Abundance

by Ezra Klein

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.

An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

Perhaps you’ve heard the cliché that the economy is a pie we must grow rather than slice. It is hard to know where to begin with what this image gets wrong, because it gets almost nothing right. If you somehow grew a blueberry pie, you’d get more blueberry pie. But economic growth is not an addition of sameness. The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different. The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past. We have settled on a metaphor for growth that erases its most important characteristic.

those of us who believe in a fairer, gentler, more sustainable world have a stake in bringing forward the technologies that will make that world possible. That is a political question as much as a technological one: those same technologies could become accelerators of inequality and despair if they’re not embedded in just policies and institutions. What Bastani sees is that the world we want requires more than redistribution. We aspire to more than parceling out the present.

The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.

Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class. But through bad policy and worse politics, we are doing in the twenty-first century what we so feared in the nineteenth: we are closing the American frontier.

Cities are engines of creativity because we create in community. We are spurred by competition. We need to find the colleagues and the friends and the competitors and the antagonists who unlock our genius and add their own.

The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax. Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that is six or seven times the death toll from traffic accidents and hundreds of times the death toll from war or terrorism or all natural disasters combined.

Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers. That may have made sense in a past era, but given the problems we face now, it is a mistake. 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.

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.