The Last Abundance Agenda

[Passages]

In the 1980s, Wall Street vowed to make housing more affordable through deregulation of housing finance. The result was the 2008 crisis.

by David Dayen
April 1, 2025

I was content to sit out the Abundance™ deliberations. Two years ago, I wrote a long piece about the ways in which adherents to the new paradigm of “a liberalism that builds” neglected any analysis of power, or the need to build coalitions to counteract that power. Ezra Klein engaged with my argument in his New York Times column and I responded. As a journal on the left, we were, I believe, contractually obligated to review Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance book, and we did so. But I personally felt like I said what I wanted to say. (As an aside, I was amused that when the authors saw fit to mention the Prospect in Abundance, they didn’t discuss the aforementioned back-and-forth at all, but instead briefly referenced a Bob Kuttner blog post about the back-and-forth.)

However, I got a call last week from an NPR program called Open to Debate. They were having Derek Thompson on to talk about his book and wanted me to join. The show has an unusual format: There’s a 40-minute interview between the subject and a moderator, then a few panelists are brought on to ask one question. I’m not sure this constitutes debate, but I took advantage of the opportunity nonetheless.

Here was my one question: “In 2006, over 2 million units of housing were built, and after that we entered the biggest depression in modern homebuilding history. Single-family homes didn’t rebound in construction for more than a decade, and multifamily, which wasn’t really involved in the bubble, didn’t recover for five years. I know you don’t believe that there were no zoning rules in 2006, and after 2006 there was a swarm of them. What happened was we had a housing bubble collapse, brought on by deregulating housing finance, which was spurred by an abundance agenda known as George W. Bush’s ‘ownership society.’ How does that factor into your analysis? What lessons should we draw from what happened in the recent past when abundance was prioritized over regulatory slowness or regulatory safeguards, even ones that on the surface have little to do with building, and the results were disastrous?

SNIP
I responded, much to the chagrin of the show producers who wanted to keep things moving, that Thompson’s ends matched George W. Bush’s: They both wanted more people to afford housing. What, I asked, if that common goal is distorted in ways that cause serious dislocations? Again, Thompson conceded a big bite of the argument. “Could we see deregulation in various markets leading to outcomes that are undesirable? Yes.” But he said that housing was so unaffordable today that we have to try something, and we should not be afraid of “allowing markets to flourish” just because we had a housing-fueled Great Recession.
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2025-04-01-last-abundance-agenda/