Abundance

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. After leaving a petri dish open to the air, Fleming found a strange substance had blown onto the dish and killed most of the bacteria he was studying. He identified the substance as penicillium, from which he was able to produce penicillin. This was a crucial discovery, as countless lives were lost to bacterial infections in the early-mid 20th century. In 1939, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming left off and sought to see if penicillin could kill bacteria in animals like it did in Fleming’s petri dish. It seemed to work, as the mice infected with bacteria survived more often when treated with penicillin. However, when Florey and Chain experimented with human subjects in 1941, treating five patients with penicillin, two of them died. Klein and Thompson pause to illustrate the importance of recognizing more than the lightning-rod eureka moments of science. The discovery of penicillin in 1923 was groundbreaking, but by 1941, two people were dead, and penicillin had accomplished nearly nothing.

The Eureka Myth

The birth of new and exciting ideas should be celebrated, but Klein and Thompson assert that “progress is more about implementation than invention” (171). The world does not always change immediately after a big discovery. The US has thrown billions of dollars at the scientific industry, but the industry is bogged down by regulations and application processes, and it has become difficult to translate inventions into domestic industries. Ideas are not just harder to find; they are harder to use.

Klein and Thompson state that this difficulty stems from the US being too focused on the eureka moments of science instead of the steps that follow. For example, they highlight US-led innovation in the initial creation of elevators, solar cells, and nuclear reactors. Now, the US lags behind European and Asian countries in deploying and continuing to develop these technologies. Politics must take technology more seriously, as the current playbook is “invent but don’t implement” (173). To rewrite the playbook, Klein and Thompson trace the story of penicillin. Florey and Chain struggled with implementing their penicillin as an antimicrobial medicine. England did not have the resources during World War II to help Florey and Chain, so they took their research to the US and the Committee on Medical Research (CMR). CMR, along with OSRD, worked to produce penicillin safely en masse. Penicillin saved countless lives around the world.

Building What We Invent

The story of penicillin illustrates the importance of implementation to the pace of progress. Tinkering, or microinventions, can be even more important than the eureka moment of invention. Klein and Thompson offer the example of Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb. Edison was not the one to invent electricity, electric light, or even lightbulbs. Edison instead made electric light useful by channeling it into a lightbulb capable of utilizing electric light. His mircoinventions and his tinkering with light and lightbulbs allowed for better implementation of electric light.

Production at scale is necessary for making technology useful, but the US has not taken this seriously, funding invention and not implementation. For example, take solar cells, which were invented in the 1950s by Bell Labs in the US. The US was at the forefront of solar cell development and implementation, utilizing solar cells in satellites and funding further research and development. However, after the election of Ronald Reagan, who prioritized free markets and limited government interventions, the US slowed down research into solar power, leading to Germany and China rapidly overtaking the US in solar technology. China, in particular, can cheaply manufacture solar power technology, as Wright’s Law dictates that some things get cheaper as people learn to build more. Chinese firms learned to build solar technology more efficiently, experimenting and learning what worked, ultimately resulting in cheaper manufacturing costs.

The US has fallen behind in solar cell manufacturing, but all is not lost, as solar is the fastest-growing American energy sector. The US must learn from its past and prioritize both invention and implementation, looking past the eureka myth. The eureka myth goes hand-in-hand with the flawed idea that the American government is helpless when it comes to technological investing. The government, however, has played a role in the development of technology from GPS to the internet, illustrating its role in supporting technological innovation. The government should have a vision for the future and support companies in the cultivation of this vision. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a challenge no individual firm could solve alone. The invention of mRNA therapy alone wasn’t enough; it needed government-backed implementation.

Progress at “Warp Speed”

In the spring of 2020, people worried a COVID vaccine would take a decade to develop. In May 2020, the government announced Operation Warp Speed (OWS) to develop a vaccine in 10 months, not 10 years. The first hurdle was the basic science of making an effective vaccine. OWS lured firms in with upfront subsidies and future payouts. The second hurdle was accelerating the approval and production pipeline. OWS fast-tracked the production process and recruited populations for clinical trials to accelerate FDA approval. The third hurdle was the distribution problem. OWS took a military approach, getting help from the Defense Department in sending vaccines and associated materials to pharmacies. OWS empowered the private sector instead of overpowering it, and the government distributed the vaccines for free, the simplest and most impactful part of OWS.

OWS was a striking success, costing only $40 billion to prevent millions of infections and deaths. However, both political parties abandoned it instead of celebrating it, making it “the oddest political orphan” (188), according to Klein and Thompson. OWS stimulated the economy more than the Apollo program and may have saved more lives than the Manhattan Project, and the lesson to take from OWS is that the government is no stranger to invention and innovation and can accelerate both. In OWS, the government identified the bottlenecks and removed them, functioning as what Klein and Thompson call “a bottleneck detective” (189).

The Bottleneck Detective

The US faces complex challenges in housing, energy, scientific policy, invention, and innovation. These are all disparate industries, and the responses to these issues must be unique. To be a bottleneck detective, Klein and Thompson state, “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” (190). Making progress begins with the question of how each industry actually works and then questioning how to overcome barriers to growth. This can mean removing restrictions that shouldn’t exist. An example is the shortage of primary care doctors in the US. In the early 1980s, a special committee reviewed the state of American medicine and decided the US was on the verge of a huge surplus of doctors. The government then cut funding to medical schools and students. The number of doctors flatlined between 1980 and 2005, leading to an invented scarcity.

To address this, the government must increase funding to residency programs to allow more medical students to become residents, which would increase the size of medical programs and lead to more doctors. Klein and Thompson then explain the difference between push and pull funding. Push funding is offering money upfront, via a subsidy or loan, to push forward innovation. Pull funding is offering money after a company meets some target, which is efficient because it only pays if the technological innovation pans out. This solves the common bottleneck of demand uncertainty. An example of pull funding is an advance market commitment (AMC), or a promise to buy a certain amount of early products to accelerate their invention. AMCs are particularly effective when the world needs new technology that is currently too expensive. AMCs could be utilized to solve certain climate issues, like incentivizing the development of technology for carbon removal from the atmosphere or finding ways to make the creation of cement carbon-neutral. AMCs make the government an active agent of invention by identifying and filling bottlenecks in public demand.

AI may be the most important technology of the 2020s. Klein and Thompson admit that AI has not shaped the economy at the time of the writing of Abundance, but the future of AI is unknown. Regardless of the uncertainty, AI development will require huge amounts of energy. Training AI models demands more energy than any other computer system, wreaking havoc on the American power system. Though corporations like Microsoft and Alphabet pledge to run their AI data centers on low-carbon energy, the US cannot build clean energy fast enough. Tech companies are searching for electricity in surprising places, like buying power from nuclear power plants, which is not a long-term solution, illustrating how the AI revolution increases the need for energy abundance.

Trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure could be built somewhere in the world in the coming decades, but the question is where. If the US fails to add an energy supply, the results could be chaotic or catastrophic. An abundance of cheap and clean energy would provide countless benefits, even without AI. It would reduce household energy costs, allow for energy-intensive futuristic technology, like ocean water desalination for drinking. Energy abundance could be the most important technological bottleneck of the contemporary era. AI and clean energy together have the potential to shape the direction of the 21st century. The US needs a say in directing AI, which means building AI and its energy source in America.

Focus Is a Choice

The most important part of OWS was focus. The project’s goal was to deliver a safe and effective vaccine. The pandemic served as a focusing mechanism. History shows that progress often requires the focusing mechanism of crisis. Penicillin took on World War II, and the mRNA vaccine took on a plague. In American history, people rise to be their best when things are at their worst. Though that may be a depressing idea, the push-pull mechanism of crisis allows people to decide what is a crisis and act. The US government could decide that heart disease is a crisis and take an OWS approach to finding a cure. National priorities are a political choice, and America needs to make a system that rewards outside thinking instead of caution. Breakthroughs can stem from luck, but implementation takes deliberate acts, laws, and policies. The US needs to push past the eureka myth and focus on building what it invents.