CONCEPT
The Abundance Agenda
The cross-ideological political program that treats construction of housing, infrastructure, and institutional capacity as the central task of American governance — the movement Andreessen's 2020 essay helped catalyze.
The abundance agenda names a political program, emerging most visibly after 2020, that treats the expansion of supply — of housing, transportation infrastructure, clean energy, scientific research capacity, and institutional capability — as the central task of American governance. The program brings together writers, policymakers, and advocates across the ideological spectrum who share the diagnosis that American institutional failure is primarily a failure of building rather than distribution, and that regulatory barriers to construction deserve priority attention. Andreessen's 2020 essay It's Time to Build is widely cited as an intellectual foundation of the movement, though its subsequent development has proceeded through writers whose politics differ substantially from Andreessen's.
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The agenda emerged from the convergence of several intellectual currents after 2020. The pandemic revealed institutional inadequacies — testing, manufacturing, hospital capacity — that crossed partisan lines in their diagnosis. The housing crisis in productive American cities produced a YIMBY movement explicitly focused on removing regulatory barriers to construction.