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Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government. An abundance of consumer goods distracted us from a scarcity of homes and energy and infrastructure and scientific breakthroughs. A counterforce is emerging, but it is young yet.
Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.
It is worth a moment to consider how financially problematic an owner-occupied home was at the beginning of the twentieth century—and remains to the present. An investment advisor whom you have consulted looks at your middle-income portfolio and tells you that you should put almost all of your liquid assets in a single investment. It is not a diversified mutual fund; it is a single firm, and the firm makes only one product in a single location. It has a great upside in that its returns are almost entirely untaxed under federal and state income tax laws, and it insures you against rent
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Woah
How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.”
We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.
This is fucking Nixon
Can we all be energetically wealthy? Not if we’re burning coal and oil. The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal.
China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.
When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.
California’s High-Speed Rail Authority has been scrupulous in following the law but has been unable to deliver a train. The result is less, not more, faith in government.
Zachary Liscow notes that the United States performs below the average of OECD states in environmental quality but also performs below average in confidence in government. “So, despite its participatory ethos, the United States does not succeed in producing more trust.”98
Pahlka has come to think of government technology—and the regulations that control it—as layers of sediment. As new problems emerge, new layers are added. But the older ones are rarely removed.
“Lawmakers often have good intentions, but 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,”
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.
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.
Before 2020, no vaccine in American history had ever gone from the lab to the public in less than three years.12 The COVID vaccines achieved this feat in about ten months.
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.
Today’s scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents, rather than on direct research.
Wright’s law runs counter to the eureka myth. It says that innovation is not a two-stage process, where a loner genius conceives of a brilliant idea and then a bunch of thoughtless brutes manufacture it. Innovation is enmeshed in the act of making.
Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.
One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack. Decades of attacks on the state have turned liberals into reflexive champions of government. But if you believe in government, you must make it work. To make it work, you must be clear-eyed about when it fails and why it fails.
