Back in June, I wrote a column about "Abundance," the new book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. I found much to admire in it, but I also came away uneasy. My primary concern was with the technocratic flavor of the argument, the assertions — both subtle and overt — that, if we could only get the right people in the room with the right ideas, we could clear away obstacles and make the machine run smoothly.
Since publishing that piece, I’ve heard a lot of thoughtful feedback. Many people pushed back, suggesting that my critique was too narrow. They pointed me toward a different reading of "Abundance," one that’s less about centralized fixes and more about freeing people and places to co-create their own prosperity. That version of abundance is much closer to the Strong Towns approach, they insisted.
I’ve sat with those conversations, and they’ve sharpened my own thinking. In particular, I’ve found myself coming back to infrastructure. How someone talks about infrastructure has become, for me, a kind of litmus test for what they mean by abundance. Let me elaborate.
The Top-Down Abundance
There’s a version of the abundance mindset that treats infrastructure spending as an unqualified good. More money for highways, transit lines, water systems, or broadband is always celebrated as an investment in the future. The problem, in this view, is never that we build too much or build the wrong things, but that we don’t spend enough, fast enough, on the right projects.
Institutions and individuals with this approach have long been a target of Strong Towns critiques. We called the American Society of Civil Engineers an “infrastructure cult” as far back as 2011. Their periodic “report cards” on infrastructure serve as pure propaganda.
I’ve shown how the arguments by some of our nation’s top economists on infrastructure are not just wrong, they are intellectually lazy. And I’ve taken publications like Jacobin to task when they assert the erroneous notion that “the public sector is barely investing enough to keep up with normal decay” of infrastructure (and then share a chart, in the same article, that demonstrates the exact opposite).
At its core, this is the “better mousetrap” mentality. If only we had smarter experts, more enlightened incentives, or more efficient federal programs, the argument goes, we could finally get infrastructure right. It’s the mindset behind efforts to tweak funding formulas to steer money toward projects deemed more beneficial.
It’s the mindset that still supports the Highway Trust Fund, despite it not having a real purpose for existing for the last fifty years. That pot of money — and the power it grants the technocratic tinkerers — is just too seductive to give up. Sure, we’ll spend hundreds of billions on highway expansions, but we’ll make it better with some discretionary grant programs and transit megaprojects.
Underneath this all is a kind of arrogance. It doesn’t respect the complexity of places or the feedback loops that make communities prosper. It doesn’t grapple with the impossible task we’ve handed to local governments: to maintain vast networks of unproductive infrastructure they can’t afford, in the hope that new growth will one day pay for the old promises.
It reduces lives and neighborhoods to mere inputs in a system to be optimized, as if prosperity were an equation waiting to be solved. And when the system fails — as it inevitably does — it leaves others to live with the damage.
This is the abundance of centralized confidence. It treats cities like machines to be tweaked and optimized, rationalizing past catastrophes as it repeats them again and again. It wields tools it neither respects nor understands, unleashing forces it cannot hope to control.
This vision terrifies me, especially when it masquerades as progress. Abundance! I fight against it with my entire being.
The Bottom-Up Abundance
There’s another way to talk about infrastructure, one that begins not with grand national systems but with people and places. This vision acknowledges trade-offs. It recognizes that when we spend billions on one kind of infrastructure, we inevitably crowd out other investments. It sees how our obsession with building new capacity has left core neighborhoods neglected and our local governments distorted in their priorities.
This kind of abundance is curious about the systems that have bankrupted our cities. It looks at taxes going up and services going down not as a short-term discomfort to be endured, but as a structural problem to be addressed. It asks how we got here and what it would take to build something that can actually endure.
Instead of pursuing the next megaproject, it leans into the Strong Towns four-step process: Humbly observe where people struggle, ask what the next smallest thing we can do is, do it, and repeat. This is abundance as small bets, multiplied over time, instead of one big gamble that promises everything and delivers fragility. It’s the difference between planting a garden and betting it all on a single hunt.
Instead of treating housing as a speculative asset class, it insists on housing as shelter. Abundance, in this vision, means making sure people have the tools and flexibility to respond to housing stress in their own place. It’s about equipping neighbors to be active participants in solving housing problems, not passive subjects of markets or policies designed elsewhere.
Instead of treating street safety as something to be engineered by the right manual, it recognizes that safe streets are created by people who care for a place, who slow down, who notice when something isn’t working and adjust. This kind of abundance isn’t delivered from afar; it’s cultivated through shared responsibility.
This abundance is humbler. It treats infrastructure as a tool, not an end. It asks: Does this investment help people live a good life in a prospering place? Does it support the incremental, intergenerational work of making our neighborhoods stronger, safer, and more enduring?
This is an abundance rooted in feedback loops, in neighbors noticing what works and adjusting what doesn’t. It’s not about experts handing down blueprints from above, but about communities co-creating prosperity from below.
When I hear this kind of abundance, I recognize it immediately. This is Strong Towns.
The Litmus Test
And that’s why I keep coming back to infrastructure as the litmus test. When someone talks about abundance, I listen for how they talk about infrastructure.
If they describe it as a top-down program, a confidence game where smarter elites can finally make the system work, I know we’re not speaking the same language. That’s an abundance that repeats the mistakes of the past — urban renewal, the interstate highway system, school consolidation — grand projects launched with total certainty and almost no humility.
If, on the other hand, they describe infrastructure as something that must be humble, incremental, and rooted in place, then I hear the beginnings of a shared vision. That’s an abundance that can actually make us stronger, because it respects complexity, embraces limits, and assists neighbors to co-create prosperity from the bottom up.
Infrastructure reveals what we really mean by abundance. Do we believe that prosperity is engineered from the top down (cities as a complicated machine)? Or do we recognize that it must be cultivated from the bottom up, one place at a time (cities as a complex, adaptive system)?
Abundance without humility is a dangerous fantasy, especially when it comes to infrastructure. We’ve tried the grand solutions before, and we’re still living with the fragility they created. The true abundance worth striving for is the kind that comes from co-creation: from neighbors working together, from feedback loops that keep us honest, from the dedicated effort of building prosperity in place.
That’s not abundance as a one-time breakthrough. It’s abundance as compound interest: a steady accumulation of small, thoughtful choices, year after year, generation after generation. It’s not always flashy, but it lasts.
The next time you hear someone talk about abundance, listen carefully when they turn to infrastructure. Their answer will tell you a lot about how they understand prosperity and where they believe it truly comes from.
