Abundance

by Ezra Klein

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.

In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk twenty feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality.

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. With nine chairs, someone will inevitably be left out. That’s when individual life circumstances begin to predict homelessness.