Abundance

by Ezra Klein

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.

Most jobs aren’t in firms like Google and Goldman Sachs. About two-thirds of the jobs in the American economy are in the local service sector, and that number has been steadily growing for fifty years. These are hairstylists and DMV employees and nurses and line cooks and retail workers and real estate agents.

In the ’70s, rising inflation and slowing home building turned the homes people did own into the center of their wealth. But how do you protect the value of that asset? You can insure a home against fire, but you can’t insure it against rising crime rates or local schools slipping in quality or a public housing complex being built down the block. To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you. You do it by making the minimum allowable lot sizes bigger and the parking requirements more expansive because both those rules ensure that only wealthier people will be able to buy into your community. You do it through organizing at planning meetings to defeat proposals for apartment buildings—they’ll change the character of the neighborhood, and think of the traffic!—and refusing to expand sewer systems to areas where developers might want to build new homes.

The climate crisis demands something different. It demands a liberalism that builds. The Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act add up to about $450 billion in clean energy investments, subsidies, and loan guarantees. This is how the scale of such bills is normally described in Washington: by a price tag. The more money, the bigger the bill. That is an incomplete measure, at best. If we could build faster, the numbers could rise. If we could build cheaper, the money would go further. That $450 billion is only an estimate. Many of the subsidies in these bills are open-ended. They will go to as many projects as can use them. These bills could spend trillions of dollars if we can build that infrastructure fast enough. They could spend far less than $450 billion if projects become too hard to permit. They could waste tens or hundreds of billions on projects that are never completed. What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.

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.48

America has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany and four times as many as France. Much of this energy is now devoted to suing the government. In 1967, there were 3 cases per 100,000 Americans directed at enforcing federal laws. By 1976, there were 13. By 2014, there were 40.87

“Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate. Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state,” Bagley writes.88 In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). 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.

I thought thus for a long time too but the business of lawmakers is to make laws so it does make sense. And is the fact that lawyers are a small fraction of the population compeling as an argument? Ill bet the fraction of people who are restaurant servers is higher but that doesnt mean the job and training demographics of congress has to redlect the overall population.

“Legitimacy is not solely—not even primarily—a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” Bagley writes. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.”89

Now the government has taken on the task of decarbonization and the responsibility of coordinating a once-in-a-century transformation of America’s built landscape. But it is doing so with laws and agencies and habits that are better designed to block green construction than to allow it.

Since 1960, federal government spending has risen more than fivefold—and yes, that’s accounting for inflation.33 But the size of the federal civilian workforce has barely budged. It was slightly fewer than 2 million people in 1960 and it’s slightly over 2 million people today. 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.

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.18 “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.”19

While it’s hard to say how the next synthetic element will be detected, it is safe to assume that it will not be discovered in a pot of hot urine.

Bush wrote: Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.

Bush’s vision of a government organization for science funding led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.

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. “It is not desired that the preparation of these reports present any long, tedious burden,”65 he wrote.

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.72 Funding agencies sometimes take seven months or longer to review an application or request a resubmission.

“Too many projects get funding because they are probable,” said Evans, the University of Chicago sociologist. “But science moves forward one improbability at a time.”

Today GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, seem to treat not only diabetes but also obesity and a dizzying range of maladies, including heart disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction. The most famous pharmaceutical breakthrough of the last decade is thus built on the foundation of a most delightfully peculiar obsession: lizard spit.

American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less.

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.

The US has more Nobel Prizes for science than the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the domestic deployment of technology—even technology that we invented—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling.

1954, three American researchers at Bell Labs built the first device for turning sunlight into energy: a silicon-based solar cell.

a bold move, the US Navy turned to solar cells for its Vanguard 1 satellite, launched in March 1958. The gamble paid off: Vanguard 1’s six solar cells powered its radio transmitter for six years.23 This success triggered a decade of intensive development. From 1958 to 1969, the US space program poured tens of millions of dollars into solar cells for its satellites.

American firms pulled back from solar power, other countries picked up the slack. In the 1990s, Germany subsidized solar technology from both sides—paying companies to make panels and paying consumers to buy them.31 The solar market took off. Between 2001 and 2011, German employment in the industry surged alongside rooftop solar installations.

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.”

The moon race is remembered today as a necessary and broadly popular response to the Soviet threat. But one of the most misunderstood aspects of the space race is that the Apollo program survived because of political persistence, not because of its popularity. In its brief history, the moon mission polled poorly. A 1965 Gallup survey found that “only 39 percent of Americans thought that the US should do everything possible, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon.”87 A majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the Apollo missions weren’t worth the cost, with up to 60 percent saying the government was spending too much on space.88 At one point, President John F. Kennedy—who famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”—told NASA chief James Webb, “I’m not that interested in space.”89 A majority of Americans supported the lunar missions only once in the 1960s: in a poll taken just after Neil Armstrong’s televised landing.

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

became common, even at the heights of American power, to hear China’s speed and capacity spoken of wistfully. “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the [Senate] floor,” Senator Michael Bennet said in 2010. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”