Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Too much money chasing too few homes means windfall profits for homeowners and an affordability crisis for buyers. Too much money chasing too few doctors means long wait times or pricey appointments. This leads to the standard Republican riposte: Just don’t subsidize demand.

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.

An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure, middle-class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most. In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.

The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different. The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past.

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.

“If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart, it isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market,” Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York City, said in 2003. “It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product.”10 New York was once where you went to make your fortune; it is now where you go to spend it.

This resolves the paradox of the metropolis: We vanquished distance for shipping and sales. But innovation thrives amid closeness. Which is to say: it thrives in cities.

“[A] home’s value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people,” Demsas says. “This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.”

“Ultimately, every conservation problem is a population problem. Every effort to save some vestige of California’s pristine splendor, every campaign to preserve the bay or the hills or a natural coastline or a grove of redwoods, every attempt to curb galloping slurbanism or to save breathing space for the future, would be defeated by the unending advance of new hordes of population like a swarm of locusts devouring everything in sight.”

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built. One vision that is popular in some corners of the left is called “degrowth.” It holds that climate change reflects humanity’s thrall to an impossible dream of endless growth. Rich countries must accept stasis, shuttering or scaling down major industries, and poorer countries must grow more gently and prudently.

The cost of trying and failing to implement the degrowth vision would not merely be missing our climate targets by a few tenths of a percentage point. It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity. It is to discredit parties that care about climate change and empower strongmen who will give people what they have always wanted: the gift of abundant energy.

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.

Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance. Neither side focuses on what scholars call “state capacity”: the ability of the state to achieve its goals. Sometimes that requires more government. Sometimes it requires less government. But it always requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way. In the absence of that focus, absurdity reigns.

One problem liberals are facing at every level where they govern is that they often add too many goals to a single project. A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.

In 2012, Gregory Petsko, a biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a satirical essay in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain mock Christopher Columbus for not collecting preliminary data about the voyage across the Atlantic. When King Ferdinand suggests that the explorer try a shorter trip—say, to Portugal—Columbus exclaims, “Everybody knows that Portugal is immediately west of Spain.… What will you learn from that?” “Not much, if anything,” Queen Isabella responds. “But it can’t fail, now, can it? Besides, you’ve sailed to Portugal before, so the Study Section would know you can do it.”58 This satire didn’t appear in a personal blog. It ran in Genome Biology, one of the most prestigious journals in the field of genetics.