Abundance

by Ezra Klein

The science and tech community has fervently debated what makes DARPA so special.93 With an annual budget of $4 billion94—about one-tenth of the NIH—DARPA punches well above its weight. One answer is that DARPA empowers domain experts called program managers to pay scientists and technologists to work together on projects of their own design. “There’s no question to me that program managers—especially program managers with vision, creativity, and independence—are the most important part of DARPA,” said Erica R. H. Fuchs, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.95 Unlike traditional scientists, these program managers do not face peer review. They can make big counterintuitive bets, are not punished for failure, and are not hauled before congressional committees for supporting weird-sounding projects.

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. By contrast, as John Doench of the Broad Institute said, many scientists seeking funding today are disempowered to the point of infantilization. Their time is colonized by paperwork, and their ambition is pinched by grantsmanship. The American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less.

In the last few years, a small group of researchers have advanced a theory of change in American politics that they call “metascience.” Their thesis is straightforward. The US government is the single largest source of science funding in the world, and yet we know shockingly little about how science actually works.102 Our laws, rules, and habits have accreted over decades without much of a grand strategy. A national invention agenda ought to operate from the first principle that if we don’t understand the science of invention at all, we should do what scientists do. We should run experiments. Lots of experiments.

Politics should take technology more seriously. Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create. The fundamental link between the two is not at the core of the Democratic or the Republican agenda. Instead, we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. In the last seventy years, we have too often followed the same playbook—invent, but don’t implement. We cannot afford to follow this playbook for the next seventy years.

Reagan’s election was the most important factor in the slowdown of US solar development, according to Nemet.28 His conservative revolution coincided with a huge drop in gasoline prices, as Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil in the 1980s. Consumers embraced gas-guzzling SUVs, and alternative energy fell out of favor. The spirit of imagining life after oil seemed to shrivel up and die. As late as the early 2000s, federal energy R&D spending was still 80 percent below its level in the 1970s.29 The US solar industry gradually withered. Many companies couldn’t survive without government support.

If the US invented solar energy in the 1950s, and Germany made it a market in the 1990s, China made solar energy cheap in the 2000s.33 Without sufficient oil and gas resources to power a billion-person economy, China has had existential motivation to develop its own domestic energy technology. In the 2010s, Beijing got serious about building out a solar energy business, lavishing subsidies, loans, and free land to upstart solar-panel makers. Recognizing this lasting commitment, Chinese solar companies invested for the long run. Whereas America whiplashed between “boom and bust cycles” in solar policy that have “surely slowed down its progress,” Nemet wrote that China’s consistent policy has allowed its firms to build more, faster, and cheaper.34

Drawing from the country’s expertise at making cheap textiles and shoes, Chinese firms gradually learned how to make solar panels more efficiently. In one case, a Chinese company bought a saw from a Swiss company that could cut thinner and thinner silicon wafers, which meant more panels from the same crystal ingot.39 They built machines to automate production lines. As they figured out what worked, they scaled up their lessons to build more production lines and larger factories. In 2000, China had barely enough solar energy to power a small town. By 2020, the nation was making 70 percent of the world’s photovoltaic panels.40 As China ramped up manufacturing, the cost of solar panels in the last fifteen years has declined by about 90 percent.41

The US led the world in solar energy development throughout the 1970s. In a parallel universe where we had continued to develop and deploy solar, we might today have the green energy paradise of our dreams: an economy fully fueled by the sun. With such abundance of electricity, we might untap businesses that today are science fiction given their high energy demands, like machines that suck carbon dioxide from the sky and factories that grow animal meat without animal suffering. 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. Progress is now, as it has always been, about the combination of invention and implementation.

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 silicon chips, the internet, GPS, voice-recognition software, and multi-touch technology, which were in part funded by the Defense Department, NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other government entities.47 If you heat and cool your home with power drawn from natural gas, you’re tapping into an energy revolution that began with federal research into drilling shale formations. If you own a home in the suburbs, you drive down state-funded roads with federally subsidized mortgages. We live in a ripely picked world. The smartest question, then, is not if the government should intervene in markets, but how to do so.

In all, the US government spent less than $40 billion to develop, produce, and buy mRNA COVID vaccines.63 It might be one of the best bang-for-buck policies in US history. COVID vaccines prevented up to 20 million64 excess deaths worldwide, with several million of those saved lives directly attributable to the acceleration of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Tens of millions of hospitalizations were prevented by the further prevention of severe disease. One analysis by three US economists estimated that the lives saved in just the eight months of the vaccinations were worth $6.5 trillion.65 Stacked up against more popular American programs, such as the Apollo program, Warp Speed’s accomplishment shines even brighter.

The right lesson from World War II and Warp Speed is that the state is no enemy of invention or innovation. In fact, the government can accelerate both. In the 1940s, the Office of Scientific and Research Development mapped out the chemistry and production challenges for penicillin and turned an obstacle course into a glide path. In 2020, the US government similarly identified the bottlenecks to rapid vaccine development and removed them. In both cases, 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.

Pull funding is efficient because it only pays out if the technology pans out. It’s effective, because it solves a common bottleneck in new technology: demand uncertainty. Some companies are rightly concerned that consumers cannot afford the early, expensive versions of a product. These companies need more certainty about future profits to invest in the final stages of invention.

This policy—a promise to buy a certain number of early products to accelerate their invention—is called an “advance market commitment,” or AMC. An AMC is particularly effective when the world needs an abundance of a brand-new technology that is currently too expensive.

The most important lesson of AMCs is that they make government a more active agent of invention, by identifying bottlenecks in public demand and filling them. “The US often makes financial commitments contingent on failure, like loan guarantees, which pay a lender in the event of a default,” said Thomas Kalil, the former deputy director for technology and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “But we don’t make enough financial commitments contingent on success, like a prize, or advance purchase order. Operation Warp Speed did it very successfully.”82 We should be looking for many more opportunities to identify what’s holding back the invention and implementation of the most important technologies of the future and dangle prizes and purchase orders to pull them closer to the present.

AI revolution makes the cause of energy abundance even more urgent. In the last few decades, US energy infrastructure projects have been slowed by all the challenges we’ve described: a lack of productivity in construction, permitting blockages, extended environmental reviews, and long interconnection queues. These bottlenecks are largely self-made, and if we don’t make it easier for AI companies to build in America, we should expect them to build data centers abroad. Some AI executives have met with Gulf states leaders about siting data centers in the Middle East. In the next few decades, trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure could be built somewhere in the world. The biggest question is where. If the US fails to add energy supply in the US, the results could be chaotic, at best, and catastrophic at worst. As new data centers demand more energy, electricity prices would rise for consumers, in the absence of supply growth. More troublingly, it’s conceivable that AI researchers are years, not decades, away from building a superintelligent system with the ability to hack foreign government secrets, cripple their military software systems, and partly collapse the energy grids of adversaries. This would be a breakthrough akin to a kind of digital nuclear bomb.

energy abundance is not strictly speaking a “data center policy” or an “AI policy.” It is an all-purpose national affordability policy and an innovation policy. Simply put, 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.

One interpretation might be that we are doomed to sleepwalk through history until a catastrophe jolts us into action. But there is comfort in the connection between perceived crisis and urgency. If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism—both galvanizing action and rewarding success—we must remember that it is always

One lesson of Apollo’s surprising unpopularity is that the program was sustained by leaders within NASA and the White House, which never pulled the plug on an audacious task that polled poorly among the public. Kennedy was right when he said, “We choose to go to the moon.” So did we choose to pass the New Deal, just as we chose to build OSRD, just as we chose to invent the bones of the internet in a government lab, just as we chose to break the record for vaccine development during a pandemic. Yes, crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.

We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. The crack-up was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in deregulated markets. The climate crisis revealed how much the profit motive missed. The aftermath of normalizing trade with China proved that the prophets of free trade understood neither China nor America. Throughout the 2010s, a slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And between 2021 and 2024, inflation brought national attention to our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

China has been the great shadow pressure on American politics over the past two decades. The confidence brought by the fall of the Soviet Union has been replaced by a fear that China has learned what we’ve forgotten. In Washington, a consensus began to crumble. Republicans and Democrats alike had been too complacent about what China’s rise meant for American workers and too certain that a richer China would embrace American values. But the blindness was not just about what China was capable of. It was also about what America was losing the capacity to do. It’s no accident that the most forceful challenge to this miasma of complacency and fear came from Donald Trump—a “builder” whose economic appeal centered around an obsession with manufacturing jobs and a deep suspicion of trade. America’s political and economic class had ceased to see the value in making things. Workers were told to learn how to code even as Washington kept proving that America had forgotten how to build. Trump didn’t care whether you knew how to code, but he seemed viscerally disgusted that America couldn’t build as it once could, and that it didn’t value the people who’d once done that work.

Under Trump, “infrastructure week” was a meme. Under Biden, it became an ethos. In his four years in office, Biden put his name to several laws that broke with the anti-build trend of modern politics. With the bipartisan infrastructure bill, he signed the largest authorization of infrastructure spending since the Interstate Highway program of the 1950s.18 With the CHIPS and Science Act, he announced America’s intention to invest billions of dollars in scientific discovery and invention—and tens of billions more to build advanced computer chips within our borders.19 With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US passed the largest clean energy bill in its history, with record investments in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, and next-generation climate technology, such as carbon-removal plants.20 The core of this agenda—subsidies for computer chips and clean energy, historic investments in infrastructure—used the spur of China to get America building and manufacturing at home again. As in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s, external threats and internal crises are converging and making possible a new kind of politics.

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.

The breakneck deployment of wind and solar infrastructure and battery manufacturing has been slowed by outdated permitting and procurement rules that split the Democratic coalition. A difficulty that Biden and Harris had in trying to run on their record in 2024 was that few communities were yet seeing benefit from all this construction their policies were meant to spark. The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.22 The bitter irony is that Trump and the Republicans might benefit from legislation Biden and the Democrats passed simply because the government spends and builds so slowly, so the changes Biden promised will now happen on Trump’s watch.

Changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard now requires confrontations with whether the systems liberals have built really reflect the ends they’ve sought. Much that was designed to foster grassroots participation has been captured by incumbents and special interests.

What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If the rate of scientific progress is slowing, how can we help scientists do their best work? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present? To pursue abundance is to pursue institutional renewal. One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack. Decades of attacks on the state have turned liberals into reflexive champions of government. But 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.

Right now, we see an America that is turning toward a story of scarcity. That turn is changing not just our politics, but our national character. We seek a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world. We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction. This is a story that must be built out of bricks and steel and solar panels and transmission lines, not just words. But it is a story, and we believe it is truer to the American character and experience, truer to both what we have done and what we will do, than the narrow narrative of scarcity that has taken hold.