Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening. We hire skilled, dedicated people to do the public’s work and then make it impossible for them to do that work well. We ask people to work on society’s hardest problems—often making much less than they could make in the private sector—and then rob them of the discretion and agility they need to solve them. And then we wonder why so many of them leave.

“Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”

If scientific spending is fundamental to economic growth, this suggests that the US has hugely underinvested in basic research.

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.

small team of independent scientists rates a project’s merit, methodology, and significance before offering funding.

But clearly, some brilliant ideas are not born giants. They are born as all children are born—small and helpless, requiring care and protection to grow.

“America has the ability to invent. China has the ability to build. The first country that can figure out how to do both will be the superpower.”

Government should have a vision of the future, and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot, to make possible what is otherwise impossible.

We should be looking for many more opportunities to identify what’s holding back the invention and implementation of the most important technologies of the future and dangle prizes and purchase orders to pull them closer to the present.

Again and again in American history, we seem to be at our very best when things are at their very worst.

That is a measure of our success, but it is also a reminder that both abundance and scarcity are stories we tell ourselves. Right now, we see an America that is turning toward a story of scarcity. That turn is changing not just our politics, but our national character.

American project. It is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters. It is a commitment to the endless work of institutional renewal. It is a recognition that technology is at the heart of progress, and always has been. It is a determination

to align our collective genius with the needs of both the

planet and each other. Abundance is liberalism, yes. But more than that, it is a...