571 | Steve Teles: The Varieties of Abundance - Why Abundance Isn't Left, Right, or Center

The Realignment

Technology, News Commentary, National Security, Marshall Kosloff, International Relations, News, Public Policy, Economics, Politics, Saager Enjeti, U.s. Politics, Policy

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Steve Teles, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, returns to The Realignment. Ahead of next week's 2025 Abundance in DC, Marshall and Steve discuss his new Niskanen Center paper on "The Varieties of Abundance." In Steve's telling, despite broad agreement within the Abundance movement on the need to increase supply, challenge existing incumbents who benefit from scarcity, and the critical role of enhanced state capacity in addressing America's challenges, there are existing and potential varieties of Abundance across the ideological and geographic spectrums. Just as the late 19th- and early 20th-century Progressive Movement held a shared critique of the industrial-era American state, different actors took the project in different directions. Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson were all progressives, but operated in separate camps. In Steve's telling, abundance is already operating accordingly. In the paper, he identifies six varieties of Abundance: Red Plenty, Cascadian Abundance, Liberal Abundance, Moderate-Abundance Synthesis, Abundance Dynamism, and Dark Abundance. The aim of the paper is not to be overly inside-baseball, but to offer readers and listeners a framework for understanding the diversity of actors, institutions, and ideologies that have positively engaged with the Abundance framework.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Sorry for the delayed publication on today's episode.
0:09.8	Steve Talley's has a new paper out at the Niskanen Center titled Varieties of Abundance, and this is tied into our upcoming abundance conference next week.
0:19.6	I had to hold the episode so that the actual
0:21.8	publication was ready to post in the show notes. One of the big questions that a lot of folks
0:26.4	have about abundance, especially abundance from the perspective of this show's coverage, has been
0:31.2	what actually is it? Why do you have people who are on the right describing themselves as
0:36.1	dark abundance people? Why do you have people
0:38.8	on the left talking about red plenty? What's up with all these abundance, Democratic Party
0:43.2	moderates? All these different sorts of people are operating together in the same space,
0:47.3	using some of the same language, yet are also quite different. So Steve, for the actual conference,
0:52.6	put this paper together to give people sort of an understanding of how these different factions within even the word abundance operate, how it looks different, the different political figures and movements that are associated with them, and I think in general it just serve as a very useful guide. I should note that with a lot of these categories, especially the Cascadian abundance or the Red Plenty abundance examples
1:11.6	on the left. Steve is using this as an intellectual exercise to describe how different sorts of
1:17.5	people and different geographies would imagine or take an approach here, and then we're sort of
1:22.2	extrapolating to the future where that could look like. So this isn't really about how do these
1:26.1	factions exist now or how do
1:27.6	these different varieties of abundance exist now, but instead how could they actually operationalize
1:31.6	themselves in the future? As you all read and hear these different varieties of abundance,
1:35.8	if you are at all interested in this agenda, which part of them do you fit into? So emails in the show
1:41.3	notes, we'd love to hear people's thoughts. Hope you all enjoy the conversation.
1:47.9	And I'm really looking forward to emceeing the Abundance Conference next week.
1:49.9	Steve, welcome back to the realignment.
1:56.4	Thanks to be on for what is my probably 4,000th episode on this, I think, now.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Realignment, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Realignment and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.