Abundance

In Kyle’s wiki, “abundance” is the economic thesis that productivity growth and globalization are pushing more and more people past basic survival needs — and the open question of what humans do with that surplus. In The AppetiZIRP (Packy McCormick), it is the underlying claim behind the post-work future: as Automation shrinks the share of people who must work (farming’s collapse from 83% of the US population in 1800 to 1% today), Universal Basic Income-style abundance reshapes what humans do with their time. In Future of Work, abundance is the optimistic pole — Sam Altman arguing AI will displace jobs while “likely creating massive abundance.”

The same idea has a supply-side, build-it framing in The Build-Nothing Country (Noah Smith), where abundance is the pro-build stance that opposes the stasis of a society that restricts housing and blocks energy projects. Across these sources, “abundance” sits at the intersection of automation, post-scarcity economics, and the politics of whether a wealthy country can still build.

Context: “Abundance” in contemporary tech/policy discourse names a cluster of ideas — supply-side progressivism, post-scarcity from automation, and the pro-building agenda — associated with writers like Packy McCormick, Noah Smith, and the broader Progress Studies movement.

Where this appears

• The AppetiZIRP — the underlying thesis that productivity and globalization push people past basic survival needs, enabling UBI-era “phenomena”
• Future of Work — Sam Altman on AI displacing jobs while likely creating “massive abundance”
• The Build-Nothing Country — the pro-build, supply-side framing of abundance that opposes build-nothing stasis