Abi Olvera wrote a great Substack post. In 16 vivid pictures, she imagines what an Abundant America might actually look and feel like beyond an abstract promise of higher GDP. A country where you can buy a healthy lunch for $4, find an affordable place to live near your job, and walk into a small neighborhood healthcare clinic without navigating a sprawling medical complex.
Abundance can mean many things to different people. But the conception Abi is working with is an agenda to remove the technical, regulatory, and artificial bottlenecks that constrain the supply of goods and services people value most. It is a reformist approach to a surprisingly diverse set of problems that share the same starting point: there isn’t enough. Not enough housing, not enough healthcare, not enough affordable childcare, not enough transportation options, and not enough ways to make a living.
What I especially appreciate about Abi’s list is that she is also describing a Tiny America. An America of tiny restaurants, tiny homes that fit between larger buildings, tiny healthcare facilities, and perhaps even tiny cars. A country where businesses do not need enormous amounts of capital to get started, buildings do not need enormous footprints to be legal, and families do not need enormous incomes to live comfortably.
This matters especially for people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution. A city built exclusively for large businesses, large homes, and large institutions imposes a minimum cost of participation that many Americans simply cannot afford.
I enjoyed Abi’s list so much that I want to add to it and to expand the imagination of what abundance can mean. Taking Abi’s 16 items, here are a few more to add to the picture:
17. Electricity abundance: Power is so plentiful and affordable that you barely think about your electricity bill.
Running the air conditioner during a heat wave shouldn’t feel like a financial decision, and manufacturing entrepreneurs shouldn’t be deterred by energy costs. Nuclear power (including small modular reactors), natural gas, geothermal, solar farms, rooftop solar, wind, storage, and technologies we haven’t invented yet should all have room to compete. We need faster permitting for generation, transmission, and grid connections, not political committees trying to guess which technologies will eventually win. Energy is not just another input in the economy. It is the great multiplier of human physical capacity. From the hand to the hammer, from the waterwheel to the steam engine, from the horse to the locomotive, from human muscle to machines capable of moving mountains. And now it is becoming the means by which we transcend some of our cognitive limitations as well. For the next great economic transformation, electricity will increasingly power not only our factories and vehicles, but also our machines of intelligence.
18. Compute abundance: Extraordinary intelligence is available to everyone, not just the companies that can afford enormous data centers.
Computing power is becoming a general-purpose resource for human intelligence, much as electricity became a general-purpose resource for human physical labor. The emerging anti-data-center movement has troubling similarities to the NIMBY movement against housing. Both respond to the visible local costs of new infrastructure while discounting the enormous, widely distributed benefits of additional supply. The most interesting consequence of compute abundance might be its effect on Tiny America. A friend of mine who works in consulting recently remarked that his AI assistant can issue invoices, read and send emails, manage his calendar, and even work inside software repositories. “In a large company, doing any of that would be almost impossible.” But only if compute is abundant enough does that extraordinary intelligence become an inexpensive tool rather than an expensive privilege.
19. Educational abundance: A great education shouldn’t depend on your ZIP code, and a great school shouldn’t need to look like a traditional school.
The charter school revolution challenged the assumption that public education must be delivered by government-operated schools. The homeschooling revolution has gone even further by demonstrating that education need not follow a single institutional model at all. Indeed, there is no homeschooling model in America. There are thousands of models. Some families teach at home. Others join microschools, learning pods, cooperative programs, or arrangements that combine several educational providers. More states should allow educational funding to follow students rather than institutions. And we should remove bureaucratic ceilings that prevent successful experiments from growing. A microschool that educates 15 children brilliantly should be able to serve 30, then 60, then perhaps 300, without having to abandon everything that made it successful in the first place. Let them grow, replicate, and compete.
20. Housing abundance: Grandma can live in the backyard.
Imagine a young couple buying their first modest home with a small cottage behind it. For a few years, they rent the cottage to help pay the mortgage. Later, Grandma moves in, close enough to have dinner with the family, but independent enough to enjoy her privacy. Yet zoning, minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, and restrictions on accessory dwelling units make them difficult or illegal in many communities. We should make it easier to build backyard cottages, garage apartments, tiny homes, duplexes, and other forms of missing-middle housing. They can also help solve one of the great social challenges of modern America: the geographic separation of generations. The abundant neighborhood has room for the newly married couple, the elderly parent, the student, and the single worker. They shouldn’t all need the same size home to live on the same street.
21. Job mobility abundance: Your professional skills don’t expire when you cross a state line.
Imagine a licensed barber moving from Georgia to North Carolina to take a better job, only to discover that the state where he now lives doesn’t automatically recognize the qualifications that allowed him to serve customers perfectly safely in the state he left. Occupational licensing too often operates as a form of protectionism, shielding incumbent professionals from competition and making it unnecessarily difficult for workers to move. We should recognize equivalent qualifications across state lines, eliminate unnecessary licenses, and allow people to demonstrate competence without forcing them through expensive, duplicative procedures. When workers can move toward better opportunities, their incomes can rise. When employers can attract more qualified workers, services become more available and competitive. That’s one way a society can achieve something that is too often treated as a contradiction: higher wages and lower prices at the same time.
22. Talent abundance: The world’s brightest minds can come to America to build the future.
The Manhattan Project drew upon scientific minds who had crossed oceans to escape persecution and war. Silicon Valley was built in no small part by immigrants and their children. Today’s AI revolution is similarly international, with researchers and entrepreneurs arriving from every corner of the globe. Driving that talent toward competing innovation hubs is an extraordinary own goal. An abundant America should have easier pathways for exceptional researchers, entrepreneurs, skilled professionals, and graduates of American universities to work, build, and put down roots. Talent is not a fixed resource that Americans must defend against foreigners. Ideas, companies, and productive relationships multiply when people are allowed to find one another. A country that wants to lead the next technological revolution should be the easiest place in the world for exceptional people to make things happen.
23. Autonomous mobility abundance: Everyone can have a personal robot chauffeur.
An elderly woman who no longer drives should still be able to visit her grandchildren whenever she wishes. A blind professional should be able to summon a car without depending on friends or an expensive private transportation arrangement. At the Progress Conference last week, I heard Waymo’s CEO describe the key unexpected bottleneck in the company’s expansion. The binding constraint is not primarily the availability of cars or the autonomous driving technology. It is politics. The company has to expand cautiously enough to avoid provoking a backlash that could reverse years of progress. According to Waymo’s published data, through June 2026 its autonomous vehicles were involved in 95% fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse, and 82% fewer injury-causing crashes, compared with human-driver benchmarks across its operating cities. And think about what happens to a city when access to a car no longer requires owning one. Households could spend less on vehicles, insurance, repairs, and parking. Vast surface parking lots could eventually become homes, parks, shops, and public squares.
24. Infrastructure abundance: America can build great things quickly again.
America once astonished the world with the speed and ambition of its infrastructure. Today, countries such as China and Saudi Arabia often complete enormous projects on timelines that would seem implausible in the United States. We do not need their political systems to recover the capacity to build. We need decisions that are timely and responsibilities that are clear, instead of infrastructure regulations that become procedural obstacles. This applies to the homes and data centers we’ve already discussed. But it also applies to highways, freight rail, ports, airports, pipelines, transmission lines, water systems, and the next generation of automated infrastructure. Imagine ports where containers move almost seamlessly from ships to autonomous trucks and trains, or airports that can expand capacity before passengers spend years enduring overcrowded terminals. An abundant country must have the institutional confidence to build at the scale of its ambitions.
25. Clean water abundance: The river running through your city is clean enough to swim in.
I was recently in Zurich, and one of the most delightful things about the city is how ordinary swimming in its urban waters has become. People gather along Lake Zurich and the Limmat River. Wooden bathhouses, swimming terraces, waterfront cafés, and sunbathing lawns transform the water into an extension of public life. You can finish work, meet friends, have a drink, and take a swim with the city around you. Imagine the rivers running through Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, or other major cities becoming places where people routinely gather to swim in designated areas. That requires investments in wastewater treatment and better management of stormwater and sewer overflows. Americans shouldn’t have to travel to an alpine lake to enjoy a beautiful urban waterfront.
26. Wildlife abundance: Endangered species become assets worth protecting, not regulatory liabilities.
American conservation has an extraordinary success story in the bison. Once nearly driven to extinction, bison recovered through a combination of private ranching, public conservation, and stewardship by Native American tribes. The lesson is that conservation can be remarkably effective when the incentives of people who manage land are aligned with the survival and multiplication of species. In the American West, regulated hunting permits for bighorn sheep could generate revenue for habitat restoration and wildlife management. Consider the red-cockaded woodpecker in North Carolina. Research published in the Journal of Law and Economics found that landowners near known woodpecker populations were more likely to harvest pine forests early, before the trees matured into suitable habitat, because attracting an endangered bird could trigger land-use restrictions. It is a variation of the infamous “shoot, shovel, and shut up” problem: when protecting a species creates substantial costs for a landowner, the law can unintentionally encourage people to avoid its presence. Reward habitat creation, and provide assurances to landowners who welcome endangered species. Experiment with conservation markets and carefully designed property rights that reward long-term stewardship.
27. Aesthetic abundance: Beautiful neighborhoods aren’t reserved for the wealthy or the past.
Too few neighborhoods in America have the features we see in movies and hallmark cards: narrow, tree-lined streets, homes with porches and balconies, small courtyards and gardens, a corner bakery by a neighborhood square, and buildings that share a recognizable architectural language. We have made many of the ingredients of beautiful neighborhoods difficult to build: narrow lots, traditional mixed-use buildings, small apartment houses, pedestrian-oriented streets, and compact blocks. Some master-planned communities demonstrate what becomes possible when a developer can coordinate architecture, landscaping, public spaces, and streets as a unified project. But beautiful neighborhoods should also be able to emerge incrementally, one lot, one building, and one small developer at a time. We could make it easier through preapproved architectural plans, form-based codes, flexible lot sizes, and rules that allow builders to recreate the human-scale patterns of older neighborhoods. And beauty does not need to mean expensive ornamentation. A shaded sidewalk around a modest public square can do more for the experience of a neighborhood than acres of costly but empty landscaping. An abundant America shouldn’t have to choose between building more and building beautifully.
28. Trade abundance: Living on an island shouldn’t mean paying a protectionist premium for everyday goods.
The Jones Act, enacted in 1920, generally requires cargo shipped between American ports to travel on vessels that are American-built, American-owned, American-flagged, and American-crewed. It is a policy that restricts competition in domestic maritime transportation, raising costs in places with few alternatives to shipping, especially Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Alaska. A foreign vessel can deliver cargo from a foreign port to Puerto Rico, but generally cannot carry ordinary domestic cargo from Florida to Puerto Rico unless it meets the Jones Act’s requirements. Why should an American territory face additional barriers to commerce with the rest of its own country? By insulating companies from competition, we also deprive them of the incentives to improve, innovate, and become internationally competitive. Trade abundance means allowing people to benefit from the world’s productive capabilities, regardless of whether they live in the middle of a continent or on an island.
29. Home-based entrepreneurial abundance: Your kitchen, living room, or garage can become the beginning of a business.
Imagine a grandmother whose empanadas are famous among her friends finally being allowed to sell them from her own kitchen. Or a parent who wants to operate a small daycare from a converted living room, allowing neighbors to drop off their children within walking distance. Or a musician who turns a garage into a recording studio. None of these businesses needs an office tower or millions of dollars in startup capital. And yet, land-use restrictions, occupational licenses, commercial-kitchen requirements, limits on home-based businesses, and other regulations can make these ventures difficult or prohibitively expensive.
Cottage-food laws in many states already allow entrepreneurs to sell certain foods prepared at home, but restrictions vary enormously, and many entrepreneurs still encounter rules designed around much larger establishments. Food safety matters, but so do child safety and noise. Rules should be proportionate to those risks, not based on the assumption that economic activity must take place in a separate commercial building. We should make it easier for people to start small, earn their first dollar, experiment with an idea, and grow at their own pace.
An abundant society can build enormous nuclear power plants. It can also, at the same time, allow a family to install solar panels on a roof. It can train a frontier AI model through massive data centers and also empower an individual to run his business from a laptop. It can build spectacular new and vertical cities and allow grandmothers to live in a cottage behind the family home. America should be capable of the monumental without prohibiting the modest. An Abundance agenda should make room for more experiments, more forms of enterprise, more ways of living, and more opportunities for people to shape their own lives.
Some of these reforms require removing unnecessary regulations, while others require better institutions, investments in infrastructure, scientific breakthroughs, and new ways of aligning private incentives to achieve all of that.
But they all point toward the same aspiration: a country where scarcity is less often the artificial result of rules we have imposed on ourselves, and where people have the freedom to live better and more abundant lives.
