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.

By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar. It is inarguably safer than burning coal and petrol. And yet the US—facing a crisis of global warming—has almost stopped building nuclear power reactors and plants entirely. Between 1973 and 2024, the country started and finished only three new nuclear reactors. And it has shut down more nuclear plants than it’s opened in most of our lifetimes.16 That is not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risk.

In 1985, the great technology critic Neil Postman wrote, “to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”17 The corollary is also true: to have no program to harness technology in service of social change is its own form of blindness. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both

We have many disagreements with the modern American right. But we focus, in this book, on the pathologies of the broad left.

It is more interesting to ask, as we will, why it is often easier to build renewable energy in red states than in blue states despite Republican opposition to the cause of climate change.

More sinshine?

California has spent decades trying and failing to build high-speed rail. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living.21 As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.22 What has gone wrong? California’s problems are often distinct in their severity but not in their structure. The same dynamics are present in other blue states and cities. In this era of rising right-wing populism,

there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.

But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance.

If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government.

American policy has been focused on enacting what the historian Lizabeth Cohen calls “A Consumers’ Republic.”31 It has been remarkably successful. Catastrophically successful. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life. We call for a correction.

We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy.

But in the late 1970s, home construction started to fall behind the pace of population growth.

prior to the 1980s, wages in New York City were unusually high even after correcting for the local cost of living.9 The city had its problems, but most people would make more money by moving there. But that flipped. By the year 2000, moving to New York meant, for most people, taking an effective pay cut. That’s not because paychecks have shrunk but because housing costs have risen. People now pay to live there; they aren’t paid to live there.

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.

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

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

in August 2023, the videoconferencing company Zoom announced that they were demanding employees be in the office at least a few days each week. Eric Yuan, Zoom’s CEO, explained that it was too hard to build trust without nearness. “Trust is a foundation for everything.

It is, then, no surprise that income inequality began rising in the ’70s and reached such striking peaks in recent decades. We took a process responsible for much of the march toward income convergence and threw it into reverse. We made mobility into an engine of inequality, and we did it on purpose, using policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford.

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

The concept of zoning, unheard-of in 1900, covered 70 percent of the US population by 1933.

The first zoning rules did little to prevent housing construction at scale.

Instead they dictated what kind of buildings could go where.

In the same progressive zip codes where homeowners press signs into the soil of their front lawns bearing the message Kindness Is Everything, affordable housing can’t be found—and homelessness is endemic.

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.

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. It might explain why an individual became homeless in a particular place, but it cannot explain why one place has a homelessness crisis and another does not.

Excellent point

Does more poverty predict more homelessness? No. A number of cities with high rates of poverty—Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia—have low rates of homelessness.45 It is richer cities with low overall poverty rates that see more homelessness. A similar story emerges for unemployment: homelessness is low where unemployment is high and high where unemployment is low.46 Odd.

Homelessness is slightly less common in the states with the highest rates of mental illness, and vice versa. Hawaii, which has among the lowest rates of serious mental illness, has among the highest rates of homelessness.

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

But the cause of homelessness isn’t the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment. All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia.

By the 1950s, rooming houses were already a target for city planners looking to maintain high home prices and orderly neighborhoods. “If rooming houses are permitted to spread to the city’s one- and two-family neighborhoods, there is not much use in talking brave words about fighting blight,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1957. “Rooming houses are not compatible with one- and two-family districts. When the rooming houses come in, the families move out—and the whole area starts down hill.”50

Does it really “protect the roomers” to move them from a boarding home without parking spaces to a tent beneath the overpass?

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.

“At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight,” she writes. “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in?

“Lot-size requirements forced developers to build fewer and more expensive homes, in turn guaranteeing that the homes would be sold to wealthier, whiter buyers,” writes Anbinder.

The story of rising housing prices in America isn’t a simple morality play of greedy homeowners and feckless city planners. This is a story, at least in part, of how the solutions of one era created the problems of the next.

America in the 1950s and ’60s was paradoxically the richest superpower in world history and functioned as a kind of mass-industrial conspiracy to kill its own residents.

Nixon promised that “the program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field in America’s history.” He was as good as his word. 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 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.

Why Cartesian dualism?

“Those who sought to pave the way for capitalism in the sixteenth century first had to destroy other, more holistic ways of seeing the world, and either convince or force people to become dualists,” writes Jason Hickel in Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

“Dualist philosophy was leveraged to cheapen life for the sake of growth; and it is responsible at a deep level for our ecological crisis.”

Cartesian dualism refers to regarding body and mind as irreducible. What does that have to do with a rejection of holism? This needs more support.

We do not primarily use land to live on. We primarily use land to feed ourselves.

It is difficult to find an environmental challenge that is not tied up in raising animals for our consumption. It is a driver of climate change. It is a driver of deforestation. It is a driver of mass extinction, as the land we turn over to cows and sheep and goats is the land that other species need to survive.

It is a driver of drought and water scarcity, as it takes about 1,800 gallons of water to produce a single pound of boneless beef.

To the vegetarians and vegans among us, this is an obvious target for elimination. Humans thrive on a vegetarian diet, and the factory farms that produce most of our meat are abattoirs of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. I...

It is a moral stain upon modernity. There is probably no single change that would do more for our interlinked environmental problems than for the world to ce...

But to suggest such a thing is to court political ruin. People want to eat meat, and they want that meat to be cheap and plentiful.

Why isn't this like saying, "People want slaves as a source of cheap labor so caing for its abolition is political ruin"?

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. It is deadliest where people cook by burning wood or charcoal and farm by burning the end of the last season’s crops. That is to say, it is deadliest where people are energy poor, because where people are energy poor, they burn fuel and breathe in the byproducts.

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.

We did not always know how to power economies without using fossil fuels. We do now. This is the technological miracle of our age. The cost of solar energy fell by about 90 percent from 2010 to 2020. The cost of wind power fell by nearly 70 percent.16 Solar power does not choke the lungs. Wind power does not sting the eyes. Neither of them warms the planet. Two decades ago, it was not possible to imagine that modernity was compatible with renewable energy.

Now we need not im...