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while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have.
But once those avenues are exhausted, it needs to do more with what it has. People need to think up new ideas. Factories need to innovate new processes. These new ideas and new processes must be encoded into new technologies. All this is grouped under the sterile label of productivity: How much more can we produce with the same number of people and resources?
When productivity surges, what we
get is not more of what we had, but new things we...
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The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.
“populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”
If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government.
difficulties of distance. But technology eroded their obvious advantages. Cities should have languished. They have, so often, been expected to languish. But they have stubbornly refused to accept their fate. Instead, they thrived, attaining a centrality in modernity they didn’t possess even in antiquity. This, Glaeser writes, is “the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.”
Americans like both the rhetoric and reality of low taxes, but they also like the programs that taxes fund. They thrill to politicians who talk
of personal responsibility but want a safety net tightened if they, or those they know and love, fall.
California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year.38 Since 2007, California has never once permitted more than 150,000 new homes.
Does more poverty predict more homelessness? No. A number of cities with high rates of poverty—Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia—have low rates of homelessness.
This leads to a reality many prefer not to acknowledge. If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or, more accurately, the result of many, many, many small policy choices. The
“Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If
In 1943, Los Angeles residents woke up to air so dark and noxious that they feared the Japanese had launched a gas attack.63 Five years later, a lethal smog in Donora, Pennsylvania, caused by industrial pollutants from zinc-smelting plants and a temperature inversion that trapped toxins in the air64 killed twenty people and sickened thousands.65 In New Hampshire, the Merrimack River, lined with textile mills in Manchester and Nashua, ran in different colors by the day, as dyes and chemicals dumped into the river tinged
Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens
The argument of the Mammoth homeowners held that yes, actually, it was, because any development that required public permits to be built was inherently a public project.
“the moral bankruptcy that many believed was inextricable from the physical form of sprawl itself.”
The sun burns, so we don’t need to.”
This was, and is, a liberalism that changed the world through the writing of new rules and the moving about of money. The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds.
What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.
United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million.
key insight is that groups capable of collective action—imagine the Sierra Club or the Chamber of Commerce—are slow to build but powerful and persistent when they coalesce.
complex society begins to reward those who can best navigate complexity. That creates an incentive for its best and brightest to become navigators of complexity and perhaps creators of further complexity. “Every society, whatever its institutions and governing ideology, gives greater rewards to the fittest—the fittest for that society,”
“The Procedure Fetish”
Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.
“The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rulemaking, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions—the
Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do
There is nothing wrong with lawyers. There might be something wrong with a country or a political system that needs so many of them and that makes them so central to its operations.
Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act. “All told,” they write, “over sixty federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime. And that is just the federal system—state and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”
The government is a plural posing as a singular. Different factions and officials and regulations and processes push in different directions.
“state capacity”: the ability of the state to achieve its goals.
requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way.
The different financing sources come with different demands, all of which make the project more complex.
Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening.
A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.
But the NOFO did not seem laser-focused on the cost problem. To be honest, it did not seem laser-focused on any problem.
But the size of the federal civilian workforce has barely budged. It was slightly fewer than 2 million people in 1960 and it’s slightly over 2 million people today.
challenge of updating government technology is the challenge of updating, harmonizing, or terminating the functions of these old systems. And all of it must be done while following procurement and contracting rules that no private technology company would ever impose on itself.
For government to do more—or even for it to just do what it is already doing—sometimes it first needs permission to do much less.
What principally distinguishes the past from the present is not biology, nor psychology, but rather technology.
American science has accumulated a set of processes and norms that favor those who know how to play the system, rather than those who have the most interesting ideas.”
“More Paper Work, Less Research”—complained that turning scientists into clerks would “cost the nation millions of dollars in lost time from research.”
the paperwork cure in science is sometimes worse than the disease.
The most famous pharmaceutical breakthrough of the last decade is thus built on the foundation of a most delightfully peculiar obsession: lizard spit.
base of knowledge is built, upon which we piece together disparate fragments of a puzzle to create new breakthroughs.
“If Bell Labs had a formula, it was to hire the smartest people, give them space and time to work, and make sure that they talk to each other,”
implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.
Wright’s law, which says that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.
