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This is the abundance agenda.
Derek Thompson "A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems"

One of the best things about reading what other people write is that sometimes, someone will articulate something that's been kicking around in my brain, but I'd never had quite the correct formulation for. Derek Thompson's Abundance Agenda is one of those things that I'd been thinking, but had yet to come across the right words for. It's one of those things that is, like so many, easier said than done, but it's about as easily understood as said. In a nutshell, the United States needs to stop manufacturing scarcity, and put that energy into creating abundance, instead.

As he points out in the article, many of the tools to do this are already there. Many people understand why certain items are scarce, and so it's understood what needs to happen to change that scarcity. Seattle city councilwoman Kshama Sawant has made a name for herself by being at the head of any parade that blames Seattle's housing costs on large companies like Amazon. This despite the fact that it's been understood since 2008 that a large part of what's been driving home prices upwards has been Washington State's Growth Management Act, which constrained the amount of buildable land when demand was rising. Add in NIMBYs who don't want high-density rental housing in their neighborhoods, and one can see how the prices for the limited local home stock keep rising.

But rather than embrace the idea that the area needs to look at its regulatory and political environment, Councilwoman Sawant tends to focus on the scarcity, as a way of prompting people to support her particular brand of redistributionist policies. And not that I have anything against redistribution, per se. I think there are often better ways of going about it is all.

That, however, means becoming less attached to scarcity as something that can provide the resources needed to transcend, well, scarcity. I look forward to what Mr. Thompson is going to propose as his series goes on, because I'm of the opinion that the United States is too attached to the idea of scarcity to really thrive. A lot of the current divide in the American political system is driven by people having the understanding that the country has too many people who are not like them, but who want what they have. An abundance agenda could help change that. Because however much it may be true that wealthy people are not above theft, as a general rule, someone who wants for little has fewer incentives to steal than someone who doesn't know where their next meal or safe night will come from.

American society doesn't need to be so aggressively efficient to sustain itself. The world won't end if people can manage to keep themselves from starving only working 32 or even 25 hours a week. American politics does really see a way to make that point. Let's see if opinion journalism can manage it, instead.