Abundance

by Ezra Klein

But there is another, very different way to use that $1 billion. You can dangle a reward if the rocket company meets some target—say, the construction of three new rockets. As opposed to push funding, this is called pull funding. If push funding pays for effort, pull funding pays for success.72 Warp Speed used both. With push funding, it covered the early expenses of several vaccine makers. With pull funding, it promised to buy a certain number of vaccine doses, provided that the therapies received FDA authorization.

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.

The most important lesson of AMCs is that they make government a more active agent of invention, by identifying bottlenecks in public demand and filling them.

Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.

In the last half century, we have made several choices about invention and implementation and science and technology. We have chosen to create a system that rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking and risk in scientific research. We have chosen to embrace a political economy that encourages offshoring the development of American inventions that are key to our national security and flourishing. None of this was inevitable. These policies are the fruits of human decisions. They are artifacts of our ripely picked world.

The serendipity of science is one reason why it’s so important to untether research from politics and allow scientists to seek the truth freely without spending half their time deluged by bureaucratic paperwork and paralyzed by fear that their ideas might diverge from the moment’s conventional wisdom.

POLITICS IS A WAY OF organizing conflict, and so our attention is naturally drawn to divisions.

The term “political order” is the coinage of Gary Gerstle, an American historian and a professor at Cambridge University. Many historians focus on how Republicans and Democrats have fought and disagreed over the years. Gerstle’s work focuses instead on how hidden points of consensus between the parties create distinctive periods of history, which he calls political orders. He defines a political order as “a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.”1 Two such constellations have extended across the last hundred years of American history, according to Gerstle. The New Deal order rose in the 1930s and collapsed in the 1970s. The neoliberal order rose in the 1970s and declined in the 2010s.

Bill Clinton emerged as the Eisenhower to Reagan’s FDR, cementing the principles of a once-radical presidency into a political order. Clinton said the era of big government was over, and he proved it: he did what Reagan had only promised to do and slashed the federal budget while deregulating the financial and IT sectors.

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle says. Today’s politics are suffused with cynicism and pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.”7 In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy’s failed promises.

But blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics. Zoning regulations in liberal states and cities that restrict housing supply have increased costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants. These restrictions exacerbated an affordability crisis that was harnessed by the right. Thus, the mistakes of liberals contributed to the rise of illiberalism. “The tendency to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages is not restricted to a basket of deplorables,” Jerusalem Demsas wrote in the Atlantic. “It’s in all of us. Most people see others as a threat to their resources, whether it’s immigrants coming for your housing, yuppies pushing up rents, other students taking slots at all the good schools, or just more people on the road, adding to congestion.”10

Comparatively, abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged that capitalism was superior to its predecessor, feudalism, at producing goods and wealth. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together,” they wrote.23 They did not want to end this revolution in production. They wanted to accelerate it.

Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many.

What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If the rate of scientific progress is slowing, how can we help scientists do their best work? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

To pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal. One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack. Decades of attacks on the state have turned liberals into reflexive champions of government. But if you believe in government, you must make it work. To make it work, you must be clear-eyed about when it fails and why it fails.

Abundance contains within it a bigness that befits the American project. It is the promise of not just more, but more of what matters. It is a commitment to the endless work of institutional renewal. It is a recognition that technology is at the heart of progress, and always has been. It is a determination to align our collective genius with the needs of both the planet and each other. Abundance is liberalism, yes. But more than that, it is a liberalism that builds.