Abundance

Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with joules dredged out of coal mines and oil pits.

Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

It’s as if the nonsense of phrenology made it sordid for doctors to treat disorders of the brain.

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.

“If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions,” Biden said. “You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer. That’s the choice.”

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.

To take technology seriously as a force for change is to take it seriously as infused with values and, yes, politics.

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!

We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.

That we preferred the romance of the West to the math of the tenements is no new fact.

New York was once where you went to make your fortune; it is now where you go to spend it.

America lost its primacy in semiconductor innovation because much is learned in the making of things—a theme to which we’ll return.

Those much-mocked Bay Area parties where young AI engineers gather in group houses to ingest psychedelics and contemplate the singularity matter.

In forty years, the American dream went from being a widespread reality to a coin toss.

In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

The community will soon wake to find that it is unrecognizable to itself.

In the same progressive zip codes where homeowners press signs into the soil of their front lawns bearing the message Kindness Is Everything, affordable housing can’t be found—and homelessness is endemic.

Tents line the buildings, feces line the sidewalks, needles crunch underfoot. This is not what anyone trying to preserve the idyllic conditions of California’s central coast wanted. But it is what they got. It is what they made.

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.

What lender in their right mind would hand out thirty-year loans on fixed terms to virtually anybody with a job?

Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all.

The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.

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.

Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

As a lobbyist for the Sierra Club put it, CEQA now covered “anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together.”

Every effort to save some vestige of California’s pristine splendor would be defeated by the unending advance of new hordes of population like a swarm of locusts devouring everything in sight.

Industrial animal agriculture is more than a climate problem. It is a moral stain upon modernity.

It is to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity.

The cost of solar is falling so fast that for much of the day it will be effectively free, in much of the world, by 2030.

The sun burns, so we don’t need to.

“Folks will look back and be blown away by how we used energy today. They’ll say, ‘Wait, you just burned it?’ ”

To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400 MW solar power facilities—each taking up at least 2,000 acres—every week for the next 30 years.

Planners imagined a silver shell whistling along beams of steel, carrying millions of parents, children, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Hollywood actors, and solo travelers through America’s largest state at speeds reaching 220 miles per hour.

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

The project is caught in a strange limbo between political fantasy and physical fact.

We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.

“Everyone has their pet theory. But everyone has a different pet.”

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.

There are a million veto points. There are a lot of mouths at the trough that need to be fed to get anything started or done.

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.

It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.

It had convinced itself that the state’s legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.

When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics.

The environmentalist movement evolved to stop bad people from destroying the world, and so we have perfected the art of saying no.

Either we build faster or we accept catastrophe. There is no third option.

The answer, for liberals, is depressing: It used private money to avoid the pile of rules and regulations that taking government money triggers.

It is damning that you can build affordable housing so much more cheaply and swiftly by forgoing public funds.

Keeping the American health-care state weak has made the American government larger and left Americans poorer.

But the grim absurdity of liberal housing policy comes clearest when you focus on the kind of housing liberals claim to support: affordable housing built by nonprofit developers with the backing of both voters and local government.

Given that failure, does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway?

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.

In the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is an attempt to create a true everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.

But there is some margin at which trying to do more means ultimately achieving less.

California was financing and overseeing a program it did not have the capacity to plan, manage, or even truly understand.

The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on to.

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.

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.

I said turn the machine on and knock the goddam thing over.

When the center lost its state funding, she sold her car for nine hundred British pounds and sewed the cash into her daughter’s teddy bear to elude Hungarian currency-control laws.

Rejected, ignored, and unfunded, her work seemed destined to wither away in that great invisible graveyard of ideas that die a silent death.

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.

If disease is a universe of mysteries, we have scarcely explored one minor solar system of its cosmos.

But they might have never existed if it weren’t for Karikó’s force of will—and the cosmic luck of an extremely well-placed Xerox machine.

It turned out that mRNA offered the perfect key to pick the lock of the virus that caused COVID.

The more low-hanging fruit we pick, the higher in the tree we have to climb to pick fruit, and the more resources we need to do it.

It is absurd to imagine that one person, even as brilliant as Gregor Mendel, could do all this alone in his backyard.

The problem is that too many scientists are all looking at the same few trees.

“But it can’t fail, now, can it? Besides, you’ve sailed to Portugal before, so the Study Section would know you can do it.”

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.

The instinct to make science democratically responsible has gunked up the scientific process.

We have—even if by accident—designed a system that often privileges the game of performing the act of science over the actual practice of science.

Too many projects get funding because they are probable. But science moves forward one improbability at a time.

In a strange way, the problem isn’t that too much science is “doomed to fail,” he said. It’s the opposite. Too much science is, in his words, “doomed to succeed”—fated to duplicate what we know rather than risk failure by reaching into the unknown.

To invent an online network of information, Licklider and Taylor built an offline network of minds.

Their time is colonized by paperwork, and their ambition is pinched by grantsmanship.

The US government is the single largest source of science funding in the world, and yet we know shockingly little about how science actually works.

It would mean creating a layer of the American science system that specializes in self-experimentation.

If so, it was carried by a heavenly breeze.

Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history.

The same accident of contamination which led to the discovery of penicillin very nearly prevented its use.

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.

Some of the dismantling was painfully literal: in 1986, Reagan removed the solar hot-water panels installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter.

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.

The highest purpose of a pro-invention government is to make possible what would otherwise be impossible.

Science is the easy part of making a vaccine. The hard part will be manufacturing this stuff at scale.

Operation Warp Speed is the oddest political orphan. A program named after Star Trek has disappeared into its own kind of black hole.

To be a bottleneck detective is to recognize that wise policy begins with an investigation rather than an ideology that tries to force the same key into a variety of ill-fitting locks.

As opposed to push funding, this is called pull funding. If push funding pays for effort, pull funding pays for success.

If it were a country, cement would be the third-biggest carbon emitter on the planet.

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.

After thousands of years of scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to turn the most elemental functions of nature—the sun’s light, the wind, the heat beneath the earth—into a swarm of electrons that can run our machines and power our lives.

Again and again in American history, we seem to be at our very best when things are at their very worst.

The historian James Phinney Baxter III called penicillin “the blue mold which blew in through Fleming’s window on that happy breeze.”

Eisenhower needed to prove that “he could take better care of his ordinary citizens than the leaders of Soviet communism could provide for theirs.”

One way of understanding the era we’re in is as the messy interregnum between political orders; a molten moment when old institutions are failing, traditional elites are flailing, and the public is casting about for a politics that feels like it is of today rather than of yesterday.

The tendency to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages is not restricted to a basket of deplorables. It’s in all of us.

Under Trump, “infrastructure week” was a meme. Under Biden, it became an ethos.

The bitter irony is that Trump and the Republicans might benefit from legislation Biden and the Democrats passed simply because the government spends and builds so slowly, so the changes Biden promised will now happen on Trump’s watch.

It can be difficult, in a raucous town meeting, to look around and remember who is not there: the mother working two jobs, the young family who couldn’t afford the apartment they so badly wanted to move into.

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.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

That is a measure of our success, but it is also a reminder that both abundance and scarcity are stories we tell ourselves.

When I started writing this book, I was just a husband. When I finished writing this book, I was a dad.

Every day, I wake up wanting to know what she’ll say next. It is my great gift to be in partnership with her. She is my abundance.

In One of the Best Decades the American Economy Has Ever Recorded, Families Were Bled Dry.

The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives.

The Wrong-Apartment Problem: Why a Good Economy Feels So Bad

Life in This Iconic Mid-Century Suburb Shows How California Dreams Are Shrinking.

The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969.

American Scene: The Great Wild Californicated West.

The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us from the Utopia We Deserve.

using ChatGPT requires up to 10x more power than a traditional web search.

“What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?”

Nader’s Raiders Is Their Name, and Whistle-Blowing Is Their Game…

What Happens When the Green New Deal Meets the Old Green Laws?

The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane.’

How California’s Faltering High-Speed Rail Project Was ‘Captured’ by Costly Consultants.

Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments.

“But if Alabama tomorrow mandated mask-wearing, it would do nothing.”

But whether productivity in this all-important sector is flat or declining, the most important thing is that it is not obviously rising.

This is welcome news, but it is not quite right to associate this entire decline with medical breakthroughs.

The fear may be overstated. Several studies have found that increases in H-1B admissions are associated with more patents and higher growth at firms, while the effect on native-born employment is not significantly negative.

The Novelty Paradox & Bias for Normal Science: Evidence from Randomized Medical Grant Proposal Evaluations.

Its mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security, and it does not have a dedicated space division.

The original sample size was eight mice only. See Eric Lax, The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle.

How Much Did Early Transistors Cost? About a Billion Times More Than They Do Now.

Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds

Advance Market Commitments Worked for Vaccines. They Could Work for Carbon Removal, Too.

The Dreams and Dedication Behind Our Leap to the Moon

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered.

The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition.

The 'Californication' of the American economy has meant that even the most essential infrastructure projects are now strangled by a thicket of procedural delays and environmental litigation.

The eureka myth of deployment and implementation suggests that the pace of progress is a choice made in times of crisis.

The index points toward 'everything-bagel liberalism,' a state where the accumulation of well-intentioned regulations becomes a barrier to the very progress they seek to guide.

Homelessness as scarcity problem of, 38–43; cities as American frontier, 21–25; eureka myth and, 171–75.

“everything-bagel liberalism,” 113–17; litigation and bureaucracy problem, 89–94, 205

The Karikó Problem and pace of scientific progress, 141–49, 156

Scarcity as choice, 4–5; homelessness as housing scarcity problem, 38–43; politics of abundance vs., 207–11, 217–22.

The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector

What Happens When the New Green Deal Meets the Old Green Laws?

Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with joules dredged out of coal mines and oil pits.

Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening.

In many blue states, voters exhibit the same split political personality, but in reverse: they are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative.

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.

The cost of solar is falling so fast that for much of the day it will be effectively free, in much of the world, by 2030.

To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400 MW solar power facilities—each taking up at least 2,000 acres—every week for the next 30 years.

It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.

In the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is an attempt to create a true everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape.

I said turn the machine on and knock the goddam thing over.

It turned out that mRNA offered the perfect key to pick the lock of the virus that caused COVID.

Too many projects get funding because they are probable. But science moves forward one improbability at a time.

It would mean creating a layer of the American science system that specializes in self-experimentation.

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.

Operation Warp Speed is the oddest political orphan. A program named after Star Trek has disappeared into its own kind of black hole.

One way of understanding the era we’re in is as the messy interregnum between political orders; a molten moment when old institutions are failing, traditional elites are flailing, and the public is casting about for a politics that feels like it is of today rather than of yesterday.