We are excited to announce the launch of our new Abundance and Growth Fund, which will spend at least $120 million over the next three years to accelerate economic growth and boost scientific and technological progress while lowering the cost of living.
We believe that scientific and technological progress have been the central drivers of economic growth over the past few centuries, increasing living standards and reducing poverty around the world. We also believe that the growth of (even well-intentioned) governmental regulation and institutional sclerosis more broadly is artificially creating scarcity, raising costs and slowing progress. We want to jointly accelerate scientific progress and remove these constraints to create a richer, healthier world.
Open Philanthropy is already one of the most active funders in this space. Over the past decade, we’ve played a catalytic role in funding the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, helping to seed some of the most important groups advocating for greater housing supply to enable more people to afford life in the country’s most productive cities. Since 2021, we have also been leading funders in innovation policy, providing founding support to organizations like the Institute for Progress (IFP) that advocate for reforms to increase the pace of scientific and technological development. From New York City’s City of Yes — the largest reform to zoning in the city since 1961 — to IFP’s partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to test new funding mechanisms supporting high-risk, high-reward projects, our grantees have already achieved major policy wins to advance the cause of progress and material abundance.
We believe that now is the right time to double down. The fund will absorb and expand on our existing work in land use and innovation policy, including by investing in movement building for the nascent Abundance and Progress Studies ecosystems. It may also support efforts to promote energy abundance (including permitting reform), reform clinical trials, and limit non-competes and occupational licensing, among other policies. The Fund will nearly triple our prior funding commitments to these fields.
We’re grateful for support from Good Ventures, which has committed $60M, and from the other private individuals who matched them. We’re also grateful for a contribution from Patrick Collison, who helped launch the Progress Studies movement.
With the launch of the Fund, we’re also launching a search for a program leader to manage it on a permanent basis. They will have significant autonomy in shaping the Fund’s direction and strategy. The application deadline is 3/31, and more information can be found here. While the search is ongoing, Matt Clancy will lead this work on an interim basis.
Why prioritize growth and abundance?
Modern economic growth has transformed global living standards, delivering vast improvements in health and well-being while helping to lift billions of people out of poverty.
Where does economic growth come from? Because new ideas — from treating infections with penicillin to designing jet engines — can be shared and productively applied by multiple people at once, mainstream economic theory holds that scientific and technological progress that creates ideas is the main driver of long-run growth. In a recent article, Stanford economist Chad Jones estimates that the growth in ideas can account for around 50% of per-capita GDP growth in the United States over the past half-century. This implies that the benefits of investing in innovation are large: Ben Jones and Larry Summers estimate that each $1 invested in R&D gives a social return of $14.40. Our Open Philanthropy colleagues Tom Davidson and Matt Clancy have done similar calculations that take into account global spillovers (where progress in one country also boosts others through the spread of ideas), and found even larger returns for R&D and scientific research.
But ideas don’t automatically raise living standards; economic growth requires turning them into technologies that can disseminate throughout society. Burdensome government regulations and institutional constraints are increasingly slowing the pace of this progress and creating artificial scarcity. Restrictive zoning and land use regulations have created housing shortages in many major cities, driving up rents and preventing people from making productive moves to centers of economic growth and innovation. Similar constraints hinder scientific and technological innovation — key institutional funders like the NSF or the National Institutes for Health (NIH) burden researchers with excessive paperwork and overly lengthy grant review processes, while preferring low-risk, incremental research over higher-risk but potentially transformative ideas. Meanwhile, environmental review laws slow a wide variety of infrastructure projects, including green energy.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and indeed there are many positive examples to point to where alternative systems have enabled faster progress. By encouraging the removal of needless constraints, we hope to accelerate economic growth and technological progress, creating the material abundance that can allow everyone to live richer, healthier, and fuller lives.
Our track record
Over the past decade, Open Philanthropy has been one of the most active philanthropic funders in core areas of the pro-abundance and pro-growth movements — particularly in land use reform and innovation policy. Our new fund will expand our work in these areas while also exploring new fields that we think could have high social returns.
Since 2015, Open Philanthropy has supported land use reform and the broader YIMBY movement, helping to promote local reforms that increase housing supply and lower rents. We have given almost $27 million in grants, and our grantees have contributed to policy wins across the country, including major statewide and city-level reforms in California, Washington, Maryland, and Massachusetts. For instance, our grantee Open New York recently helped pass “City of Yes,” a major zoning reform in New York City that removes and reduces parking mandates, enables construction of accessory dwelling units, and eases office to residential conversions, among other provisions. The NYC Department of City Planning estimates that “City of Yes” will result in 80,000 additional homes over the next 15 years. This is not enough to solve New York’s housing crisis — policymakers estimate hundreds of thousands more housing units are needed to restore a healthy market — but it represents New York City’s largest zoning overhaul in more than 60 years.
Since 2021, we have also made over $20 million in grants to initiatives aimed at accelerating scientific and technological progress. We were founding donors of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a bipartisan think tank doing research and advocacy to help lift constraints on innovation. IFP has quickly become a leading research hub and advocate for evidence-based policy in Washington, DC, working with leaders of both parties to help shape innovation policy reform. In 2023, IFP partnered with the NSF to experiment with new mechanisms to support high-risk, high-reward research. Over time, we have expanded this portfolio to support a range of organizations working to accelerate innovation. This includes the Institute for Replication, which works to improve the credibility of scientific research by replicating key results in scientific journals, and the University of Chicago Market Shaping Accelerator, which draws from global successes in vaccine development to design market-shaping mechanisms that can incentivize and scale up critical innovations.
Other areas we may explore
Our future program director will shape the strategy for the Abundance and Growth Fund, and we expect it to expand in different directions as we learn more.
We are excited by the development of a community of people who care about pushing the frontier of growth, increasing the pace of scientific development, and eliminating artificial scarcity that increases the cost of living. Our grants may potentially fund this growing movement and help to cultivate organizations that share these common goals.
New thematic areas where we fund efforts at reforms may include permitting (particularly in relation to energy and infrastructure construction), clinical trial regulation, non-competes, and state capacity, among others. We may also explore additional geographic areas — currently, our main focus is in the United States, but we have made initial grants in other countries and may fund more in the future.
Why we’re doubling down
We believe that changes in the national political environment have created an opening for a renewed policy focus on economic growth and material progress. With a promising track record to date and like-minded donors to help us scale, we think this is an opportune moment to double down.
We are particularly encouraged by the recent rise of the Abundance movement, marked by a conference in Washington, DC last October, and by the upcoming publication of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and the recent book Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman, among others. The Abundance Agenda emphasizes increases in supply of socially valuable goods from housing to health care to energy by removing inefficient barriers to production. As longtime backers of the YIMBY movement, we’re naturally aligned with this view and are excited about the Abundance Agenda extending this logic from housing to a broader range of social goods.
We’re also excited about the parallel rise of the Progress Studies movement, which focuses on understanding and advocating for the social, cultural, and economic factors that drive human progress. Compared to the Abundance movement, which typically has an explicit policy focus, Progress Studies is more focused on underlying work in science, innovation, and entrepreneurship. We supported Roots of Progress in its early days and are looking forward to its second annual conference for the Progress Studies community later this year. We think the breadth of this community (see this dispatch from last year’s inaugural conference for example), united around a common purpose of identifying and accelerating the drivers of progress, makes it an important resource to draw on and invest in.
These ideas have been gaining traction for some time on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum. On the left, there is a renewed recognition that artificial supply-side constraints are limiting access to affordable housing, health care, and other essential goods. In her 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called for cutting red tape to boost housing supply and lower rents. Democratic governors from Colorado’s Jared Polis to Maryland’s Wes Moore have embraced reforms to lift constraints on homebuilding. On the right, President Trump has issued an executive order focused on reducing energy costs. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has previously called for zoning reform and infrastructure investment to boost the economic health of cities, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has argued for the removal of burdensome regulations on nuclear power. There is also cross-partisan interest in improving science policy, from newly nominated NIH director Jay Bhattacharya’s calls for a focus on reproducibility and funding high impact research, to the launch of the new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate at the NSF during the Biden administration.
For Open Philanthropy as an institution, the timing is also right. Learning from the recent success of our Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF), which doubled the total amount of philanthropic funding toward lead exposure reduction in low-income countries, we are increasingly exploring pooled funding models. We talked with a number of like-minded donors who suggested potential appetite for a pooled fund like this, and ultimately received commitments for over $60 million so far from other funders. We’re grateful to Good Ventures, Patrick Collison, and our other donors in this fund (who are private individuals) for their support, and we’re always excited to hear from other funders who might be interested in collaboration opportunities.
While we think this nascent momentum is promising and suggests that further progress could be tractable, we also want to be up front that political winds can shift rapidly — that’s certainly been our experience with other policy causes in which we’ve worked. That’s part of why we’re making a three-year commitment: we think that is long enough to see some initial signs of progress but short enough to update fairly quickly.
Conclusion
The launch of the $120 million Abundance and Growth Fund represents a significant expansion of Open Philanthropy’s work to foster prosperity and remove barriers to human flourishing. By building on our existing work in land use reform and innovation policy, expanding our support of the broader movement, and exploring new areas like permitting reform, we aim to help create a future of greater abundance for all.
We’re grateful to our co-funders for their trust and collaboration, and we’re excited to be able to expand our support for the crucial work our grantees in this area are doing. Our impact depends on the talent of our team, so we encourage you to check out the job description for the leader of the Fund and apply yourself or recommend someone who you think would be a strong candidate.