Why we're founding Students for Abundance

Policies that manufacture scarcity. Institutions that can't deliver. A culture of risk aversion. America's young adults must topple all three.

After generations of progress, young Americans are falling behind.

We see a nation in decline, with not enough homes, energy, or healthcare to go around, and a government ill-equipped to tackle today’s most pressing challenges. We see the American Dream slipping out of reach, with dwindling opportunities to get ahead and build a good life. We see people stuck, with declining trust, shrinking communities, and a society adrift.

It shouldn’t be this way.

When there’s not enough to go around, it can be tempting to hoard opportunity and mistake caution for progress. In a diminished society, it can feel like a victory to grab what pieces we can, then close our doors, put up barriers, and accept a smaller, less ambitious future. Or perhaps to gamble that in a world of too little for too many, we can join the few at the very top.

But we must resist those impulses. When the problem is that there isn’t enough, the solution is to make more: more homes, more infrastructure, more healthcare, more research, more energy.

Students for Abundance is shaping a generation of leaders to advance programs, policies, and infrastructure that renew our institutions and rebuild the American Dream. We face a long road ahead to break from a status quo that froze the world around us, hobbled the government we rely on, and closed off paths to a better life, but a new era is emerging.

Most of American history is the story of building up. We built great cities where people came to make better lives. We powered our way to mass prosperity. And we invented and deployed the technologies that defined a century of progress.

It felt like we were forever on the upswing. Then we stopped building.

Since the 1970s, American politics has been defined by suspicion of progress. While both parties fought about taxes, foreign policy, and whatever culture-war provocation got people angriest, they largely agreed on two big ideas: that it should be harder to change things and that it should be harder for the government to do things. For our generation, the ladder that allowed our parents and grandparents to ascend was pulled away.

In this era, we made it harder to build houses and apartments. We made it harder to introduce new energy technologies and nearly impossible to build nuclear power. And we made it harder to manufacture and roll out new technologies, even those we invented ourselves. As if building wasn’t hard enough for the private sector, we made it even harder for our government. We layered onerous processes on the government that no private company would ever have to follow. We opened every government project up to lawsuits, giving everyone a veto. And we stripped government of the competence to plan and deliver on big projects. Earlier generations broke the government on purpose and then told us "government" was the problem when it didn't deliver.

We are now facing a crisis: We don’t have enough of the things we need most to build a good life.

These are things like:

• Housing — the foundation of a good life. We haven’t built enough homes in decades, driving prices out of reach. Half of renters now spend more than 30 percent of their income on their home, and the median home costs a record five times the median income. These crushing prices choke mobility, weaken communities, worsen climate change, and deny us jobs and progress.

• Infrastructure — the backbone of movement and connection. We take longer and spend more to complete projects than our peers abroad. Even massive infrastructure investments leave us with fewer trains, buses, and safe roads than we need and longer commutes than anyone wants. These broken systems shrink the map of where people can work, live, and gather, and with it, the hours we have for family, friends, and community.

• Education – the ladder of opportunity and engine of innovation. Higher education costs are soaring, with more and more money going to administrators. Admissions rates at the most prestigious universities have sharply declined while public universities and community colleges have been starved of investment. Meanwhile, our best researchers spend almost as much time navigating bureaucracy as they spend actually doing science.

• Healthcare — the foundation for a long and healthy life. Americans pay the highest prices for healthcare while getting some of the worst outcomes. Among the reasons behind this failure is a shortage of more than 1 million nurses and 65,000 physicians. Shortages are perhaps even more stark for mental health and addiction treatments. Meanwhile, a dearth of hospital beds or alternative places to receive care, exacerbated by market consolidation, drives higher prices that exploit patients.

• Technology — the ideas that build a better world. We once built railroads, airplanes, and rockets and regularly developed cures to deadly diseases, but scientific progress has slowed. The government invests less in bold research, while grant systems reward safe bets over transformative ideas. Even when breakthroughs emerge, we lag in deployment, causing us to fall behind countries racing to build the future.

• Energy — the power that makes everything possible. Energy heats our homes, keeps the lights on, moves us from place to place, and powers the technology we use every day. When energy becomes scarce, everything gets expensive. AI and other breakthroughs will require more power than ever, just as climate change forces us to mobilize clean energy faster than we’ve ever built before.

Addressing our failure to provide each of these goods will be its own challenge, but we see a common pattern. This is a repeated failure of policy, of institutions, and of culture:

• Policies that manufacture scarcity: In nearly every part of life we care about, the rules are rigged to make life harder for those starting out and easier for those already at the top. When we restrict the supply of things we value, their costs soar the moment people need more, and nearly everyone suffers except those who already have more than they need. For example, zoning laws restricting apartments protect the property values of local homeowners while hurting young families. Artificial caps on the number of new doctors and barriers to opening hospitals and clinics keep healthcare costs high. Changing this means challenging the many interests that profit from scarcity.

• Institutions that can’t deliver: From housing to high-speed rail, clean energy to scientific breakthroughs, we need a government that can make big things happen. But our government is stuck in another century. Outdated systems, red tape, and broken processes drag out good projects for years or kill them outright and leave behind a bureaucracy that only the well-resourced know how to navigate. When the government fails, we respond by layering on more of the kinds of procedures that caused it to fail in the first place, fueling a death spiral of mistrust. Earning back trust means rebuilding a government that can deliver.

• A culture of risk aversion and complacency: Achieving big things requires risk-taking and sustained focus. But our funding systems, regulatory processes, and career incentives reward the predictable and legible over the ambitious and potentially extraordinary. In turn, young people with transformative ideas are often told to wait their turn, and our emerging leaders are funneled into familiar tracks rather than pushed to chart new paths that we can’t yet even conceive of. Solving the great challenges of the 21st century demands nothing less than the grit and daring that once built railroads, cured polio, and sent humans to the moon.

Policies, institutions, and culture don’t exist in a vacuum. These failures reinforce each other. Bad policies make weak institutions, and weak institutions make us pass worse policies. Together, weaker institutions and bad policies foster a risk-averse culture. A risk-averse society, in turn, layers on constraints that weaken its institutions and passes policies that produce more scarcity by making change and growth impossible. It’s a system whose worst tendencies exacerbate each other, hurtling our country towards a bleak future where we have to accept decline as inevitable.

Yet certain moments remind us that progress is still possible. During a global pandemic, we created and delivered life-saving vaccines in under a year. Over the course of merely a decade, we cut the cost of solar power by nearly 90 percent. When an overpass on I-95 collapsed in Philadelphia, we rebuilt it in just 12 days. These examples prove that we still know how to build when we choose to.

We believe we must direct the same ambition, the same urgency toward all of the things people need most. This would mean a future where:

• We can afford a home by the time we’re 30 and have affordable options at every stage of life, even in the most sought-after areas.

• Quick, reliable transit connects places with few opportunities to those with many, and makes it easy to reach friends and family, whether by high-speed rail, buses, subways, or safe, modern roads.

• Colleges serve more students, lift up the disadvantaged, and prepare their graduates to work for the public good.

• Healthcare is affordable and readily available, with better treatments for chronic illnesses and new life-saving cures deployed widely.

• Breakthrough research turns technology into useful products within months, freeing us to spend more time on what matters most.

• Clean, cheap, and abundant energy drives down all costs and fuels industries beyond our imagination.

This is the world we envision. It’s a world where we deliver on the things people need to live a good life and push the frontiers of what people imagine their lives could be. It’s a world where broken institutions like Congress, federal and state bureaucracies, and universities have earned back our trust. And it’s a world where Americans can once again find community and purpose, act with agency, and rest assured that their lives are getting better.

Students for Abundance exists to realize this future. We are fighting to improve policies, reform institutions, and cultivate a hopeful and forward-looking culture. By shaping a generation of leaders, Students for Abundance is laying the foundation for a new era in which we renew our institutions and rebuild the American Dream.

Representing red and blue states, public and private schools, and institutions big and small, our chapters will advance the Abundance Agenda through education, engagement, and community. Across the country, students are already hosting speaker series, teaching courses, starting projects with campus administration — and we are only getting started.

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Victoria Ren is co-founder and Executive Director of Students for Abundance, which grew out of a group she founded at Stanford in early 2025. Matthew Meyers is co-founder and Policy Director of Students for Abundance and serves as Abundance Coordinator at the Niskanen Center. Maxwell Stern is co-founder and Organizing Director of Students for Abundance and is establishing a chapter at the University of California, Berkeley.