sources of energy, even when the cost of wind and solar have come down 40% and 86% respectively in just 15 years. Water bills go up because of shortages, even though we possess the technology to create fresh water from the ocean, store it, and pump it anywhere it’s needed.
Home insurance prices go up in part because rebuilding after fires is so much more expensive than previously predicted.
Medical appointment wait times and health insurance premiums keep going up in large part because we don’t train enough doctors or nurses for our growing population.
A shortage of childcare centers drives up costs and, in turn, drives many young parents out of their careers.
The cost of food goes up because, like so many other things, its inputs are land, labor, and equipment - all of which have gotten more expensive.
Scarcity is a choice, often made by government.
While housing, energy, water, medical care, childcare, and food are all different things people and families need to thrive, the root cause of their unaffordability is largely the same: scarcity. And the cause of that scarcity is in most cases the result of deliberate government action, or inaction.
Did you know that starting in the 1960s cities in California enacted more and more restrictive zoning laws that now restrict 75% of Los Angeles and 94% of San Jose’s residential land to no more than one residence per lot, all the while the state’s population more than doubled? That was a choice to restrict the supply of housing - and we’re paying for it now.
Did you know that starting in the 1970s California allowed anyone with a grievance against any construction project to delay it with a lawsuit based on the incredibly low “fair argument” legal standard that the environment might be harmed in the process? That was a choice to allow anyone who could hire a lawyer and a PhD (even in bad faith) to endlessly delay housing, energy, or infrastructure - and we’re paying for it now.
Did you know that starting in the 1980s the federal government pressured medical schools to reduce the total enrollment of new medical students? That was a choice to limit the number of doctors - and we’re paying for it now.
The Evidence of scarcity’s failure is now all around us.
There’s a saying, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” and in many ways that’s where we are today. There’s also a saying, “A frog in a boiling pot of water,” and that’s where we have been until recently.
For decades, most of us have lived our lives largely unaware of the slowly increasing scarcity being created all around us. Many of these things would never be noticed in a given week or month or even year back in the 1990s or early 2000s.
If you got sick and needed to see a specialist, maybe there was a wait of a few weeks, but how could you tell if that was longer or shorter than it would have been 10 years earlier?
Most people only buy a house or rent a new apartment a few times in their lives, and most people only go to college once or not at all. So there was no easy point of comparison except a vague notion that your parents seemed to have paid lot less when they did these things.
But by now, by 2025, things have gotten so out of balance the evidence is all around us. In 1970, it took the median worker saving 10% of their income 4.7 years to afford the 20% downpayment for the median priced house. Today it would take the median worker 16.6 years to save for the median house.
Today even people with good medical insurance and the ability to drive across town or farther for an appointment routinely have to wait months to be seen.
When whole communities are wiped out by fire, such as Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Santa Rosa, or Paradise, it is generally accepted that insurance will never pay out the true cost of rebuilding, and that’s if homeowners were able to keep fire insurance at all from an increasingly small pool of companies covering California.
Abundance is about using the power of government to unlock the supply of what society needs.
The solution to scarcity is Abundance - the plentiful supply of what society needs to thrive - and that is what California Abundance seeks to bring about in California.
The good news is that this is a problem government can absolutely solve. Government can create new laws, and repeal old ones that stand in our way. Government can spend money on things that will pay off in decades not years. Government can coordinate across sectors to solve problems too complex for individuals or industry to do alone. Fundamentally, government can replace the status quo with something better.
The bad news is that the status quo has incredible power in our political system, and that will need to be overcome. Let’s make no bones about it, some sacred cows will need to be sacrificed for us to create an abundant future. And that is where you come in.
How you can bring about abundance
People control government in a democracy - but only if they really want to.
While you’ve probably felt both subtly and acutely some effects of scarcity, you may not have ever known what you can do about it. Are you going to argue with PG&E about your higher electrical bill? Good luck. Are you going to chew out the receptionist for saying your doctor’s next availability is in three months? Not advisable. But you can actually play a major role in fixing both of these problems and so many more just like them.
First, we need to organize.
Every interest group protecting its own narrow interest is already organized against us. I’m not going to name them all because you are probably one way or another associated with at least one. There’s nothing wrong with advocating for yourself and people like you, but the system we’ve created through all this single-lens advocacy is broken and needs to be torn down.
We need to build a constituency of citizens that wants more of everything for everyone, not just more of this for us.
Second, we need to advocate.
This means talking to our elected officials and telling the which bills to support. If they won’t, it’s means electing candidates who will. It means writing to your local newspaper, posting on social media, and yes, even bringing it up at Thanksgiving. We need to explain the problem as we see it, declare what we want changed, and then keep pressure on people to do their part.
Third, we need to stay engaged and have a long view.
It took two generations to replace abundance with scarcity in America, and it will take at least one generation to fully undo it. We absolutely will have wins in the near term, but the whole project will likely take two decades to complete. So come for the fight today, and then stay in the fight tomorrow, next week, next year, and beyond. Tell your children what you’re doing and why it matters, and then when they’re old enough, bring them with you.
America was once the land of Abundance, where each generation was nearly guaranteed to live longer, more comfortable, and richer lives than the generation before them. Yes, we had a lot of problems long ago and we’ve tried to address many of them. But in the meantime, we’ve also allowed a really great thing about America to slip away. It is time to bring Abundance back.
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