Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on January 23, 2025.
What do mega-philanthropists as distinctive as John and Laura Arnold, Dustin Moskovitz and Charles Koch have in common, besides the fact that they’re absurdly rich?
Well, for one thing, they’re all proponents of the “abundance agenda,” an ascendent centrist movement calling for the expansion of material resources, opportunity and productivity to produce more housing, energy and technological innovation.
Positioned as “neoliberalism’s rebrand” in an eye-opening piece by Revolving Door Project Senior Researcher Dylan Gyauch-Lewis in The American Prospect, the abundance agenda is an attractive frame for high-dollar philanthropists casting around for something less stodgy than neoliberalism’s old dogmas.
However, a closer look at the abundance agenda’s, well, agenda, suggests its red-tape-slashing precepts, coupled with its proponents’ ties to AI, Big Tech and oil, may put it on a collision course with progressive grantmakers who are suspicious of once again deferring to the idea of unfettered free markets.
The positions major grantmakers end up taking on “neoliberalism’s rebrand” will tell us a lot about philanthropy’s posture in a society ever more intent on catering to the interests of the very rich — who, in what probably sounds like a familiar refrain, contend that the benefits of a top-down economic order will inevitably trickle down to middle- and working-class Americans.
What is the abundance agenda?
Last October, individuals spanning the political spectrum, and hailing from academia, journalism and philanthropy, gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 2024 Abundance Conference.
According to Gyauch-Lewis’ reporting, the gathering was sponsored by the Arnolds’ Arnold Ventures, Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Koch’s Stand Together and Renaissance Philanthropy, a philanthropic intermediary recently launched with funding from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy that works with high-net-worth funders to launch programs focusing on science, technology and innovation.
“Abundance,” reads the conference’s website, “stems from the idea that society’s challenges cannot all be resolved merely by regulation or redistribution, but also require the active expansion of material resources, opportunity and productivity.” The page also notes that “from solar panels and wind farms to new transit and housing, desperately needed development is blocked or slowed to a crawl by outmoded and parochial barriers.”
While the page was short on actual policy, it’s not a huge leap to conclude the movement’s proponents could find some common cause with progressive funders. After all, folks on the left aren’t exactly allergic to plentiful housing stock, ample wind farms and networks of light rail systems criss-crossing America’s exurbs.
Consider progressives’ near-universal approval of the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, promotes green energy projects to facilitate the transition to a green economy. The bill was “solidly what we’re looking for,” Larry Kramer, then-president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told Axios’ Salmon in 2022. “We had nothing directly to do with the bill. But the frameworks that underlie it were all things that were funded directly on the Hewlett site.”
Of course, the bill passed with zero votes from Republicans, who argued that a private sector attuned to market demand should be galvanizing growth — not federal bureaucrats. Gyauch-Lewis’ explication of the abundance agenda underscores this fundamental philosophical fissure.
“Abundance starts from a ‘growth above all’ mindset,” she wrote. “The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws — which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives — but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.”
AI could drive a wedge between funders
It’s at this juncture that a forest of red flags begins to come into focus. It’s quite the stretch to expect progressive funders who have prioritized worker protections, environmental safeguards and reining in Big Tech to sign up for another Faustian bargain that could exacerbate the same problems that have neoliberalism’s fingerprints all over them.
The issue of AI could be an especially fraught flash-point between abundance proponents and their more progressive peers.
Gyauch-Lewis noted that Abundance 2024 conference sponsor Renaissance Philanthropy was started “with an explicit focus on AI” and its founder, Tom Kalil, sits on the board of the Spanish AI company Sherpa.ai. Gyauch-Lewis points out that Eric Schmidt, who provided seed funding to Renaissance, is also on the board of multiple AI companies. As entities beholden to shareholders, these companies adhere to a Friedmanesque mindset that, like the abundance movement itself, prioritizes growth above all.
And oh, what growth it may be! A 2023 McKinsey study estimated that generative AI could create as much as $7.9 trillion in annual global wealth creation. The catch is that much of this wealth is the byproduct of what McKinsey euphemistically calls “improved labor productivity” — e.g., putting an untold amount of people out of work — which feeds into fears, articulated by watchdogs like the Hewlett Foundation, that AI may actually “reinforce the neoliberal order.”
Throw in Big Tech’s dismal track record when it comes to self-regulation and the cold reality that AI development requires a dramatic ramp-up in fossil fuel extraction, and it’s probably inevitable that some funders will push back on pro-abundance policies that give AI companies carte blanche to operate as they see fit.
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Funders are searching for neoliberalism’s successor
The AI surge may be a new development, but the question of what should replace neoliberalism has been kicking around philanthropy’s more intellectual precincts for a while. And that philosophy, which broadly speaking favors free-market capitalism, deregulation and a reduction in government spending, was itself conjured up by conservative thinkers in the middle of the 20th century to stave off socialism.
It’s an old story. With neoliberal thinking on the rise back then, left-of-center and progressive funders gritted their teeth and forged what were, in many cases, uneasy alliances with the center-right. Neoliberalism took root, diminishing accountable public entities while elevating opaque but purportedly more efficient private actors. The latter group included unelected megadonors deploying money and influence to a body politic that, as IP Editor-in-Chief David Callahan noted, had been “hollowed out” because government was in a state of constant retreat.
After the 2008 financial crisis laid bare neoliberalism’s myriad shortcomings, some funders began interrogating the status quo. Their efforts intensified after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by successfully tapping into the frustrations of working-class Americans who felt left behind in the prevailing economic order.
Two years after that, two major funders sprang into action. Omidyar Network, the giving vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, launched Reimagining Capitalism, which aims to build a more equitable economic system by advancing worker power, pushing for financial reforms and curbing monopolies.
Last August, Omidyar Network CEO Mike Kubzansky walked me through the funder’s strategic evolution, which aims to ensure that the expansion of digital technology — and AI in particular — has a positive impact on society. Kubzansky said this thinking could be applied to Omidyar Network’s Reimagining Capitalism work in terms of how “society in its political economy set boundaries and expectations for what it wants the private sector to be doing.”
It was also in 2018 that Hewlett’s Kramer penned a memo proposing a program called “Beyond Neoliberalism.” Two years later, the foundation launched a five-year, $50 million Economy and Society initiative to “replace neoliberalism with a new common sense about how the economy works and the aims it should serve to improve the lives of people.”
Speaking to Callahan in 2023, Kramer wasn’t sure which philosophy would replace neoliberalism, and that other and more menacing options, like “21st century fascism” rooted in ethnonationalism, were gaining traction. “We could fail, there’s no question about it,” he said.
It’s obviously worth stating that an economic system based on the abundance agenda, which again, has support across the political spectrum, won’t be as existentially fraught as Kramer’s hypothetical situation. Gyauch-Lewis labels the abundance agenda “neoliberalism’s rebrand,” and one could make the case that it’s simply neoliberalism with fewer guardrails. I suspect it isn’t many progressive funders’ ideal paradigm for structuring the economy, but Kramer’s comment is a reminder that it beats some of the alternatives.
Moreover, post-election headwinds suggest the movement’s proponents may not need to exert much energy on the lobbying front, at least on the federal level. In the last 24 hours alone, Saudi Arabia floated a potential $600 billion in investment in the U.S. and President Trump, flanked by Larry Ellison and Sam Altman, announced a $500 billion AI investment after he repealed a 2023 executive order signed by then-President Joe Biden to create safety standards and watermarking of AI-generated content.
To paraphrase an old axiom, the abundance horse has already left the barn. With Trump poised to slash more regulations and billionaires unwilling to push back against the market systems that enriched them, the big question facing progressive funders moving forward isn’t whether they can stop the movement’s ascent as much as how to temper and respond to its more uber-neoliberal excesses.
