Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The second problem coming out of the growth of the NIH is that the onerous process of applying for grants has put a premium on status-seeking rather than pure science. This was a theme of Katalin Karikó’s years in the wilderness. “I wasn’t very good at kissing butts,” Karikó said bluntly. In Breaking Through, she wrote that she felt success in academia was more about marketing and status than it was about hard science:

In 2017, longtime NIH director Francis Collins acknowledged, in an email to the libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel, that NIH needed “to liberate young scientists from training periods that are much too long” and that “some of the ways in which we support” biomedical research are “outdated.”

Gross

If the DARPA model holds a lesson, it is that the agency works because it empowers program managers to pursue their most radical ideas with an open-ended budget and vast connections throughout science and industry. By contrast, as John Doench of the Broad Institute said, many scientists seeking funding today are disempowered to the point of infantilization. Their time is colonized by paperwork, and their ambition is pinched by grantsmanship. The American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less.

We should run experiments. Lots of experiments. We could start with the NIH. To reduce the paperwork burden, we could run pilots that eliminate major parts of the application process. Or we could expand programs that prioritize the funding of younger scientists. To mimic the program director’s power at DARPA, we could give some NIH panel members a “golden ticket,” such that they would have the power to independently approve one proposal each year, regardless of how crazy the idea sounds to their peers. Or, for some applications, we could replace the existing selection process with a random lottery. Or we could announce that, for a lucky group of grantees, no scientists would have to fill out yearly progress reports. And then, after we run all these experiments, we should have independent scientists study the results.

As we tinker with the basic funding models of science, we could also pay for the creation of new federal research organizations, where full-time scientists pursue ambitious projects over many years without having to stress over quarterly paperwork. The ambition would be to rebottle the magic of midcentury DARPA and Bell Labs. It might not work. But that’s what high-risk science does: it takes on projects with a keen possibility of failure.

Finally, the simplest part of OWS is perhaps the most important: the vaccines were free. The federal government bought out the vaccines from pharmaceutical companies, which allowed them to sell the shots to the public for any price they wanted. They chose the price of $0.00. For much of 2021, the most cutting-edge biotechnology in America was also the cheapest therapy in the world.

In all, the US government spent less than $40 billion to develop, produce, and buy mRNA COVID vaccines.63 It might be one of the best bang-for-buck policies in US history.

Sometimes being a bottleneck detective is about removing restrictions that shouldn’t exist. The US has fewer primary-care physicians as a share of its population than almost any other rich country, despite having the world’s most expensive health-care system. This shortage is partly by design. In the early 1980s, a special committee established to review the state of American medicine reported to the US Department of Health and Human Services that the US was on the verge of a massive surplus of doctors. Physician groups backed up the finding. “The size of medical schools must be diminished,” Charles Evarts, the president of the American Orthopaedic Association, said in a 1985 speech. “Certain programs need to reduce their numbers, others must consolidate, and others need to terminate voluntarily or be terminated.”68 Starting in the 1980s, the government cut its support for medical schools and medical students, and many universities agreed to freeze the number of new studies and stop construction on medical programs. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of medical-school matriculants essentially flatlined69 as the US added 70 million people.

Fixing this problem is eminently within the powers of the federal government. “The first thing I would do is to expand the residency system so that more doctors can become residents after medical school,” Robert Orr, a policy analyst who studies health-care policy at the Niskanen Center, said. “This might be the key bottleneck. The medical schools say they can’t easily expand, because there aren’t enough residency slots for their graduates to fill. But there aren’t enough residency slots because Washington has purposefully limited federal residency financing.”71 The arithmetic is simple: more funding means more residents; accepting more residents allows medical schools to grow; more medical students today means more doctors in a decade.

The few companies that are working on lower-emission cement replacements face significant bottlenecks in terms of cost and scale. That could make them prime candidates for pull funding. “Cement could be perfect for an AMC, because the government already buys forty percent of US cement, and suppliers don’t know who will pay high prices in the short run,” Ransohoff said. “We need a policy to move it down the cost curve.”81 If the US pledged to buy several billions of dollars’ worth of affordable green cement, it could encourage investors and entrepreneurs to pour more time and treasure into its development. The up-front funds could help green cement companies expand their production facilities.

Artificial intelligence might be the most important technology of the decade. In the last few years, tech firms have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build machines that can carry out a dizzying array of tasks: writing essays and code, reading thousands of pages in seconds, carrying on fluent conversations, and even producing animated movies. AI has not transformed the US economy in the hour that we’re writing these words, but things are moving fast enough that it is impossible to predict what effect AI will have had by the time you read them.

Not accurately

More troublingly, it’s conceivable that AI researchers are years, not decades, away from building a superintelligent system with the ability to hack foreign government secrets, cripple their military software systems, and partly collapse the energy grids of adversaries.

No no no

The moon race is remembered today as a necessary and broadly popular response to the Soviet threat. But one of the most misunderstood aspects of the space race is that the Apollo program survived because of political persistence, not because of its popularity. In its brief history, the moon mission polled poorly. A 1965 Gallup survey found that “only 39 percent of Americans thought that the US should do everything possible, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon.”87 A majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the Apollo missions weren’t worth the cost, with up to 60 percent saying the government was spending too much on space.88 At one point, President John F. Kennedy—who famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”—told NASA chief James Webb, “I’m not that interested in space.”89 A majority of Americans supported the lunar missions only once in the 1960s: in a poll taken just after Neil Armstrong’s televised landing.

The Democratic and Republican parties do not merely disagree over the details of tax policy. They disagree over the legitimacy of elections, of institutions, of the structure of American government. They are split in their views of speech and history and decency and truth. Distinguished scholars write books considering the nearness of another civil war and wondering whether fascism is resurgent on American soil. The polarization of the 1990s feels quaint against the chasmic conflict of the 2020s. These divisions are real. They are dangerous. But behind them is the murky outline of something very different. Perhaps a path out of the morass we’re in. A new political order.

Policy is downstream of values, and by the 1970s, Washington was a changed place. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, deregulated large parts of the economy, including the trucking and airline industries.5 In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan slashed the high tax rates that Harry Truman had imposed and that Dwight Eisenhower had kept.

Clinton said the era of big government was over, and he proved it: he did what Reagan had only promised to do and slashed the federal budget while deregulating the financial and IT sectors.

It may be happening again. We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. The crack-up was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in deregulated markets. The climate crisis revealed how much the profit motive missed. The aftermath of normalizing trade with China proved that the prophets of free trade understood neither China nor America. Throughout the 2010s, a slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And between 2021 and 2024, inflation brought national attention to our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

In the 2024 election, JD Vance spoke often of the inadequacy of housing supply, which he wielded as a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,”

This book has offered a critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years. It also reflects an opportunity open to liberals now. Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because of the failures of present-day liberalism. But that is very different from saying that he won by offering a compelling vision for America’s future. Trump could have run on bringing the Texas housing miracle to the nation. Instead he ran on closing the border. He could have run on the success of Operation Warp Speed. Instead, he has disowned it as his coalition has rebuilt itself around skepticism of scientists and vaccines. Elon Musk has led some of the most innovative companies of the modern era, but according to the earliest reports of his role in Trump’s government, he is focused on slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do. The right is abandoning many of its successes to embrace a politics of scarcity. That has left room for liberals to embrace what Republicans have abandoned: a politics of abundance. In fact, there are signs that they already are.

A difficulty that Biden and Harris had in trying to run on their record in 2024 was that few communities were yet seeing benefit from all this construction their policies were meant to spark. The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.22

chargers???

They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or slow to construct, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. To unmake this machine will be painful. It will require questioning treasured nostrums and splitting old alliances.

It will also require opposing visions of scarcity that are gaining adherents on the left. The values of the degrowther movement have gained momentum among Western intellectuals. The environmental devastation that has accompanied modernity seems like an equation with an obvious solution: If this is what progress has wrought, then regress is necessary. If this is the cost of going forward, then we must go backward. In its strongest versions, this philosophy is too politically impractical to gain many adherents or wield much power. But its weaker manifestations are everywhere and have been since “Small Is Beautiful” became a rallying cry in the ’70s.

Comparatively, abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged that capitalism was superior to its predecessor, feudalism, at producing goods and wealth. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations toge...

Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many. Marx’s aim was not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance: to unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine. There is much he got wrong, but one need not be a communist to see the wisdom in this analysis.

We considered calling this book “The Abundance Agenda.” We could have easily filled these pages with a long list of policy ideas to ease the blockages we fear. On housing, for example, cities should reform their zoning laws to make it easier to build homes and apartments of all sizes, legalize the construction of accessory dwelling units, reduce parking requirements, and pass new laws to create maximum permitting wait times. Stopping individuals or developers from building places for people to live on land they own should require unusual cause. Building homes, at a time when housing is scarce, should not.

What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?

A lens is what we have sought to offer here. What keeps an apartment building from being built in San Jose is not what keeps a new transmission line from being built in Oklahoma. What keeps the IRS from successfully updating its software is not what has kept a high-speed rail system from being completed in California. What keeps an ambitious young scientist from proposing his best ideas is not what keeps us from discovering and scaling new ways to make cement. There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.

What has surprised us most in this project have been the blind spots—our own, as much as anyone else’s. Stories we once saw as exceptions to the rule of well-functioning government—a public works project that went over budget and remained unfinished; an absurd price tag on a public toilet; the explosion of homelessness in blue cities; the profusion of lawsuits against even well-meaning infrastructure projects; the loss of manufacturing leadership in core technologies; the absence of an agenda that harnesses invention to social purpose—now seem frighteningly close to the norm. The purpose of a system is what it does. If an outcome recurs again and again, across time and place, it is the result of choices that became rules. Which means it is the result of ideas and movements.