
The following remarks were delivered by Inclusive Abundance CEO Derek Kaufman at the opening of Abundance 2024, a seminal convening which brought together nearly 300 leaders from government, industry, academia, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector. These remarks followed those of Alex Trembath at The Breakthrough Institute.
Alex, thank you for those kind words. I can’t sufficiently express my gratitude to you and to the fantastic team at Breakthrough for being such incredible partners in planning every detail of Abundance 2024.
Since our first conversation, it has been a pleasure to work with you and our co-hosts on the audacious goal of willing a conference of this scale into existence.
And here we are - welcome to Abundance 2024!
I am excited for what we have in store — main stage conversations that will inspire us to think differently and more boldly, breakouts where we’ll dive into the weeds on some of the greatest opportunities to unlock American prosperity, and moments of networking where we can start collaborating to make lasting change.
I’m Derek Kaufman, and I’m the Founder and CEO of the Inclusive Abundance Initiative. After a long career on Wall Street, I left the industry in 2015 to work on policy philanthropy, starting with two significant projects.
The first focused on enhancing economic mobility via an expanded Child Tax Credit. The second focused on bringing opportunity to more places via the regional economic development provisions in the CHIPS and Science Act.
Those bills passed because of the efforts of many of you in this room.
At the time, I wondered, “what project should come next?” Serendipitously, the Abundance approach to policy making was just beginning to gain attention.
Abundance looks at the choices we make to organize our society and asks:
- Which ones are still working as originally intended,
- What needs to be improved, and
- How can we streamline processes and refine systems to achieve better outcomes?
I came to love the framing of Abundance as an antidote to the scarcity we observe all around us - to scarcity we shouldn’t see in a country as innovative and prosperous as America in 2024.
We viscerally experienced this scarcity during the pandemic - fragile supply chains made it impossible to buy everything from toilet paper to computer chips. Years of underproduction in housing led to skyrocketing rents. Enrollment systems for social safety net programs collapsed under a crush of applications, as Jen Pahlka so poignantly explained in Recoding America.
Much of this scarcity is self-imposed, and driven by a variety of factors, including:
- Antiquated Government Systems that can’t handle modern demands ,
- Misguided Narratives that suggest economic growth is incompatible with sustainability,
- Zero-Sum Thinking that implies when someone in America wins, someone else must lose,
- Political Divisiveness that fuels distrust and civic disengagement, and
- Red Tape that makes it costly and challenging to innovate and build
It doesn’t have to be this way, and the Abundance approach presents an optimistic vision for how we can navigate our country to a better future.
Over the next two days, we will collectively explore the ways in which an Abundance Agenda will help us chart this course.
One year ago, we launched the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, a nonprofit organization focused on building more housing, investing in clean energy, encouraging innovation, and making government work better for everyone.
The words “Inclusive” and “Abundance” were chosen deliberately. On the surface, it’s obvious - we want the abundance to include everyone, everywhere in America.
But it goes deeper than that - the Abundance movement itself is inclusive along three key dimensions:
- First, Abundance is ideologically inclusive - unlike many of the hot-button, divisive social issues that dominate our discourse, this community can find common ground and effective solutions to address many of the most pressing challenges we face.
If I ask someone their views on 2nd Amendment rights, I will probably know how they feel about a host of other cultural issues. But I will have no idea what they think about permitting reform.
This framework of seeking out nonpartisan, impactful policy areas was the guiding principle behind programming Abundance 2024.
- Second, Abundance is inclusive of seemingly disparate intellectual communities and advocacy groups - from the Ecomodernists to the YIMBYs to the government capacity crowd to the progress studies proponents - look around the room - Abundance is building a political movement with those doing aligned work, uniting kindred spirits under a common banner.
As your participation in Abundance 2024 demonstrates, there is profound demand for this kind of community in our highly polarized political environment.
We envision a future with burgeoning Abundance factions in both parties collaborating across the aisle and pushing for major change in years ahead.
- Finally, Abundance is inclusive across many sectors and segments of our society, each of which plays a key role in shaping the development, legislation, and implementation of policy.
Over 350 people - from across the political spectrum - RSVPd for this inaugural conference, with substantial representation from government, think tanks, academia, advocacy organizations, journalists, business leaders, philanthropic foundations - the list goes on.
People who feel a patriotic duty to make a difference in our society and are willing to take time out of their busy schedules to be here today.
Moreover, we’re eager to make sure this movement looks like all of America, and isn’t just people like me talking to other people who look just like me.
This diverse coalition reflects the broad appeal of our ideas. However, we can't ignore the political context in which we're operating.
I want to briefly address the elephant in the room - or more precisely, the elephant and the donkey in the room. We are now a few weeks away from a highly uncertain election.
Many of you are surprised this election is so tight. And remember, many of you are surprised it’s so tight for completely opposite reasons.
I hope that over the next two days, we can be respectful of our differences and take comfort in the fact that disagreements in this community are opportunities for learning from each other and working together to find common ground.
None of us can know how things will turn out in November, but the beauty of the Abundance movement is that no matter the outcome, this community and these ideas will be key to shaping the trajectory of policy making going forward.
Abundance scrambles many traditional areas of left-right disagreement by using the best parts of the playbook from across the ideological spectrum, such as:
- Smart regulatory reform,
- High-return investments in public goods,
- Systems measured by their outcomes rather than their processes,
- A data-driven emphasis on thoughtfully evaluating tradeoffs and siding with what will do the most good for the most people,
- Complementary roles for the public and private sectors, and
- A culture of progress, innovation, and economic vibrancy.
It’s common sense to most of us. And yet there hasn’t been a home for it until now.
As Alex mentioned, our wonderful co-hosts - the Breakthrough Institute, the Niskanen Center, the Institute for Progress, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Federation of American Scientists - conceived of Abundance 2024 with the intent of bringing together an exceptional group like we have here today - in our nation’s capital - to work on defining the Abundance Agenda, and showcasing the intellectual vitality, ideological diversity, and growing scale of the movement to a wide audience.
We’ve come a long way since those first happy hours.
There has already been so much success, with meaningful federal legislation advancing in permitting reform, housing policy, regional economic development, and innovation.
This, in addition to many significant Abundance policy wins in states and cities - red, purple, and blue. You all should be enormously proud.
We also know there is so much more work to be done, and are thrilled to have 15 panels with 60 experts weighing in on issues from critical minerals to building a world-class federal workforce to economic mobility to artificial intelligence.
Thank you to our speakers for sharing their insights with us - please give them a round of applause!
We will hear main stage presentations from the co-host organizations, and fireside chats with Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as the original luminaries of Abundance thought who exerted such an enormous influence on our work, including Derek Thompson, Matt Yglesias, Jerusalem Demsas, and Patrick Collison.
We are in policy wonk heaven!
But this conference isn’t just about the programmed speakers. There are dozens of impressive organizations represented in this room, doing incredible work across a variety of policy areas.
If you’re here, it’s because we believe you will make immense contributions to this discussion and to this movement. We hope Abundance 2024 helps you forge new relationships, expand and amplify your impact, and leave with a renewed sense of optimism about what concrete steps we can take over the coming months and years to turn Abundance ideas into action.
We at the Inclusive Abundance Initiative would love to hear feedback on how we can do that as effectively as possible. We believe that more capacity is needed in the Abundance space, and the various groups in attendance here today will all play a key role in providing:
- Increased financial resources,
- A comprehensive menu of detailed policy proposals,
- Compelling narrative change, and
- Growing the political power, legislative accomplishments, and policy implementation success of the movement.
Abundance 2024 is meant to help achieve those objectives.
And we couldn’t do it without the generous support from our sponsors at Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together Trust.
Please give them a hand!
When we launched the Inclusive Abundance Initiative one short year ago, we dreamed about hosting a conference like this.
But even in our wildest imagination, we didn't expect the turnout we have here today, surrounded by so many passionate pragmatists who embody the spirit of Inclusive Abundance.
I am deeply grateful for your work, for your presence here at Abundance 2024, and for your tireless efforts to improve the lives of all Americans. Together, we can transform systems of self-imposed scarcity into engines of Abundance.
Thank you, and let's make the most of our time together!