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.

Democrats learned to look for opportunities to subsidize. They gave little thought to the difficulties of production.

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.

We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.

The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.

Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California!

“populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”

Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.

Cities are engines of creativity because we create in community. We are spurred by competition. We need to find the colleagues and the friends and the competitors and the antagonists who unlock our genius and add their own.

Mobility, Chetty found, is a product of place. A child born poor in San Jose has three times the likelihood of ending up wealthy as a child born poor in Charlotte.

We made mobility into an engine of inequality, and we did it on purpose, using policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford.

In 2015, when the California Legislative Analyst’s Office investigated the cause of the state’s housing cost and availability crisis, the authors were unambiguous in their diagnosis. “First and foremost, far less housing has been built in California’s coastal areas than people demand,” they wrote.

planners have been very successful at mostly eliminating the accommodations for down-and-outers with the consequence that if you are down and out in a city where real estate is expensive, you end up on the street,”

How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.”

Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens and the environment. They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act. In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building.

The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity.

There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality.

Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.

In 1979, Americans pumped out 22.7 tons of CO2 per person; Canadians, 18.2; Germans, 14.3; Australians, 13.2; the UK, 11.5, France, 10.22 All these countries are richer today than they were then, and yet they emit less carbon, per person, than they did then.

The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds.

In 2009, then, this was the status of high-speed rail in California: It was a signature project of the president of the United States. A signature project of the most powerful governor California had in decades. Voters in California had set aside billions to make it real. And the federal government was adding billions more. It is hard to imagine a more favorable climate for the project.

In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.

What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money.

The more organized groups you have, Olson says, the more fights over distribution you’ll have, the more lobbying you’ll have, the more complex regulations you’ll have, the more bargaining you’ll get between groups, and the harder it will be to get complex projects done. Affluent, stable societies have more negotiations.

Olson, who died in 1998, was right when he said that affluence is a gift that comes with costs. And those costs concentrate in the areas of the economy in which the number of groups that have to be consulted mounts. From this perspective, the productivity woes in the construction industry don’t seem so puzzling.

a complex society begins to reward those who can best navigate complexity.

A mature country that has entered its negotiations phase creates opportunities for lawyers and management consultants.

Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism.

Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it.

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.

Those who succeeded would be those best suited to operating at the nexus of that complexity. In the economy, that might be management consultants and financiers. In politics, it will be lawyers.

“Most people do not like the idea of an oil pipeline or electric transmission line running through their backyard,” write Ruhl and Salzman. “Guess what—they do not like the idea of wind turbines or solar panels in their backyard, either.”

The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.

It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds. Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?

(When do Angelenos want affordable housing? Now! Where do they want it? Not here!)

Everyone, everywhere, is afraid of being implicated in fraud or waste or having their funding cut or seeing the public turn on them.

Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening.

A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.

In countries like China and Singapore, civil service is held in high esteem, and the brightest graduates compete in nationwide tests to win government jobs. In the United States, the word “bureaucrat” is tossed around as an epithet.

Read that again: They had not been working on modernizing their technology stack for ten years. They had been working for ten years on the massive contract they would award to outside firms to modernize and manage their technology stack. That contract was expected to take eleven years to execute.

in turning these questions from choices into rules, we have taken discretion and judgment away from people like Carroll.

The process Shapiro used would typically be illegal. Yet national Democrats and Pennsylvania voters alike loved it. What does that say about the typical process?

Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers.

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.

Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that 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.

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

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

American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas. What is most obvious is that American science is getting older.

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.