Alexander Billy and Neel Sukhatme: Abundance beyond housing

It’s 2026, and everyday life is quietly futuristic. Few of us carry cash, and in some cities you can get into an autonomous car that will take you through traffic safely enough to squeeze in a nap. Yet a doctor’s office can swap your first and last name on an intake form and trigger hours of administrative hell. 

That mismatch is a core insight behind the abundance movement. Abundance argues we should be able to deliver essentials – like housing, energy, and healthcare – faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost. You should not spend hours on the phone to stop a clerical error from becoming a $1,000+ bill.

Housing makes headlines but the abundance agenda covers everything else we fail to deliver or lack, even when solutions are within sight.

Scarcity today does not entail empty shelves or rickets. Rather, it is manifest in unnecessary wait times, surcharges on bills, or infrequent tragedies we strangely accept. Our systems move too slowly or frequently break. 

Constraints are often created by bureaucratic and procedural friction. The US has world-class medicine, yet care is routinely delayed by paperwork. Too often, referrals still travel by fax. Authorizations bounce between offices and insurers. So staff time is overwhelmingly spent pushing forms instead of treating patients. Delays discourage patients from seeking essential care. 

Scarcity appears in other ways like preventable blindness, which affects hundreds of millions today. We have appropriate treatments; we lack screening devices that catch cases in time. Scarcity is also time spent and higher costs incurred by firms trying to replace fragile supply chains built on imported petrochemical inputs that are vulnerable to price shocks, policy swings, and geopolitical winds. 

Some bottlenecks are regulatory in nature. For instance, if we want abundant healthcare, we should lift indirect Congressional caps on the number of medical residents; increasing the supply of doctors will lower costs. If we want more robust supply chains, we should reduce uncertainty by choosing and sticking with a trade policy; ideally, we eliminate tariffs, which only increase costs. 

But policy isn’t responsible for all scarcity. No law will automate paperwork that delays care, identify substitutes for petrochemical inputs, or build tools to screen patients for preventable blindness. 

The good news is solutions to these non-policy bottlenecks already exist.

For instance, Medsender is building AI tools that replace fax-and-phone based referrals and prior authorizations. When paperwork moves faster, patients get routed to the right care sooner, and clinics can spend their time on medicine instead of bureaucracy. Visilant is scaling low-cost vision screening so treatable eye disease is caught early, before people lose sight. Materiom assists firms in finding and adopting sustainable alternatives to petrochemical materials, reducing cost and friction when supply chains shift.

These examples show we’re not short on solutions. The fact that your doctor still uses a fax machine instead of Medsender illustrates the problem: the solutions have yet to scale. But scaling requires the right kind of capital. 

This is where abundance-aligned funders and investors come in. They can help turn promising tech tools into widely adopted solutions that end unnecessary scarcity. 

Mission-driven venture firms like Khosla Ventures have shown what it looks like to do so: their investment portfolio includes companies that seek to eliminate common physical pain, develop lab grown organs for drug discovery, and convert pollution into energy. 

On the non-profit side, Fast Forward backs tech firms designed to scale — including Visilant and Materiom, who were members of its 2025 Startup Accelerator program.

But Khosla Ventures and Fast Forward are outliers. Most capital still behaves as if abundance is either a policy fight or a buzzword. To end an era of scarcity, we need investors and funders to rethink their business models. 

Khosla Ventures has shown this does not require firms to accept lower returns. Rather, they need to include mission and impact as part of their due diligence. Right now, many for-profit funders treat impact as a virtue signal. For them, it’s merely a nice-to-have afterthought. Critically, however, it’s where their dollars could yield the greatest returns in the long-run.

For philanthropists, they need to prioritize scale and implementation. Too often, nonprofit funding goes to high-touch programs that cannot expand. Tools should be designed to work across different settings; if a tool requires heavy manual effort every time or cannot be replicated, it isn’t scalable. Other philanthropists only fund policy, which is necessary but not sufficient to address scarcity. Those organizations should welcome well-designed tech solutions as part of their portfolio. 

We live in the wealthiest society in history, and our ingenuity is unparalleled. There’s no reason we cannot direct our capital at the highest-impact bottlenecks to end scarcity. Only then will we truly usher in a new era of abundance.

Alexander Billy is an economist and co-founder of MidFill, a housing-focused venture. Neel Sukhatme is dean of the University of Michigan Law School. The opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not represent the views of the University of Michigan or any other institutions with which they are affiliated.