Abundance

by Ezra Klein

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

Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government.

They thrill to politicians who talk of personal responsibility but want a safety net tightened if they, or those they know and love, fall.

Adversarial legalism was a way of reconciling the government we wanted with the suspicions we harbored.

Keeping the American health-care state weak has made the American government larger and left Americans poorer.

Many of these are good goals. But are they good goals to include in this project? There is no discussion in the NOFO of trade-offs. Nor was there any admission by the administration that anything they were asking for even represented a trade-off.

Process is enthusiastically added but seldom lifted.

When we claim the world cannot improve, we are stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress.

If these institutions had never been created or expanded, the lives of millions, even billions of people around the world would be shorter than they are today, and people would be sicker. If they disappeared tomorrow, the world would instantly be worse.

We have—even if by accident—designed a system that often privileges the game of performing the act of science over the actual practice of science.

The ten-thousand-year story of human civilization is mostly the story of things not getting better:

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, decimated the solar revolution in America.

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

we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis.

The serendipity of science is one reason why it’s so important to untether research from politics and allow scientists to seek the truth freely without spending half their time deluged by bureaucratic paperwork and paralyzed by fear that their ideas might diverge from the moment’s conventional wisdom.

Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy’s failed promises.

That we have not matched our institutions to our moment is our failure,