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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“In 1940, a child born into an American household had a 92 percent chance of making more money than her parents. But a child born in the 1980s has just a 50 percent chance of surpassing their parents’ income.23 In forty years, the American dream went from being a widespread reality to a coin toss.24”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“What was needed was subtraction. What Pahlka and her team found, again and again, was that the rules and regulations that governed California’s unemployment insurance system and that had been written into its code had just kept growing. That made the code more complex and harder to update. It made new hires harder to find and harder to train. It made backlogs harder to clear. “Lawmakers often have good intentions, but they continually add policy layers with too little understanding of (and, sometimes, regard for) how what they add will interact with the layers that are already cluttering the delivery environment,” she concluded.51 For government to do more—or even for it to just do what it is already doing—sometimes it first needs permission to do much less.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Today NIH, along with the NSF, are irreplaceable. If these institutions had never been created or expanded, the lives of millions, even billions of people around the world would be shorter than they are today, and people would be sicker. If they disappeared tomorrow, the world would instantly be worse.63”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

“A young country that is still in its building phase creates opportunities for engineers and architects. A mature country that has entered its negotiations phase creates opportunities for lawyers and management consultants.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

“Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas,” Glaeser writes. “These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

“Cities are engines of creativity because we create in community. We are spurred by competition. We need to find the colleagues and the friends and the competitors and the antagonists who unlock our genius and add their own.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future

“Too many see clearly the costs that dirty energy can impose on the environment but do not dare imagine the possibilities clean and abundant energy unlocks for it. In a paper imagining “energy superabundance”—which they define modestly, as simply every human being having access to the energy that residents of Iceland enjoy—Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado sketch out some of the near-term possibilities. Vertical greenhouses could feed far more people while using far less land. Desalination is a major contributor to water supplies in Israel now and could supply more than half of the demand in Singapore by the middle of the century. The technology could become affordable for poorer, populous nations that need new water sources most. Directly removing carbon dioxide from the air would become more plausible, giving us a path to reversing climate change over time.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“People of Plenty, the historian David M. Potter’s brilliant 1954 book”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Despite making up only about 14 percent of the US population, immigrants accounted for 23 percent of US patents from 1990 to 2016, 38 percent of US Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics from 2000 to 2023, and more than half of the billion-dollar US start-ups in the last twenty years.49”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”41”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“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 in liberal states and cities that restrict housing supply have increased costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants. These restrictions exacerbated an affordability crisis that was harnessed by the right. Thus, the mistakes of liberals contributed to the rise of illiberalism. "The tendency to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages is not restricted to a basket of deplorables," Jerusalem Demsas wrote in the Atlantic. "It's in all of us. Most people see others as a threat to their resources, whether it's immigrants coming for your housing, yuppies pushing up rents, other students taking slots at all the good schools, or just more people on the road, adding to congestion.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance