Abundance

Highlights

Page 136

But Democrats, cowed by the Reagan revolution and frightened of being seen as socialists, largely confined themselves to working on the demand side of the ledger. When Americans in 1978 heard that “government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision,” the words didn’t come from Ronald Reagan. They came from President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in his State of the Union address.2 This was a preview of things to come. In 1996, the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, announced that “the era of big government is over.”3 The notion that the US government cannot solve America’s problems was not unilaterally produced by Reagan and the GOP. It was coproduced by both parties and reinforced by their leaders. Progressivism’s promises and policies, for decades, were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford. The Affordable Care Act subsidizes insurance that people can use to pay for health care. Food stamps give people money for food. Housing vouchers give them money for rent. Pell Grants give them money for college. Tax credits for child care give people money to buy child care. Social Security gives them money for retirement. The minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit give them more money for anything they want. These are important policies, and we support them. But while Democrats focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed, they paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have. Countless taxpayer dollars were spent on health insurance, housing vouchers, and infrastructure without an equally energetic focus—sometimes without any focus at all—on what all that money was actually buying and building. This reflected a faith in the market that was, in its way, no less touching than that offered by Republicans. It assumed that so long as enough money was dangled in front of it, the private sector could and would achieve social goals. It revealed a disinterest in the workings of government. Regulations were assumed to be wise. Policies were assumed to be effective. Cries that government was stifling production or innovation typically fell on deaf ears. A blind spot emerged. Political movements consider solutions where they know to look for problems. Democrats learned to look for opportunities to subsidize. They gave little thought to the difficulties of production.

Page 174

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.

Note: This is going to be one of the money quotes.

Page 207

Perhaps you’ve heard the cliché that the economy is a pie we must grow rather than slice. It is hard to know where to begin with what this image gets wrong, because it gets almost nothing right. If you somehow grew a blueberry pie, you’d get more blueberry pie. But economic growth is not an addition of sameness. 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. We have settled on a metaphor for growth that erases its most important characteristic.

Page 216

Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church. When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph. Now imagine dozing off for another thirty-year nap between 1990 and 2020. You would wonder at the dazzling ingenuity that we funneled into our smartphones and computers. But the physical world would feel much the same. This is reflected in the productivity statistics, which record a slowing of change as the twentieth century wore on. This is not just a problem for our economy. It is a crisis for our politics. The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.

Note: Too true. I feel like all the hatred in society is fuelled by the feeling that there’s only so much to go around and there won’t ever be any more.

Page 236

It is routine in politics to imagine a just present and work backward to the social insurance programs that would get us there. It is equally important to imagine a just—even a delightful—future and work backward to the technological advances that would hasten its arrival.

Page 240

What Bastani sees is that the world we want requires more than redistribution. We aspire to more than parceling out the present.

Note: We aspire to more than parcelling out the present. I feel like this is my main issue with people who focus on taxing billionaires. Even if you taxed them, you wouldn’t be able to run the government on that money for very long. It would merely encourage hiding the wealth better, or stashing it abroad. The real reason people are upset with billionaires is that they feel poor in comparison. Taxing billionaires will feel good but won’t create lasting wealth for people.

Page 293

Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! California has spent decades trying and failing to build high-speed rail. It has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst housing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living.21 As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona.22 What has gone wrong?

Page 323

A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.

Page 404

Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class. But through bad policy and worse politics, we are doing in the twenty-first century what we so feared in the nineteenth: we are closing the American frontier.

Page 485

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. And because it thrives in cities, so does much else. It’s in missing how much else that we made a terrible mistake.

Page 729

In her essay “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing at the Atlantic, traces the politics of treating homes as assets. Housing is often spoken of as a safe investment, but it’s not. Homes rise in price when there are too few of them to go around. The greater the gap between supply and demand, the higher the returns for homeowners. “At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight,” she writes. “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.” The logic of this is inescapable, and the politics it creates predictable. “[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.”56

Page 882

Anti-growth politics could, and often did, tip into a kind of misanthropy aimed at newcomers. Those who already lived in a place were its stewards, its guardians, its voice. Those who wanted to move to that place were recast as a consumptive horde. Harold Gilliam, who wrote the “This Land” column for the San Francisco Chronicle, put it grimly. “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.”79 But what could you do about it?

Page 944

In this sense, degrowth recognizes the difficulty that politics poses to climate policy. It knows people want more of what they have, and although it blames capitalism and plutocracy for these wants, it sees the challenges these wants pose to traditional climate politics. But those challenges apply to the degrowth vision with even greater force. If you cannot imagine convincing people to change their desires in the presence of energy abundance, how do you imagine convincing them to accept the rapid, collective scarcity that degrowth demands?

Page 973

Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was frigid in Versailles, and no treasury could warm it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of more than a hundred slaves,11 but his ink still froze to the tip of his pen during winter.12 Today, heating is a solved problem for many. But not for all. There are few inequalities more fundamental than energy inequality. The late demographer Hans Rosling had a vivid way of framing this. In 2010, he argued that you could group humanity by the energy people had access to. At the time, roughly 2 billion people had little or no access to electricity and still cooked food and heated water by fire. About 3 billion had access to enough electricity to power electric lights. An additional billion or so had the energy and wealth for laborsaving appliances like washing machines. It’s only the richest billion people who could afford to fly, and we used around half of global energy.13 Energy is the nucleus of wealth.

Note: I often say I wouldn’t want to live the life of the Ottoman Sultan and this is a good example.

Page 340

One of Olson’s insights is that a complex society begins to reward those who can best navigate complexity. That creates an incentive for its best and brightest to become navigators of complexity and perhaps creators of further complexity. “Every society, whatever its institutions and governing ideology, gives greater rewards to the fittest—the fittest for that society,” Olson writes.67 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.

Page 396

When the PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer asked Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000, Nader told him, “I don’t know anybody who has sued more [agencies and departments].”78 Nader and his Raiders believed in government. They defended it from conservative assault. When they criticized it—when they fought it, sued it, restrained it—they did so to try to make it better. But those same laws and processes were available for anyone else to use, too. 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. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin writes.79

Page 446

Americans were asking the government to do more than it ever had but they were not willing to give the government the trust and authority it needed to do it. But reformers could not simply devolve power to state and local governments. Liberals had just seen, in the fight against Jim Crow, that you could not trust the states, much less the localities, to do what the federal government asked. And so they turned to the courts, which had, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, become newly beloved by liberals. Adversarial legalism was a way of reconciling the government we wanted with the suspicions we harbored. America is unusually legalistic. It always has been. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”86 What was true then is truer now. America has twice as many lawyers per capita as Germany and four times as many as France. Much of this energy is now devoted to suing the government. In 1967, there were 3 cases per 100,000 Americans directed at enforcing federal laws. By 1976, there were 13. By 2014, there were 40.87 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,” Bagley writes.88 In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). 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.

Page 712

Heidi Marston led the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from late 2019 until April 2022, when she resigned in frustration. “We had thirty-eight unique funding sources coming in when I was there,” Marston says, “and each of those had annual or biannual audits of not just us, but the nonprofits we were funding.” Those audits were meant to show that the money was being spent exactly as intended. But that was part of the problem. “Federal funding is probably more restrictive than any other,” Marston continued. “Every year we get money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The city often gives their share to us, but on top of the auditing and tracking that the federal money comes with, they add on their own conditions, like we can’t use it for staffing. Just all this stuff that gets added on in the process.”24 It is easy enough to imagine how these conditions emerge. The city wants to show that it is using its money to build houses rather than expand its head count. HUD has no end of priorities and is trying to satisfy the desires and demands of the members of Congress who control its funding. Tax credits are added to the code to address real and wrenching problems, like the rise in homelessness among veterans. Grant makers want to show donors that their money is being used well, and the only way to prove that is through audits. Everyone, everywhere, is afraid of being implicated in fraud or waste or having their funding cut or seeing the public turn on them. Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening. We hire skilled, dedicated people to do the public’s work and then make it impossible for them to do that work well. We ask people to work on society’s hardest problems—often making much less than they could make in the private sector—and then rob them of the discretion and agility they need to solve them. And then we wonder why so many of them leave.

Note: This, right here, is why liberals will never solve this problem. Public and charitable funding is so prone to misuse that it needs audits. The audits make the project infeasible. Rinse and repeat. The money will either go to auditors or to corrupt officials.

“Then how does Singapore do it”. Not by having multiple sources of funding, that’s for sure.

Page 760

In 2023, the Biden administration released its Notice of Funding Opportunity for the $39 billion it intended to hand out to semiconductor manufacturers to locate new fabs in the United States. Reading the NOFO was a strange experience. Here was the US government trying to recapture an industry it had lost in part because it had become cost-prohibitive to manufacture semiconductors domestically. But the NOFO did not seem laser-focused on the cost problem. To be honest, it did not seem laser-focused on any problem. Page 12 encouraged a pre-application that includes an environmental questionnaire “to assess the likely level of review under the National Environmental Policy Act.” Page 20 mandated that applicants prepare “an equity strategy, in concert with their partners, to create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals in their region,” which should include “building new pipelines for workers, including specific efforts to attract economically disadvantaged individuals and promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” Pages 21 and 22 asked for a plan “to include women and other economically disadvantaged individuals in the construction industry” and encouraged the use of project labor agreements and sets out requirements for “access to child care for facility and construction workers.” Pages 24, 25, and 26 asked applicants to detail how they would include minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses, as well as small businesses, in their supply chain, and offered seven bullet points detailing how this might be done, including dividing supply chain requirements “into smaller tasks or quantities to expand access” and “establishing delivery schedules for subcontractors that encourage participation by small, minority-owned, veteran-owned, and women-owned businesses.” Then there are requirements for “a climate and environmental responsibility plan,” as well as community investments in areas like transit, affordable housing, and schools.30 Many of these are good goals. But are they good goals to include in this project? There is no discussion in the NOFO of trade-offs. Nor was there any admission by the administration that anything they were asking for even represented a trade-off. “Every one of the requirements—or they’re not really requirements—nudges—are for criteria or factors we think relate directly to the effectiveness of the project,” Raimondo said. “You want to build a new fab that will require between 7,000 and 9,000 workers. The unemployment rate in the building trades is basically zero. If you don’t find a way to attract women to become builders and pipe fitters and welders, you will not be successful. So you have to be thinking about child care.”31

Note: Stinging critique of the liberal project.

The problem with giving away money “no strings attached” to billionaire firms is that left wing voters will absolutely hate it. It will literally make rich people richer - fab owners, fab workers, construction workers. All of these people are likely to be male by default, so it wouldn’t fly with a party trying to appeal to women.

But all this is fucking bullshit when it’s a question of whether Intel will survive or not. Who gives a fuck if minority owned businesses got a handout if it means the primary objective of creating semiconductor fabs fails.

Ironically the later trump approach of taking an equity stake in exchange for money is more efficient and probably will lead to greater success. It shows the Federal government is backing the company, and if the intervention is successful then they’ll sell the stake at a profit.

Page 792

To be clear, there is nothing unusual in the way the Biden administration approached the CHIPS and Science Act. The federal government often tries to make the subsidies it offers serve an array of goals and constituencies. California’s high-speed rail was shaped by this dynamic, too. Many Californians were confused that construction had begun in the Central Valley, which was far less populated than the corridors near Los Angeles or San Francisco.32 Why start there? When California applied for federal money under the terms of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration gave preference to bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific places. The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. California is building high-speed rail in a place that makes it less likely that it will generate the ridership, political support, and financial backing to ever finish. The irony is that it’s not just bad for the high-speed rail project. It’s also bad for air pollution across the state.

Note: This is the worst. High speed rail might have had a greater chance of succeeding if they hadn’t sent this money at all.

Page 804

Since 1960, federal government spending has risen more than five-fold—and yes, that’s accounting for inflation.33 But the size of the federal civilian workforce has barely budged. It was slightly fewer than 2 million people in 1960 and it’s slightly over 2 million people today. In countries like China and Singapore, civil service is held in high esteem, and the brightest graduates compete in nationwide tests to win government jobs. In the United States, the word “bureaucrat” is tossed around as an epithet. Republicans have spent decades demonizing government, and they have largely won the argument. The dominant belief is that anything that can be outsourced or privatized should be. Government is bloated. The private sector is efficient. Democrats may not believe what Republicans believe about government, but they often act as if they do. In 2008, when California began building its high-speed rail system in earnest, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority had just ten workers. One of them was responsible for designing graphics for social media. The job was turned over to a vast assemblage of consultancies. It was one of these consultants—WSP—that estimated the system would cost only $33 billion and take only twelve years to build. But WSP was joined by Project Finance Advisory, Cambridge Systematics, Arup, TYLin, HNTB, PGH Wong Engineering, Harris & Associates, Arcadis, STV, Sener, and Parsons Corporation. The outsourcing “proved to be a foundational error in the project’s execution— a miscalculation that has resulted in the California High-Speed Rail Authority being overly reliant on a network of high-cost consultants who have consistently underestimated the difficulty of the task,” reported Ralph Vartabedian in the Los Angeles Times.34 California is one of the richest polities in the world. It was building one of the most ambitious rail projects in the world. But it did not hire the best rail designers and engineers to provide inhouse expertise and manage the project. California was financing and overseeing a program it did not have the capacity to plan, manage, or even truly understand. “There was an ideology at the Authority some time ago that was like, ‘Let’s keep this small and in-house and we’ll rely on consultants to build this,’” Brian Kelly, the High-Speed Rail Authority’s CEO, said. “My philosophy when I got here was the state is the owner of this project and so we need to build state capacity. When I started, the authority was seventy percent consultants, thirty percent state. Now it’s fifty-five percent state and forty-five percent consultant.”35 In the Bay Area, a different story played out. In 2012, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) signed a contract with Alstom, a French rail car manufacturer, to deliver 775 cars for $2.58 billion.36 By 2023, though, something unusual had happened: the cars were coming in faster, and cheaper, than expected. The cost estimate was slashed by almost $400 million.37 One major source of savings, reported…

Note: Damn. Democrats say they don’t believe Republicans but act as if they do.

Page 846

Technologically, there was nothing particularly novel in the challenge. Unemployment insurance is fairly simple. People apply. They are accepted or rejected. Then checks are sent out. By the standards of the technology sector, this is a solved problem. “Privately, some California officials told me they thought the EDD staff was just incompetent at technology and our team would find the problems easy to fix,” Pahlka writes. But that wasn’t how the task force saw it. “Privately, we wondered if we could help at all.”41 Pahlka has come to think of government technology—and the regulations that control it—as layers of sediment. As new problems emerge, new layers are added. But the older ones are rarely removed. “Each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies,” she writes. “The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to.”42 The challenge of updating government technology is the challenge of updating, harmonizing, or terminating the functions of these old systems. And all of it must be done while following procurement and contracting rules that no private technology company would ever impose on itself.

Note: That’s just regular software development but with worse leadership (always prioritising short term) and procurement constraints.

Page 867

The EDD doesn’t build or manage its own technology. Nor is that technology built or managed by a centralized team of software engineers in the state government. It is done by external firms chosen and managed through a labyrinthine procurement process. At the time of the meltdown, the EDD had been working on a modernization contract for ten years that it was theoretically just weeks away from awarding. Read that again: They had not been working on modernizing their technology stack for ten years. They had been working for ten years on the massive contract they would award to outside firms to modernize and manage their technology stack. That contract was expected to take eleven years to execute. The sedimentary chaos at the EDD was not at all unusual. California spent ten years and $500 million trying to bring its courts onto a common document management system before abandoning the effort.44 The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs has been trying to modernize and consolidate its visa and passport systems since 2009.45 The IRS began trying to replace one of its core systems—the Individual Master File—in 2000. The work is now projected to be completed in 2030.46 “The public servants responsible for the interminably drawn-out modernization efforts are neither lazy, stupid, nor malicious,” Pahlka writes. “I’ve met hundreds of them, and they are overwhelmingly dedicated, conscientious, and often quite creative. IRS employees managed to send monthly child tax-credit payments to nearly forty million families and to mail out over $800 billion in stimulus checks during the pandemic, all while relying on systems that were never designed to change so quickly or handle such enormous volume.” The problem is that the systems they are updating have become “complex beyond our ability to imagine,” as has “the complexity of all the rules these public servants need to follow to do that updating.”47

Note: Based on my limited experience in software development, everything they say is absolutely correct. Software developed piecemeal by consultants will be low quality mountains of tech debt. Software developed continuously by teams will be much higher quality.

But I can also understand why these government departments are reluctant to have permanent software devs on their payroll (although at these prices maybe it just makes sense). Nor do they want to fight other departments for a common pool of devs.

Page 912

Amid all this, Pahlka recalls, a member of the California Assembly introduced legislation requiring the EDD to make its applications and communications available in over a dozen languages. Most of those languages were already required by a 1973 state law. They were also required by multiple federal laws and rules. The EDD wasn’t in compliance with all these older rules. It wasn’t even serving English speakers effectively. It was not able to do what it was already required to do. Now it was being instructed to do more.

Note: Fucking nightmare to work in this environment.

I understand that government needs to be responsive to the people and their representatives. But what if the people lack any understanding and their representatives are just looking for cheap “wins” they can brag about.

Page 952

It’s worth taking seriously what Carroll says there. These were risks. There are reasons these rules are in place. No-bid contracts can enable corruption as well as speed. There are reasons not to put down asphalt when it’s raining. But in turning these questions from choices into rules, we have taken discretion and judgment away from people like Carroll. We prefer that projects go badly by the book. We minimize some risks but make delay and high costs routine.

Note: We prefer that projects go badly by the book.

Page 966

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.58

Note: But any government that reduces the veto power of its voters gets voted out. How do you square that?

State capacity can’t be measured, number of employees can be.

Page 058

It is tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus at last only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas. But this would be worse than a failure of imagination; it would be a kind of generational theft. When we claim the world cannot improve, we are 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.

Note: I think most people do think in these terms though

Page 074

Inventions that may seem outlandish today may soon feel essential to our lives. Streets filled with electric self-driving cars that give us mobility without emissions and free us from the vast number of deaths caused by faulty human reflexes or judgment. Gigantic desalination facilities that transform our oceans into drinkable tap water. An economy with robots that build our houses and machines that take on our most dangerous and soul-draining work. Wearable devices to scan our bodies for diseases. Vaccines that we can rub on our skin rather than inject at the end of a needle. As unrealistic, or even ludicrous, as some of these ideas might seem, they are not much more ludicrous than a rejected, ignored, and unfunded mRNA theory that came out of nowhere to save millions of lives in a pandemic. To make these things possible and useful in our lifetime requires a political movement that takes invention more seriously.

Page 144

In order to mount a revolution, numbers are never enough. Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’ The Russian Revolution finally erupted not when 180 million peasants rose against the tsar, but rather when a handful of communists placed themselves at the right place at the right time.

Page 238

Meanwhile, recruiting brilliant immigrants to the US has for decades been the “secret ingredient” to America’s success in science and technology, according to Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress. “Some of the greatest achievements in US history, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, are impossible to imagine without the contribution of people who were born abroad,” he said.48 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

Note: Apollo program, I’m losing it 💀

Where did the Apollo immigrants come from? Werner von Braun, could be Irish maybe?

Page 327

Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.60

Page 362

As science funding became more entrenched inside the federal government, politicians did what they do best. They created paperwork. In the early 1960s, Congressman Lawrence Fountain, a Democrat from North Carolina, published two reports complaining that the NIH did a lousy job accounting for the money it sent to scientists. He convinced Congress to take the unusual step of cutting the agency’s funding.68 A decade later, Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat, created the Golden Fleece Award to draw negative attention to the worst use of government money in science. The first two Golden Fleece Awards went to studies about human attraction and why mammals clench their jaws when stressed. Proxmire called on government science funding to “get out of the love racket” and declared that these projects “made a monkey out of the American taxpayer.”69

Note: The jaw clenching sounds really important! But I understand why this works. This guy brags to voters that he “reduced waste”. Voters never see the wasted time in grant writing, but their attention is caught by a few big, clear instances of fraud.

Page 383

“Folks need to understand how broken the system is,” said John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute.74 “So many really, really intelligent people are wasting their time doing really, really uninteresting things: writing progress reports, or coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science, as if those numbers have any meaning. Universities have whole floors whose main job is to administer these NIH grants. Why are we doing this? Because they’re afraid that I’m going to buy a Corvette with the grant money?”75 The rules exist for a reason, Doench acknowledged. Some scientists in the past probably abused their funding. But just as environmental laws passed in response to twentieth-century problems created a crisis of building in the twenty-first century, the paperwork cure in science is sometimes worse than the disease. “We are very much in danger of falling behind because we are so bloatedly inefficient,” Doench said. “It’s the same truth about how it takes forever to build a mile of subway in New York City. The cracks are emerging, and we are going to lose our edge if our best and brightest people are spending their lives filling out forms rather than focusing on the next great thing.”

Note: “Are you afraid I’m going to buy a corvette?” Yes!! Suppose we fund 1000 scientists for a year for 600 scientist-years of research and 400 scientist-years of grant writing. We get rid of grant writing, so we go from 600 to 1000. A 66% If one out of a thousand scientists steals the money for a corvette, it may free

Page 432

Bias against novelty, risk, and edgy thinking is a tragedy, because the most important breakthroughs in scientific history are often wild surprises that emerge from bizarre obsessions. “Too many projects get funding because they are probable,” said Evans, the University of Chicago sociologist. “But science moves forward one improbability at a time.”83 In the 1990s scientists studying the Gila monster, a stocky lizard, discovered a hormone in its venom that allowed the reptile to go months between meals. When they synthesized the hormone in a lab, they produced a medicine called a GLP-1 agonist, which was shown to reduce blood sugar levels in some people with diabetes.84 Today GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, seem to treat not only diabetes but also obesity and a dizzying range of maladies, including heart disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction. The most famous pharmaceutical breakthrough of the last decade is thus built on the foundation of a most delightfully peculiar obsession: lizard spit.

Note: I knew this story!

Page 442

Science is often nonlinear in this way. The most popular COVID tests relied on a technology called polymerase chain reaction. Developed in the 1980s, PCR is a method for amplifying small DNA sequences, which can be used for paternity tests and disease diagnoses. When scientists were initially trying to figure out how to scale PCR, they needed bacterial enzymes that didn’t fail at high temperatures. Fortunately, two decades earlier, in the 1960s, biologists in Yellowstone National Park had isolated a hot-springs bacteria that thrived in boiling conditions.85 The bacteria they isolated was incorporated into PCR research and helped launch a revolution in diagnostics and genetics. Without the bacteria, significant achievements such as the Human Genome Project might have been impossible. (Not to mention other great moments in scientific history, such as “You are not the father!” outbursts on The Maury Show.) Nobody building an effective medical test during a pandemic would ever stop to think, Well, first thing, let’s book a flight to Wyoming and take samples from geysers. But this is how science often works; a broad base of knowledge is built, upon which we piece together disparate fragments of a puzzle to create new breakthroughs. Another example: CRISPR is a gene-editing function that some scientists believe could one day unlock the cure for any number of genetic diseases. But it was not discovered by a group of geneticists. The first mention of CRISPR in the scientific literature comes from Japanese and Spanish researchers working with bacteria that displayed a peculiar immune reaction when attacked by viruses.86 This early work did not initially receive many citations. But after twenty years of development, CRISPR now looks like one of the most powerful medical technologies in history. Isaac Newton famously said he saw further by standing “on the shoulders of giants.” But clearly, some brilliant ideas are not born giants. They are born as all children are born—small and helpless, requiring care and protection to grow.

Note: I was already convinced of the Kariko problem. But this section is what I’ll quote.

Page 497

The science and tech community has fervently debated what makes DARPA so special.93 With an annual budget of $4 billion94— about one-tenth of the NIH—DARPA punches well above its weight. One answer is that DARPA empowers domain experts called program managers to pay scientists and technologists to work together on projects of their own design, “There’s no question to me that program managers—especially program managers with vision, creativity, and independence—are the most important part of DARPA,” said Erica R. H. Fuchs, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.95 Unlike traditional scientists, these program managers do not face peer review. They can make big counterintuitive bets, are not punished for failure, and are not hauled before congressional committees for supporting weird-sounding projects.

Page 541

Bell Labs benefited from a unique moment in history. “After spending six years writing a book about Bell Labs, I’ve often wondered whether it would be possible to recreate it today,” said Jon Gertner, the author of The Idea Factory. “My answer is no.”98 After World War II, AT&T was a goliath within a goliath—a huge government-sanctioned monopoly inside a country that dominated fields like chemistry and quantum mechanics when Nazi Germany’s assault on Europe forced many of the continent’s best minds to flee to America.

Page 636

For many, progress appears to be a mere timeline of such eureka moments. Our mythology of invention treats the moment of discovery as a sacred scene. In school, students memorize the dates of major inventions, along with the names of the people who made them—Edison, lightbulb, 1879;5 Wright brothers, airplane, 1903. The great discoverers—Franklin, Bell, Curie, Tesla—get bestselling biographies, and millions of people know their names. You can think of this as the “eureka theory of history.” It’s the story of progress you might expect to see in Hollywood or to read in nonfiction books that hail the lonely hero whose flash of insight changes the world. But this approach to history is worse than incomplete; it’s downright wrong. Inventions do matter greatly to progress. But too often, when we isolate these famous scenes, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery. Consider the actual scale of penicillin’s achievement in 1941: five human subjects and two deaths. Thirteen years after one of the most famous discoveries in science history, penicillin had accomplished practically nothing.

Note: I agree with this with every fibre in my soul. I thought I agreed with everything they had said before this, but I realise now that this resonates even more with me.

Page 721

Tinkering, embodiment, scaling: these are examples of what Mokyr calls microinventions, or the incremental improvements needed to turn a new idea into a significant product. These micro-inventions are often more important than the original breakthrough. For example, it’s broadly understood that Thomas Edison “invented” the incandescent lightbulb in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, lab in 1879. But what exactly did he invent? Certainly not electric power. In 1800, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta reportedly built the first battery with an electric current.18 Not electric light, either. In 1809, Humphry Davy built the first practical “arc lamp” that sent a span of sparks across two rods.19 Edison didn’t even invent lightbulbs. In 1841, the English inventor Frederick de Moleyns was granted the first patent for a charcoal-powered incandescent lamp.20 So, what did Edison actually do? In his chambers, he painstakingly burned hundreds of materials inside a glass vacuum until he settled on a carbonized bamboo to serve as an efficient lightbulb filament. Understanding that electric light required the steady delivery of electricity, Edison also built a system of generators to make power, wires to carry it, sockets and switches to turn it on and off, and meters to measure usage and allow for the billing of customers. Edison did not make electric light possible. But his microinventions did something even more important. Through exhaustive tinkering, embodying, and scaling, he made electric light useful.

Note: Probably the best defence of Edison.

Page 787

There is an idea in manufacturing history known as Wright’s law, which says that some things get cheaper as we learn to build more.35 The theory is named after Theodore Wright, an American aeronautical engineer who served as vice chairman of NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.36 In the 1930s, Wright recognized that the cost of building airplanes had declined with an eerie consistency since World War I: for every quadrupling of total aircraft production, unit costs consistently fell by about one-third. In 1936, Wright proposed that some products enjoy a kind of virtuous cycle of building and learning. Wright’s law runs counter to the eureka myth. It says that innovation is not a two-stage process, where a loner genius conceives of a brilliant idea and then a bunch of thoughtless brutes manufacture it. Innovation is enmeshed in the act of making. Wright’s law is the story of penicillin, whose costs declined as the government learned to cook larger batches of the medicine. It is the story of the Model T automobile, which became more affordable as Ford built larger and larger factories. It is also the story of the computer chip. In the 1960s, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, wrote that the number of transistors on a chip might double every two years.37 His prediction became prophecy. Fifty years later, transistor costs declined by a factor of one billion.38

Page 827

For the past few decades, the eureka myth has walked hand in hand with another attractive fable: that the US government is helpless as an investor in new technologies. One useful summary of this view came from a 2012 Economist essay, which claimed “governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online [and] turn them into products.” This dual image—the state, as a lazy slowpoke, versus the market, as the self-sufficient45 dynamo of innovation—bears little resemblance to history. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato pointed out in The Entrepreneurial State, it is strange that we still debate whether the government ought to pick winners when it is obvious that we live in a world that has amply “picked” for us.46 When you use an iPhone, you are playing with a technology that bundles silicon chips, the internet, GPS, voice-recognition software, and multi-touch technology, which were in part funded by the Defense Department, NIH, the National Science Foundation, and other government entities.47 If you heat and cool your home with power drawn from natural gas, you’re tapping into an energy revolution that began with federal research into drilling shale formations. If you own a home in the suburbs, you drive down state-funded roads with federally subsidized mortgages. We live in a ripely picked world.

Page 840

The smartest question, then, is not if the government should intervene in markets, but how to do so. Nearly one hundred years ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes offered an elegant answer in his 1926 book 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,” he wrote. If technological progress requires money or resources that are beyond the scope of any one company, and government does nothing, progress slows down. This is exactly what we saw after 1980 in the solar industry. As the private sector lacked the resources to scale solar production, Washington slashed its support, and the industry went cold. The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible. No private company could orchestrate the national production of penicillin in World War II, so OSRD did it. No private companies were close to putting a man on the moon in the 1960s, so NASA did it.48

Page 923

Americans love to take credit for their accomplishments. So one might expect that Warp Speed would receive universal adulation today. Quite the opposite, however: Warp Speed has been practically abandoned by both parties. In January 2021, the incoming White House announced it would rename the program.66 Rather than officially rename it, they basically stopped talking about it. Democrats rarely credit or mention Operation Warp Speed, perhaps because they’re reluctant to be caught lavishing praise on anything that bears the fingerprints of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Republicans—including Trump himself—rarely celebrate the vaccines, because much of the party is populated by anti-vax conservatives who refused to take the shot and came up with wild conspiracy theories to discredit its effectiveness. When Trump won reelection in 2024, he named Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps the nation’s most famous vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Operation Warp Speed is the oddest political orphan. A program named after Star Trek has disappeared into its own kind of black hole. A policy that stimulated the economy more than the Apollo program, and which may have saved more lives than the Manhattan Project, has almost no loud champions in politics. Even its scarce champions seem intent on taking the wrong lessons from its success. In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, the University of Chicago professor Casey B. Mulligan, who had served as chief economist for the Trump White House, claimed that “the urgent lesson” from Operation Warp Speed was that “too much government hinders private innovation.”67 But OWS increased government spending by billions of dollars. With an urgency typically reserved for war, the federal government directed the development of vaccines from their testing to the final transport. It’s odd to claim that a program that expanded government powers succeeded by proving that one should never expand government powers. The right lesson from World War II and Warp Speed is that the state is no enemy of invention or innovation. In fact, the government can accelerate both. In the 1940s, the Office of Scientific and Research Development mapped out the chemistry and production challenges for penicillin and turned an obstacle course into a glide path. In 2020, the US government similarly identified the bottlenecks to rapid vaccine development and removed them. In both cases, the government served as a chief national problem solver, molding its policies to fit the moment. It is a vision of a new kind of entrepreneurial state. It is the government as a bottleneck detective.

Page 012

Cement poses a unique challenge to decarbonization. Cleaning up electricity is conceptually simple: it’s possible to power an electric car battery with wind, or to run air-conditioning with electricity from solar energy. But the cement-manufacturing process is different. Making cement requires converting limestone (calcium carbonate) into quicklime (calcium oxide) by heating it to about 1500° F. This is a double whammy for carbon dioxide emissions. Not only does that level of heat often require burning fossil fuels like coal, but also the chemical reaction automatically produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. To make traditional cement without releasing an enormous amount of carbon dioxide simply isn’t possible. As billions of people transition to urban living in the coming decades, demand for cement will only grow. The problem cannot be simply wished away. It’s not realistic to demand that the entire planet stop building things. The only truly global solution is invention.

Note: He managed to summarise the Vaclav Smil book in two paragraphs.

Page 050

The biggest tech firms, like Microsoft and Alphabet, have pledged to run their data centers on low-carbon energy. But these promises are smashing up against America’s inability to build clean energy fast enough. So tech companies are hunting for electricity in surprising places. In March 2024, Amazon agreed to buy energy from the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to power its data centers. In September, Microsoft made a deal to buy the entire electricity output of the last working reactor of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979. Buying power from existing power plants is a short-term stopgap. But it’s not a long-term solution. New nuclear power plants can take years, even decades, to complete.

Note: I told Gurminder at work about this and he invested in a nuclear etf that went up. He thought I’m a genius but I really am not.

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When we asked Paul Mango to name the single most important part of Operation Warp Speed, he said it was focus. “On the Warp Speed team, you could have asked anyone what the project’s goal was, from the generals and leaders, down to the lowest-ranking officials, and they would all give the same answer: deliver at least one safe and effective vaccine, manufactured at scale, before the end of the year,” he said. “Every decision we made was based on those constraints.”86 The health crisis served as a focusing mechanism— a way of taking the tangles of competing priorities and rightening them into a straight thread.

Note: Thank god they didn’t add affordable housing or child care facilities or contracting with marginalised groups as goals. There’s no saying a Democratic administration wouldn’t have done that.

Page 108

The moon race is remembered today as a necessary and broadly popular response to the Soviet threat. But one of the most misunderstood aspects of the space race is that the Apollo program survived because of political persistence, not because of its popularity. In its brief history, the moon mission polled poorly. A 1965 Gallup survey found that “only 39 percent of Americans thought that the US should do everything possible, regardless of cost, to be the first nation on the moon.”87 A majority of Americans consistently told pollsters that the Apollo missions weren’t worth the cost, with up to 60 percent saying the government was spending too much on space.88 At one point, President John F. Kennedy—who famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”—told NASA chief James Webb, “I’m not that interested in space.”89 A majority of Americans supported the lunar missions only once in the 1960s: in a poll taken just after Neil Armstrong’s televised landing.

Note: This is an example of real political leadership. Pushing an unpopular thing because you know it’s necessary.

When people talk about direct democracy I’m going to respond - if the apollo program had been put to a referendum at any point before November 1969, it would have been shut down by a landslide.

Page 209

The politics of scarcity can be seductive. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. In the 2024 election, JD Vance spoke often of the inadequacy of housing supply, which he wielded as a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” he said in the vice presidential debate.8 Donald Trump sounded the same themes. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.9 Right-wing populism seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. Scarcity is its handmaiden. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy’s failed promises. 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.”10

Note: As long as there is scarcity, we will have to blame some minority or the other.

Page 262

With the CHIPS and Science Act, he announced America’s intention to invest billions of dollars in scientific discovery and invention—and tens of billions more to build advanced computer chips within our borders.19 With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US passed the largest clean energy bill in its history, with record investments in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind manufacturing, and next-generation climate technology, such as carbon-removal plants.20 The core of this agenda—subsidies for computer chips and clean energy, historic investments in infrastructure—used the spur of China to get America building and manufacturing at home again. As in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s, external threats and internal crises are converging and making possible a new kind of politics.

Note: All reverses within months. He’s not just removed the funding, he’s actively stopping viable wind plants for no reason.

Page 293

A difficulty that Biden and Harris had in trying to run on their record in 2024 was that few communities were yet seeing benefit from all this construction their policies were meant to spark. The infrastructure bill, for instance, included $7.5 billion to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations; by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running.

Note: 500k promised, 7 delivered. In 2 years. The most stinging rebuke of left wing politics. Meanwhile everyone in the left wing coalition says “mission accomplished” as soon as the money is allocated.

Page 308

Comparatively, abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged that capitalism was superior to its predecessor, feudalism, at producing goods and wealth. “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together,” they wrote.23 They did not want to end this revolution in production. They wanted to accelerate it. Just as feudalism blocked production that only capitalism could unleash, so did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might unleash. Core to this analysis of the economy was an idea that has come to be called the “fettering of production.”24 Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless fettering serves the rich few at the expense of the poorer many. Marx’s aim was not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance: to unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine. There is much he got wrong, but one need not be a communist to see the wisdom in this analysis.

Note: The nicest take on Marx I’ve seen. I wonder what he would have thought if he had written several decades later, seeing creative destruction wrought by the innovators dilemma. I think he kinda assumed that the dominant capitalist would also invent and harness new technologies.

Page 342

In the 1960s and ’70s, environmentalism wasn’t just a legislative sea change, a legal revolution, or a cultural phenomenon. It was all of them at once. Americans developed new ideas about their relationship to land and their stewardship of nature. New ideas gave way to new laws, new arguments, and new customs. People working at all levels of society, inside and outside government, brought those ideas into their labors. The environmentalist movement bequeathed both correction and overcorrection, but it transformed the country for decades— it is transforming the country even now—because it touched something weightier than the legislator’s pen. More than a law, it was a lens. A US senator could look through it and see the bills that needed to be written. A judge could look through it and see new decisions that needed to be made. A family could look through it and see that they were wasting too much and recycling too little. A heady college student could look through it and see a cause. A lens is what we have sought to offer here. What keeps an apartment building from being built in San Jose is not what keeps a new transmission line from being built in Oklahoma. What keeps the IRS from successfully updating its software is not what has kept a high-speed rail system from being completed in California. What keeps an ambitious young scientist from proposing his best ideas is not what keeps us from discovering and scaling new ways to make cement. There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.

Page 389

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. But if you believe in government, you must make it work. To make it work, you must be clear-eyed about when it fails and why it fails.

Note: This right here. This is the entire book, distilled.

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