i haven’t read “Abundance” yet, but here’s a bit i wrote when i knew it was coming. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/17/abundance-is-overcapacity/index.html
Text: The core of an abundance agenda, I posit, would be to reshape American capitalism so that overcapacity, rather than capacity nearly fully employed, becomes the norm. At desirable overcapacity, the marginal cost of a new unit would sit approximately at the minimum of firms' marginal cost schedule, well below the level where costs meaningfully rise. Firms can't do this on their own. Under capitalism, the means of production are in private hands, but production is always a public-private partnership. That firms use public roads and rely upon public regulation does not render our economy socialist. An abundance economy should rely upon private firms competing aggressively, pursuing pricing power through quality and innovation, rather than by engineering scarcity. But if we want industries to eschew capital discipline, if we want firms to deploy capacity at levels that would undo the pricing power scarce capacity yields, the public sector will have to subsidize capital deployment.