Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Outside China, the industry is concentrated within a few square miles along the California coast. OpenAI is not far from Anthropic, which is a quick drive to Google, which is located near Meta. The sole exception is DeepMind, which is based in London, but sold itself to Google in part because it needed the computing expertise their Silicon Valley–based engineers provided.

In practice, the frontier of ideas is best breached by people who know each other well and work with each other closely and who move between different companies with different cultures and specialties smoothly.

The money you save in rent doesn’t make up for the talent and knowledge that dissipate over distance.

But when it wanted to enter into e-commerce, it didn’t pile software engineers into a new wing of its headquarters. “Instead it chose Brisbane, California, just 7 miles from downtown San Francisco, one of the most expensive labor markets in the world,” Moretti notes.

But if a few dozen or a few hundred of them can build you an e-commerce platform that you will use for millions or billions in sales, it’d be foolish to locate elsewhere.

Some thought that the dislocations of the pandemic, combined with the rise of videoconferencing, would finally sever the link between place and innovation.

“To defeat the human need for face-to-face contact, our technological marvels would need to defeat millions of years of human evolution that has made us into machines for learning from the people next to us,” Glaeser writes.”21 This resolves the paradox of the metropolis: We vanquished distance for shipping and sales. But innovation thrives amid closeness.

They don’t see the kinds of wild productivity improvements that tradable goods do because, while one software programmer can write code for a million users, one line cook cannot make food for a million mouths.

Chetty’s team also found that children who moved to a high-innovation area when they were young are much likelier to patent inventions of their own when they matured. The effect was specific to the specialty of the place: “Children who grow up in a neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class,” they write.

It used to be that both high-wage and low-wage workers moved from poorer areas to richer ones.

It is liberals—and particularly a strain of liberalism that began to develop in the ’60s and ’70s—that bears much of the blame.

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

To be fair to California, change is messy and uncomfortable everywhere.

In the 1800s, no American city had zoning rules, the economist William Fischel writes in his aptly titled book Zoning Rules!

After World War II, millions of veterans returned from the European and Pacific theaters. They started families in a hurry. Birth rates spiked, and young parents balancing babies in their arms scoured the country for houses.

Bergen County, New Jersey, made it illegal by 1970 to build apartments on all but 131 acres of land.

This is not what anyone trying to preserve the idyllic conditions of California’s central coast wanted. But it is what they got. It is what they made.

San Francisco is eminently livable, which is why the average apartment sells for more than a million dollars. If San Francisco were unlivable, and people ceased to want to live there, the price of homes would plummet, and so too would the ranks of the homeless.

But what Colburn and Aldern wanted to understand is why homelessness varies so much across cities and regions. If a driver of homelessness doesn’t predict these differences, then it is probably not a cause of mass homelessness.

So what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing.

The way to think about homelessness, they write, is to imagine a game of musical chairs. With ten chairs and ten people, everyone will find a chair when the music stops. That will be true even if one of the players is on crutches.

Yglesias quotes the urban planner Payton Chung’s description of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, which features Klaatu, an alien, escaping captivity at what was then known as Walter Reed General Hospital and moving into a Washington, DC, boardinghouse at Fourteenth and Harvard Streets.

The answer is that they were made, in most jurisdictions, functionally illegal.

The point is not that cities wanted the homelessness crises they now face. They didn’t. Their hope was that people who couldn’t afford the kind of housing they allowed would leave. Many did exactly that, of course. But some had nowhere else to go. Others needed to stay near their families or jobs.

One of the main aims of federal housing policy has been to make possible the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, a peculiar financial device that wouldn’t survive a day in the economic wild.

But it gets worse, as Fischel explains: 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.

To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing.

In her essay “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing at the Atlantic, traces the politics of treating homes as assets. Housing is often spoken of as a safe investment, but it’s not.

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.”

Then came civil rights legislation that made it illegal to directly discriminate against homebuyers based on race.

In his 1958 bestseller The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith described an America cosseted by new comforts yet unable to shake a sense that something had gone fundamentally awry:

“An older growth politics which extolled the benefits of metropolitan development, and a newer antigrowth politics which rejected the idea that such development improved society.”

The book is broadly credited with founding the environmental movement, but like any founding document, it hit a nerve because it concretized anxieties that already existed.

They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act.

He went on to sign the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency, making him arguably the most important environmentalist president of the twentieth century.

The term “ticky-tacky” comes from a song recorded by Malvina Reynolds and covered by Pete Seeger, describing the soulless, same-same tract housing covering the hills of Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

Here it is typically the right that is willing to leap into the unknown, confident that humanity can adapt to unimaginable change. Here it is largely the left that wants to conserve the climate that the entirety of human civilization has known.

It is an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity’s promise of dominion over nature. The problem is not simply greenhouse gas emissions or microplastics. It is Cartesian dualism and American-style capitalism and everything these systems of thought and practice have taught us to value and prize and want.

All of us can identify some aspect of the global production system that seems wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. The problem is that few of us identify the same aspects of the global production system.

Turning global politics into a zero-sum contest for allotted energy rations will not deliver a greener future.

“Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time,” Charles Mann writes in The Wizard and the Prophet. “In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil and natural gas.”10 Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits.

In 2010, he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to.

Energy is the nucleus of wealth.

The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax.

As societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean their air and water. Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.

The cost of solar is falling so fast that for much of the day it will be effectively free, in much of the world, by 2030.

As the climate writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, “In the place of those fires we keep lit day and night, it’s possible for us to rely on the fact that there is a fire in the sky—a great ball of burning gas about ninety-three million miles away, whose energy can be collected in photovoltaic panels, and which differentially heats the Earth, driving winds whose energy can now be harnessed with great efficiency by turbines. The electricity they produce can warm and cool our homes, cook our food, and power our cars and bikes and buses. The sun burns, so we don’t need to.”

So much clean energy is possible, and available, if we can muster the ingenuity and the will to harness it.

All these countries are richer today than they were then, and yet they emit less carbon, per person, than they did then.

We know nuclear fusion can work: it is how stars generate power. We have never known if we can make it work here on earth—at least not affordably and at scale.