Fwd: A Conversation with Abi Olvera on the Abundance Agenda
Loretta Lohman
A Conversation with Abi Olvera on the Abundance AgendaAbundance, apartments, autonomous vehicles, and electrotech!
Abi Olvera served as a diplomat in the U.S. State Department for ten years, including as one of the core team negotiating directly with China. In 2025, she founded the DC Abundance Community, inspired by the hit book Abundance and dedicated to promoting “abundant housing, energy, science, and infrastructure.” She writes Positive Sum on Substack at Abi Olvera. I’m very interested in the basic philosophy of increasing state capacity that’s detailed in Abundance, and that you’re working on as part of the eponymous Abundance movement. And I feel like there’s been a lot of confusion about what this Abundance concept even is. To me, abundance is sort of an ideology-neutral set of tools. A vision of government as a bottleneck detective, to quote the book. A practice, that can be applied by a libertarian or a socialist or anything in between, of finding the weird kinks in the state and the economy that are preventing good stuff getting done and trying to un-kink them and get stuff working in a way that increases human flourishing, and build more of key things that are currently scarce.
So I see this as a set of tools but I feel like it’s sort of been sort of boxed in, in a way that the authors didn’t intend, to become seen as a political faction. I’d love to know: what does Abundance mean to you? Positive
Sum
I
keep hearing that abundance is a nice idea but
it doesn’t help families who are struggling
today. So I made a list…
4 months ago ·
174 likes · 63 comments · Abi Olvera
I really love the way that you explained it, the ideology-neutral set of tools. That’s exactly what I’m trying to clarify and build. I have noticed that people have said that there’s kind of now an abundance faction in Democrats. I admit it seems to lean center-left, but I don’t think that has to be the case. Specifically, one of my goals is to clarify, hey, there can be an abundance version of Medicare for All. This applies to things that are not center-left coded. I think it’s just happened more quickly in the center-left. I’m pretty optimistic about it. It really does apply widely, but it certainly has been embraced more by the center-left. Even if it’s been embraced more by the center-left, I think as abundance makes more of a name for itself, there’s more people in the left-left who kind of come out about it.  Derek
ThompsonWith
its projected heat index surging toward 110,
New York City goes to the polls on Tuesday to
choose the Democratic candidate for mayor.
It’s a race that former New York Gov. Andrew
Cuomo should be running away with. Fame and
name recognition are potent assets in local
politics, and Cuomo has both in ample supply.
But polls now point to a dead heat wi…
a year ago ·
193 likes · 4 comments · Derek Thompson
It’ll be more clear that it is trying to do exactly what you mentioned, which is prioritize fixing the big kinks that are impacting, not just the economy, but people’s lives. We recently had Derek Thompson at an event celebrating one year of Abundance. He mentioned that to him it was prioritizing the things that were impacting social good. For example, that’s why I just wrote up a piece on occupational licensing. If someone needs to move across states and they don’t have the occupational license, a specific type of training to be licensed in that state, oftentimes they can’t move with their family. Or they might have to move and end up unemployed for a year or two while some of the regulations kick in. Positive
Sum
When
some states allowed psychologists to prescribe
antidepressants, the suicide rate dropped 7…
a month ago ·
152 likes · 46 comments · Abi Olvera and
Alicia Plemmons
But worst of all, at least to me, because I have family members who have felonies, is that a lot of times there’s a requirement to be “morally upstanding” or something. But there’s no way to prove that! These things are just making it harder for people who already have it pretty hard. Positive
Sum
My
mom was a daycare worker for most of my life.
My best friend’s mom was one too. My childhood
memories consist of many daycare workers,
mostly women…
4 months ago ·
81 likes · 34 comments · Abi Olvera
Fundamentally, a lot of the things that the Abundance movement focuses on can sound really boring. Occupational licensing, that is not appearing on anyone’s bumper sticker. Restrictive zoning laws are a primary issue of abundance. And too-long permitting review cycles. It can make the average person fall asleep. But when you dig into the data, this is what’s stopping good stuff getting done! Positive
Sum
No
one plans to become fragile. You get in a car
crash and can’t walk. A virus leaves your
brain foggy. You start getting seizures and
can’t drive. You turn 75 and the stairs become
difficult…
3 months ago ·
217 likes · 41 comments · Abi Olvera
By the way, I had a conversation quite recently with Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author. And he told me, “You know, just as a word guy, in terms of semantics, I don’t like the word abundance.” It seemed to him to have connotations of excess and greed. What do you think of that? To sort of answer that question from Kim Stanley Robinson, I would say I want more of the things that truly make your life better. Housing isn’t just cheaper housing, it’s also being able to live near your family, near your work, being able to walk to work. I walk everywhere now! Me too! I live in a walkable neighborhood. And it’s totally changed my life. The fact that me going to the grocery store, me going to the post office, going into a coworking, it’s all by foot where I see people. I have a community. This is a social good. This is more than just like an affordable house. Everything changed. My life was better! It’s eudaimonia. It’s multi-dimensional human well-being. Positive
Sum
In
Japan, workers rely on healthy lunch bowls for
under $4. Japanese media literally tracks
these prices because they're a daily staple
for working people. The Japanese media
reported on a surge in their price from $2.63
to $4.25 in 2021…
10 months ago
· 160 likes · 22 comments · Abi Olvera
Yeah, exactly. The things you don’t see if you haven’t been exposed to them. There’s more third spaces here. I think of Abundance also as the things that you don’t even know you can expect. It seems like they might be on track to help make a dent in obesity, which is a huge problem, and it predominantly impacts lower-income people. As GLPs become more accessible and also cheaper, that’s pretty great. Positive
Sum
A
meteorologist first proposed the controversial
idea that the continents were moving slowly.
Geologists ridiculed him for decades. The
meteorologist was right…
a year ago · 6
likes · 3 comments · Abi Olvera
Faster science would be great in ways that we don’t know how to expect! It’s hard to make a vision around the things where you’re not sure exactly how they’ll come out. Like, clean energy abundance would mean people don’t even have to think about like energy bills, but then that also should have knock-on effects for manufacturing and businesses. One thing I think a lot about whenever there’s new technologies is the case of semiconductors and chips. That started up here in the U.S. decades ago, but then other countries, the East Asian tigers, adopted it and manufacturing it helped them get out of poverty. Asia has also become dominant in manufacturing clean energy, my bailiwick. Could you have imagined in the 1970s, when Carter was putting solar panels on the White House roof and Vietnam was just a war zone, that Vietnam would be a serious competitor to the U.S. in solar manufacturing in the 2020s? Our politics fumbled very badly to lose the initiative in that kind of high-value industry. Walkable cities, that’s so incredibly important as well. You can walk across the entire city of Paris, France, home to millions, in three hours and a half. It’s the classic meme, right? “This kind of walkable mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities.” Zoning laws, one of the big boring bogeymen of abundance, is what makes so many U.S. cities car-dependent, and not looking like Paris. Because it’s illegal here to build that many apartment buildings that close without parking lots!
Yeah! Exactly! Exactly. I know that not everyone wants to live somewhere walkable. But it is under-supplied in terms of being available for people who want it! And even need it. A lot of people will end up needing it when they’re when they’re too old to drive, or if there’s another reason they can’t drive. I also think that folks haven’t experienced how nice it can be! I had a friend visit me from Michigan. She thought it was crazy that I walked everywhere and that I enjoyed it. We’re from Texas, where being outside is kind of a hundred degree ordeal. I grew up not even liking to go outside. And then she came here and then, randomly, 20 minutes into one of our strolls to somewhere, she was like, “I get it now.” We were literally walking among beautiful, gorgeous townhouses. Different colors and brick and tons of trees and then tons of cute dogs. I think a lot of times people think density means what their downtown area looks like. And their downtown area might not have people living there! There’s a different vibe when you get grocery stores and people are just kind of walking throughout their lives rather than driving. I think she was expecting a lot of panhandling and a lot of feeling uncomfortable or something. There’s often a wildly skewed perception of what life in big cities is like. The murder rate is way higher in Oklahoma than in New York City! People see a media highlight reel of every bad thing happening in a city, that’s not at all representative. Zoning limits that most people don’t even realize exist have created a dire lack of the kind of urban housing that people just flock to whenever they get the chance. Places that people pay huge amounts of money to visit for brief periods, places like Disneyland or really fancy college campuses for their kids, they are not full of parking lots. They are dense, walkable, mixed-use areas of the kind that are banned by single-family zoning laws in most U.S. cities. Yeah, exactly. There’s even some zoning laws within places like D.C. that make it needlessly hard to live here. There’s structural kinds of issue that abundance type of thinking can fix, and that’s why we don’t have enough three-bedroom apartments. Cities don’t supply enough three-bedroom apartments. This kind of makes it seem to people who want to start families that the city’s not amenable to them. But that’s not an inherent feature of cities. That’s like an accident of policy. I’m hoping the Abundance movement can fix this. Because then we can, you know, walk to the park! It’s just a nicer life. I’d love to discuss your articles on Waymo, because they’re really good and they tie into this theme of how cars keep people poor. Positive
Sum
“Reliable
transportation required” is one of the most
common lines in low-wage job ads. You see it
in Craigslist job ads for cleaning and day
labor…
2 months ago ·
218 likes · 94 comments · Abi Olvera
I think self-driving cars have kind of become collateral damage in a broader anti-tech backlash. Because lots of big tech companies, like OpenAI, X, Palantir, are really doing horrible, evil things. But Waymo really looks like it could improve human flourishing on several metrics. I know Waymo’s really expensive right now, but unlike Uber and Lyft, it doesn’t structurally need to be. I’ve also done separate papers on Uber and Lyft. Part of the reason why they’re expensive is labor, right? And the labor doesn’t get cheaper because labor is linked to a wage and living wage. But since Waymo doesn’t have that, Waymo could go the same path as other technologies. The first ever cell phone in the late 80s was $4,000, which is $12,000 today but now that same “dumb phone,” right, it’s gonna be under $100. The same phone. Things that are just hardware tend to get cheaper. I know Waymo is not just hardware, there’s like a human remote overseer with a ratio of like 70 cars watched by one person. But it’s a lot less labor than a car. And it’s like 90-plus percent safer in terms of injuries, crashes, fatalities. There’s a lot of studies already done. It might sound crazy to believe that Waymo will get cheaper, but maybe it’s not going to be Waymo to get cheaper. Maybe it’s going to be some future budget autonomous vehicle company that’s competing with Waymo that competes on just making a shuttle from point A to point B. There’s no reason not to have it be like that. And there is actually a precedent. We have had privately run or privately owned public transit options. The private streetcar system that America had before the 1930s, you could have gone from one coast to the other coast entirely on streetcars if you wanted! Wow, really? Yeah, it was that well-connected. And it was privately owned. The streetcars even were helping them to pay to maintain facilities that they relied on. It’s not crazy to think that a public transit option could be privately run. This also doesn’t preclude that later this could be another path for governments to do it. All we are doing is accelerating autonomous vehicles as a technology. The reason why I think this is pretty important is because I know a lot of the Waymo discussion doesn’t tend to focus on the impact on working-class people. It’s mostly like in the bottom two quintiles of America where your car ends up taking up a lot of your mental bandwidth. If there’s even just a path where you can instead borrow a car affordably just for the ride that you need, that’s insanely helpful! Positive
Sum
I
waited tables for six years at $2.13 an hour.
Now I'm a policy researcher in DC. These two
worlds talk about technology completely
differently. Let me use Uber driving as an
example…
6 months ago ·
277 likes · 58 comments · Abi Olvera
When I arrived at the University of Richmond, I was on scholarship. I figured out how to get as close as possible via just buses, but oh man, getting from the bus stop to the university, it was a $50 cab ride, and it was insane to me to spend that much money! That was like an eight-hour weekday shift! I also hope we get better buses. We should have both better buses and have autonomous vehicles, to be clear. But in Texas, the buses don’t often show up. Even in D.C., I think one out of seven times I take the bus, it just doesn’t show. And then it sucks because I end up having to pay for an expensive Uber. The cost of this transit makes it harder when you do rely on public transit. We should want things that make it easier for people to live without a car! I absolutely agree! Also, pivoting, you have a record in America’s foreign service that’s really impressive. Positive
Sum
A
few years into my Foreign Service career, a
colleague leaked something to the press. The
thing they leaked wasn’t true. I couldn’t
figure out why they’d done it…
2 months ago ·
125 likes · 33 comments · Abi Olvera
You’ve represented the country on the ground in Senegal and in Egypt, and at the China desk in the State Department in DC. Positive
Sum
I
was a US diplomat in Senegal and Egypt. In
both countries, being gay is illegal…
6 days ago ·
64 likes · 5 comments · Abi Olvera
Just based on my reading and my recent trip to China, I’m getting the general overall impression that China has been totally kicking America’s butt in global geopolitical, economic, and cultural market share lately.
I personally think that the Abundance toolset is in many ways similar to what China’s done to build a lot of stuff really quickly, and is one of the best hopes for keeping America competitive. What’s your perspective on the international ramifications of abundance? That’s a great point. I want to add one more bit about Waymo first, which is the main point I wanted to make. I think, because it happens in the bottom two quintiles, a lot of people underestimate how much mental bandwidth a car takes from you. Positive
Sum
I
spent six years in low-wage work. Waitressing,
a call center, selling laptops at Circuit
City, handing out T-shirts for a radio
station…
4 months ago ·
128 likes · 72 comments · Abi Olvera
My brother, he used to work at Red Lobster, and his car broke down, and it was ridiculously hard for him to get to work on time. Taxis were crazy expensive, buses weren’t showing up, friends couldn’t always make it. So he ended up losing the job at Red Lobster because of being late, not showing up because of the car broke down. But then he couldn’t afford to fix the car, right? Because that was the way to get money! The people who are in the bottom quintile spend 38% of their income on their car, if they have a car! That’s one of the things that keeps people poor. If you go through the Craigslist ads for cleaner, construction worker, jobs that are some of the lowest paid jobs, they often say reliable transportation is required. That’s one of the things that makes it really hard for people to have stable income. I have family members who have to share a car. It’s really hard! In a two-parent household, it’s hard for the other parent to have a consistent job, because they can only do the job whenever their partner is at home and then they have to juggle that with child care. For a lot of people who have a car, driving everywhere is just convenient and the way things automatically are by default. When that’s not easy for you, it can literally be the limiting factor of your life. And I’m not even including the people who can’t drive because they have seizures, or because they’re elderly and losing their sight, or whatever. And lastly, this would be also a pretty big deal for disabled people. Some of the folks that have been most excited about or most vocal about helping the Waymo cause have been paratransit, drivers for disabled people. It’s apparently really hard to get with rideshare drivers. There’s a lot of things you have to qualify for in order to serve as paratransit under the paratransit programs. What ends up happening is that if you’re a paratransit customer, you’ll end up seeing a lot of cancellations and a lot of delays because not enough people who will qualify for being able to service it. Waymo kind of skips that. On to your China question. I was shocked to see how affordable cars could be abroad. You’re seeing cars that like $10,000. Electric. The U.S. hasn’t been able to reap as much of the benefits of these cheaper cars. They’re import-banned! You literally cannot buy the $10,000 EV in the U.S. Yeah, oh man. I also think about just how bad that policy is in combination with how we accidentally set regulations encouraging big cars. For most of the world a car now is this massively cheaper, much better performing thing than anything available in the U.S. right now. The bestselling vehicle model in Britain lately was a Chinese hybrid, the Jaecoo! This happened just in 3 to 5 years. I have been really focused a lot on road fatalities. For that, there’s a whole bunch of weird reasons why our cars are very large. It’s not just consumer preference, it’s more that that’s what’s available to buy. There’s not as much competition, not as many other cars coming in. The bigger cars are more lucrative, higher profit margin. And U.S. regulations set easier emissions standards for larger vehicles, like SUVs. So to me, this is a pretty big abundance issue. A new car on average is now over $50,000 in the U.S. And BYD is selling cars for $10,000, right? That’s a pretty huge cost of living impact for people. There are electric cars widely available in the world that are less than one-fifth the price of the average new car in the U.S., and they are just not allowed on U.S. shores. And U.S. EV-makers just had their legs cut out from under them in last year’s OBBBA budget. A bunch of investments got canceled.  Your
Daily Dose of Climate HopeElectric
car sales in 2026 are at record highs — but
not in the U.S…
14 days ago ·
23 likes
Literally, the U.S. is in the worst of both worlds on electric cars. It is comically bad policy. Electric cars are like the exact opposite of abundance in the US right now. There’s deliberate scarcity. Oil billionaire Harold Hamm helped raise like a billion dollars for Trump 2024 campaigning, more or less openly to stop electric cars, and then he got to lead the Trump administration energy policy transition team! I mean, this looks intentional. A lot of times in abundance issues, I find that things are unintentional. Right? In climate issues, you have active opposition. But climate issues are abundance issues too. The fact that America has become a fossil fuel exporter, that there’s so much fossil fuel industry money floating around, has led to regulatory capture and active sabotage of electric competition in the U.S in a way that hasn’t happened in China or Europe. ICE even raided an electric vehicle factory and deported hundreds of people on legitimate visas who were working to build electric vehicles for America! I feel like I need to provide the Wikipedia and New York Times articles for that just because otherwise it sounds insane. It sounds ridiculously conspiratorial but it’s just what’s happened. It’s crazy. This is so bizarre. The largest-ever U.S. immigration enforcement operation in a single location! And it was against South Korean engineers! Like the least threatening demographic possible in terms of what people are concerned about when it comes to immigration. This has also meaningfully pushed South Korea much closer to China. This has just been a massive multidimensional screw-up. You know that saying, the axe forgets but the tree remembers? Americans forget when we do stupid stuff like this, but South Korea remembers. They remember 300 of their people being treated like animals and led away in chains. The way policy is made these days, probably Stephen Miller said, let’s go after the immigrants making woke electric cars. As far as I know, none of these people were actually even charged with any crime. These battery engineers were just dragged away in chains, from the EV battery factory they were building for America, and then deported. That’s horrible. Foreign investment in U.S. factories has declined even further since that event. Oh, man. Yeah. That’s the kind of stuff I used to write about when it would happen in other countries. The good news is, if we could just stop massively self-sabotaging, we’d actually be in a great position to compete on clean energy! Biden was ramping things up! We have tons of great people and resources. Many people in America are still in this 2005 mindset where it’s like, oh, EVs, maybe they work, maybe they don’t. No! Almost the entire rest of the world has cheap great EVs and you don’t and it is your government’s fault! Yeah. It’s kind of awful. I feel it. Because I’ve been abroad, I notice how much better, like, healthcare can be. And then we come back and we’re just used to it. We think that there’s no other way. We think that healthcare abroad must be like crazy long lines and all these things. And I’m like, no that’s not what it was like at all Have you seen that viral article about the amazing cheap yet high-quality healthcare experience in Malaysia?  The
ElysianMy
husband and I showed up at the Malaysian
hospital at 8:30 am and were given a checklist
of things we wanted to get tested…
7 months ago ·
114 likes · 80 comments · Elle Griffin
Oh yeah, yeah, I love that piece. “If I get sick, I’m moving to Malaysia.” It’s so good. I think people just do not realize that there’s now a spectacular healthcare ecosystem in places like Malaysia. This is the kind of stuff Abundance exists to fix. To bring into existence the good things that America sort of tells itself it has but doesn’t actually have. Yeah! Our lives could be a lot more affordable. Life could be a lot cheaper. And a lot less, having to deal with crazy amounts of, paperwork and lines and lack of clarity around pricing. That’s kind of all a policy choice! Positive
Sum
Lightning
rods, those simple metal rods installed on
roofs to safely direct lightning strikes, were
vehemently opposed when invented, with
churches claiming that controlling lightning
strikes was usurping God's authority. Despite
saving lives, Ben Franklin's invention faced
riots. Earlier adoption of these rods would
have prevented countless fires and s…
2 years ago ·
31 likes · 5 comments · Abi Olvera
Yeah, it is. It’s all a policy choice. So the bad news is that it’s so frustrating that America doesn’t do it. But the good news is we know it can be done! We don’t have to invent these solutions, just implement them. Like plug-in solar, balcony solar. In Germany, you’re allowed to buy small solar panels and just plug them into a wall outlet in your home so they start feeding power back into your house and reduce your electric bills. A movement started in Utah in 2025 for states to make it allowable in the U.S., and it’s taken off big in 2026! Yeah! Popular in Europe, people in Germany say they saw a 15% drop in their bills. And again, that’s illegal in most of the U.S.! You can buy an assault rifle, but you can’t buy a set of solar panels for your balcony. That’s crazy. I’ve been really impressed at Utah being such a leader in this kind of stuff. They’re also a bit of a leader in occupational licensing reforms. It’s exactly like occupational licensing, actually. It’s just an artificial barrier to doing the thing. Regulatory capture. Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s pretty recent, too. I can’t believe that that wasn’t legal before. Yeah. People don’t realize. They’re like, well, if electric vehicles were good, surely we’d be able to buy some cheap electric vehicles. Or if solar power works, surely I’d just be able to buy a kit for my house. But you can’t. People can in other countries, like Germany or Australia or China, but they can’t in much of the U.S. There is pending plug-in solar legislation in D.C., though, that might pass this year. I’ll probably try to get this installed in my house. This is really cool. I’ve been pretty focused on cost-of-living, the poverty angle. In Australia, rooftop solar now is actually cheaper than the cost of building out a power line from a centralized power source to a house. So if Australia had infinite free power at a centralized source tomorrow, nuclear fusion or the Tesseract or something, rooftop solar would still be cheaper. That’s pretty big for rural communities especially. I’m sorry, I’ve probably been talking too much! It just seemed really relevant to what you’re saying and what you’re working on. No, no. This is really good. Also, you’re running D.C. Abundance, and D.C. is one of the key jurisdictions in the U.S. that still has active plug-in solar legislation in this 2026 session. Positive
Sum
For
decades, the Democratic Party's best moments
came when it delivered concrete benefits that
improved millions of people's lives. Social
Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Food Stamps.
Head Start…
a year ago ·
24 likes · Abi Olvera
Yeah, that’s true. Although we’re thinking of changing the name because we’re more focused on national issues. We do want to focus on D.C. issues as well, but predominantly it’s the national issues, which is also why we have people in Virginia and Maryland as well. We’re getting to the end of our planned time slot. Thank you for everything! It’s been a great conversation. I appreciate it, Sam. It was really awesome! Thank you so much! Live long and prosper.
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