Abundance

I wrote a while back about how to pay for the government we want. That raises the question: What kind of government do we want?

Well, I want a government that does important stuff well, and quickly.

America responded to the Great Depression by putting the unemployed to work on public projects via the Civilian Conservation Corps. They built bridges, roads, dams, parks and more. We mobilized during World War II to create huge manufacturing capacity and do practical research in radio, electronics and nuclear physics. In the decades following the war, we built a nationwide network of highways that connected the country and eased trade and travel.

America used to get things done.

Mark Dunkelman and Jen Pahlka have written books about why that's not true anymore. (Jen's blog is also good!) Progressives both, they point their fingers at progressives. Rules and regulations meant to protect the interests of the underserved and to push the government toward fairness have accreted over time to slow projects down and to aim them toward irrelevance and failure.

I've just finished Abundance, a new book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that expands on that story in really useful ways. They repeat some of the arguments that Jen and Mark make. Regulation meant to protect the environment, for example, has been weaponized and co-opted by homeowners to prevent new housing from getting built, driving their home prices up and enriching those who already own at the expense of new buyers.

Beyond tales of regulatory abuse, though, Klein and Thompson make a fundamental point. We can use technology today to create economies of abundance instead of scarcity. Electricity from solar power, for example, is already incredibly cheap. Regulation makes large solar farms hard to site and build. Revising and removing those regulations could give us vastly more power at much lower prices, allowing us to build more factories and more housing, to create desalination plants to make fresh water available in places where it's not, and more.

It's not that we should eliminate all regulations or environmental protections. But we can and must think about the critical problems that society must solve right now. Climate change is real and already doing enormous damage. Homelessness is a crisis in many cities across the US. China, Japan, Europe have wonderful high-speed rail networks that make travel safe and convenient at low cost, while we still rely on automobiles. Life expectancy in America is actually falling despite our spending more per capita on health care than any other nation. And so on.

In the past, our country would take on problems like that by envisioning the future we wanted and then making it happen. We need that attitude. We need that excellence in planning and building. We need especially to be willing to dismantle and adapt the systems we built a half-century ago for the citizens and challenges of that time. We need new protections that take into account our current goals and the world we live in today.

That's not just the government I want. It's the government we need. These are certainly the messages I need to hear from politicians vying for office – not lists of people to fear and hate, but proposals for a future we can build together that will benefit all Americans and the rest of the world.

I loved Abundance and recommend it highly. Its message can unify across party lines. I believe that it's a strategy that can restore faith in government. Success on projects like these can heal the rifts that our economics of scarcity have created over decades.