Abundance Quotes

“We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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?”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“The prevalence of lawyers in American life is unusual. But their dominance at the top of American politics is startling. “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,”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

“crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“progress is more about implementation than it is about invention.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Let's define the Karikó Problem like this: American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas. What is most obvious is that American science is getting older. In the early 1900s, some of the most famous scientists – Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger – did their breakthrough work in their twenties and thirties. Indeed, their youth may have been critical to their paradigm-busting genius. But these days the twentysomething scientist is an endangered species. The share of NIH-funded scientists who are thirty-five years old or younger declined from 22 percent in 1980 to less than 2 percent by the 2010s.54 American science also seems to produce far too many papers that don't create new knowledge while overlooking researchers with promising new ideas. A 2023 study titled "Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time" found that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper from the same field decades ago. This could be because too many papers are essentially worthless. Or it could mean that scientists feel pressured to herd around the same few safe ideas that will keep them in good standing with their peers.

"When you look at the diminishing returns in medicine, you can say, well, maybe all the easy drugs have been discovered," said James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. But the more compelling possibility, he said, is that "the very organization of modern science is leading us astray." In Evans's interpretation, the low-hanging fruit hasn't been plucked. The problem is that too many scientists are all looking at the same few trees.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Burned by regulations and inattention to cost-effective production, basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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. But perhaps most important, we could fix the incentives of the American innovation system to help each dollar of funding find the right scientist taking the right risk at the right time.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“When we claim the world cannot improve, we a stealing from the future something invaluable, which is the possibility of progress. Without that possibility, progressive politics is dead. Politics itself becomes a mere smash-and-grab war over scarce goods, where one man's win implies another man's loss.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“We are used to understanding the battle lines of American politics as cleaving liberals who believe in a strong, active government from conservatives who doubt it. The truth is far more complicated. 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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Abundance, as we define it, is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had. And so we are focused on the building blocks of the future. Housing. Transportation. Energy. Health. And we are focused on the institutions and the people that must build and invent that future.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“The results of that mistake are everywhere. In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it was 6 times the average annual income.5 Between 1999 and 2023, the average premium for employer-based family health insurance rose from $5,791 to $23,968—an increase of more than 300 percent—and the worker contribution to that premium more than quadrupled.6 In 1970, the average annual cost of tuition and fees was $394 at public colleges and $1,706 at private colleges. In 2023, it was $11,310 at public colleges for in-state students and $41,740 at private colleges.7 Child care for an infant and a four-year-old costs, on average, $36,008 in Massachusetts, $28,420 in California, and $28,338 in Minnesota.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“The US has fewer primary-care physicians as a share of its population than almost any other rich country, despite having the world’s most expensive health-care system. This shortage is partly by design. In the early 1980s, a special committee established to review the state of American medicine reported to the US Department of Health and Human Services that the US was on the verge of a massive surplus of doctors. Physician groups backed up the finding. “The size of medical schools must be diminished,” Charles Evarts, the president of the American Orthopaedic Association, said in a 1985 speech. “Certain programs need to reduce their numbers, others must consolidate, and others need to terminate voluntarily or be terminated.”68 Starting in the 1980s, the government cut its support for medical schools and medical students, and many universities agreed to freeze the number of new studies and stop construction on medical programs. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of medical-school matriculants essentially flatlined69 as the US added 70 million people.70”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“immigrants accounted for 23 percent of US patents from 1990 to 2016”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“affixed”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“So what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing. When Colburn and Aldern begin testing these variables”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Eisenhower needed to prove that “he could take better care of his ordinary citizens than the leaders of Soviet communism could provide for theirs.”3 That meant embracing the policies of Roosevelt and the Democrats”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“To be a bottleneck detective is to recognize that wise policy begins with an investigation rather than an ideology that tries to force the same key into a variety of ill-fitting locks. Making progress in these industries requires first that we want to understand: How does this industry actually work? From that question can emerge an agenda for overcoming the barriers to growth.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“The key to the rebuild was that the people in charge of the rebuild could act. “Managers of every component of the project were empowered to be decisive”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“You can bog clean energy projects down in environmental reviews. You can use a process meant to stop the government from building a highway through your town to keep a nonprofit developer from building affordable housing down the block.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Cities play two roles. They are engines of innovation and engines of mobility.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance