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.

We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes. We say we want better health care, better medicine, and more cures for terrible diseases. But we tolerate a system of research, funding, and regulation that pulls scientists away from their most promising work, denying millions of people the discoveries that might extend or improve their lives.

3 The notion that the US government cannot solve America’s problems was not unilaterally produced by Reagan and the GOP. It was coproduced by both parties and reinforced by their leaders. Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford.

But giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.

Then there is the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern. One of us was born in California and lived there throughout much of the writing of this book. California’s most populous cities are run by Democrats.19 Every statewide elected official in California is a Democrat.20 Both chambers of the legislature are run by Democrats. And California is a land of wonders. It leads the world in technology. It creates the culture that much of the world consumes. It is astonishingly, breathtakingly beautiful. If it were its own country, it would have the fifth-largest GDP in the world.

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life. We call for a correction. We are interested in production more than consumption. We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy.

Degrowth is simultaneously much more and much less than an answer to the climate crisis. It is much more than an answer because it is not really about climate at all. It is an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity’s promise of dominion over nature. The problem is not simply greenhouse gas emissions or microplastics. It is Cartesian dualism and American-style capitalism and everything these systems of thought and practice have taught us to value and prize and want.

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.

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?

Every one of these is a worthy goal. But so too is building a lot of affordable housing quickly and cheaply. Los Angeles is failing, and failing badly, at doing that. Given that failure, does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway? To pose the question sounds callous. But to refuse to pose the question, given the need for more housing, is cruel.

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.