Abundance

by Ezra Klein

There is an idea in manufacturing history known as Wright’s law, which says that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.

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.

In a parallel universe where we had continued to develop and deploy solar, we might today have the green energy paradise of our dreams: an economy fully fueled by the sun. With such abundance of electricity, we might untap businesses that today are science fiction given their high energy demands, like machines that suck carbon dioxide from the sky and factories that grow animal meat without animal suffering.

As the economist Mariana Mazzucato pointed out in The Entrepreneurial State, it is strange that we still debate whether the government ought to pick winners when it is obvious that we live in a world that has amply “picked” for us.

“The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all,” he wrote.

The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible.

But whether by accident or by instinct, they retraced many of the steps that made penicillin a wartime reality.

Warp Speed leaned on officials from the Defense Department’s Army Materiel Command to help with logistics, and lessons from the battlefield were pulled into the vaccine program. For example, for every 100 doses of vaccines sent to pharmacies, the government sent 110 needles and 110 syringes.

OWS solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it.

“We let one of the biggest pharmaceutical distributors in the world (McKesson) handle the vaccines, let the most successful delivery companies in the world (UPS and FedEx) deliver the vaccines, let those entities who knew best how to vaccinate millions of Americans (CVS and Walgreens) conduct vaccinations.”60 Finally, the simplest part of OWS is perhaps the most important: the vaccines were free.

It might be one of the best bang-for-buck policies in US history.

Stacked up against more popular American programs, such as the Apollo program, Warp Speed’s accomplishment shines even brighter. For all the wondrous drama and exploratory genius of touching a human foot to moon dust, the Apollo missions did not directly save any lives or unveil any new technologies, even as they accelerated the development of computer chips and related fields.

A policy that stimulated the economy more than the Apollo program, and which may have saved more lives than the Manhattan Project, has almost no loud champions in politics.

These are all examples of push funding because the up-front money pushes forward innovation.

If push funding pays for effort, pull funding pays for success.

With push funding, it covered the early expenses of several vaccine makers. With pull funding, it promised to buy a certain number of vaccine doses, provided that the therapies received FDA authorization.

Pull funding is efficient because it only pays out if the technology pans out. It’s effective, because it solves a common bottleneck in new technology: demand uncertainty.

This policy—a promise to buy a certain number of early products to accelerate their invention—is called an “advance market commitment,” or AMC.

It’s not realistic to demand that the entire planet stop building things. The only truly global solution is invention.

We should be looking for many more opportunities to identify what’s holding back the invention and implementation of the most important technologies of the future and dangle prizes and purchase orders to pull them closer to the present.

The computational intensity of training artificial intelligence consumes significantly more power than other computer systems.

In the last few decades, US energy infrastructure projects have been slowed by all the challenges we’ve described: a lack of productivity in construction, permitting blockages, extended environmental reviews, and long interconnection queues.

An abundance of cheap and clean electricity would provide broad benefits, even if AI didn’t pan out.

It is an all-purpose national affordability policy and an innovation policy. Simply put, energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.

A regrettable feature of history is that progress often requires the focusing mechanism of disaster.

If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism—both galvanizing action and rewarding success—we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis. In an alternate history of the twentieth century, the launch of Sputnik might not have led the US to do anything.

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.

A majority of Americans supported the lunar missions only once in the 1960s: in a poll taken just after Neil Armstrong’s televised landing.

Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.

Even in times without world wars and pandemics, crises abound. Turning them into national priorities is, and has always been, a political choice.

None of this was inevitable. These policies are the fruits of human decisions.

Breakthroughs often involve a flash of luck, even when they follow decades of painstaking labor.

The serendipity of science is one reason why it’s so important to untether research from politics and allow scientists to seek the truth freely without spending half their time deluged by bureaucratic paperwork and paralyzed by fear that their ideas might diverge from the moment’s conventional wisdom. But the next stages of technology are not about luck. Building, deployment, and implementation are not the stuff of happy breezes. They require deliberate acts, laws, and policies.

He defines a political order as “a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.”

The New Deal order rose in the 1930s and collapsed in the 1970s. The neoliberal order rose in the 1970s and declined in the 2010s. The New Deal order brought the agreement that the federal government must take an active role in managing the American economy and protecting workers.

In the 1970s, the New Deal order collapsed beneath the weight of crises it could not contain—stagflation and the Vietnam War, most notably.

Abroad, the horrors and absurdities of communism became clearer.

Nurturing the dignity and genius of the individual, in the face of regimes that seemed to squelch both, became the reigning ethos.

“That the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”4 Policy is downstream of values, and by the 1970s, Washington was a changed place.

The Soviet Union collapsed, proving the supremacy of the American model.

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. When the spell of a political order breaks, ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable.

Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past.

China has been the great shadow pressure on American politics over the past two decades.

Republicans and Democrats alike had been too complacent about what China’s rise meant for American workers and too certain that a richer China would embrace American values.

America’s political and economic class had ceased to see the value in making things.

The temperament needed to shatter a consensus does not often coexist with the judiciousness and patience needed to build something better in its place.

He promised one “infrastructure week” after another without ever passing an infrastructure bill. Trump understood the dark side of competition, but he never understood the possibilities of cooperation. To the surprise of many, Joe Biden, as thorough a creature of the Washington establishment as has ever held the presidency, accepted many of Trump’s premises.

With the CHIPS and Science Act, he announced America’s intention to invest billions of dollars in scientific discovery and invention—and tens of billions more to build advanced computer chips within our borders.

The core of this agenda—subsidies for computer chips and clean energy, historic investments in infrastructure—used the spur of China to get America building and manufacturing at home again.

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.