Abundance

by Ezra Klein

This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis. It reads, even to us, as too simple. And yet, the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have. Countless taxpayer dollars were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus—sometimes without any focus at all—on what all that money was actually buying and building.

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.

It is childish to declare government the problem. It is just as childish to declare government the solution. Government can be either the problem or the solution, and it is often both. 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.

There is a word that describes the future we want: abundance. We imagine a future not of less but of more.

Americans have long lionized the frontier. But our futures have largely been made in our cities.

Millions endure multi-hour commutes, or far worse jobs, in order to live in a far-flung city where they can afford a home. These choices are missed in raw estimates of affordability, but they are a drag on the economy and an anchor on people’s lives.8

Americans like both the rhetoric and reality of low taxes, but they also like the programs that taxes fund. They thrill to politicians who talk of personal responsibility but want a safety net tightened if they, or those they know and love, fall. This dynamic is so well known, so easy to see, that we miss how often it gets reality backward. In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

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.

So what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing. When Colburn and Aldern begin testing these variables, their charts, which had just been masses of disconnected bubbles, coalesce into lockstep lines. As the cost of rent rises, so too does the number of homeless. As the vacancy rate plummets—meaning that the housing market is tight, with too many buyers and too few sellers—homelessness rises.

Boardinghouses were a common place for adults to live through much of American history. They worked something like today’s college dorms: The rooms were small, the bathrooms and kitchenettes shared, and the cost was low. They weren’t as nice to live in as a single-family home with a detached garage, but they were far nicer than a tent in the middle of an encampment in the dark of winter. So where did they go? The answer is that they were made, in most jurisdictions, functionally illegal.

“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

There’s an odd website called WTF Happened in 1971? It’s a long stack of charts, gathered magpie-like from all manner of books and papers and articles, recording the many ways society began to tilt on its axis as the ’70s dawned. The most convincing of them are economic: starting in the ’70s, wages began to stagnate, inequality began to soar, inflation began to rise, and housing prices began their inexorable march upward. Our favorite of these charts shows how many years an average wage earner would presumably need to save to buy a home. In 1950, it’s 2.3 years. In 1960, it’s 2.6 years. In 1970, it’s 2.4 years.

By 1980, it’s 3.8 years. By 1990, it’s 5.4 years. By 2000, it’s 7 years.53 And this forward march is hiding the regional differences: that home you could buy with 2.4 years of labor in 1970 was in a different kind of city than that home you could buy after even 7 years of work at median wages in 2000.

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. What lender in their right mind would hand out thirty-year loans on fixed terms to virtually anybody with a job? But the federal government backed those mortgages and made the interest payments on them into large tax deductions, and so they became the cornerstone of the American housing market.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be. We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called. 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.

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built. One vision that is popular in some corners of the left is called “degrowth.” It holds that climate change reflects humanity’s thrall to an impossible dream of endless growth. Rich countries must accept stasis, shuttering or scaling down major industries, and poorer countries must grow more gently and prudently.

A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics. Contrast that with the economy overall, where labor productivity rose by 290 percent between 1950 and 2020, or to the manufacturing sector, which saw a stunning ninefold increase in productivity.

But behind these victories, Nader’s revolution created a new layer of government: democracy by lawsuit. The number of lawyers and cases soared in the 1970s and 1980s. The result, Sabin argues, was a new kind of liberalism, which regarded government not as a partner in the solution of societal problems but rather as the source of those very problems.77 When the PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer asked Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000, Nader told him, “I don’t know anybody who has sued more [agencies and departments].”78 Nader and his Raiders believed in government. They defended it from conservative assault. When they criticized it—when they fought it, sued it, restrained it—they did so to try to make it better. But

Liberal legalism—and through it, liberal government—had become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-oriented. It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” Bagley wrote.

“It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.84

In politics, it will be lawyers. There is nothing wrong with lawyers. There might be something wrong with a country or a political system that needs so many of them and that makes them so central to its operations.

What happened next is a kind of miracle. Before 2020, no vaccine in American history had ever gone from the lab to the public in less than three years.12 The COVID vaccines achieved this feat in about ten months. In December, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for two COVID therapies based on mRNA technology—the

In Britain, an analysis by Imperial College London estimated that between 10 million and 20 million lives were saved worldwide by the shots in the first year of the vaccination program.15

Elon Musk is now a vociferous critic of progressive policy. But he has also been a beneficiary of it. In 2010, when Tesla needed cash to launch its first family-friendly sedan, the Model S, the company received a $465 million loan from the Obama administration Department of Energy.17 His rocket-launching company, SpaceX, has received billions of dollars from NASA under Democratic and Republican administrations. Musk has become a lightning rod in debates over whether technological progress comes from public policy or private ingenuity. But he is a walking advertisement for what public will and private genius can unlock when they work together.

The idea that the NIH has become deeply biased against risky and novel research—and too fixated on funding only those projects that are practically guaranteed to succeed—is so widespread that it has become “the biggest cliché in science,” said Azoulay, the MIT economist.

Democrats rarely credit or mention Operation Warp Speed, perhaps because they’re reluctant to be caught lavishing praise on anything that bears the fingerprints of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Republicans—including Trump himself—rarely celebrate the vaccines, because much of the party is populated by anti-vax conservatives who refused to take the shot and came up with wild conspiracy theories to discredit its effectiveness.

Twenty years from now, it is possible that we will consider the combination of clean energy growth and AI the most important technology story of the decade.