Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

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.

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

One is that it means public housing efforts in San Francisco are, by definition, discouraged from working with large contractors that have grown in size and revenue precisely because they are good at delivering projects on time and under budget.