Americans who have heard of the Abundance movement most likely encountered it through Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 bestseller Abundance. Although their book, and the broader Abundance movement, focused on a wide range of issues drawn from across the country, some of the most vivid examples of failed projects relating to affordable housing, transportation, and infrastructure have come from California. These include the state’s infamously over-budget and under-constructed high-speed rail project, its worst-in-the-nation real estate prices and rates of homelessness, and its exorbitant price tags for public infrastructure (such as the notorious $1.7 million public toilet). And since Democrats have long held legislative supermajorities and a monopoly on statewide offices, California’s failures provide a stark example of the kind of liberal overregulation and antipathy toward growth that the Abundance movement aims to counter.
Misha Chellam is a San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur and a leader in the Abundance movement who is coming at the debate from a unique angle. Although he has long experience in the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement that for decades has challenged barriers to housing construction, as co-founder of the Abundance Network he aims to create an alliance of elected officials and civic leaders who can work together to achieve Abundance-related policy outcomes.
In this podcast discussion, Misha Chellam explains how he came to the Abundance movement and why he started his organization as a kind of collective project to achieve what he calls “twenty-first-century government.” He describes how his view of Abundance connects to related concepts like YIMBYism, state capacity, and Progress Studies, and analyzes how his movement achieved political victories in San Francisco through a coalition of growth-focused Abundants and good-government moderates. And he explains that while California’s politics may have inspired much of the early Abundance movement, he aims to create chapters outside the state and envisions that Abundance may come in different “flavors” depending on regional needs and the ideological approaches of its participants.
Transcript
Misha Chellam: To us, our mission statement as an organization is to organize a new generation of civic leaders to build twenty-first century government. And sort of implicit in that is that we have today twentieth-century government, and so that makes it a very broad project.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Misha Chellam. He is a founder of the Abundance Network and his writings frequently appear on the Modern Power Substack. Welcome, Misha!
Misha Chellam: Thanks for having me, Geoff. It is quite a privilege to be on a podcast hosted by one of my favorite institutions, the Niskanen Center.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thank you. We really appreciate that, Misha. I note that in addition to co-founding the Abundance Network, you also founded the Council on Technology and Society, which was an organization for tech leaders who want to understand and improve government. You founded a tech-oriented vocational training program called TradeCraft. And you founded a tech company called Scanadu that aimed at allowing users to better monitor their health using next-generation tests and devices. You like founding things, it would appear?
Misha Chellam: Yes. I very much like starting things. I have a muddled track record of finishing them, but yes, there’s something about doing… There’s something in my sort of orientation or personality and set of interests that overlaps to liking to start new things. I will say that this project, the sort of Abundance work I’m doing now, feels like it could well be what I do for the rest of my career. We’ll see, but it is holding my attention now and has been holding my attention for seven-plus years. And I feel every day that I learn something new. So yes, hopefully this will be the last thing I found.
Geoff Kabaservice: Fingers crossed. But you’re also speaking to me, I believe, from the epicenter of tech founders and startups in Silicon Valley. Am I right about that?
Misha Chellam: Yes, that’s right. I am speaking to you from Alameda, California, which is a small island off the coast of Oakland in the Bay Area.
Geoff Kabaservice: Great. Did you grow up in Silicon Valley?
Misha Chellam: I moved here when I was three. My parents met… My dad grew up in Malaysia, my mom grew up in Belgium. They met at a discotheque in London and I was born in England. And we moved when I was three to Silicon Valley because my dad had gotten a job with Intel.
Geoff Kabaservice: What was it like to grow up in Silicon Valley?
Misha Chellam: It’s hard to compare, because I didn’t grow up anywhere else. It was a very optimistic, up and to the right childhood that I experienced; things just got naturally a tick and a tick better. And I think it’s interesting, in retrospect… We moved because of the tech industry to the Bay Area. A lot of the friends I grew up with had grown up in the Bay Area and had roots that preceded the tech industry, and they have struggled to stay in the Bay Area because housing prices exploded and they weren’t working in the tech industry. So that’s kind of been interesting. Almost basically everyone that I grew up with, and certainly went to high school with and was close with, has since moved away from the area. So that’s the downside of prosperity in a world where the policy doesn’t keep up.
Geoff Kabaservice: It is. Did you also go to school in California, university?
Misha Chellam: I went to Pomona College, which is a small liberal arts school in southern California, and met my wife my first month of my freshman year of college. And I was in a band and then my wife was a diplomat, so we lived abroad. And then we came back and I started founding all these new random things. And yeah, now I’ve been back in the Bay Area for about ten, twelve years.
Geoff Kabaservice: Coincidentally, just a few weeks ago I interviewed Virginia Postrel, who’s a California-based writer, about Abundance themes although from a libertarian perspective. And she also met her husband in their first week at college. I always like it when those stories work out.
Misha Chellam: Yes, exactly.
Geoff Kabaservice: Out of curiosity, how have you identified yourself politically over the years, if you have?
Misha Chellam: I grew up in a sort of left-of-center household. My mom is a European, so she just voted for… Maybe that is not self-evident, but my understanding of Europeans was that they were liberals, so she voted for Democrats. I think my dad voted maybe for Reagan in ’84. But they were very much happily Clinton supporters. And we didn’t really talk about politics much growing up, but I kind of found my way into the 2000 state Democratic convention.
I was always for the anti-establishment candidate, so I was a Bill Bradley supporter over Al Gore. Then — safely, because I was in California — I was actually a Ralph Nader voter, which I find ironic now, but I was a Ralph Nader voter in 2000. So I was always a little bit distrustful of the two-party system, the entrenched interests, that kind of stuff, without necessarily having a complex or nuanced political science-informed vocabulary about it. But yes, definitely sort of left-of-center.
Geoff Kabaservice: How did you feel about outsider Republican gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Misha Chellam: I think at the time… I forget exactly what year that was, but I was either paying zero attention to politics or I was out of the country. I basically did that 2000 thing. I just randomly was looking through a box at my parents’ house and found my old state convention tag. I was very lightly following politics in 2000. Worked on a Senate campaign in 2006, on Jim Webb’s Senate campaign in Virginia in 2006, because my wife was training to go abroad with the Foreign Service. But really I didn’t follow politics super closely growing up or in a number of intervening years in the early part of my career.
Geoff Kabaservice: I ask this partly because the last Republican who wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger — who was obviously a sort of an independent, aberrational candidate — the last time a Republican was elected governor in California was Pete Wilson when he got reelected in 1994. So it’s been thirty years at this point since California’s elected a Republican governor — and Republicans used to have a very large presence in the state. Of course, both presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came out of California politics.
So it’s something that people have seen in their lifetimes, the downfall of Republican politics in California, and not just a super-majority in the state legislature for the Democrats but a super-super-majority. There’s a quote from Republican president Theodore Roosevelt that I happen to know you like, because I’ve seen you use it: “The government is us. We are the government, you and I.” You don’t really hear Republicans say things like that anymore.
Misha Chellam: Yes. I mean, you don’t really hear Democrats say that much anymore either. Both parties would probably have a different kind of median valence towards government. But I think this self-governance, this sort of more — what’s the word I’m looking for? — self-reliance? That’s not exactly the word I’m looking for. It’s like if you go out and survive in the wilderness on your own. But this notion that we are self-governing, and that everything that we complain about is ultimately our own faults: we are where the buck ends in a self-governing system. I think we’ve sort of consumerized our concept of many things in society, and we’ve consumerized our experience of government to blame other people, point at other people.
To me that quote by Teddy Roosevelt is the beating heart of the Abundance movement. And it’s not a particularly partisan idea, it’s just this idea that things are messed up because we broadly as a citizenry are not paying that much attention. My personal added layer on that is that the people with the most resources in a broadly conceived of way — if you imagined a socioeconomic ladder that included cultural capital, and had it from the most resourced to the least resourced — I think the top 10 to 20% of society has the most obligation because they have the most capacity to engage in governance, and not just complain at other people but do stuff themselves.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, I spent a certain amount of time in California and in Silicon Valley in the ‘90s and early 2000s. And I would have characterized the attitude of many of the people in tech that I knew in those days as generally libertarian — a feeling that “We here in Silicon Valley are creating big things, and all the government does is take from us, take from the people and get in our way.” So I wasn’t all that surprised that at least some segment of Silicon Valley really shifted its loyalties from Democrats to Republicans and specifically to Trump in recent years.
Misha Chellam: I’m not sure about the folks who were here in the ‘90s… There’s actually a really good podcast that unfortunately I won’t be able to think of off the top of my head, but it was Mark Andreessen and somebody; maybe it was Ross Douthat. And he was describing what the old deal was, and how that kind of suited all parties. I disagree with Mark Andreessen about a ton of stuff, but I actually thought that that characterization was pretty accurate.
I don’t think it was “You’re taking our money,” like the libertarian low-tax piece of it. I don’t think that they really cared about that. I think in general — and again painting with a very broad brush — that many technologists are really kind of artists. They’re excited to build, they’re builders. They want to just build stuff unconstrained. And it’s the creativity that they’re after, and it’s not really… The financial rewards are sort of secondary. Like, they’re not in finance. They chose to build something new that had a high probability of failure because that was exciting to them.
So I don’t think it was the money part of it. I think people were very happy to vote for tax increases and stuff like that. I think it was the freedom to operate, and probably the idea that they’re going to be valorized in society at some level. I think that was also the view of a more adolescent industry. And I think as the industry has matured, it clearly has implications for society, so clearly society should have some say over how the industry and the markets that it’s embedded in work.
But another thing… I can’t remember if I said this earlier or if I just thought it. As the island of knowledge grows, so too do the shores of ignorance. The more time I spend in and around politics — which is quite different in some meaningful ways to business — things are really complex. And every human is their own person, and you can make some broad generalizations. But there’s lots of different attitudes that exist in the tech industry. It’s obviously not monolithic.
Geoff Kabaservice: Misha, you and I met — or, excuse me, I guess we were first in a room together — in the spring of 2023, when we were at an Abundance happy hour put on by Derek Thompson and Matt Yglesias. This of course was a year after Derek had come out with his “Abundance agenda” piece in the Atlantic but two years before Ezra and Derek published their book Abundance. And I emailed you the next week after that happy hour because you had written a review on Modern Power of Jennifer Pahlka’s not-yet-published book, Recoding America. And you wrote that “Just as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement, I believe Jen’s book can help launch the state capacity movement.”
You put Niskanen in touch with Jen, and we’re all very grateful to you for that. That is in fact what led to her becoming a senior fellow and a treasured colleague of us all here. And in fact, I think her book did have a catalytic impact. It really did change the frame of reference of those of us who had been thinking about why government wasn’t working well, even though there weren’t that many of us at that point. You come out of a band background, so the comparison I would make is that it was sort of like the Replacements’ second album Hootenanny; it only sold a thousand copies, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.
Misha Chellam: Yeah. You didn’t end that in a question, so that gives me license to take this wherever I want. So I’m going to use it to talk about… Well, I’m going to use it to talk about a couple of things. So the origin of the work that I do now was in 2018. I was, like probably many people, still sort of processing the 2016 election. And for me, I was both, “Wow, Trump seems like a pretty crappy person. I wonder why we elected him president?” But also thinking about all the energy behind Bernie in the Democratic primary. And both of those things pointed to that there was more bomb-throwing energy in the system than I was seeing myself living in my little Silicon Valley bubble.
And so I started this group called the Council on Technology and Society. And it was basically for startup founders and VCs who had a pretty blinkered view, just focused on their company’s success. How does the rest of society work, and how might we plug in pro-socially? And in that group, I met my co-founder, Zack Rosen. Zack had co-founded an organization the year before called California YIMBY, which works on YIMBY politics in the state of California.
And there were sort of two twin ideas that we kept circling in that group, and then the subsequent group which was called Effective Government California, and then eventually the Abundance Network. One was sort this what I’d call vertical kitchen-table issues, with housing being the principal one. You could point at stuff that wasn’t working and picture a concrete outcome that you wanted to see, like “We should have more housing so that housing is less expensive and more people can move to opportunity.” But there was also this sense that both connected to visible issues like housing, but felt also subterranean, which is effective government: “Why is government so slow and sclerotic?”
And so Zack was sort of the represented and sort of brought with him the experiences of doing YIMBY advocacy. Jen had joined that group early on. Her husband, Tim O’Reilly, was a technology guy, and so he had joined and Jen had joined with him. And whenever I would mention this effective government implementation stuff, which I had a very hazy understanding of at the time, Jen was like, “Yeah, I think that this is a really, really big piece of the puzzle.” And she was writing the book at the time, and then I got an early copy and I read it, and I was like, “Oh my God.” I felt the same kind of quake moment from reading that manuscript as I had had reading Mancur Olson describing the problem of encompassing versus distributional coalitions (which is basically narrow interests).
And to me, those are still the two pillars of the Abundance movement, in my opinion: anti-rentier-ism, countervailing the power of narrow interests on the one hand; and then tackling these state capacity issues, which, as your colleague Brink Lindsey wrote, come out of ideas from both the left and the right. I consider Jen a spiritual third co-founder of Abundance Network, and also clearly one of the leading voices in the broader Abundance movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: Sort of a side project of my podcast lately has been to explore the Abundance movement from a number of different angles and in some kind of historical perspective. And I wanted to talk to you, Misha, because you not only have hands-on experience with movement-building in this area, but you also have thought deeply about Abundance as an intellectual and political project. You’re even able to name-drop Mancur Olson with the best of them. I have to say, though, that I have a number of listeners who aren’t intimately familiar with the Abundance movement, and they need to have insiders explain it to them without using insider-y terms. And also they need the people involved to make the case for the movement.
And I should say that there’s a complication for newcomers in that a number of concepts tend to be grouped under the Abundance rubric and used interchangeably, when in fact they’re somewhat distinct, even though of course there are areas of overlap. And these concepts are, first of all, YIMBYism. “YIMBY” of course is a pro-development acronym for “Yes in My Backyard,” as opposed to anti-development, “Not in My Backyard” or NIMBYism. Second, Abundance; third, state capacity; and fourth, a somewhat separate, mostly science- and tech-oriented cluster that revolves around concepts like progress and dynamism.
But let’s start with YIMBYism, because it was one of the earliest clusters to take on organizational form, and it is relatively narrow-focused on the issue of housing. I think I’m correct in saying that it also originated in the early 2010s in the San Francisco Bay Area with organizations like California YIMBY and SFBARF, the all-too-memorable acronym for the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation.
Tell me again, how far back did your interest in this movement go? And am I correct in thinking that it kind of grew up with the tech industry and the upward pressure on rents and housing availability which led a lot of young people really to be frozen out of the housing market?
Misha Chellam: Yes, that’s right. So the YIMBY story… Again, like all human stories, it’s complex. I think there’s some parallel invention. There’s A Better Cambridge, started in 2013, which was a sort of pro-YIMBY organization. And of course there were small groups of people thinking about zoning and the implications of zoning restrictions much further back, decades back. But yeah, I think that certainly a propulsive force at the start of all this Abundance work was the YIMBY work starting in San Francisco in 2013, 2014.
I was not involved at that time. I sort of became aware of YIMBY — and, again, even just local and state politics — through my co-founder, Zack. Zack got involved in about 2016 or 2017 when he helped Brian Hanlon co-found California YIMBY. Before that, Brian Hanlon had been involved with an organization called CaRLA (which was the California Renters Legal Advocacy or something like that) in 2014, 2015. Brian’s partner in that effort was Sonja Trauss, who is the woman who is most widely and probably most accurately credited as starting the YIMBY movement — and she had started BARF. Lots of folks in the Abundance Network world were very early in YIMBY. In addition to Zack, my colleague Annie Fryman, our policy director, was a very early BARF activist and later worked for Senator Wiener as his housing policy aide.
So basically, in very broad strokes, the tech boom, combined with restrictive zoning in San Francisco, pushed up rents. A set of millennials, including Annie, Sonia, Brian and others, were frustrated. They showed up at planning meetings and said, “You should let people build apartments.” They came into contact with a very active NIMBY resistance from local homeowners and just local folks who lived there. I think sometimes we associate NIMBYism too much with the financial part of it. People care about money, but they also care about other things. I think we’re just status quo change-averse as humans.
But yes, it basically started by building… I think that the world is always messier than political theory. What we would love to be able to say is there’s this narrow interest — homeowners — who are, like Mancur Olson says, blocking new housing supply to increase the value of their good, and then this broad interest — of renters and society at large — wanting more growth and dynamism.
The reality is that two-thirds of Americans are homeowners, so they’re not the narrow interest. In fact, the narrow interest in a lot of housing stuff, at least in California, is a set of groups who latch onto the regulatory frameworks that let them block housing, like the construction trade unions in California as well as some other environmental groups, who don’t want to change the system whereby some frustrated homeowners can pull the stop lever. They don’t want to take away that lever, because they like to pull it for their own reasons. So it’s a complicated story.
But the things that I would point out that are really important in YIMBYism that can transfer over to Abundance… One is this idea that we have unnecessarily limited the supply of a good that we would collectively benefit from, because we have put a relatively small set of folks in charge of the decision of whether or not to increase the supply. The second is that there’s a sort of moral valence that I think is really powerful at the center of YIMBY, which is this idea that we’re embedded in a community, that we’re not just individuals, that we’re not sort of hoarding, that we have a positive-sum view of the world, that growth can be good.
And if you think organizationally, SFARF, California YIMBY, and all of the successive organizations — maybe the original people who came to the work were themselves renters and were sort of working in their own self-interest. But they were very quickly joined by a set of folks, both as advocates but also as funders, who themselves were homeowners and maybe you could say would have benefited from keeping supply narrow.
And so I think that there is an untold story in YIMBYism, which is that basically all the money for YIMBYism has come from startup CEOs, or at least the Bay Area variants of it. And that’s partially just because that’s who has the money in the Bay Area. But I think there’s an enlightened self-interest to YIMBYism from the perspective of the sort of home-owning class, where we just believe society will be better if there’s more growth and dynamism. And I think that has an important carryover into Abundance.
Geoff Kabaservice: Of course, the environmental movement has figured pretty prominently in this discussion as well. And you mentioned Scott Weiner; he’s a state senator in California. He actually came to visit us at Niskanen six or seven years ago when he was pushing an idea to make it more possible to build higher buildings near public transit nodes. And he encountered significant bipartisan opposition on that.
Misha Chellam: Hey, it’s the third time! It’s in the legislature this year. They just had this big win with some changes to CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. But another big bill he’s carrying, which is still wending its way through the legislature, is a third attempt at up-zoning near transit. So it’s still a fight, but it’s certainly getting a lot better hearing this time than it did six years ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: I highly recommend to people who can’t get enough of podcasts that they should listen to Derek Thompson’s recent podcast discussion with Senator Scott Weiner and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks about those rollbacks of CEQA — the California Environmental Quality Act — that recently were signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom.
CEQA was, I think, a 1970 law signed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, ironically enough. But as Derek put it, CEQA “became a Swiss army knife for any group to file any lawsuit to block any new construction at any time. It was used not just to stop the growth of chemical plants but to stop the development of solar farms and wind turbines and downtown bike lanes.” Curiously, the environmental law was used to stop pro-environment building and technology. So there’s a lot of layers of irony in this debate as well.
Misha Chellam: Yes. It reminds me of — and I don’t know anything about this beyond the sentence or two I’m about to say about it, so please don’t ask me a follow-up question. But Jen has often told me that the Paperwork Reduction Act is the most ironically misnamed law, because it has generated just a ton of extra paperwork. So yeah, there’s some way in which we often get the opposite of what we intend in our laws.
Geoff Kabaservice: Very true. Steve Teles is kind of a theoretician of Abundance, and he points out that it comes in different varieties. But how would you describe the variety of Abundance which the Abundance Network is concentrating on? And how does that differ from YIMBY?
Misha Chellam: Okay, let me start with broadly how I think Abundance is different. I think Abundance is a superset of YIMBY. I think YIMBY is a tent-pole issue within Abundance. I don’t think that you can be a NIMBY and be Abundant. So it is a sort of tent-pole issue. But I think we’re sort of saying, “Okay, where on the sort of anti-rentier or supply-constraint killer of abundance, where there are other policy domains where we similarly see supply constraints imposed by or enforced by incumbents who don’t want to see supply expanded?”
People talk about this in the context of energy infrastructure. People talk about this more narrowly around occupational licensing or around the supply of doctors in the medical field. Brink and Steve had written a book in 2016 that I read, The Captured Economy, which covers some of these things. So you think about YIMBYism, you expand it to other places where you can sort of apply a similar logic, and that is part of Abundance.
And then I think the other part of Abundance is the state capacity piece. And the state capacity piece is much broader, a little bit more amorphous or sort of slightly harder to describe. And it’s really the thing that to me gives license for Abundance to sort of construct a whole politics. If you look in the book by Ezra and Derek, there’s a little bit of a tension in how they talk about things. On the one hand, they want to limit it to a few concrete policy areas so it feels real and concrete and doesn’t get spread overly thin. And then on the other hand, at the conclusion, they talk about how they want Abundance to be a political order in the Gary Gerstle framing of political orders.
And the thing that I think allows it to be at the level of a sort of political order is this one line in the book which says, “To pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal.” So that’s kind of how we think about Abundance. It’s about renewing our institutions and a lot of the systems of government: the agencies, our city charters which govern the constitutions of our cities, the agencies and departments at the local, state, and federal level. These are all really big organizations that have been brought into place a hundred-plus years ago. And there hasn’t been a real serious deep reform effort since then to reimagine how they might work in the modern era.
So to us, our mission statement as an organization is, “Organize a new generation of civic leaders to build twenty-first-century government.” And sort of implicit in that is that we have today twentieth-century government. And so that makes it a very broad project, which is again: How do we renew our institutions to be able to meet the challenges of today?
Now, if you look at Jen’s framework for state capacity, there are a few more particular things we can say about it, which I think she’s now calling the four competencies of the operating model of government: Who do you have doing the work of government? How easily are you able to attract the people you need to attract? If somebody’s not doing a good job, are you able to fire them?
And then what are the procedures we’re asking those people to follow? And this is where we think we have way over-proceduralized government, such that it needs to tick an unending set of boxes before it can move forward on something. Then what tooling do the workers of government have to use to do their jobs? And is that tooling modern? And this is where things like procurement come in: What are the systems that workers use to get their jobs done? And then the fourth one is: What’s the feedback loop between what a policymaker says they want to accomplish and then what happens in the real world? And how can you tighten that feedback loop, such that we see that a thing that we wanted to have an intended outcome, we tighten the feedback loop between when a disconnected set of legislators specify what they want to what actually happens when it runs through the administrative agencies and gets through to the end user of the system. And if it didn’t work, how do we feed that back into the system quickly?
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s very interesting to me because both you and Jen come out of the tech world. And in Jen’s work, there is at least sometimes an implicit comparison between the way the tech world is organized (in a way that produces high performance and great results) and the way that government is organized (which tends to produce really bad results). And that’s especially the essence of her comparison of the old waterfall model of decision-making in government, which feels like something out of the industrial era, as opposed to agile decision-making, which has been very much the model in Silicon Valley businesses and a lot of businesses for a while now.
And there’s a whole other dimension, like I said, of Abundance. I was rereading Derek’s original “Abundance agenda” essay in the Atlantic, and he put a lot of emphasis on the need to address the slowdown in scientific and technological innovation. But that angle was downplayed, I thought, considerably in the Abundance book, and it frequently gets lost in Abundance discussions.
And there has also been this development, mostly in and around Silicon Valley, which its proponents sometimes call techno-optimism and its detractors sometimes call retro-futurism. But its buzzwords tend to be words like “dynamism” and “progress.” It includes controversial, conservative-identified figures like Marc Andreessen, who you mentioned earlier, but also less politically-identified organizations like, for example, the Astera Institute, which is in the Berkeley area. In fact, I saw recently that Eli Dourado, who had been the chief economist at the Abundance Institute, is now the head of strategic investments at Astera.
But I’d also identify it with, for example, Jennifer’s USDS, the US Digital Service, which was attempting to bring Silicon Valley processes and digitization to the government. And the Defense Innovation Unit X, which in a similar way attempted to bring cutting-edge Silicon Valley technology to the Department of Defense, as related in that excellent book Unit X by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. Am I right to think there is this kind of separate discussion going on, which maybe doesn’t always overlap with Abundance?
Misha Chellam: Well, you named a few different things. Let me try to tease them apart. The last two things that you mentioned, DIUX and USDS/USDR and Code for America — I think of those as very much in the state capacity realm. So that is about: How do we improve the operations of government, using things that we have learned? And government work, setting the priorities of government action, is different than business. Business has a very clear thing that it’s aiming at, which is revenue, and everyone can kind of agree how that’s defined. And we live in a big, messy, pluralistic society, and we have to balance interests, and different people would assign different weights to different things that you could prioritize in a process. So it’s a much more complicated end-state that you’re solving for.
Now, once you get into the “Okay, we’ve decided what we want to solve for, let’s execute,” that’s actually… There’s this great government reformer, Ken Miller, and he says, “Nonprofit, private, government — they all make widgets. You just need to identify what’s the widget that you’re trying to make.” And the widget could be a physical output, it could be a regulation. But ultimately they’re just organizations. And there’s a theory, which I think I roughly buy into, which is that we tend to innovate in terms of organizational form, first in the private sector. The Progressive movement, which we often analogize the Abundance movement to, one strand of it was taking the things that we had learned in industrial companies and bringing them into government. And it was just sort of like, “What are the best management practices that we know of today?” And there’s just a lot more experimentation that can happen in the private sector. And so those ideas were brought into government.
And so I think that things like agile versus waterfall decision-making are things that we learned, “Oh wow, this works better when we apply it in the private sector. And as long as the goals are still set in a more pluralistic way in government, I think agile will also help us execute better on those goals.” So that’s where I’d put those things.
Progress Studies is about taking state capacity ideas and thinking specifically about how we apply that to the parts of the economy that are around science and innovation. And I think it’s specifically thinking about: “How does NSF and NIH do grant-making? Are we encouraging a sufficient amount of risk-taking? Why are scientists getting older and older by the time they get their first government grant? Why do they spend so much time on paperwork?” So it’s the intersection of some state capacity themes with this particular focus on progress, with progress defined by technological and scientific progress. And that’s coming out of this view that ultimately those are the things that increase wellbeing across the broadest set of folks — the breakthroughs that we’ve had in science and technology — and looking at that over a scale of hundreds of years. And that community, again, is not to me pinned to any one particular part of the political spectrum. I think there are folks like Patrick Collison, who I would think about as a classical European liberal/center-left, and then maybe folks like Andreessen, although I don’t even know that Andreessen cares particularly about Progress Studies.
But anyway, this goes to the earlier comment that I skipped, which was Steve Teles’ “flavors of Abundance.” Yes, definitely, if you think about supply constraints and state capacity and this idea that there’s ways to get more surplus — which we didn’t talk about, but just sort of a positive-sum view of society — then I think that you can also map those onto the existing left-right spectrum. So you can get a more leftist Abundant person who’s like, “I want to do state capacity so that the state can build grocery stores or build social housing” or whatever. Then you’ve got the sort of center/center-left kind of abundance, which we would put ourselves more in.
I mean, we don’t want to overly partisanize the project. We think it’s important that both parties have Abundance factions within them. But just empirically, we have worked more and probably will continue to work in more blue-state jurisdictions than red-state jurisdictions. And then I think that there’s this more-to-the-right idea that Steve calls “Dark Abundance,” which I don’t totally know definitionally, but it’s maybe more focused on energy superabundance and defense, more classically right-of-center topic areas.
Geoff Kabaservice: That was a good answer, thank you. So tell me about your organization. Why did you and Zack Rosen start it? What was the problem you were solving for, and what does it do?
Misha Chellam: We met in this Council on Technology and Society. We spent two years talking to… We probably hosted a hundred conversations with leading national thinkers. I can’t remember if we hosted Steve, but we hosted everyone from Ezra Klein and Reihan Salam and Grover Norquist, and… who’s the guy… Noam Chomsky. We just were like, “We just want to learn.” So we hosted a ton of conversations. Robert Putnam, David Brooks, a bunch of people who influenced our thinking. And at the end we’re like, “Okay, partisanship is really scrambling the brains in D.C., and it’s really big and far away. And yet we have a bunch of bad governance outcomes in California, where there are no Republicans currently in power. Let’s scope down to California to see what we can learn by doing, instead of just learning by reading or listening.”
And so we built a donor network that was supporting YIMBY and state capacity work at the state level. And then after a couple of years of that, we had racked up some important individual high-ROI wins, but we weren’t changing the culture of how Sacramento worked. And so we decided to scope down further to San Francisco. And at San Francisco we could finally see what did it look like to have a coherent sort of factional effort across politics, policy, and implementation?
And so that is what we’re now scaling to other cities around the country. We’re now expanding outside of California. And the goal is to build these professionally staffed and sustainably financed chapters in cities across America. “Sustainably financed” means that local donors are funding it, not a big national donor, and “professionally staffed” means that you have competencies across inside game, insider politics, policy. You can start to support at least pieces of implementation of policy, you can do grassroots organizing, you can fund campaigns. The whole suite of political and policy activities.
And so we’re early in that. We’ve got two professionally staffed, sustainably financed chapters, one in San Francisco, one in Oakland, and we’re just now having conversations with folks outside in Seattle, in Louisville, in San Antonio, and in a couple other place. Our goal is to expand this network of city chapters or more municipally focused chapters. And then in addition to that, we run a set of national organizing programs, which are basically how people can find their place in the Abundance movement. And so we have a donor network of folks who are wanting to fund the movement, people who are giving $10,000 a year or more. We have a professional member network, which is folks who want to work in the movement or are working in and around the movement, and we’ve got about seventy folks in that group ranging from quite early-in-their-career folks to quite senior folks.
And then we have a network for local elected officials. We’ve got about a hundred folks in that, one hundred local elected officials around the country who are excited about the ideas of Abundance but want to be in a community of practice, like “How do I actually make policy, improve state capacity, and drive growth and dynamism in my community?”
Geoff Kabaservice: Just to return to your earlier point, when you mentioned Republicans in your earlier discussion, one can argue that a source of American dysfunction is political polarization. Republicans are certainly a big player in that. But in California there are so few Republicans in any position of power that that’s not the frame of reference you are using. Is that right?
Misha Chellam: Yes, that’s right. In California, we have super-majorities. Interestingly, a lot of the important YIMBY legislation has passed with some critical Republican votes, including out of committees where obviously are Democratic-chaired committees but that were a little more hostile to sort of YIMBY policy — and it was Republican votes that got it out of committee. But yeah, that’s right. California’s a uniparty state and Republicans don’t hold any power, so they can’t really be blamed for the problems of the state.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have here a quote, which I think I took from the Abundance Network’s website. But it says the Abundance Network “is a community of people — largely entrepreneurs and organization builders — who want to help close the gap between California’s values and our outcomes. We believe better government policy and implementation could lead to fewer rent-burdened households, cleaner air, shorter commutes, fewer inmates, fewer wildfires, higher test scores, and more good jobs.” Does that sound more or less like your current mission statement?
Misha Chellam: It’s one click out of date. That was probably from Effective Government California, which was the predecessor org. We’re working now with a broader set of stakeholders. We used to just be working with these entrepreneurial donor members. Now we’re working with professionals who might have spent their whole career in public policy, or with elected officials. That would sort of change the audience.
And then I would change the jurisdiction to moving beyond California, focusing more locally at the state level, because the resource base is better matched to how many resources we have currently. And then I’d probably… That’s an aspirational footprint of policy areas, which eventually we’d want to get to, because we think state capacity gives us the license to work across all those areas. But for now, we would probably be picking a subset to just not boil the ocean.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was impressed by the breadth of issue areas and the ambition behind that statement.
Misha Chellam: We definitely think it’s meant to be an ambitious project. The goal is to build a twenty-first-century government that’s responsive to citizens’ needs. It’s obviously going to take a ton of people to do that. There’s a ton of talent; there’s no shortage of talent or financial capital in our country. There is a shortage of belief that change is possible. And so if we can get the flywheel going where people believe that change is possible, then I believe we can attract…
Again, money is… I think there’s $15 trillion of wealth that was created in the Bay Area in the last ten or fifteen years. There’s $84 trillion passing from Boomers to Millennials in the next two decades. So we think that the scale of this movement is probably at the level of a billion dollars a year. If you put in a billion dollars a year over for ten years or twenty years, I think you’d see a ton of change. On the one hand, that’s an insanely big number. And on the other hand, relative to the wealth numbers I just gave you, it’s a tiny number. So we don’t actually think it’s a shortage of financial capital.
And then there’s a ton of talented people… What we’ve found in the work to date… Obviously the elected officials are doing the job today. A lot of the people in the professionals program are doing a lot the job today. A lot of the folks that we have pulled in as donor members, and even some folks that we’ve now pulled in on staff, they sort of were interested in politics when they were young. And then they went on their way, and they ended up in the private sector. But this is the work that feels more pro-social and that they’re more interested in doing.
And I can say for me, having held jobs, done a bunch of random stuff, this is by far the best, most fulfilling job I’ve ever had. It feels great to be working to try and solve public problems. It feels like an epically hard task right now because we’re just 1% of the way there. But as we get the flywheel turning, I think it will feel more and more believable and tractable.
Geoff Kabaservice: At the risk of saying something resoundingly obvious, most people I encounter in the Abundance space come out of a kind of place like a think tank — somewhat like Niskanen, let’s say. It does seem to me that what you’re doing, which is very different, is trying to build actual political power, both on the local and ultimately the state and national levels.
Misha Chellam: Yes, that’s right. I mean, we think of ourselves as sort of taking the ideas that a lot of… I would say there’s folks at think tanks doing really important thinking work. There’s folks who are working in policy or doing really important policy work. I think we’re trying to organize people, yes, to build political power and drive outcomes, and also to connect people together and build these communities of folks who can be optimistic and seen together.
And of course, YIMBY is the sort of… YIMBY Action and the Welcoming Neighbors Network are two chapter-based organizations, organized slightly differently. There are a lot of humans who have been doing this work for a decade. Ed reform, I think, was proto-Abundance. So there’s a lot of folks who have been in around this work. But yes, I think we’re trying to help accelerate it to the next level of maturity as a movement.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m glad to hear that you are doing work on starting chapters outside of California. I think there’s a lot of appetite for these ideas around the country, and I would actually say all around the developed world. I’ve spent time in the United Kingdom, where their economy has stagnated for decades and they have these problems of government delivery and a lot of other related problems. And you just hear people talk on the street about “Broken Britain.” There certainly should be that kind of dialogue.
But I think the movement has particular salience in California because some of the problems it addresses are at their worst there. I don’t want to offend your California patriotism. because I know you have a lot of that. But there’s certainly this national story, that we’ve heard for years at this point, how California used to be among the best of the states and now it’s among the worst. I mean, it used to be the quintessence of American opportunity and growth, freedom, innovation, prosperity. And then came the downfall.
And you can look at that in terms of its public education system, which used to be among the best in the country; now it’s among the worst. In terms of costs, I believe California has the nation’s highest costs for housing, but also gas, water, electricity. In 1970, it cost twice the median income to buy a house in the state; now it costs nearly nine times the median income. It has the highest homeless population, and the highest rates of poverty, the highest tax rates… I mean, you can kind of go on down the list. And of course, the terrible wildfires in Los Angeles that you mentioned have at least strengthened the impression that city government is not adequate to the problems it confronts.
And then there’s what seems to me to have been kind of a backlash from within the Democratic Party against the progressives who have been in control, particularly in cities like San Francisco. And you can point to the recall elections for the school board members in San Francisco. You can point to the sort of pullback on some of the liberalization of laws penalizing property crimes and drug infractions. You can point to the recall election for Chesa Boudin, who was the progressive San Francisco DA. And then of course moderates winning a majority, I think, on the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee as well as on the Board of Supervisors. And then this recent victory with CEQA reform in the legislature signed by Gavin Newsom.
So I guess my question is… There’s an unavoidable political dimension here, where even if you don’t put a name to yourself or a party label or anything like that, you have incurred (or this movement has incurred) the wrath of progressives. And it seems that there have been electoral battles over these issues in which the moderates or pragmatists now seem to be coming out on top. Am I misreading that as an outsider to the state?
Misha Chellam: I think the broad strokes are right. One thing that my colleague Annie Fryman has convinced me of is that a little bit of California’s struggles are bound up in its successes, which is to say a lot of people wanted to move to California — for obvious reasons. It’s a beautiful state and, due to some historical luck, it ended up being the center of the technology industry and the entertainment industry, and it had a big defense industry. It had a lot of jobs, it had great weather, so a bunch of people moved to California.
And it sort of worked while we could sprawl out. And then when we hit our growth boundaries, we didn’t figure out how to build up. If you look at the litany of ills that you ascribe to California, a lot of those are bound up in our inability to figure out how to continue to grow in a way that the existing residents were okay with. Prop 13 is a huge sort of anchor around the neck of California at the structural governance layer.
Geoff Kabaservice: That was a 1978 innovation.
Misha Chellam: Yes, and that basically came from rapidly increasing property assessments, property prices, leading to higher taxes, and the legislature being slow to tackle that. Something Annie says is that if you look at a bunch of places like Texas and the Sunbelt, people only wanted to move to them once air conditioning was widely available. Those places did not somehow magically figure out how to zone way better or build up. They just sprawled out, and now are encountering their own sort of growth limits.
So I think California is maybe equally thought of as just sort of where the future happens, and that has had good periods and bad periods. And we hope now Abundance is going to be a good period where we figure some stuff out that might be relevant to other jurisdictions.
At the same time, what you said… We’re really excited to be getting outside of California because it is a particular place. And we’ve been learning a lot from just being in touch with elected officials all over the country to understand what are the shared challenges and what are different challenges.
Then to the political question — and this goes a little bit to the varieties of Abundance… Yes, I think of the coalition that we’re a key part of in San Francisco as being a coalition between Abundance and moderates. And Abundants are maybe a little bit more focused on growth, on thinking through the weeds of what it would take to make the San Francisco government be able to be more effective. I think that the moderates are clean streets, good schools, just the basics. And I think we’re both. It’s a powerful political coalition, because between those two I think that we represent the majority of the city, and have been winning elections in line with that. I suspect that that sort of political coalition will hold in other places that we go to. We’re still early in figuring out, when we go to different cities, what it looks like.
But I think it’s easy… Our brains are really quick to want to get to a black-and-white story that we can understand. I think I have said a few times on this podcast that it’s all pretty nuanced and complex. And I think nowhere in America have we fully figured out what the right way to allocate decision-making is, that sort of incentivizes continued growth and sort of dynamism and change and sort of adjusting new circumstances. I think we’re quite status quo-anchored. And again, part of that is because humans are status quo-anchored, and we live in a liberal democracy. So we don’t know what the future will hold, but hopefully… Yes, I think California will have something to say about the shape of the Abundance movement, but also I don’t think it will be a purely California thing.
Geoff Kabaservice: I love this term “Abundant” as a noun of identity: “I’m an Abundant.” I hope that catches on. I don’t want to dwell on this topic, but I do think I have to mention it because the progressive response or reaction to Abundance would seem to have been way over the top and out of proportion to whatever political threat it represents. I mean, you have people who are all about reforming zoning rules and amending sections of what you alluded to earlier, the Paperwork Reduction Act. And now they’re equated with one progressive called “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”
And there was a piece in the New Republic earlier this year that mentioned you, talking about San Francisco Abundance and YIMBYs. And the article said, “Though the real estate titans, conservative philanthropists and tech bros who fund these projects don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, they share a common and often obfuscated goal: to create a centralized political machine, powerful enough to transform the city into a regulation-free, heavily policed paradise for the wealthy.”
Misha Chellam: Wow.
Geoff Kabaservice: Do you think there’s any way to reconcile with these progressives? Or is this battle simply going to go on because it is ultimately a battle over who is going to control the city, and there’s only one outcome there?
Misha Chellam: First of all, that level of pitched rhetoric or whatever is not in the day-to-day… There are real political fights happening in San Francisco about how to solve problems. But I think there’s this sort of national conversation. I just hosted something with our group and somebody sort of speaking about left populism or anti-monopoly or whatever. I think there’s a lot of quasi-punditry that just thrives on factional discord and making things seem very fraught and divisive when it’s not.
So what we see in San Francisco is that it’s not that pitched. People have slightly… People have, within blue, different shades of opinion on how you solve problems. They’re really complicated problems to solve. I think we live in a pluralistic society. People always have different things that they value and different ways that they view the world. So you’re not going to take the conflict out of politics. But I also don’t see these as deeply intractable, never-to-be-bridged gaps between different folks.
And I think we’ll see exactly how Mamdani — if he wins for mayor, and it’s a really epically big, hard job — we’ll see how he does. But he’s certainly already incorporating some set of Abundant ideas and combining them with left ideas.
I think it’s very likely that Steve’s “flavors of Abundance” will end up being prescient. It is just empirically true that we have an enormous number of ways in which we encumber government from doing what it wants, and I think that as folks get into power with all types of political ideological priors, they’re going to encounter that. And the more robust kind of community political power and academic or policy literature there is on how to sort of allow government…
So in that way, I think that the part about creating a stronger state, creating a stronger and more autonomous city government, that is the accusation in that piece that you referenced — that part is right. And that part also is what Chris Hughes says in Marketcrafters; maybe Chris is somewhere between Abundant and left-populist in his orientation. So that part is right. We have a disempowered state. We need to be able to take decisions as a society, and then trust and let government execute on those decisions. And if we don’t like the outcomes, then we can vote the people out of power who held power.
And the system that we’ve built now, which is extremely low-trust and extremely encumbered and requires a hundred tick boxes to do anything, is not going to work. And people will lay the end state; what they want that government to do might vary, but I think that we will be coming… I are coming to a shared recognition that the way that things are, it’s not tenable to continue with such a circumscribed government.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as a final question, Misha… Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson begin their book Abundance with a kind of science fiction vision of a future in which the Abundance model has been fully realized. You said earlier that you think the Abundance Network is about 1% of the way toward where you’d like it to get. Can you tell me, not the whole sci-fi version, but what would 10 or 20% of the way look like in a few years if everything goes the way you hope it will?
Misha Chellam: Organizationally or societally?
Geoff Kabaservice: Organizationally first, but maybe then also societally.
Misha Chellam: Organizationally, in two or three years we would have professionally staffed, sustainably financed municipal chapters in call it twenty cities and counties around the country. Those chapter leads and the staff in those chapters would be working together, feeling as if they’re a team. So it would be maybe a hundred folks who are on weekly calls, sharing playbooks and best practices for how they’re building power behind Abundant-aligned policy change in their communities.
At the central organization, we’d be figuring out what kind of tooling and other support could we be building to give more leverage to all of the individuals on the ground in those places. If you think about all of those professionally staffed, sustainably financed chapters, there are donor networks behind each of those in each of those cities. And in at least a few states, we would have had a few cities be online such that those donors see, “Oh wow, we also need to build power at the state level to affect city policy.” And so we’d start to have maybe a handful of state chapters.
So that’s where I think we would be organizationally. Our donor professional and elected programs are now in the low hundreds, would be in the low thousands of members per, so you’d just have a lot of people being sort of organized and activated into Abundance. Outcomes are slow. We’ve been working in San Francisco for three or four years and we’ve passed meaningful policy, we’ve helped advance meaningful up-zoning in the city and done some meaningful land-use public space work. But these things take time.
Ideally, I could say we would have up-zoned a number of cities. We would have probably made some progress on transit infrastructure, but more like bike lanes and BRT, not like building light rail. And I think we’d maybe in one or two cities be sort of starting to get under the procurement or civil service reform sort of processes. But that would be a little bit more nascent. Yeah, that’s my best guess in three years.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it does seem that the new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is quite receptive to a lot of the ideas that you’ve been advancing in San Francisco.
Misha Chellam: Yes. He is an institutional reformer. He’s a lifelong San Franciscan who wants to make San Francisco government work better and be more responsive to the needs of the people. So in my mind, that’s 100% overlap with Abundance.
Geoff Kabaservice: Misha Chellam, thank you so much for talking with me today. I wish you a lot of luck with the Abundance Network, and please post as often as you can on the Modern Power Substack too.
Misha Chellam: Thanks, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
