Abundance

by Ezra Klein

TAHANAN,

So how did Tahanan do it? The answer, for liberals, is depressing: It used private money to avoid the pile of rules and regulations that taking government money triggers. But it could only do that because it had the support of city and state officials who streamlined zoning and cut deals to make it possible.

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

With COVID, the science of mRNA proved its value almost immediately. On January 11, 2020, Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the virus. Within forty-eight hours, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine recipe was finalized. By late February, batches of the vaccine had been shipped to Bethesda, Maryland, for clinical trials. By December, it was approved—the fastest vaccine development in history. Today, several billion mRNA vaccines have been shipped.29 In 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who struggled for years to get a dollar of funding from the NIH, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a technology that saved millions of lives.

Meanwhile, recruiting brilliant immigrants to the US has for decades been the “secret ingredient” to America’s success in science and technology, according to Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress. “Some of the greatest achievements in US history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, are impossible to imagine without the contribution of people who were born abroad,”

the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and moved away.

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

everybody’s looking in the same place, and we’re not making enough high-risk, high-reward bets,” Evans said.

The idea that the NIH has become deeply biased against risky and novel research—and too fixated on funding only those projects that are practically guaranteed to succeed—is

In the 2000s, when the Human Genome Project cracked open a new frontier in genetic research, the NIH was its leading bankroller.

In June 1940, as the German army invaded and occupied Paris, the eminent engineer Vannevar Bush delivered grave news to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in an urgent White House meeting: America was technologically unprepared to take on the Axis powers.

grew to become the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)—a multibillion-dollar hydra of wartime science and technology operations that supported the work of thousands of scientists and engineers. OSRD’s early work developing an atomic weapon eventually became the Manhattan Project, overseen by J. Robert Oppenheimer. With OSRD funding and guidance, American scientists invented radar, invested in malaria treatments, developed an early influenza vaccine, and built the foundations for early computing.

The most important idea that emerged from the Bush report was the primacy of “basic research”—a term Bush meant to refer to science at universities and research centers that seeks to understand the world “without thought of practical ends.”

a kind of hub-and-spoke system, with the federal government directing funds to the most deserving university researchers.

But it is precisely because the NIH stands above every bioscience institution in significance that we should scrutinize the way it shapes the practice of science in America and around the world.

rules have increased, while efficiency has decreased.

The instinct to make science democratically responsible has gunked up the scientific process. To appreciate the explosion of scientific paperwork

You needed the ability to sell yourself and your work. You needed to attract funding.

You needed the kind of interpersonal savvy that got you invited to speak at conferences or made people eager to mentor and support you. You needed to know how to do things in which I have never had any interest (flattering people, schmoozing, being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100 percent certain that you are correct). You needed to know how to climb a political ladder, to value a hierarchy that had always seemed, at best, wholly uninteresting (and, at worst, antithetical to good science). I wasn’t interested in those skills.76

“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.”

modern science too often plays it safe.

Bias against novelty, risk, and edgy thinking is a tragedy,

But this is how science often works; a broad base of knowledge is built, upon which we piece together disparate fragments of a puzzle to create new breakthroughs.

Rather than see the NIH as an enemy of risky science, it makes more sense to think of it as a typical bureaucracy whose leaders are doing their best to solve typically bureaucratic problems.

“With a standard grant, you often have to show that you can accomplish everything you’re proposing, and you’re graded on a very high feasibility level,” she said. “For a New Innovator Award, we like to see a little plausibility, sure, but mostly they just need a cool idea and the equipment to plausibly get it done.”90

the Department of Defense established the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The internet, GPS, personal computers, and self-driving vehicles all trace their roots back to DARPA-funded research.

To explain how a successful program manager works, Fuchs pointed to the invention of ARPANET, the world’s first internet. In 1962,

Nazi Germany’s assault on Europe forced many of the continent’s best minds to flee to America.

For decades, too many university researchers applying for NIH funding have constrained their own curiosity. The perceived biases of the NIH became their own biases. By contrast, the best DARPA program managers see the world as a set of puzzle pieces to snap together in the creation of a new initiative.

We could do so much better. We could fix the manufactured scarcities of our immigration system and make it easier for the world’s most brilliant people—who often graduate from American schools—to stay and work in the US. We could increase federal research and development spending rather than allow it to decline as a share of the economy, as we did for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

To mimic the program director’s power at DARPA, we could give some NIH panel members a “golden ticket,” such that they would have the power to independently approve one proposal each year, regardless of how crazy the idea sounds to their peers.

In 2009, several researchers compared a group of typical NIH grant recipients to scientists funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Whereas the NIH pays scientists for specific projects, HHMI funds scientists without attaching strings to their research. They found that HHMI funding led to more “flops” but also more “hits”—more

basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland.

Thirty years ago, a group at the University of Texas developed next-generation technology to create lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries—which car companies need for the top-performing electric vehicles. But in the early 2020s, no American company knew how to manufacture these batteries at scale, and China held a monopoly on the market.

we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.

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.

technologies. One useful summary of this view came from a 2012 Economist essay, which claimed “governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online [and] turn them into products.” This dual image—the state, as a lazy slowpoke, versus the market, as the self-sufficient45 dynamo

As the economist Mariana Mazzucato pointed out in The Entrepreneurial State, it is strange that we still debate whether the government ought to pick winners when it is obvious that we live in a world that has amply “picked” for us.46 When you use an iPhone, you are playing with a technology that bundles

Government should have a vision of the future, and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot,

example, the Pfizer vaccine needed to be stored at around minus 70° Celsius, a temperature at which most glass vials shattered.55 So, Warp Speed approached the materials science company Corning to produce, in quantity, a special glass they had developed a few years earlier.56 The program ultimately granted $347 million to Corning and one other glass manufacturer to ensure ultracold transport.57 Third, OWS had to solve

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,” Mango wrote in

Finally, the simplest part of OWS is perhaps the most important: the vaccines were free. The federal government bought out the vaccines from pharmaceutical companies, which allowed them to sell the shots to the public for any price they wanted. They chose the price of $0.00. For much

A regrettable feature of history is that progress often requires the focusing mechanism of disaster. Penicillin took a world war, and mRNA vaccines took a plague. The Federal Reserve was created only after a string of financial disasters, culminating in the Panic of 1907. The tragedy of the Great Depression allowed for the boldness of the New Deal. The Nazi domination of Europe galvanized the creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 moved Washington to create the Advanced Projects Research Agency, later renamed DARPA, which contributed to the invention of the personal computer, GPS, and drone technology. It also pushed the US to expand NASA and eventually launch the Apollo program. Again and again in American history, we seem to be at our very best when things are at their very worst. This is a depressing thought.

Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy’s failed promises. Liberals might detest the language that Trump and Vance use to demonize immigrants. But blue America practices its own version of scarcity politics. Zoning regulations

he is focused on slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.

The right is abandoning many of its successes to embrace a politics of scarcity. That has left room for liberals to embrace what Republicans have abandoned: a politics of abundance. In fact, there are signs that they already are.

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