To a person from the Twenties, life in the Seventies would have seemed fantastically advanced, what with all those cars, all those white goods, and all that electricity thrumming into all those new houses. The West, at least, saw an extraordinary rise in living standards, a 50-year feat that, 50 years later, has not been equalled. Today, we are enmeshed in an all-encompassing digital web, but our physical world has changed only subtly. We’re sitting in our existing housing stock rather than radically expanding it; we’ve been making our white goods more efficient rather than inventing new ones; and we consume less power per person rather than more. In 2012, the economist Tyler Cowen summarised the situation as the “Great Stagnation”, arguing that there had been a slowdown in innovation, and that the West had, in some important material and economic senses, stalled.
Since then has bloomed the youthful field of “Progress studies”, which hopes to unleash cheap energy, plentiful housing and daily technological breakthroughs. Progress studies has some presence in academia, but exists principally in think tanks, blogging and journalism (I have made some modest contributions regarding geothermal energy) and is part of an ecosystem that is beginning to acquire political influence. The field owes much to economists such as the recently anointed Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, who has argued that year-on-year enhancing of prosperity is not a law of nature; rather, it must be deliberately brought about. And so the Cowen crowd has tried to do exactly that: finding obstacles to progress — bureaucracy, Nimbyism, legalism and so on — and looking for ways society might circumvent them.
In recent years, the world has benefited from some amount of technological freshening up. Reusable rockets, large language models, self-driving cars, mRNA vaccines, cheap solar power: these are the kinds of innovations that excite technophiles. Yet China is pulling ahead, and the Gordian knots remain. At last weekend’s Progress Conference, in Berkeley, California, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — never one to knowingly understate the galaxy-shaping potential of his product — told Cowen that AI alone would not be able to solve the housing crisis. Even God-like intelligence, in other words, would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.
“Even God-like intelligence would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.”
Altman’s presence at the conference betokens the intellectual clout that the progress scene enjoys in both technology and, increasingly, politics. Progress thought now comes in a variety of flavours, with each carrying different political valencies, and with each having different ramifications for industry and society alike. Usefully for its survival prospects, progress thought is syncretic: that is, able to attach itself to existing ideologies rather than needing to defeat them. It is worth paying attention to the question of which flavour is likeliest to win the day.
So far, one of them has achieved particular prominence. In May, two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published Abundance, a book that argues that their country has spent decades prioritising process over progress. The book is now well thumbed among Democrat staffers, and its style of thinking was visible in the planning reforms signed by Gavin Newsom, governor of California, four months later. This is the state, of course, whose flagship high-speed rail project has produced an even more outrageous and ineffective boondogglethan HS2. In this context, where post-Seventies California has been entirely unequal to the task of building housing and infrastructure to accommodate its population boom, some regulatory streamlining might be no bad thing.
Whether the Democratic party is the optimal vessel for the progress movement, though, is debatable. Other political scenes seem more infused with vigour. Both the Right and non-mainstream Left are developing their own versions of abundance. In August, the political scientist Steven Teles made an early attempt at taxonomising these new schools of abundance, which we can think of as flavours of progress. “As abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse”, he predicted, these new varieties “will increasingly structure political identities”.
In the Teles taxonomy, the Left-most entry was “Red Plenty”. Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who beat the centrists to the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of New York City, falls into this camp. Under Red Plenty, the state would lead economic development. Your power plants would be built with union labour, as would your housing. High rents would be solved by, er, banning landlords from charging high rents.
The “Red Plenty” approach will make economists roll their eyes, but it has the virtue of speaking to a more visceral part of human psychology than does the “Abundance” school. In socialist thought, there is an “us” and a “them”. Red Plenty offers to stick it to the landlords, to the wealthy, to the extractive capitalists. Abundance, in contrast, is rigorous and illuminating, but will not stir your passions. In classic liberal style, the book is carefully triangulated so as to avoid controversy. When Klein and Thompson discuss California, for instance, they make little acknowledgement of the fact that the state’s neglect of public transport might have something to do with the kind of people you encounter on it. (If you encounter anti-social behaviour on the subway, as often happens in large American cities, then you will be less inclined to take the subway in future, and less willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on improvements to the subway.) Similarly, the authors are much more interested in the constraints on Californian housing supply than in recent decades’ gargantuan and immigration-driven increase in demand. Abundance, in their view, is universalist.
We can observe an intriguing contrast in the “American Dynamism” aesthetic, which valourises modern American technological and architectural achievement. The coinage derives from an essay, published in 2022, by an investor who argued that America’s best hope is in “technologists building companies that support the national interest”. On X, accounts like “Based Americana” post appropriately bombastic images: Starship’s Raptor engines spewing blue flames, arrowhead silhouettes of B-2 bombers lowering in a hangar, the neoclassical magnificence of the long-lost Penn Station, American astronauts beholding the curve of the Earth, and Trump watching fighter jets soar over Mount Rushmore. The curation of these images amounts to propagandising rather than policy prescription. But it speaks to something that the Abundance movement would rather avoid: chauvinism. By this I mean that, as with Red Plenty, American Dynamism is for a particular group of people. It has a brash patriotism to it. Universalists, by definition, cannot be chauvinists, but they might nevertheless note the intrigue stirred up by another of Teles’ categories, the provocatively named “Dark Abundance”.
Within the Dark Abundance category are the think tankers and MAGA personnel who, like the Klein and Thompson crowd, want to reinvigorate American industry and improve American living standards, but, unlike the Klein and Thompson crowd, are inclined to do so via means that are more aggressive and, in their way, more chauvinistic. Dark Abundance, in the Teles taxonomy, is alarmed by the decline of America’s industrial base relative to China’s, and willing to take a Milei-esque chainsaw to the institutions it deems to be failing. (DOGE, in all its anti-bureaucratic fervour, is cited by Telos as an example.) Champions of Dark Abundance, whether or not they identify as such, are likely to be supportive of, or part of, the new generation of defence-adjacent tech firms — SpaceX, Anduril, other creators of Based Americana — and unsentimental about the use of fossil fuels en route to new forms of energy production. One might even classify Trump himself as a proponent of Dark Abundance. In an open letter to Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, Trump wrote in March that the US needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets”. The US, wrote Trump, is in competition with other nations, and on a quest to become “greater than ever before”. Prosperity, in this view, is tied to security. “We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.”
There is geopolitical safety, and there is day-to-day safety. Teles touches only glancingly on crime, but Dark Abundance was to take on new resonance in September. To the horror of the American Right, widely circulated CCTV footage showed a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, being fatally stabbed in the neck by a man who had been sitting behind her on a bus. “The Abundance crowd has no solution for this,” wrote Drew Pavlou, a high-profile Gen-Z political activist. Referring to the transformative, but severe, former prime minister of Singapore, Pavlou wrote: “This is why we need to combine Abundance with Lee Kuan Yew Thought: extremely harsh penalties for crime and public disorder.” Dark Abundance, in Pavlou’s subsequent framing, is not just about introducing gleaming subway carriages, but about ensuring those carriages are safe — even if to do so requires punitive measures.
Liberals, naturally, are scandalised by Dark Abundance. Jerusalem Demsas, the editor of a prominent new liberal journal, The Argument, wrote that Teles’ description “sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism”. The accusation is overblown, but Demsas was right to note that the conventional Abundance crowd is better on detail, is more collegiate, and can point to a growing body of patiently accumulated legislative achievements that the Dark Abundance crowd cannot.
Still, the Democrat flavour of abundance has little to say about the reality that some forms of technological progress are being held back by urban disorder. Every time an autonomous taxi in the Bay Area is vandalised, the technology becomes more expensive. It was announced last week that autonomous taxis will come to London next year, and we can quite reasonably hope that our own level of urban misbehaviour, being lesser than the Bay Area’s, will leave these new taxis, defenceless as they are, generally unharmed. Other forms of robotics, such as pavement-trundling delivery robots, will be more vulnerable, especially in a city where phone theft and shoplifting have skyrocketed. Public goods depend on public order.
It’s curious, then, that Dark Abundance is so-called. Should people who want lean and functional institutions or clean and safe public transport willingly identify as “dark”? One reason is that those ends require some unsavouriness: long prison sentences, intrusive surveillance, mass sackings, a devotion of our industrial energies to weaponry. This principle of unsavouriness applies even to construction, where to get rid of proceduralism is often to deny people the opportunity to object to a new housing estate or train line. The compromises are even more stark when it comes to crime.
But another answer is that the Right has been so often framed by the Left as morally wrong, as being on the dark side of a Manichean binary, that some of its disciples have developed some quasi-ironic contrarian relish for the role. There is a long and amusing history of Republicans professing support for, of all causes, the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe. In May, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, delivered a defence of Emperor Palpatine on CNN. “He took on an entrenched deep state [in] the Jedi Council… he wanted free and fair and reciprocal trade around the galaxy. [He] protected law and order.”
As another guest pointed out, Palpatine blew up an inhabited planet. But Jennings dug in. “Some could argue that it was warranted given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”
Which brings us back to Trump. “I think the Trump administration is less interested in sunshine and rainbows than, say, Ezra Klein is,” an attendee of this year’s Progress Conference told me. She reported that there was much more discussion of nationalism than there was at the same conference in 2024, which I attended, and plenty of pragmatic discussion of how to work with the MAGA White House. One success in this regard is Blake Scholl, whose company, Boom Supersonic, has built the first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. Boom was the principal beneficiary of an executive order (EO), signed in June, that was designed to reduce the regulations holding back supersonic air travel. As the EO put it: “This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation.”
In this case, then, chauvinism has propelled progress. A knot has been cut, and it might once again become possible to travel from London to New York within three hours. We can expect that Boom’s airliner, the Overture, will feature heavily in the next generation of “Based Americana” imagery.
So where will we be in another 50 years? If Dark Abundance wins the contest of ideas, and if the result is that supersonic airlines fill the skies above a wealthy, safe America, then its corner-cutting might appear to be justifiable. There remain many corners that Dark Abundance is unwilling to cut, many eggs that it hasn’t cracked into an omelette: eugenics, autocracy, wars of conquest, El Salvadorean prisons, and whatever it takes to wrench the birth rate back up. Each of those measures could, theoretically, enhance a country’s material progress; each requires significant moral compromise. Darker Abundance, as we might call it, would make Dark Abundance seem tame. The habit of corner-cutting is not always for the best, and nor is the habit of relishing the mantle of darkness.
