Abundance

by Ezra Klein

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

Boy they must have some strong evidence to support this!

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.

What about jobs?

From 1880 to 1980, the income gap between residents of different states closed steadily each year. Today,

Here

It is, then, no surprise that income inequality began rising in the ’70s and reached such striking peaks in recent decades.

Two paragraphs before he claims it didn't rise until 1980. Sloppy. this is an essential lie bc he wants to claim that this isn't due to reaganomics EDIT: they did not say anything about reaganomics. they blame this on the hippies gaining power

In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

Finally something we can agree on

Desalination is a major contributor to water supplies in Israel now and could supply more than half of the demand in Singapore by the middle of the century.

Lol. Do we care for the environmental or not? Using a very narrow definition of climate change to justify harming in other ways

Florida gets only around 6 percent of its electricity from solar.35 So much for the Sunshine State.

Not to get distracted with aesthetic complaints but he's genuinely one of the worst writers ive ever read

Obama said in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over one hundred miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”42 Obama wanted it to happen here.

Imagine calling yourself a writer and adding that last sentence

Or take the job site, he said. “The safety features on jobs when I started in the industry were not even noticeable. Safety on a job today is incredibly different. You don’t walk across a beam; you walk around on a pathway marked for you to stay safe so you don’t fall off the side of the building. By the time I retired, one thing that took place every day, on every job site, was a mandatory 15 minutes of calisthenics before you start your workday. That’s totally nonproductive, but it led to fewer work site injuries during the day.”

"we have to deregulate bc companies shouldn't be responsible for worker safety. Woke construction workers now stretch before working"

This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. 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.

so many unjustified assumptions about how construction works in China

But time has exposed gaps in the theory. Japan has gone from economic poster child to growth laggard.

At the same time that they deregulated and privatised???? Who could have expected

In countries like China and Singapore, civil service is held in high esteem, and the brightest graduates compete in nationwide tests to win government jobs.

And why is that, Derek?

Nor is this an isolated anecdote. Zachary Liscow’s research found that increasing employment in state departments of transportation by 1 employee per 1,000 residents reduced the cost-per-mile of highway construction by 26 percent.39 Government cannot do everything itself. But it needs enough know-how to oversee the projects it is doing.

Read that again: They had not been working on modernizing their technology stack for ten years. They had been working for ten years on the massive contract they would award to outside firms to modernize and manage their technology stack. That contract was expected to take eleven years to execute.

Do you think more money for upgrading would have helped?

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.

This seems to say a lot about how he sees scientific innovation: future markets

Doubling the H-1B visa cap, especially while raising the average wage for visa holders, could be transformative for American science and technology,52 Neufeld said. “We’d have more, and more meaningful, inventions, which would increase productivity, and make the US as a whole richer.”53

Fully agree, but why stop there? Why not unlimited open-borders?

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Thomas Edison proved a new model: the corporate research lab. Inside the two-story shed he built in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison oversaw a team of “muckers”—his term for professional experimenters—who fleshed out his sketches and helped him invent, among other things, the incandescent lightbulb and the first instruments for recording sound and video. Edison’s team-based success became too obvious to ignore, and other companies copied him, with magical results. In the 1930s, DuPont’s Experimental Station developed synthetic rubber, nylon, and Kevlar. Meanwhile, the university scientists who worked outside these labs mostly relied on funding from private philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation.

None of these were the kind of out of the box thinking you describe and making science corporate disincentivizes innovation