Abundance

Democrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”

The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.

As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”

Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.

The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.

Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.

Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.

Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• The right fought government and the left hobbled it
• John Galt. character from Ayn Rand
• Laffer Curve gave Republican tax cuts their intellectual argument but they keep failing to pay for themselves (this coded “supply side” as Republican so Democrats steered away from it
• Jimmy Carter: government cannot solve our problems
• Clinton: The end of big government is over
• Democrats programs were all demand side (ACA and food stamps and housing vouches)
• “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”
• “Don’t subsidize demand” is a fine critique “where access is not a matter of justice” — but housing, education and medicine are different
• Aaron Bastani’s 2019 Fully Automated Luxury Communism: post work post scarcity
• Authors say they’re speaking to the broad left, they’re not the right messengers for the right who instead can listen to James Perhokoukis of Conservative Futurist; economist Tyler Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” and thinkers at Niskanen Center
• “Why is it often easier to build renewable energy in red states than in blue states despite Republican opposition to the cause of climate change?”
• Liberals should be able to say vote for us and we’ll govern like California but instead Republicans say vote for us or they’ll govern like California
• Voting is a cheap way to express anger; moving is expensive and yet…
• “Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle class families as well presiding over the parts of the country that they are leaving”
• People of Plenty 1954 book by David Potter
• “We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life”
• “We believe what we can build is more important than what we can buy”
• “Americans have long lionized the frontier. But our futures have largely been made in our cities.”
• Potter in his 1954 book: the frontier gave crops and minerals and resources so “the city as a locus for the transformation of this abundance into mobility” ..”more Americans have changed their status by moving to the city than have done so by moving to the frontier”
• Americans can more easily follow Horace Greeley’s supposed advice of “going west” but not his actual example— of moving to NYC, starting a company and creating wealth
• OCED avg dwellings per thousand people is far lower in United States than others

• Ed Glaser: by 2000 it flipped, before moving to New York would come with a pay raise above cost of living; then after the opposite became true. Now you pay to live in NYC but before it paid to move there
• “New York was once where you went to make your fortune; it is now where you go to spend it”
• Cities should be where wealth is created “not just where it is displayed”
• Ed Glaser in his 2011 book “Triumph of the City: “Cities are the absence of physical space between people and companies”
• “The central paradox of the modern metropolis” is why proximity became more valuable as telecom made it less necessary
• Ed Glaser: average American living in a metro area with 1m+ residents is 50%+ productive than smaller —even accounting for IQ, income and education
• It’s not just more people (Soviet Union tried to force relocate) but the culture within them
• Cities are engines of innovation and mobility: high housing costs have far more hurt mobility than innovation
• Raj Chetty: in 1940 a child born into an American household had a 92% chance of making more money than her parents. But a child born in the 1980s has just a 50% chance of surpassing their parent’s income.
• “In 40 years, the American Dream went from being a widespread reality to a coin toss”
• Mobility is a product of place: moving to a more economically vibrant zip code increases with every extra year a child spends in their new city, especially those moving earliest. “Children who grew up in the neighborhood or family with a high innovation rate in a specific technology class are more likely to patent in exactly the same class,” Chetty and team write
• 2017: Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag paper: 1880-1980, income gaps across states closed; since it’s reversed. Use lawyers and janitors as examples: the rich ones still move to high cost/opportunity places but now the poor ones are moving away
• Americans are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal — in blue states it’s the opposite
• William Fischel’s 2015 book Zoning Rules: In the 1900s, Los Angeles introduced the first zoning, then New York — 8 cities had them in 1916, 68 in 1926, 1926-1936 1246 added. Unheard of in 1900, zoning covered 70% of US population by 1933. Trucks liberated manufacturing locations and buses liberated workers. Now we need zoning
• Lakewood 1950s growth versus the Petaluma Plan
• Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page’s 2022 book “Homelessness is Housing Problem “: “homelessness is low where unemployment is high, and high where unemployment is low.” Drug use explains just 5% of homelessness ; mental health, crime and poverty rates don’t meaningfully correlate. It’s a game of musical chairs, they write, and so once there aren’t enough chairs then it’s the poverty and education and drugs that put the most vulnerable residents out onto the streets
• Matthew Yglesias notes that boarding houses were long a source of housing but made functionally illegal
• 30-yr mortgage is a hedge against inflation
• By the 1970s, housing became a center of wealth but you can’t insure against crime or bad development so you do zoning to try to control this asset of yours
• Jerusalem Demsas: homeownership society was a mistake. Housing can’t be both a wealth building tool and cheaply available
• Reagan’s CEQA was used in 1972 Mammoth Friends case to argue all development is public and so require environmental studies
• Jason Hickel’s 2020 book “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World”
• In 2010, Hans Rosling: 2b people had no electricity and heated by firewood; 3b had electric lights; 1b enough electricity for washing machines and 1b more access to flights and this group used half the world’s energy
• Solar is getting way cheaper faster than we expected
• “What matters is not what gets spent. What matters is what gets built.”
• California high speed: the delays aren’t construction they’re politics
• Transit cost project: Americans build rail more expensively than other rich countries — countries that have governments and unions too

• With all our technology why can’t we build faster, better cheaper? Politics
• Austan Goolsbee: “strange and awful path of productivity in U.S. construction sector “ found little clear reason why – even Wharton’s Track of building regulations by state doesn’t fully explain the slowdown
• Mancur Olson’s 1982 Rise and Decline book overlooked the post materialist turn in rich countries: some coalitions formed not for funds but for environment or other cause. But Olson understood that as societies get more complex, those best navigating complexity thrive. Initially engineers and architects and then later lawyers
• Ed Gaeser paper: Between 1935-1970, house per construction worker grew at a similar rate as car per factory worker
• Paul Sabin’s 2021 book “Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism”: Nader’s Raiders did great work in the 1960s, but also made it easy for ever more groups to follow
• The environmental  movement of Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund saved lives and made cars cleaner — but invented “democracy by lawsuit”
• Sabin : “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again”
• Bagley: “procedural fetish” is “process-obsessed rather than outcomes orientated” — but still needs to remain legitimate and accountable
• Notes that it’s telling that Republicans learned a great way to make the state less effective is to burden it with process and legal review — and yet the left has followed
• Professor  Robert Kagan: Americans replaced big European central bureaucracy with “adversarial legalism”
• In 1835 Tocqueville: “any political question” in United States becomes a “judicial question”
• Ruhl and Salzman: 1970s was a “grand bargain” that development would be greener but slower
• “Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option.”
• Zachary Liscow’s “getting infrastructure built” paper: US has OECD-low environment quality and low trust in gov — so it isn’t working
• In the 1970s liberalism slowed down construction to enact important environmental goals and now needs to build fast to reach environmental goals
• “The government is a plural doing as a singular”
• Tahanan public housing project in SF had to be fast tracked to overcome hurdles of requirements: “micro local business enterprises” 14B requirement for small firms that require many small underperforming contractors, plus local hiring requirements, design reviews from arts commission and mayors office of disability and ADA and many more. The Tahanan project used union labor but modular from another district and SF unions were mad: so choose between local unions and cheaper housing (but Private Schwab funding is what allowed it to move fast; deeming that public money would slow down)
• State capacity: the ability of the state to reach its goals sometimes means more government but sometimes less
• “One way to make housing more affordable is to make it cheaper to build”
• “Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening.”
• Liberalism today “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will “ ((we don’t solve homelessness but we sure use a BIPOC led firm that reflects on indigenous needs and environmental concerns while gathering community feedback)
• Michael Gerrard in 2022 Time for Triage paper: Instead of “climate denial”, liberals have “trade off denial”
• “A government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all. (Conservatives are not immune from piling on procedure and stricture, but they often do so in a purposeful attempt to make government work poorly, and so failure and inefficiency become a perverse form of success.)
• Everything bagel liberalism
• 2023 Biden NOFO on semiconductors hit many topics: environment, workforce equity, construction diversity, small business engagement
• One difference between California high speed and BART project to buy Alstom train cars that came under budget was that vast majority of high speed rail project used outside consultants
• Zachary Liscow: increasing employment in state department of transportation by one employee per 1000 residents reduced the cost per mile of highway construction by 26%
• Jen Palka’s 2023 book Recoding America gets shoutout
• PA Gov. Josh Shapiro’s pushing I-95 bridge reconstruction in 2023: let government have choices not just rules, letting them put asphalt down in light rain and cutting down a sign rather than salvage as government policy required — 12 days not months
• What does it say that voters loved a politician flouting all those policies?
• “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.”
• Kaitlin Kariko: rejections and demotion before breakthrough in COVID
• Democrats talk about how we buy healthcare but not what we have to buy and where that invention comes from
• “If progressives underrated the centrality of invention in their politics, conservatives often underrated the necessity of government policy in invention.”
• Fall 1997, Kaitlin Kariko bumped into Drew Weissman at Xerox machine inside Robert Wood Johnson pavilion — but limited progress so in 2013 she was “forced to retire” from academia but Moderna and BioNTech founded to use their research (with Gates Foundation backing): The result was that rather than three years minimum, the COVID 19 vaccine was out in 10 months (fastest vaccine development in history)
• Are ideas getting harder to find paper
• Benjamin Jones: the burden of knowledge (and the death of the Renaissance man)
• Heidi Williams: government funded R&D has declined as a share of government spending

• Jeremy Neufiel: immigrants drive innovation so double the cap on H1B visas
• The Kariko Problem: “ American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky idea ideas”
• The share of NIH funded scientists who are 35 years old or younger declined from 22% in 1982 less than 2% by the 2010s
• Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time: 2023 paper
• Gregory Petsko’s 2021 satirical essay in which Ferdinand tells Columbus to just sail to Portugal because it can’t fail
• Thomas Edison popularized corporate research which left behind the solo inventor, but it was Vannevar Bush getting FDR to take on science that brought federal government in
• Bush’s 1945 paper: Science the endless frontier: after WW2 popularizing basic research “ without thought of practical ends”
• Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin gave a Golden Fleece award in 1975 to what he called the worst use of government funded science — encouraged more paperwork and less science via NIH
• “The instinct to make science democratically responsible, has gunked up the scientific process”
• 40% of science time is on paperwork not research
• 2014 Harvard University analysis of scientific paper evaluation: familiar proposals did ok, slightly novel did best and highly novel did worst
• Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya: 2020 paper showed NIH in 1990s funded papers with key words fits appeared in last 7 years but 2000 the “vintage” has declined 25%
• Breakthroughs surprises: Ozempic came from Gila monster saliva research
• NIH High risk, high reward grant program
• DARPA program managers do not face peer review
• Grantsmanship
• Jon Gertner of Idea Factory: Bell Labs couldn’t be recreated today (monopoly company in dominant country in a culture of invention
• Metascience: let’s improve science with science
• Alexander Fleming’s famous 1928 discovery took many years to actually amount to anything (by 1941, only 5 patients had been tested with it and two died)
• From zero to one gives the possibility of change; how one to a billion goes is how the world actually changes
• “It’s not just that ideas are getting harder to find. The problem is also that new ideas are getting harder to use.”
• Americans love eureka moments but not implementation; we don’t deploy well: the elevator, nuclear reactor and solar cell all invented by Americans but more widely deployed more cheaply elsewhere
• “Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create.”
• Joel Mokyr: micro inventions of tinkering and tweaking is how invention get to implementation to actually change.
• Wrights law: things get cheaper the more you produce them
• John Maynard Keynes in the End of Laissez Faire: “The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all”
• ORSD made war-scale penicillin; Nasa won the space race— we could have done the same for solar energy we invented but we left the implementation to China
• mRNA vaccine was both the invention and its deployment and implementation: Operation Warp Speed under Trump  made three bets on different technologies and offers subsidy not picking companies
• Mango’s 2022 book on Warp Speed: except for the VA, no federal employee worked directly on manufacturing, packaging, shipping or injecting warp speed vaccine, instead they enabled the private sector
• Covid vaccines prevented up to 20m deaths worldwide for $40b vaccine program, and as one group economists projected $6.5 trillion in savings from just early lives saved under vaccine program — stimulated the economy more than the Apollo program, saved more lives than Manhattan project
• OWS: push funding (covered early expenses), pull funding (promised to buy complete doses, which is an AMC or advance market commitment a kind of pay for success)
• Leopoldo Aschenbrenner 2024: Situational Awareness essay
• Yes we respond to crisis with big building but Sputnik didn’t have to spark a concentrated political effort — Apollo space program polled poorly among Americans until it was completed. So we could respond to other crisis too
• “Politics is a way of organizing conflict, and so our attention is naturally drawn to divisions”
• Gary Gerstle “political order”: The New Deal of 1930s-1970s and the neoliberal order of 1970s-2010s. It’s an opening now  
• “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders”
• Biden’s infrastructure bill as big as highway of 1950s, CHIPS/SCIENCE and IRA the biggest green energy bill
• Marx: fettering of production” — authors argue Marx and Engels knew capitalism created more from feudalism so they wanted to accelerate it with worker ownership
• “Can we solve our problems with supply”?
• “Political movement succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past”