What I saw (and didn’t see) at last week’s Abundance Conference
At the Abundance Conference last week in Washington, D.C., what I saw was something rare in today’s politics: nonpartisan optimism. People from different backgrounds and perspectives came together not to trade insults or score partisan points, but to share ideas about how to make America more prosperous. Just as important, what I did not see was tribalism. The usual markers of red versus blue or left versus right were absent. Instead, the conversations were forward-looking and solutions-oriented.
What is (or was) the Abundance Conference? The Abundance Conference is an annual gathering of a cross-partisan coalition of policy leaders committed to building toward opportunity, not scarcity. Hosted in Washington, D.C., and put on by nonprofit The Breakthrough Institute, it brought together policymakers, advocates, researchers, entrepreneurs, and agency officials from a wide ideological spread. The goal wasn’t just to talk about abundance but to make it actionable—to dismantle bureaucratic inertia, realign incentives, modernize our systems, and push back against the scarcity mindset that has held back growth in housing, energy, infrastructure, and more.
This was music to my ears.
The event reminded me of an old essay, Frédéric Bastiat’s What Is Seen and What Is Unseen. Writing in 1850, Bastiat argued that the visible effects of a policy are only half the story. The unseen consequences, the opportunities that vanish quietly, are often more important than what is immediately in front of us. That lesson is just as important, if not more, today.
What is seen are the few projects that survive the maze of regulations. After years of environmental studies, lawsuits, and agency reviews, a housing development may finally break ground or an energy facility may at last begin construction.
But what is unseen are the far more numerous projects that never make it. The homes never built because the local government imposed costs that made it financially infeasible to build them. The renewable energy projects that died in permitting purgatory. The infrastructure plans shelved indefinitely because delays stretched into decades. These unseen costs, costs that include lost jobs, higher rents, fewer choices, and foregone prosperity, rarely enter the political debate. Why? Because we can’t see them.
The Abundance Conference challenged us to stop ignoring the things we cannot see but could have been real. Instead of focusing only on the visible product of regulation, it urged us to notice the prosperity strangled before it can emerge. The case for abundance is not wishful thinking. It is a recognition that human creativity and free enterprise are the surest paths to solving problems. When barriers come down, abundance becomes real.
Examples are everywhere. America’s housing shortage is not caused by a lack of land or resources but by rules that make it nearly impossible to build at scale. Cities and states that have reformed zoning and streamlined approvals, like Austin in Texas and the State of Montana, are starting to see more homes and lower rents. Energy tells the same story. Innovation is surging, but permitting bottlenecks and endless litigation keep much of it bottled up. The unseen here is the cleaner, cheaper, more reliable energy Americans could already be enjoying.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox underscored that point and made it in his keynote address at the Conference. He described Utah’s “Operation Gigawatt,” a plan to double the state’s energy production in the next decade, and his broader Western Governors Association initiative for “Energy Superabundance.” He also offered a memorable reminder that as parents of grown children, we want our kids to live near us, not with us. His line captured the personal stakes of housing affordability better than any statistic could.
The same lesson applies in natural resources. In Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, land in Louisiana was designated as “critical habitat” for a frog that could not even survive there. What was unseen were the opportunities for future residents to use that very land productively for homes, parks, schools, and new communities.
The tone at the conference was not grievance but possibility. The message was that abundance is within reach if we lift the artificial scarcity imposed by outdated rules and bureaucratic inertia. That optimism cut across partisan lines. Progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and independents all shared the stage, united by a belief that more can be built, more can be created, and more people can flourish if we allow it.
I wasn’t the only attendee who noticed the spirit of the event. Roger Pielke Jr. described the conference as “incredibly refreshing,” noting the “bipartisan cooperation, active debate and discussion, and productive disagreement” that defined the atmosphere. And Josh Barro, with whom I appeared on a panel at the conference, echoed this in his own review, calling abundance “a bipartisan project.”
That spirit of cooperation is an example of seeing what is usually unseen. In a time when politics is defined by division, it was striking to witness conversations that bridged ideological lines. For a few days in early September, the tribalism that usually dominates our debates was simply absent. In its place was a practical consensus: America needs more abundance, and the path to it runs through innovation and freedom, not bureaucracy and restriction.
Bastiat would have recognized the stakes. The true measure of policy is not only the projects that get built but the countless others that never come into being. The abundance movement insists we recognize both sides of that ledger, and start on the hard work of fixing the imbalance.
