Abundance
Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.
written on: 2025-11-10
This book stuck out to me when it was first released and immediately joined my read list. As someone who works on a team focused on large scale infrastructure projects, this read was preaching to the choir. We can have the future that we envision, but we need to maintain a high level of innovation across all sectors. The general idea here is that we have built an economy that relies heavily on scarcity for pricing, so much so that most sectors deliberately create scarcity. This in turn makes everything more expensive.
Housing is the main example this book applies the idea of abundance to. The government can hand out rental vouchers or try to implement rent control, but ultimately what we need is more units. The number one thing stopping new units and homes to be built is prohibitive zoning laws and NIMBYISM. When a developer buys a chunk of land and dreams of building a 50 unit apartment complex on that land, maybe based on demand research of what the community needs, they will first have to fight the municipality and community to get permission to build that complex. And that permission probably won’t ever come.
Most of the new apartment complexes that are built throughout the US are partnerships between the local municipality and developers. The local municipality decides, after a lot of arguing, that they need more units. They take years to find a spot to put them. A developer then comes in and bids for the land that the city selects, after the zoning on that land has already been secured. The land is more expensive than usual because it went through a lengthy rezoning process, and that cost will be noticed by the end user once the development is finally finished. Even after all that, it’s still not a done deal. Community members will often fight back, claiming that apartment complexes or multi-family housing will ruin their quant small town.
In my city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the locals in neighborhoods near me recently fought back against a proposal that would eliminate single family zoning. Thankfully it passed, but the push back was baffling. The fact that we still have so many single family homes in a city within a mile of Boston proper is bizarre and unacceptable, especially since Boston has a dire housing crisis.
That’s one personal anecdote. Country wide this happens every day. Owning a home for most people in my generation and younger has become incredibly difficult. The older generation will acknowledge how difficult home ownership has become in one breath, and then show up to town hall meetings and fight every proposal for new housing.