Supply-side progressivism

Approach

Conventional progressivism focuses on policies that redistribute wealth or subsidize access to basic goods, such as universal healthcare and housing vouchers. By contrast, supply-side progressivism aims to create more of these goods and services and make them more widely available.

Reducing regulatory restriction of supply

Supply-side progressives criticize regulations that constrain the supply of essential goods and services. Examples include zoning laws and building permit requirements that impede the building of new housing and infrastructure, as well as limits on doctor residency training positions and immigration.

Building state capacity

Supply-side progressives support strengthening the civil service to plan government projects. For example, a reliance on private consultants in planning is often cited as a contributor to high transit infrastructure costs in the United States. In contrast to traditional supply-side economics, supply-side progressives view enhanced state capacity as beneficial to increasing the supply of public goods and services.

Encouraging innovation

Supply-side progressives emphasize innovation as a way to increase manufacturing capacity and throughput of existing goods, and to create new goods to help meet demand. This can come in the form of research, development, or implementation sponsored directly by the government, and prizes provided to people or companies who solve specific problems. Some supply-side progressives argue that increasing the supply of high-skilled immigrants will encourage innovation.

Applications

Housing

Supply-side progressivism attributes the high cost of housing in many coastal cities to regulations such as zoning laws that prevent the construction of larger apartment buildings with more homes. Klein writes that, while progressives have long advocated for housing affordability, they have not until recently prioritized increasing housing production. In 2021, California banned single-family zoning. California also has a Housing Element Act that mandates that cities build housing for different income levels every year. Houston does not have land-use zoning, but they have a building code with height restrictions.

Healthcare

In healthcare, the supply of doctors is restricted by limiting the number of doctor residency-training programs, increasing barriers for immigrant doctors to practice, and preventing nurses from providing certain medical services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply of vaccines and tests for COVID-19 were restricted by the FDA, who were slow in approving development and manufacturing. Thompson advocated federal action to ramp up vaccine production capacity for new variants, "creating a super-team of virus hunters to monitor viral strains around the world", and "an Operation Warp Speed" for increasing vaccine manufacturing capacity globally. One group of researchers estimate that "installed capacity for 3 billion annual vaccine courses has a global benefit of $17.4 trillion, over $5800 per course." Klein suggests allocating more government money for basic research and drug trials, as well as prize money for discovering treatments for specific conditions. Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation for such prizes. Yglesias said that government funding is also necessary to slow the decline in healthcare access in rural and low-income urban areas.

Energy

Supply-side progressives push for energy abundance rather than energy conservation, noting that periods of accelerated human progress stem from energy abundance. They say this can be done through government investment in research and development and scale-up of new energy technology, especially in the clean energy sector. Beyond neutralizing climate change concerns with clean energy, Rachel Pritzker wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that energy abundance could support energy-intensive environmental mitigation projects such as desalination plants for water treatment or plasma gasification for waste treatment.

Advocates say that government action to invest in clean energy without action to lift supply-side restrictions results in "cost-disease environmentalism". An example they give is that clean energy technology has been stymied by regulatory difficulties in acquiring building permits for solar or wind plants. Derek Thompson has pointed to nuclear power plants as an affected clean energy technology, with the US closing "more nuclear-power plants than we've opened this century", despite it being "99.6 percent greener ... and 99.7 percent safer". Matthew Yglesias has criticized the regulatory infrastructure around energy for favoring oil and gas drilling, both of which are exempt from most environmental reviews.

Transportation

Similar concerns also affect the country's ability to build and maintain transportation infrastructure. Thompson said that, due to the National Environmental Policy Act, "endless and expensive impact analyses and environmental reviews have ground our infrastructure construction to a halt. From 1900 to 1904, New York City built and opened 28 subway stations. One hundred years later, the city needed about 17 years to build and open just three new stations along Second Avenue." Klein has pointed out that other countries with stronger unions protections than America have completed transit projects more quickly and less costly.

Reception

The abundance agenda has had a divisive effect on American left-wing politics. Its proponents, mostly moderate or centrist politicians, identify it as "key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition" while its opponents, mostly from the more progressive left, criticize it as "a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by 'corporate-aligned interests'" or a rebranding of neoliberalism. Jonathan Chait identified this divide as a "diametric conflict" between strands of American progressivism: "The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away." Writing for The Atlantic in 2023, Reihan Salam indicated ideological sympathy for tenets of supply-side liberalism, but argued its proponents misunderstand the nature of the U.S. liberal coalition, thus thwarting its viability as a political project. Writing for New York, Eric Levitz believes that many of the critics of this ideology misunderstand several aspects, such as the role of unions.