Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The instinct to make science democratically responsible has gunked up the scientific process.

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.

“We find that evaluators uniformly and systematically give lower scores to proposals with increasing novelty,” the team concluded.

If the DARPA model holds a lesson, it is that the agency works because it empowers program managers to pursue their most radical ideas with an open-ended budget and vast connections throughout science and industry.

“If Bell Labs had a formula, it was to hire the smartest people, give them space and time to work, and make sure that they talk to each other,” Gertner said.99 Like DARPA, the program thrived by identifying brilliant people who wouldn’t normally work together and by giving them freedom to pursue their most ambitious ideas together.

Edison did not make electric light possible. But his microinventions did something even more important. Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.

But for too long, America fell for the eureka myth and its attending faith in markets alone to solve the problem of scaling new technology.

“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.”

“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,”

OWS solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it. With few exceptions, such as the Veterans Administration, “no federal employee was directly involved in manufacturing, packaging, shipping, or injecting a single dose of any Warp Speed COVID vaccine,”

the government served as a chief national problem solver, molding its policies to fit the moment. It is a vision of a new kind of entrepreneurial state. It is the government as a bottleneck detective.

energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.

A regrettable feature of history is that progress often requires the focusing mechanism of disaster.

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.

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.”

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.

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.