Over the past several months, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s manifesto Abundance has set off a wide-ranging debate about the future of progressive politics and governance. But there is a strange lacuna in the book and the conversation it has occasioned. Not too long ago, the commonly used term for the goal of creating a better future through infrastructure, technology, and material wealth was development. Yet neither the authors of Abundance nor those responding to them make much use of this term in its broad sense. You can read about the plight of housing developers or technology development, but the big-picture concept is out of view.
It is an especially notable omission right now. Even as the Trump administration haphazardly gestures at foreign development exploits from Greenland to Gaza and opens up the Alaskan wilderness to oil exploration, it has also embarked on various efforts that look set to erode gains in development in terms of education, health, environmental protection, and democracy. What all this means is that development is up for grabs politically. Will the right or the left claim it?
Development differs from abundance in that it is both a goal and a means or process of reaching that goal. (We don’t speak of “abundancing.”) The 20th century conceptualized development as linear, leading to a final state—hence, nations could be classified as “developed,” “underdeveloped,” or “developing.” This conception was bound up with colonialism, with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles setting up the principle that “advanced nations” should provide tutelage for the well-being of territories not yet able to “stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Within the United States, development entered the national agenda in 1949 with Truman’s “Point Four” inaugural address. Like today’s “abundance liberals,” Truman centered science and technology, and called for helping people “produce more food, more clothing, more materials for housing, and more mechanical power to lighten their burdens.”
“By the end of the 20th century, much of this optimism about development had receded.”
By the end of the 20th century, much of the optimism about development had receded. In 1975, the UN report What Now?: Another Development laid out the “crisis of development” in stark terms. In 1980, the Brandt report of the North-South commission presented several proposals for remedying the failures of the development paradigm, including “an orderly transition” from dependence on non-renewable energy, a broader sharing of technology, and a universal tax on all non-poor nations to finance development. These reports constituted high-level recognition of the conceptual problems without really changing much in practice.
In the 1990s, despite this growing disillusionment, there was still enthusiasm about what a “post-development” paradigm, which looked to grassroots movements and local knowledge for sparks of hope, might bring to the table. But by the 2010s, people seemed fatigued with the search for plausible alternatives. “Development is one of those zombie categories that have long since decayed, but still wander around as a worn-out utopia,” declared post-development scholar Wolfgang Sachs in 2019. You still see people at conferences walking around with colorful pins for the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but even with that consensus-based process to define a development agenda, everyone knows the goals are aspirational. “Development is more often about survival now, not progress,” wrote Sachs, quipping that the SDGs should really be called the SSGs: sustainable survival goals.
Back in the 2010s, when I was studying for a doctorate in development sociology, the curriculum emphasized critical perspectives on development, highlighting, for instance, how the West had used foreign aid to counter communism, and how the wealthy nodes of the global economy extract resources and labor from the periphery. At the same time, I was also part of a National Science Foundation program where students would collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to solve problems—in our case, studying food systems and poverty reduction in East Africa. This seemed like important, real work, and indicated to me that “development,” for all its problems, could still do something positive in the world. I wasn’t sure what my role was on these teams besides to provide historical context about why development was problematic. But perhaps, I thought, that was the point: Critical theorists were needed as outsiders to provide correctives and articulate alternatives to development-as-usual.
Since then, something has shifted in our culture, as what were once outsider critiques have become common wisdom. This is why a bestseller like Abundance can make sweeping statements about how our optimism for the future has evaporated and presume that most readers will recognize the sentiment. The prevalence of critique over any positive agenda is also a factor behind the Trump administration’s war against Harvard and other elite universities. Trump’s supporters don’t see Harvard as working to repair ailing organs, build quantum computers, develop gene editing tools, or other things that would bring concrete benefits. Instead, what they see are the Marxist books on the library shelves—which, ironically, few students ever bother to check out. In Harvard’s stacks, you can in fact find rows and rows of Marxist-inflected books cataloguing development’s discontents: critiques of neoliberal development, the development of underdevelopment, why markets aren’t a solution. It’s hard to find a title that would dare to make the case that development has brought some useful things. This broad intellectual discrediting of the concept is no doubt part of why Klein and Thompson avoid making use of it.
Despite all that, it is also true that in many spaces, development is still the only game in town. When I leave the United States, development speak is still not hard to come across, especially in discussions of climate and energy policy. “Sustainable development” remains at the crux of global climate debates, and not just from countries in the Global South. Japanese philosopher Kohei Saito sold over half a million copies of a book about capital in the Anthropocene, with a viral quip that “sustainable development is the opiate of the masses”—which tells you as much about the not just the intellectual tastes of the Japanese reading public, but the Japanese government’s wide buy-in to the sustainable development goals.
Global development also has bearings on domestic climate, energy, and innovation policy. Analysts project that most greenhouse gas emissions going forward are going to come from outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. This means, for one thing, that the US public is unlikely to support regulations that seem out of step with the actions China or India are taking. As one participant in a focus group I ran recently in Maine put it, “When you turn on the TV and you see other countries, India, China, where things are smoggy because they are putting out all these emissions—sometimes I know it’s a little selfish, but I’m like, well, why the hell should I try?” Storylines about global development, therefore, are necessary to frame what we do at home.
Development discourse and the critical theory that it provoked can also help us grasp the ways in which domestic development is being eroded under the current administration. On one hand, it is increasingly the right—the “tech right” of figures like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks as well as the GOP’s energy-industry constituents—that claims development as its domain. Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” for instance, proclaims accelerationism as “the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development” while also decrying the Sustainable Development Goals as part of a “mass demoralization campaign.”
“The current administration is taking us on a path toward reversing development.”
At the same time, the current administration is taking us on a path toward reversing development in areas including immunization, health, education, corruption, and rule of law—in some cases accelerating trends that were already underway. The first step in tracking this trajectory is recognizing that development can be reversed. Despite a number of relevant examples from recent history, especially in the former Soviet Union, there is no robust literature on development reversal; no conferences or workshops, nor even a coherent terminology. If development reversal were an established field, we might be able to diagnose it more readily here. As it stands, we are stuck with this vague language of “losing faith in the future” or “stories of decline.”
If you look at the Human Development Index maintained by the United Nations Development Programme, the only countries marked as having undergone a decline are conflict-ridden ones such as Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen; the former Soviet countries dipped after the fall of the USSR but were back up by 2000. Changes that the Trump administration is now making will take years to be revealed in data. But we might not be looking at the issue correctly. Indicators such as people’s perceptions about development and the future and more granular data that focuses more on regional differences and worsening inequality paint a more complex picture.
The process of development reversal precedes Trump’s return to office. Declines in reading and math test scores have been seen for a decade; US life expectancy peaked in 2014. But the second Trump administration is unique for dismantling a government-funded science and technology infrastructure that was an engine of growth. Many of the moves being made would appear to willfully accelerate development reversal. Declining interest in “development” as an organizing concept for what society is trying to accomplish also has a long back history. Most would locate this shift somewhere in the late 1960s or 1970s, driven by factors including the Vietnam War, the rise of environmental awareness, and a broad abandonment of state-led development efforts.
To see where the wave of American development optimism crashed and rolled back, and what’s at stake when progressives fail to engage with development, visit Alaska. Development came to many parts of the state just as hesitation about the whole enterprise was beginning to emerge, and its landscape bears a sense that the country lost interest partway through the process.
Rural Alaska relies on flying in diesel to aging tank farms that need to be replaced. There is a looming gas shortage in the Anchorage region because gas fields in the Cook Inlet are in decline. Despite the fact that every governor has attempted to build a pipeline to bring North Slope gas down to the capitol region since the 1970s, this has never come to fruition. A dam was planned for the Susitna river that would have provided for electricity for two-thirds of the population, but its construction was vetoed. The power grid that serves the majority of people has just one transmission line, making the entire state incredibly vulnerable, though it received a $200 million federal grant as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to begin an eight-year process of building a second line to ensure redundancy.
Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, is a town of about 5,000 and the seat of the North Slope borough. The northernmost community in the United States, it is situated on the Arctic Ocean, where the Chukchi and Beaufort seas meet. Utilities are provided by the utildor, a $800 million underground corridor of pipes built in the 1980s, which is now vulnerable with the permafrost thawing. A percentage of the population lives without plumbing and uses honey buckets for sewage disposal; 3.4 percent of people in Utqiagvik and about 10 percent of the North Slope borough lack indoor plumbing, according to a 2019 census. The only paved street is in front of the airport, so it can be muddy. When the passenger plane lands—if it can land that day given the fog that rolls in off the ocean—the community pitches in to help move the baggage along. There’s satellite internet, a hospital, a Thai restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and two pizza joints.
When it comes to things like poverty and health disparities, Utqiagvik is not equal to lower-48 standards. Some people might see this as the federal government failing to adequately provide for the wellbeing of all Americans; others might appraise the level of “development” as fine, or not a fair topic to raise. Why should standards from a different geography apply? The majority Iñupiat community has a rich culture; surely only a limited mind would see the place through a lens of absence. Do I know anybody living in a place with higher “development” indicators who would have the skill to build a boat or hunt a whale? Of course not.
Nonetheless, the condition of the region constitutes a structural failure for which the federal government bears responsibility. As with the water-insecure colonias of the Texas border counties, the failing educational system in west Baltimore, or health disparities in parts of Appalachia, the picture is one of underdevelopment, characterized by the standard core-periphery dynamics where the core extracts resources at the expense of the periphery.
“We can’t afford to lose a collective vision of the material and social state that people should enjoy.”
Ideas from post-development critiques like “asset-based community development” can help people get beyond seeing communities like Utqiagvik as merely deficient, and as rich in ways that matter. But we should also be tracking how the government is failing places and populations. We need some kind of vision of a shared goal and a standard of material and social well-being in order to articulate when and where that standard is not being met. Turning away from “development” made sense given all its flaws—but in doing so, we can’t afford to lose a collective vision of the material and social state that people should enjoy.
Right now, there are actually multiple conversations about development happening, albeit somewhat outside the ambit of a book like Abundance. Most of these are focused on rural regions and small towns, which is at least part of why they didn’t feature in that book or the conversations around it. There’s a whole infrastructure around “regional economic development,” a field that despite several “turns” and trends (small-business growth, industrial clusters, “the creative class”) still looks very much like the “smokestack chasing” emphasis of the 1950s. People in economic development offices are still concerned with attracting big firms or projects, often in exchange for tax breaks. Much of the funding passed during the Biden administration for big manufacturing or energy projects aligned with this style of thinking.
Then there are the practitioners of “community development,” which is much more focused on what communities want (often parks or amenities, rather than economic drivers), and tends to center justice and empowerment. This is a bit of a caricature, but the point is that there are different ways of thinking that are often talking past each other. People are out there trying to merge them—the state of California went through a whole process to build a bottom-up “State Economic Blueprint,” organizing 10,000 people to give input to build 13 “community-led regional economic plans” that informed a state-wide strategy. But generally speaking, many of these professionalized efforts are not something citizens are engaged with, or that politicians and intellectuals are speaking to. Traditionally, the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century was very concerned with the development of peripheral regions; that has fallen into the background. Part of the appeal of MAGA futurism is that it gestures, however vaguely, to there being a future we are moving towards, one in which left-behind small towns and rural regions are included.
A recent poll from a progressive group asked respondents whether they thought “the big problem” facing the nation was bottlenecks from interest and community groups that make it hard to build, or big corporations holding too much power. The result was widely interpreted as meaning that people, especially Democrats, prefer “populism” over “abundance.” But this misses the point that abundance is, or should be, for a vision of the future, not just against a version of the present. Development is a concept freighted with failure and disappointment, and no one’s been able to reconceptualize it after 50 years of trying. But inventing a story for talking about the future we want is not the kind of project progressives can give up on, and “development” is too much a part of how we got to this point to leave it out of the discussion.
To be clear, this is not a call to revive the fatally flawed 20th-century notions of “development.” Rather, it means that we need to learn from what worked and what was poisonous within that way of thinking, in order to create a concept that actually accomplishes what “development” imagined it was about: telling a collective story about where we want to go, suggesting some strategies about how to get there, and offering metrics that tell us the truth about whether the project is working. Call it “abundance,” or not, but the left needs to have something on the table.