I recently read
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I've been familiar with Klein for many years going back to my blogging days, and always found him a very smart and thoughtful writer, even if we didn't always agree politically.
I don't want to debate politics, so if you want to go that route, please do not respond. I personally am of a largely libertarian bent. For some, that means a jerk who wants the government to stay away so they can do despicable things. For others--like me--that's someone with broadly liberal values who sees all the ways that liberal government has failed to live up to--or even thrown up roadblocks in front of--those values. One of the guys from Reason once said "Ezra Klein will die a libertarian", because he thought Klein would see that what he wanted was unachievable via the methods [gov't] he believed necessary to achieve them.
Preamble aside, that's essentially what this book is. It's a book written by liberals, for liberals, explaining why liberalism is actually failing to result in--liberalism. He's not speaking to conservatives or anyone that doesn't share those liberal values. He's speaking to liberals explaining why and how their ideals actually resulted in building a government that can't fulfill those ideals. How we've spent so much time trying to make sure that everything we do is done "right" that we end up doing... Nothing at all.
The intro to the book states this:
Essentially he looks at this through multiple areas (the first word is the chapter title):
- Grow - Looking at things like housing stock, affordable housing, etc. Dealing with things like NIMBYism, zoning regulations, and all the other entrenched ways in which we prevent building housing, which [naturally] means that we have no chance of housing being affordable because it's supply-constrained.
- Build - Looking at things like infrastructure spending, high speed rail, green energy, etc. How projects get tied up in mountains upon mountains of red tape, environmental impact reviews, etc. How every regulation--though well meaning--means that everything we try to build is slower and more expensive than it "should be", if it gets built at all.
- Govern - Looking at the ways that government--often in a well-meaning way to avoid repeated past problems--stops progress. And how the incentives are reversed... If you are in government and you have the opportunity greenlight 99 successful projects and 1 screwup, well it might be better to greenlight nothing because you don't want that screwup.
- Invent - Looking at things like the NIH and NSF. Largely that these are the government agencies that are supposed to be advancing health and science, but that they are largely SO worried about being called wasteful that they greenlight grants for the most milquetoast ideas unlikely to fail but unlikely to truly advance the science, and avoid the big ideas that are high-risk, high-reward. It largely centers around the scientist who decades ago had some funky ideas about the opportunities of mRNA but was getting absolutely no traction because everyone was focused on DNA and "the establishment" largely thought mRNA was a dead end. But it also highlights that the structure of DARPA is the opposite of NIH/NSF--they empower their "project managers" to take on risky, big idea, projects. And as a result, DARPA has had a pretty significant hit rate on developing real things that have changed the world... Like the internet that we're communicating through right now.
- Deploy - Largely looks at the "Eureka myth" and gets into the nitty gritty about deployment of new ideas is an area that the US falls behind. An example is solar... It was invented in the US, but into the 1980s the funding on development was gutted and abandoned by the US, and where we could have been world leaders, we're laggers. And makes examples of many other areas where doing something overseas is just easier, because we don't get out of the way. But then it uses a counterexample--Operation Warp Speed. Where suddenly you decide to bypass all the BS, and lo and behold, America actually still DOES know how to get something done when you let it [and support it $$]!
In the final summary chapter, they also touch on the "degrowth agenda"--the idea that you tell Americans that the answer to scarcity is to reduce consumption, reduce energy usage, and generally to accept a lower material standard of living. That not only is this a political loser, but that ultimately the story of history is that invention creates abundance. That some of the scarcity we experience today is not due to limited resources, it's due to a lack of invention that allows a greater standard of living based on the resources we already have--including the energy output of the sun that we can harness without doing things like burning fossil fuels and adding CO2 into the atmosphere.
Ultimately, the message is that we can achieve a world better than we have today, something that it seems was once the soul of liberalism. But that it's the tying down the engine of abundance (building/inventing/deploying), usually by well-meaning people for well-meaning reasons, that keeps us from getting there. And that the idea of a "degrowth agenda" is going to fail because you can't tell voters to want something they don't want. You have to articulate how you're going to build something they do want. And what they want is Abundance.
That's a long way of saying that this is a political book, written by a liberal for liberals, that was highly enjoyed by this libertarian.
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