(2025-04-11) Rao The Poverty Of Abundance

Venkatesh Rao: The Poverty of Abundance. A rhetorical letter in response to the question: “Is this book worth reading based on what you know about me?

(Sloptraptions is an AI-assisted opt-in section of the Contraptions Newsletter.)

Abundance is not a serious book in the philosophical sense. It is not addressed to those who wish to think. It is addressed to those who wish to recover legitimacy—without truth, without reckoning, without loss.

Its authors and their allies—figures nestled for years in the editorial heart of elite liberal media—are not impartial analysts offering a vision for renewal. They are, in no small measure, the engineers of the present malaise. For the better part of two decades, they have constructed and defended a style of procedural liberalism that demoted imagination, displaced conflict, and outsourced moral complexity to the aesthetics of clarity and competence.

Before we can understand the shape of Abundance, we must first study its echo. The reception of this book is not merely a collection of opinions—it is a map of allegiances, a soft launch of an ideological bloc.

The chorus of voices praising it are not simply impressed readers; they are participants in a long-running effort to refurbish the liberal project through the idioms of competence, optimism, and post-ideological pragmatism.

On the side of praise, we find the Vox-alumni network in full force... Matthew Yglesias... Noah Smith... Eric Levitz.

Beyond this core, Abundance has drawn favorable commentary from voices in the institutional center-left, particularly those seeking to counterbalance the image of liberalism as technocratic or hesitant.

Elsewhere, the response has been more critical

In The American Prospect, Hannah Story Brown calls the book “unserious” for sidestepping political economy. In Jacobin, Matt Bruenig points out the book’s allergy to redistribution. Zephyr Teachout, writing in Washington Monthly, warns that its technocratic ambition masks a deregulatory logic.

And in Democracy Journal, Mike Konczal’s review, The Abundance Doctrine, supplies the most serious internal critique to date: that Abundance forgets the historical function of the very procedures it derides. He reminds us that many administrative constraints were liberalism’s response to a hostile conservative judiciary—and that any “abundance” agenda blind to this context is courting fantasy.

This contextual vacuum is thrown into sharper relief by Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman, a book published alongside Abundance, which offers a historical diagnosis of institutional decay. Where Abundance diagnoses procedural friction, Why Nothing Works reveals the cultural shift—away from Hamiltonian ambition and toward Jeffersonian suspicion—that made such friction inevitable. The books together seem orchestrated, if not coordinated: one demanding speed, the other lamenting blockage, but neither quite naming power.

And if we step further back, the intellectual scaffolding comes into view. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker hovers as an unmentioned ghost text, a reminder that building at scale has historically meant bulldozing the weak.

Abundance is not a text emerging in solitude. It is a coordinated signal, amplified by a coalition of reputation managers, policy narrators, and institutional survivors. Its very reception reveals its function—not as a proposal for change, but as an aesthetic rebranding of a liberalism in retreat.

Klein, from The American Prospect to Vox to The New York Times, has long narrated procedural liberalism into legitimacy. Thompson, at The Atlantic, translates optimism into policy tone, supplying the cultural gloss for technocratic proposals. Their auxiliary chorus—Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, Eric Levitz—offer synchronized reinforcement, not critique. Together, they operate as a reputational economy, laundering legacy affiliations into future-facing branding.

The establishment response has not been merely tactical—it has been sacramental. Francis Fukuyama, liberalism’s canonical high priest, offered an early and emphatic endorsement of Abundance, praising it as a “blueprint” for restoring trust in governance. His blessing is not just symbolic. It is an attempt to graft this new rhetoric of abundance onto the withered trunk of end-of-history optimism.

Around this media core hovers a broader liberal restoration project. Think tank voices like Sam Hammond, institutional figures like Brian Deese, and centrist validators like Pete Buttigieg all whisper through the text, even if not named in it. Together they constitute not a coalition of change, but a class of survival—rebranding itself as forward-looking precisely because it cannot afford retrospection.

Meanwhile, Abundance borrows heavily—rhetorically and conceptually—from the techno-optimists of the New Right. Marc Andreessen’s “Time to Build” and the American Dynamism crowd have set the tempo. The language of speed, agency, and unblocking used in Abundance is less a reaction to conservatism than a mimetic convergence.

This is not a coalition of inquiry. It is a class of survivors, retooling their house style for a moment they helped author but no longer control.

The omissions in Abundance are not incidental. They are structural. They form the negative space in which the text assembles its coherence. And taken together, they tell us what liberalism cannot yet say.

First among these is capital. The book offers us regulation as the villain, but never capital as the antagonist. Developers are always hindered, never extractive

Next is history. Abundance presents procedures as if they emerged in a vacuum—bad habits of a self-sabotaging elite. But as Mike Konczal points out in The Abundance Doctrine, many of these procedures were built in response to conservative courts and anti-government ideology. They were safeguards against sabotage, not obstacles to progress.

The book also omits labor. Workers appear as abstractions, not agents. Building happens, but builders are not named. Supply increases, but ownership is never redistributed. Scarcity is treated as a logistics problem, not a consequence of class politics.

Even its analysis of liberalism’s own failures is curiously shallow. The professional managerial class, on whom this entire project depends, is neither defended nor interrogated

And then there is ecology. Environmental regulation is framed as friction, not as memory of catastrophe. The climate crisis is abstracted into “permitting delays,” rather than located in the political economy of carbon.

Finally, and most tellingly, there is no real vision of the good. Abundance offers motion, not destination

These silences are not gaps in an otherwise coherent theory. They are the foundations on which the book rests

What Abundance offers is not vision but simulation. It borrows its style from the techno-optimists—Marc Andreessen, Katherine Boyle, Balaji Srinivasan—but without the clarity, the rupture, or the willingness to name enemies.

The result is a rhetorical uncanny valley: liberalism in cosplay, moving fast and healing things, in theory.

The authors do not join the techno-right’s program. They do not defend wealth, capital, or founding myths. But neither do they clearly break with them. Instead, they aestheticize their urgency—appropriating momentum while disavowing ideology.

The book lifts motifs from intellectual projects it refuses to name. From Samo Burja’s Great Founder Theory, it appropriates the language of high-agency institutional re-foundation, but strips away the commitment to elite political rupture

Even the meme of "abundance" itself—ubiquitous in techno-libertarian and neoreactionary discourse—is stripped of its transhumanist or post-liberal stakes and reduced to housing permits and gigabit fiber.

On the other end of the spectrum, Abundance also evacuates the radical promise of left-accelerationism, once theorized by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, which called for deploying the tools of modernity—automation, planning, infrastructure—not for market optimization, but for liberation from wage labor and scarcity itself. (Fully Automated Luxury Communism)

It invites liberals to feel bold again without doing politics. It is momentum for the already convinced, repackaged as intellectual breakthrough.

In this, Abundance resembles the final phase of neoliberalism: not as doctrine, but as styling language, reassembled for survivability.

Abundance cannot imagine a world. It can only imagine more throughput. More houses, more energy, more bandwidth. But more is not a theory of the good. It is not even, necessarily, progress.

The future is rendered not as possibility but as a better-run present.

Abundance is not worth your time—not because it lacks intelligence, but because it lacks courage.
You are looking for what Abundance cannot offer: a theory of change that begins with conflict and ends with meaning.

What Abundance gives you instead is choreography. A simulation of ambition, choreographed to avoid the questions that matter.

So no—this is not a book you need to read.
But it may be a book you need to understand. As artifact. As confession. As an admission, artfully curated, that the center can no longer hold—but hopes, with just the right rhetoric, to be invited back into relevance.

(This essay was co-authored through an iterative dialogue between a human author (Venkat) and an AI assistant (ChatGPT-4o), using a structured but fluid authoring protocol designed to surface critique, integrate research, and refine rhetoric. The process was guided by a pseudo-prompt framing device, collaborative phase transitions, and alternating pedagogical roles.)