Abundance Ezra Klein 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.

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?

crisis is a focusing mechanism. But leaders define what counts as a crisis. And leaders are the ones who choose to focus.

energy abundance might be the single most important technological bottleneck of our time.

progress is more about implementation than it is about invention.

We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.

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.

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.

Abundance, as we define it, is a state. It is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had.

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water? Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later. Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be. We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening

Other times, our crises reflect the overhang of the past into the present. One generation’s solutions can become the next generation’s problems. After World War II, an explosion of housing and infrastructure enriched the country. But without regulations for clean air and water, the era’s builders despoiled the environment. In response, the US passed a slew of environmental regulations. But these well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

Sometimes these blockages reflect differences of beliefs or interests. A thousand square acres of solar panels can be a godsend to the city they power and a blight to the community they abut.

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.

This tracks the broader difference between the two cities: in Houston, the median home costs a bit over $300,000 rather than a bit over $1.7 million in San Francisco.13 Houston is not free of affordability problems. But it is not facing the crises of homelessness and housing affordability seen in the superstar cities of many blue states.

The reality of housing development doesn’t track along such neat ideological lines. Kuttner says that eliminating zoning restrictions and making it easier to build multifamily housing would make only a modest difference in our problems. He does not provide any evidence for this claim, but there is evidence against it. Houston has no zoning rules at all, though it does have some land use regulations.10 As a result, it is dramatically easier to build in Houston than to build in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or Boston. In 2023, the San Francisco metro area issued about 7,500 new housing permits. The Boston metro area issued 10,500. New York City, Newark, and Jersey City—together—issued slightly fewer than 40,000. The Houston metro area issued almost 70,000.11 This divergence is decades old, and its consequences are clear. Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city. Officials estimate that it costs $17,000 to $19,000 to house a homeless resident of Houston, with about $12,000 of that going to housing and the rest to wraparound services.12 In San Francisco, the cost is between $40,000 and $47,000 annually, with about $35,000 going to housing costs alone.

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.

Nicholas Bagley’s argument that liberalism has become obsessed with procedure rather than with outcomes, that it seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will. Homelessness in Los Angeles is a catastrophe. The public is furious at the sluggish, ineffective response. And the lead agency on homelessness is spending its time filling out audit forms and making sure each dollar is spent in strict accordance with the specific demands of funders.

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

The point is not that cities wanted the homelessness crises they now face. They didn’t. Their hope was that people who couldn’t afford the kind of housing they allowed would leave. Many did exactly that, of course. But some had nowhere else to go. Others needed to stay near their families or jobs. And these policies did not generate crisis in a single year, or even a single decade. It took time before choices to limit housing led to mass homelessness.

But how do you protect the value of that asset? You can insure a home against fire, but you can’t insure it against rising crime rates or local schools slipping in quality or a public housing complex being built down the block. To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you.

If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home. But the cause of homelessness isn't the poverty or the addiction or the unemployment. All those conditions are far more prevalent in, say, West Virginia than in California, and yet California has six times the per capita homelessness of West Virginia.

In their book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern test these and other explanations and find them worse than lacking. When we tell the stories of the homeless, we focus on the individual events that pockmarked a life path: the loss of the job, the workplace injury, the onset of schizophrenia, the first glow of an opioid high. But what Colburn and Aldern wanted to understand is why homelessness varies so much across cities and regions. If a driver of homelessness doesn’t predict these differences, then it is probably not a cause of mass homelessness. It might explain why an individual became homeless in a particular place, but it cannot explain why one place has a homelessness crisis and another does not.

Burned by regulations and inattention to cost-effective production, basic elevators cost four times more in New York City than in Switzerland.

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.

it’s not just that ideas are getting harder to find. The problem is also that new ideas are getting harder to use.7

The American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less.

If the DARPA model holds a lesson, it is that the agency works because it empowers program managers to pursue their most radical ideas with an open-ended budget and vast connections throughout science and industry.

Unlike traditional scientists, these program managers do not face peer review. They can make big counterintuitive bets, are not punished for failure,

we are doomed to sleepwalk through history until a catastrophe jolts us into action.

The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process. And this is not just the view of a few law professors.

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.

The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax.

It is more interesting to ask, as we will, why it is often easier to build renewable energy in red states than in blue states despite Republican opposition to the cause of climate change.

In this era of rising right-wing populism, there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.

Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too.

Democrats made clear that they preferred the risks of a hot economy, like inflation, to the threat of mass joblessness.

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.

The land that matters most is the land that aids in the fiery creation of the new. That land is in the heart of our cities, not at the edge of our settlements.

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are "symbolically" conservative but "operationally" liberal. Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals...This dynamic is so well known, so easy to see, that we miss how often it gets reality backward. In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

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

What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. 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?

The developer has to hopscotch from one funding source to another to another," Tong said. "So you start by saying we'll serve low-income families at this development. But the funding falls through. So you put in veterans' units. Or try to house domestic violence survivors in here. There's this constant restructuring of the project as the funding sources come and go.

But so too is building a lot of affordable housing quickly and cheaply. Los Angeles is failing, and failing badly, at doing that. Given that failure, does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for may of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway? To pose the question sounds callous. But to refuse to pose the question, given the need for more housing, is cruel.

It is tempting to say that, with these essentials [current modern medicine] 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.

Democrats would defend the government against these salvos, but they didn't seem to notice what the defenses implied. If Republicans were proposing more paperwork and process to make the government less effective, wasn't it likely that less paperwork and process would make government more effective? Or as Bagley asked, "If new administrative procedures can be used to advance a libertarian agenda, might not relaxing existing administrative constraints advance progressive ones?

To the extent that degrowth has a specific climate plan, it is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion.

About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that, three-quarters is given over to raising livestock or growing feed for livestock. It is difficult to find an environmental challenge that is not tied up in raising animals for our consumption.

It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds. Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?

As societies become economically and technologically rich, they clean their air and water. Air pollution is not a problem of using too much energy or pursuing too much growth. It is a problem of using dirty energy because you do not have the money or the technology to grow another way.

For most of human history there was no other choice. That is why nearly every society that has become rich since the industrial revolution has seen air pollution build to crisis levels. Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today.14 “Environmental action is often framed as at odds with the economy,” writes Hannah Ritchie in Not the End of the World. “It’s either climate action or economic growth. Pollution versus the market. This is just wrong.

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

remote and hybrid work have stabilized at a much higher level than before COVID, it is notable that in August 2023, the videoconferencing company Zoom announced that they were demanding employees be in the office at least a few days each week. Eric Yuan, Zoom’s CEO, explained that it was too hard to build trust without nearness. “Trust is a foundation for everything. Without trust, we will be slow.”20

And so, Olson suggests, “if organizations and collusions for collective action usually emerge only in favorable circumstances and develop strength over time, a stable society will see more organization for collective action as time passes.”60 The more organized groups you have, Olson says, the more fights over distribution you’ll have, the more lobbying you’ll have, the more complex regulations you’ll have, the more bargaining you’ll get between groups, and the harder it will be to get complex projects done. Affluent, stable societies have more negotiations. And that means they have more negotiators. There’s great good in that. It means people’s concerns can be voiced, their needs can be met, their ideas can be integrated, their insights can be shared. It also means that it becomes difficult to get much of anything done. This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.

Your micro-earpiece pings: a voice text from a friend and his family, on their way to the airport for another weekend vacation. Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared. Your friends are flying from New York to London. The trip will take them just over two hours. Modern jetliners now routinely reach Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air.

One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack.

Markets will, we hope, proffer some of these advances. But not nearly enough of them. The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can. The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must.

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.

The way to think about homelessness, they write, is to imagine a game of musical chairs. With ten chairs and ten people, everyone will find a chair when the music stops. That will be true even if one of the players is on crutches. With nine chairs, someone will inevitably be left out. That’s when individual life circumstances begin to predict homelessness. If you live in a city with too few homes, poverty and drug abuse and unemployment and mental illness make it likelier that you will be among those who end up without a home.

Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city. Officials estimate that it costs $17,000 to $19,000 to house a homeless resident of Houston, with about $12,000 of that going to housing and the rest to wraparound services.12 In San Francisco, the cost is between $40,000 and $47,000 annually, with about $35,000 going to housing costs alone.

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.

(When do Angelenos want affordable housing? Now! Where do they want it? Not here!)

Throughout these years of failure and disappointment, Karikó stayed motivated. She loved science: the painstaking discovery of the new, the long and winding road out of ignorance. On her wall hung a Leonardo da Vinci quote that offered inspiration during the dark years when the rejections piled one on top of another: Experiments never err, only your expectations do.7 “I was a scientist through and through,” she writes in her memoir. “I wanted more than anything else to understand how the world works.”8

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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.

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

(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.)

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.

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.

Fleming later claimed that the spore of mold blew into his lab through an unlocked window. If so, it was carried by a heavenly breeze. For millennia, humankind fought bacteria in war after war within our bodies and died by the millions at the hands of the unseen enemy.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, decimated the solar revolution in America. Driven by a conservative ideology that favored free markets and limited government intervention, Reagan dismantled much of the solar infrastructure built up over the previous decade.

After World War II, the American approach to innovation has been to throw money at the initial eureka moment, sporadically support its development, and then watch idly as the technological frontier moves to other countries.

in 1986, Reagan removed the solar hot-water panels installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter.

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.

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.

Notably, Warp Speed didn’t force any company to make vaccines. Instead, firms were lured with up-front subsidies and promises of future payouts.

Whereas America whiplashed between “boom and bust cycles” in solar policy that have “surely slowed down its progress,” Nemet wrote that China’s consistent policy has allowed its firms to build more, faster, and cheaper.34

It is richer cities with low overall poverty rates that see more homelessness. A similar story emerges for unemployment: homelessness is low where unemployment is high and high where unemployment is low.

what does explain homelessness? The availability and cost of housing.

If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or, more accurately, the result of many, many, many small policy choices.

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.

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.

It’s odd to claim that a program that expanded government powers succeeded by proving that one should never expand government powers.

America in the 1950s and ’60s was paradoxically the richest superpower in world history and functioned as a kind of mass-industrial conspiracy to kill its own residents.

It was a move reminiscent of blue states creating so many rules around permitting and environmental regulations that it became impossible to build necessary housing and energy. The instinct to make science democratically responsible has gunked up the scientific process.

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.

In California broadly, and San Francisco specifically, dozens of pro-housing bills have not led to the construction of more homes, in part because those bills are layered with additional requirements and standards that builders must meet in order to take advantage of the newly streamlined processes. For developers we spoke to, the added costs of compliance weren’t worth it, so the legislation hadn’t led them to build any new homes at all, much less build them faster.

As a share of the economy, government-funded R&D has declined in the last sixty years,” the economist Heidi Williams said.47 If scientific spending is fundamental to economic growth, this suggests that the US has hugely underinvested in basic research.

Innovation can make impossible problems possible to solve, and policy can make impossible technologies possible to create. The fundamental link between the two is not at the core of the Democratic or the Republican agenda. Instead, we are stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.

we have gotten worse at translating our inventions into domestic industries.

The lesson, which the US seems to have forgotten in the last few decades, is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress.

What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.

Zoning regulations in liberal states and cities that restrict housing supply have increased costs far more than the recent influx of immigrants.

When we think of humanity’s land footprint, we mostly think of buildings and roadways. But only 2 or 3 percent of habitable land is taken up by cities. We do not primarily use land to live on. We primarily use land to feed ourselves. About half of all habitable land is used for agriculture.

is an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity’s promise of dominion over nature. The problem is not simply greenhouse gas emissions or microplastics. It is Cartesian dualism and American-style capitalism and everything these systems of thought and practice have taught us to value and prize and want.

We are attached to a story of American decline that is centered around ideological disagreement. That makes it easy to miss pathologies rooted in ideological collusion. Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government. An abundance of consumer goods distracted us from a scarcity of homes and energy and infrastructure and scientific breakthroughs. A counterforce is emerging, but it is young yet.

Today's politics are suffused with cynicism and pessimism about government because a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable. in 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

We are in a period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. The crack up was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in deregulated markets. The climate crisis revealed how much the profit motive missed. The aftermath of normalizing trade with China proved that the prophets of free trade understood neither China nor America. Throughout the 2010s, a slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans' trust in government, or what was left of it. And between 2021 and 2024, inflation brought national attention to our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

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.