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America is unusually legalistic. It always has been. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”86 What was true then is truer now. America has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany and four times as many as France. Much of this energy is now devoted to suing the government. In 1967, there were 3 cases per 100,000 Americans directed at enforcing federal laws. By 1976, there were 13. By 2014, there were 40.87
“Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate. Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state,” Bagley writes.88 In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). When you make legal training
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Brink Lindsey puts it well: What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s,
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Great summary
Today’s scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents, rather than on direct research.72 Funding agencies sometimes take seven months or longer to review an application or request a resubmission.
“Too many projects get funding because they are probable,” said Evans, the University of Chicago sociologist. “But science moves forward one improbability at a time.”
Our institutions shape the way we think, and new institutions can make new kinds of thinking possible. For decades, too many university researchers applying for NIH funding have constrained their own curiosity. The perceived biases of the NIH became their own biases. By contrast, the best DARPA program managers see the world as a set of puzzle pieces to snap together in the creation of a new initiative. The Bell Labs scientists worked in an offshoot of AT&T, which made it natural for them to consider the commercial potential of their work, which might explain how they created so many useful
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more people died of bacterial pneumonia during the 1918 influenza pandemic than from the virus itself.
Politics should take technology more seriously. Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create. The fundamental link between the two is not at the core of the Democratic or the Republican agenda. Instead, we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.
John Maynard Keynes offered an elegant answer in his 1926 book The End of Laissez-Faire. “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,”
Government should have a vision of the future, and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot, to make possible what is otherwise impossible. The COVID pandemic was a crisis that required a first-of-its-kind invention that no company could solve on its own. It was inconceivable that a single firm might invent, test, approve, and manufacture a therapy in record-breaking time. In the case of mRNA technology, an ingenious invention wasn’t enough. We needed an equally ingenious plan to bring that invention to life. And, just as the US government did for
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The US has fewer primary-care physicians as a share of its population than almost any other rich country, despite having the world’s most expensive health-care system.
This policy—a promise to buy a certain number of early products to accelerate their invention—is called an “advance market commitment,” or AMC. An AMC is particularly effective when the world needs an abundance of a brand-new technology that is currently too expensive.
When we asked Paul Mango to name the single most important part of Operation Warp Speed, he said it was focus. “On the Warp Speed team, you could have asked anyone what the project’s goal was, from the generals and leaders, down to the lowest-ranking officials, and they would all give the same answer: deliver at least one safe and effective vaccine, manufactured at scale, before the end of the year,” he said. “Every decision we made was based on those constraints.”
One lesson of Apollo’s surprising unpopularity is that the program was sustained by leaders within NASA and the White House, which never pulled the plug on an audacious task that polled poorly among the public. Kennedy was right when he said, “We choose to go to the moon.” So did we choose to pass the New Deal, just as we chose to build OSRD, just as we chose to invent the bones of the internet in a government lab, just as we chose to break the record for vaccine development during a pandemic. Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the
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