Abundance

by Ezra Klein

the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities.

Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. Institutional renewal is a labor that every generation faces anew.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.

Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford.

without any focus at all—on what all that money was actually buying and building.

Politics is not just about the problems we have. It’s about the problems we see.

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.

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.

“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.”

In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power.

Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving.

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.

Almost 30 percent of American adults are “house poor”—spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing.7 But that understates the problem.

homelessness is low where unemployment is high and high where unemployment is low.46

If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or,

“Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available.

A] home’s value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people,” Demsas says. “This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.”

About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, three-quarters is given over to raising livestock or growing feed for livestock.

It is a driver of drought and water scarcity, as it takes about 1,800 gallons of water to produce a single pound of boneless beef.

he found that “people who bear the cost of climate policies increasingly flock to the far right.”

stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax. Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that

societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean their air and water.

cost of solar energy fell by about 90 percent from 2010 to 2020. The cost of wind power fell by nearly 70 percent.

The world installed more solar power in 2023 than it did between 1954 and 2017.

It is possible to power a modern economy with clean energy. It is possible to develop an economy with clean energy.

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.

What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating.

Olson’s biggest error is his assumption that groups organize around redistribution. Olson almost completely missed the post-materialist turn in the politics of affluent countries. Some groups seek to fill their coffers, but others organize to protect the environment, to increase safety standards, to preserve the feel of their communities, or to express their values.

manufacturing productivity rises and rises even as construction productivity falls—is a new phenomenon, not a historical inevitability.

democracy by lawsuit.

“It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin

liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented.

America is unusually legalistic. It always has been. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

“Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.”

we can’t ‘no’ our way to the kind of growth we need.

Liberalism acted across many different levels and branches of government in the 1970s to slow the system down so the instances of abuse could be seen and stopped. Now it will need to act across many different levels and branches of government to speed up the system. It needs to see the problem in what it has been taught to see as the solution.

The government is a plural posing as a singular.

Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.

liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.

government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all. (Conservatives are not immune from piling on procedure and stricture, but they often do so in a purposeful attempt to make government work poorly, and so failure and inefficiency become a perverse form of success.)

they continually add policy layers with too little understanding of (and, sometimes, regard for) how what they add will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment,” she concluded.51 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.

On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.58

Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.

But while the dominant fight in Washington is typically about how we buy health care, we rarely talk about the health care that exists to be bought.

If progressives underrate the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrate the necessity of government policy in invention.

government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War

Despite making up only about 14 percent of the US population, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of US patents from 1990 to 2016, 38 percent of US Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 2000 to 2023, and more than half of the billion-dollar US start-ups in the last twenty years.49 Today, however, this talent pipeline is at risk.

Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create.

we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.