Abundance

by Ezra Klein

a 2023 study found that government-funded research and development have been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth in the US since the end of World War II.

“There is widespread agreement that scientific research and invention are the key driver of economic growth and improvements in human well-being,” the Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams said. “But I think researchers do a poor job of communicating its importance to lawmakers, and lawmakers do a poor job of making science policy a major focus.”

At the highest levels, American science has become biased against the very thing that drives its progress: the art of taking bold risks.

backyard. That is Jones’s point in a nutshell. Scientific progress is a blessing that comes with a curse. The unsolved problems are typically harder than the solved ones.

If keeping up the pace of scientific progress demands more resources, it points to a clear solution: recruit more scientists and spend more money. These aren’t bad ideas; they might be great ones.

If scientific spending is fundamental to economic growth, this suggests that the US has hugely underinvested in basic research.

Meanwhile, recruiting brilliant immigrants to the US has for decades been the “secret ingredient” to America’s success in science and technology,

This artificial scarcity means many promising foreign students and researchers are forced to leave the US after completing their studies, taking their skills and innovative potential elsewhere.

Doubling the H-1B visa cap, especially while raising the average wage for visa holders, could be transformative for American science and technology,

American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas.

American science also seems to produce far too many papers that don’t create new knowledge while overlooking researchers with promising new ideas.

In Evans’s interpretation, the low-hanging fruit hasn’t been plucked. The problem is that too many scientists are all looking at the same few trees. “I think there are all kinds of weird trees in the forest that we haven’t found, because everybody’s looking in the same place, and we’re not making enough high-risk, high-reward bets,”

Immediately after World War II, NIH leaders foresaw that the rising tide of bureaucracy could drown the work of science. In 1946, Cassius Van Slyke, who would soon become deputy director of the NIH,64 warned in the journal Science that he did not want the work of writing research grants to eclipse the work of actually doing science.

While Karikó flashed the intelligence of a future Nobel-winning scientist, she wasn’t world-class at a skill that Azoulay calls “grantsmanship”—the ability to write winning project proposals.77 “There is a hidden curriculum for navigating grants, and it is critical for success as a scientist today,” Azoulay said. “But those skills are weakly correlated with scientific potential, and they might be negatively correlated.”78 We have—even if by accident—designed a system that often privileges the game of performing the act of science over the actual practice of science.

“We want the most life-saving, life-enhancing, productivity-expanding inventions and innovations possible,” Evans said. “That means we need a system that is designed to take more risks, and accept more failures, as a part of the scientific process.”87 In a strange way, the problem isn’t that too much science is “doomed to fail,” he said. It’s the opposite. Too much science is, in his words, “doomed to succeed”—fated to duplicate what we know rather than risk failure by reaching into the unknown.

DARPA empowers domain experts called program managers to pay scientists and technologists to work together on projects of their own design.

Inventions do matter greatly to progress. But too often, when we isolate these famous scenes, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery.

implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.

John Arnold, the cochair of Arnold Ventures philanthropy, put it pithily: “America has the ability to invent. China has the ability to build. The first country that can figure out how to do both will be the superpower.”

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,” he wrote.

“The first thing I would do is to expand the residency system so that more doctors can become residents after medical school,” Robert Orr, a policy analyst who studies health-care policy at the Niskanen Center, said. “This might be the key bottleneck. The medical schools say they can’t easily expand, because there aren’t enough residency slots for their graduates to fill. But there aren’t enough residency slots because Washington has purposefully limited federal residency financing.”71 The arithmetic is simple: more funding means more residents; accepting more residents allows medical schools to grow; more medical students today means more doctors in a decade.

Pull funding is efficient because it only pays out if the technology pans out. It’s effective, because it solves a common bottleneck in new technology: demand uncertainty.

hundred thousand lives.73 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 US often makes financial commitments contingent on failure, like loan guarantees, which pay a lender in the event of a default,” said Thomas Kalil, the former deputy director for technology and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “But we don’t make enough financial commitments contingent on success, like a prize, or advance purchase order. Operation Warp Speed did it very successfully.”82 We should be looking for many more opportunities to identify what’s holding back the invention and implementation of the most important technologies of the future and dangle prizes and purchase orders to pull them closer to the present.

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.

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,”

Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden.

America’s greatest external threat has been the rise of China, a superpower that many now fear and even envy. How could they build so much as we struggled to complete even simple projects? As sluggishness and process came to feel like the defining features of American governance, it became common, even at the heights of American power, to hear China’s speed and capacity spoken of wistfully.

Republicans and Democrats alike had been too complacent about what China’s rise meant for American workers and too certain that a richer China would embrace American values. But the blindness was not just about what China was capable of. It was also about what America was losing the capacity to do.

Trump understood the dark side of competition, but he never understood the possibilities of cooperation.

Trump could have run on bringing the Texas housing miracle to the nation. Instead he ran on closing the border. He could have run on the success of Operation Warp Speed. Instead, he has disowned it as his coalition has rebuilt itself around skepticism of scientists and vaccines.

the rise of the Yes In My Back Yard (or YIMBY) movement,

a strategy that married the life Americans want with the clean energy the planet could tolerate. Investments in solar and wind installation, in electric vehicle plants and factories to manufacture next-generation batteries, have rocketed upward since.

irony is that Trump and the Republicans might benefit from legislation Biden and the Democrats passed simply because the government spends and builds so slowly, so the changes Biden promised will now happen on Trump’s watch.

On housing, for example, cities should reform their zoning laws to make it easier to build homes and apartments of all sizes, legalize the construction of accessory dwelling units, reduce parking requirements, and pass new laws to create maximum permitting wait times.

When you allow housing to become scarce where the wages are highest, you shut down a powerful engine that long kept social mobility in America high.

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?

It was this abundance, Potter argues in People of Plenty, that formed the American character. It was in the midst of not just actual plenitude, but the belief in plenitude, that our peculiar set of ideals and aspirations could form.

Right now, we see an America that is turning toward a story of scarcity. That turn is changing not just our politics, but our national character.