(C) Common Dreams
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Getting Abundance Right [1]
['Sandeep Vaheesan', 'Joseph E. Stiglitz', 'Rana Mitter', 'Elina Noor', 'Nouriel Roubini', 'Martijn Konings', 'Ahmet Davutoğlu', 'José Manuel Barroso', 'Laurence Tubiana', 'Vanessa Nakate']
Date: 2025-07
The abundance agenda, which has gained traction in media and policy circles, offers little beyond what has already been tried and failed. Rather than doubling down on neoliberal dogma, Americans should look to a time in their history when a bold, capable federal government delivered broad-based economic prosperity.
WASHINGTON, DC – From Elon Musk to proponents of the so-called abundance agenda, influential voices in the United States portray the state as an impediment to prosperity. Musk asserts that the state traps workers in low-productivity jobs, while the abundance agenda’s promoters attack environmental review and zoning rules as bureaucratic obstacles to private investment. The common theme is a state that prevents the emergence of an American golden age defined by plentiful clean energy and affordable housing.
The abundance agenda has been gaining traction in media and policy circles, not least because it offers an explanation for inadequate investment in zero-carbon energy and housing. But it is a flawed approach that ignores the benefits of government intervention. For example, zoning can separate industrial activities from residential areas and ensure that new homes are supported by adequate physical and social infrastructure.
Fundamentally, the abundance agenda dismisses the value of public input. Giving communities a say in infrastructure development can lead to more informed land-use decisions and serve as a democratic check on powerful corporate interests. Instead of being jettisoned, environmental review and zoning should be improved through tailored measures, such as expanding state administrative capacity and directing greater population density toward places with ample health-care, school, and transit capacity.
More broadly, the abundance agenda embodies the failure to confront the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. Simply granting corporations the legal freedom to build by relaxing zoning rules and environmental reviews ignores the fact that today’s corporations place short-term shareholder payouts above long-term objectives and are thus unlikely to invest at the scale and scope necessary to deliver broad-based abundance.
The most effective rebuttal to this anti-statist philosophy is the American experience itself. US economic history includes episodes in which vigorous government action proved crucial for prosperity. A prime example is President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which delivered shared abundance by expanding public capacity – most notably through large-scale investments in electricity infrastructure. These investments made electricity affordable and widely available, and pushed the private sector to expand access and lower costs.
Whereas private companies refused to extend power lines into the countryside – leaving millions of rural Americans in the dark – the New Deal brought electricity to nearly every corner of the country. Though less radical on housing, Congress in the 1930s also expanded the housing supply and improved the quality and livability of homes.
If Americans are truly committed to achieving broadly shared abundance, they shouldn’t fall for warmed-over neoliberal dogma repackaged for the twenty-first century. Instead, they should look to a time in their own history when a bold, capable federal government stepped in to deliver real prosperity for the many, not just the few.
FDR’s “Birch Rod”
A century ago, the provision of electricity was a major political issue. The absence of electricity was a defining feature of rural life – in 1930, fewer than one in ten farmers had access to power. While most urban households were connected to the grid, only the wealthy could afford heavy-duty items like refrigerators and washing machines, as high electricity rates, prohibitive appliance prices, and a housing stock ill-equipped for modern living kept these technologies out of reach for most people. Private power companies showed little interest in serving the mass residential market. Instead, they focused on wealthy households and, above all, industrial clients.
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Recognizing the stakes, Roosevelt outlined his vision for the power sector during a 1932 campaign stop in Portland, Oregon. While affirming his belief that private ownership should remain the industry norm, he also called for stronger public oversight of privately owned utilities.
Regulatory commissions, he argued, should act as advocates for the public interest rather than as neutral arbiters adjudicating disputes between utilities and their customers. He delved into the technical side of public utility regulation as well, reviewing the common-carriage rules that governed ferries and inns and endorsing simpler and more objective methods for valuing utility systems.
In the more radical portion of his speech, Roosevelt called for a major expansion of federal and public involvement in the power sector. He envisioned federal hydroelectric projects on the Columbia, Colorado, St. Lawrence, and Tennessee Rivers. Some, like the dams on the Colorado and Tennessee, were already completed or under construction. Roosevelt described such projects as “yardsticks” by which to measure the performance of private power companies. Through direct competition and public pressure, they would help keep private utility rates in check.
Roosevelt extended the yardstick concept to local distribution. A public utility in one town, he suggested, could discipline the rates of a neighboring town’s private provider simply through comparison. Publicity, in his telling, would help regulate the rates and service of private utilities.
But Roosevelt also acknowledged that publicity alone would not be enough. Some private utilities might remain impervious to naming and shaming, as well as to unflattering comparisons with public alternatives. In such cases, he said, local communities should be able to take over private utilities and operate them as public entities. Roosevelt illustrated his argument with a metaphor that would no longer pass political muster: “I might call the right of the people to own and operate their own utility something like this: a ‘birch rod’ in the cupboard to be taken out and used only when the ‘child’ gets beyond the point where a mere scolding does no good.”
Following Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, Congress moved quickly to implement the vision he laid out six months earlier. In the first 100 days of his presidency, lawmakers created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries and serve as a regional development agency. The Roosevelt administration also allocated recovery funds to dam construction across the country. In the Pacific Northwest, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation began building the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, respectively, on the Columbia River.
While the New Dealers – to their discredit – discounted the interests of indigenous peoples and tenant farmers in their dam-building efforts, they did plan extensively. Rather than developing water resources in an ad hoc manner, federal agencies drew on years of surveying by the Army Corps of Engineers and sought to construct dams in a way that maximized the hydroelectric output of the Columbia and Tennessee River basins.
The federal government also supported the creation of community-owned electric-distribution utilities. The Public Works Administration (PWA) – established by Congress to fund state and local construction projects and put Americans back to work – played a key role in bringing Roosevelt’s “birch rod” principle to life. Although the PWA did not directly finance the buyouts of existing private utilities, it offered low-cost loans and grants to cities seeking to build their own competing power systems. These funds enabled cities and towns to threaten private power companies with public competition, bringing them to the bargaining table to negotiate buyouts in good faith.
After some delay, the federal government turned its attention to rural electrification. In 1935, Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to fund the construction of power lines in underserved rural areas. Congress made the agency permanent in 1936 and directed it to give preference to cooperatives and public power agencies when allocating credit.
The surge in public investment was accompanied by public regulation of private utilities. In the mid-1930s, private holding companies dominated the industry, in many cases owning far-flung utility systems that lacked any real coherence. Economist James Bonbright described these holding companies as a “helter-skelter formation of systems of poorly integrated properties in defiance of all principles of engineering technique and operating efficiency.”
But while these corporate structures provided little social value, they generated easy profits for their executives and investors, who could control vast utility empires with relatively small outlays. In response, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935. The law – the product of an intense six-month legislative battle – aimed to break up utility company empires that failed to serve the public interest.
No Yardsticks for Housing
By contrast, Congress took a far more conservative approach to housing. The federal government’s most significant intervention was the establishment of a national mortgage market, achieved by insuring home loans against default – provided those loans met specific criteria. Backing only mortgages for properties that adhered to certain size and design standards, the Federal Housing Administration increased both the volume of home construction and the overall quality of America’s housing stock.
This system worked symbiotically with private homebuilders. By supporting the extension of low-cost, long-term credit – most notably, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage – the federal government dramatically widened the pool of financing available to prospective homeowners, albeit primarily for white Americans.
The federal government also funded the construction of rental housing by local governments, though this effort looked radically different from Roosevelt’s more ambitious electricity policy. While the PWA built high-quality housing for a broader segment of the population, that experiment was short-lived. Under the Housing Act of 1937, federal support was directed toward rental housing for the middle class “submerged” by the Great Depression and the working poor. The affluent remained the exclusive domain of private developers and landlords.
The 1937 Act included another major limitation that was fundamentally at odds with the yardstick concept that guided New Deal policy in the power sector. To avoid expanding the national housing supply and competing with private real-estate interests, Congress inserted the “equivalent elimination” clause: for every new unit of public housing built, an existing home had to be removed eventually from the market. While the federal government was massively expanding the country’s power-generation capacity through institutions like the TVA, it imposed artificial limits on its public housing programs.
What the New Deal Got Right
The New Deal transformed everyday life in America, making electricity both universal and affordable. By working with rural residents to set up electricity cooperatives and build power lines, the federal government helped electrify the countryside. In cities, working and middle-class households, many of whom already had electricity before the New Deal, benefited from rate reductions and increased their consumption. Combined with a modernized housing stock and more affordable appliances – also a result of federal action – millions of Americans now had refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines in their homes.
Congress and the Roosevelt administration had successfully implemented the yardstick principle. Federal dams produced large volumes of low-cost hydroelectric power, and public competition – paired with stronger regulation – reoriented private utilities away from short-term profit maximization toward delivering reliable service at reasonable prices, reducing rates across the board.
The power of public competition was undeniable. As historian Thomas McCraw observed in 1976, private power rates were consistently lower in areas closer to the Columbia and Tennessee Rivers, the two hubs of federal power generation. Meanwhile, the success of the REA-led rural electrification program proved to private utilities that the rural market – which they had long written off – was, in fact, a lucrative one.
Tupelo, Mississippi, was one of the first places to benefit from abundant, federally generated electricity. Connected to the TVA system in 1934, the city gained access to electricity at significantly lower wholesale rates than those offered by private utilities. The TVA directed the municipally owned utility to pass those savings on to customers, and the results were immediate: in one of the poorest parts of the country, average household power consumption more than doubled between 1934 and 1935, as Tupelo residents were suddenly able to enjoy modern comforts such as refrigerators and washing machines. When Roosevelt visited the city in November 1934, he highlighted the qualitative improvement in living standards:
“[T]he number of new refrigerators that have been put in, for example, means something besides just plain dollars and cents. It means a greater human happiness. The introduction of electric cookstoves and all the other dozens of things which, when I was in the Navy, we used to call ‘gadgets,’ is improving human life.”
The practical benefits of electricity were felt most acutely by women, especially in rural areas. Bringing electricity into the home relieved women of the backbreaking, time-consuming labor of doing laundry by hand.
Yet, despite the significant expansion of federal and local participation in electricity generation and distribution, private power companies continued to dominate the sector. In 1947 – nearly 15 years after the onset of New Deal reforms – private utilities still served more than three-quarters of American consumers and generated around 80% of the country’s electricity.
As Roosevelt intended, private ownership remained the norm. More ambitious efforts by more progressive members of the public power coalition, such as Republican Senator George Norris, fell short. Norris’s vision of establishing “little TVAs” and a network of federal power yardsticks across the country met strong resistance in Congress and ultimately lost the support of Roosevelt, whose appetite for continued reform had cooled by the late 1930s.
Yardsticks for the Twenty-First Century
Public yardsticks can play a vital role in addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our time, especially climate change and the housing crisis. Both require swift, large-scale action, and the public sector is well-positioned to expand the supply of clean energy and affordable housing while also pushing private companies to raise their standards.
The “little TVAs” model championed by progressives in the 1930s and 1940s offers a valuable blueprint for accelerating decarbonization. Although renewable-energy output has grown significantly over the past two decades, the current pace remains too slow to meet critical climate targets. The US still generates roughly 60% of its electricity from natural gas and coal. A publicly owned renewable-energy developer – free of shareholder pressure for dividends and stock buybacks, and with access to lower-cost financing – could invest more aggressively in solar, wind, and other renewables.
Given the ongoing destruction of state capacity – including at power agencies like the Bonneville Power Administration – by US President Donald Trump’s administration, meaningful federal intervention is unlikely anytime soon. But state and locally owned utilities, such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, can still move forward with decarbonization efforts on their own.
New York is already moving in this direction. In 2023, the state legislature empowered the publicly owned New York Power Authority – originally established by then-Governor Roosevelt in 1931 – to develop large-scale renewable energy projects. Under an implementation plan announced in January, the NYPA proposed building three gigawatts of renewable-energy capacity. But the NYPA can and should go much further to meet the state’s ambitious climate goals, especially given the repeated failure of private-sector projects.
Similarly, state and local housing authorities can help expand the housing supply while imposing competitive pressure on private landlords. Rather than simply lifting zoning restrictions and other public barriers and then hoping that private developers will find large-scale construction sufficiently profitable in the near and medium term, state agencies can take a hands-on approach by building and managing housing units for poor, working-class, and middle-class households.
By competing with private developers and landlords, these agencies would not only increase the overall housing supply but also help regulate rents and improve habitability standards. Well-managed public housing agencies could exert competitive pressure on their private counterparts, delivering meaningful benefits to tenants across the market. Maryland’s Montgomery County, where the public housing authority is actively building rental units aimed at working- and middle-class households, offers a useful model.
This approach differs significantly from the prevailing model of public housing. While cities like New York and Chicago own and operate residential rental properties, their public housing authorities are not true yardsticks because they typically do not compete directly with private actors. Originally designed in the 1930s, they function as housing of last resort, providing shelter to individuals and families lacking the means to rent from private landlords or purchase a home. Their housing stock, intentionally built to be lower quality than private alternatives, was meant to supplement rather than challenge private landlords.
Today, after decades of neoliberal law and policy, the gap between corporate incentives and the public good is wider than ever. Given that companies routinely prioritize stock buybacks, dividends, and mergers over investment in productive capacity and long-term capabilities, the Abundance movement’s call to give them more freedom to build is unlikely to deliver meaningful benefits without a deeper transformation of American capitalism.
More importantly, the US already has a proven track record of producing abundance through public investment and regulation. By directly providing essential goods and services, whether energy, housing, or broadband, the government can expand supply and compel the private sector to be more socially responsive, harnessing the power of competition and public accountability. Instead of doubling down on the failures of the past half-century, we should revisit a model that has already proven to be highly effective at promoting abundance and strengthening democratic institutions.
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[1] Url:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/the-right-abundance-agenda-cannot-be-reheated-neoliberalism-by-sandeep-vaheesan-2025-03
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