Abundance

“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.”

Klein and Thompson explain how both Republicans and liberals fall into the traps of supply-side economics. While Republicans seek to allow the market to operate on its own, liberals toss money at it instead of enacting systemic change.

“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.”

Klein and Thompson advocate for growth, but they are cautious in explaining what type of growth can bring about a brighter future. Change in the economy is necessary to create abundance, as an economy rooted in green energy and affordable housing is a just one.

“Government can be either the problem or the solution, and it is often both.”

Klein and Thompson add nuance to their understanding of the government. They do not lay all the laurels nor all the blame at the feet of the government. Instead, they take a bifurcated lens to their understanding of the government’s role in creating a greener economy.

“Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. Our sympathies there lie with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle. What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.”

Klein and Thompson outline their intentions in their creation of Abundance. They seek to create a vision of an abundant future, not decide whether looking to the past or the present is better. Abundance is a vision of a future, not an understanding of times gone by. This passage develops The Role of Government in Fostering a Culture of Abundance.

“Ideas, and the technologies and companies and products they power, draw the outer borders of growth. 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.”

Klein and Thompson investigate the importance of cities in creating abundance. Cities are the heart of innovation, as Chapter 1 illustrates, which Klein and Thompson place in contrast to the idealized history of the “frontier.”

“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.”

Even as technology allows businesses to spread over vast areas, cities remain crucial to innovation. Klein and Thompson end one section of Chapter 1 with these sentences, foreshadowing their introduction of the cost-of-living crisis in the following sections.

“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 it is not surprising that choices to limit housing led to mass homelessness. And it is not even surprising that cities often choose to limit the forms of housing, or even the amount of housing, that can be built nearby. After all, if you already own a home, scarcity makes the asset you own all the more valuable.”

Klein and Thompson trace the genesis of the current homelessness crisis by tying together policy and scarcity. Policy decisions led to the limitation of housing, causing a scarcity in an essential market, which resulted in too few houses for the population of a given area. This demonstrates The Impact of Regulatory Environments on Innovation and Progress.

“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. There is some appeal to this.”

Klein and Thompson note the appeal of degrowth, as the reduction of harmful industries sounds like a perfect plan to solve the climate crisis. However, the use of the term “some” foreshadows their introduction of the political difficulties of degrowth.

“It is possible to power a modern economy with clean energy. It is possible to develop an economy with clean energy. And it will be possible to go beyond where any economy is today with clean energy.”

Klein and Thompson again utilize repetition to describe the connection between the economy and green energy, illustrating the importance of green energy development to Klein and Thompson’s vision of an abundant future. Green energy is a key piece of their vision of abundance.

“When richer residents want something stopped, they know how to organize—and they often already have the organizations, to say nothing of the lobbyists and access, needed to stop it.”

Communal lobbying can be a force for good, but Klein and Thompson illustrate the potential downfalls of a negotiation-based society. The wealthy have access to more resources that they can utilize to keep affordable housing out of their communities.

“Sometimes that requires more government. Sometimes it requires less government. But it always requires a focus on what the state is trying to achieve and what is in its way. In the absence of that focus, absurdity reigns.”

Klein and Thompson explain that the size of the government is not the determining factor in the efficacy of governmental action. Focus is more important, and the government needs to narrow its legislative goals to achieve more.

“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.”

Klein and Thompson compare the American view of bureaucracy to the view of bureaucracy elsewhere, illustrating how the American view of the work of government is portrayed in a detrimental light. Klein and Thompson challenge this belief, illustrating that the private sector cannot implement new inventions alone.

“Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers. That may have made sense in a past era, but given the problems we face now, it is a mistake.”

Klein and Thompson advocate for trust in the government instead of solely in regulatory and judicial bodies. Liberals want outcomes from the government but refuse to empower the government to create those outcomes. This is a dichotomy Klein and Thompson rally against and use to develop the impact of regulatory environments on innovation and progress.

“At the highest levels, American science has become biased against the very thing that drives its progress: the art of taking bold risks.”

Klein and Thompson’s discussion of the invention of mRNA illustrates an issue in the scientific community of the US. Innovation is driven by risks, and the regulatory bodies like the NIH now find risk, ironically, too risky. This demonstrates the impact of regulatory environments on innovation and progress.

“But it doesn’t solve what we’ve called the Karikó Problem. In fact, in the same way that throwing housing vouchers into a market with insufficient supply raises home prices, throwing more money into a flawed science system might exacerbate its problems.”

Klein and Thompson utilize the example of Karikó to blend the issues facing the housing crisis and the scientific community. Like the housing crisis cannot be solved with difficult-to-access public funds, the science system cannot be solved with more money. Instead, it needs a serious upheaval. This highlights The Intersection of Policy and Technology in Shaping the Future.

“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.”

Klein and Thompson utilize evocative language to describe the ideas that lead to innovation. They employ a metaphor that likens nascent ideas to newborns, which emphasizes that, like all children, “brilliant ideas” are dependent on care and protection to develop. This language further cements the necessity of process in scientific development, the essential nurturing to allow the ideas to grow.

“Our institutions shape the way we think, and new institutions can make new kinds of thinking possible. For decades, too many university researchers applying for NIH funding have constrained their own curiosity. The perceived biases of the NIH became their own biases.”

Klein and Thompson explain how the NIH shapes scientific development in the US. Because of the stringent system that scientists must use to apply for grants, scientists are burying their curiosities and their passions, leading to less development of innovative technology like mRNA therapies. This highlights the impact of regulatory environments on innovation and progress.

“But for too long, America fell for the eureka myth and its attending faith in markets alone to solve the problem of scaling new technology. Progress is now, as it has always been, about the combination of invention and implementation.”

Klein and Thompson directly connect the ideas of invention and implementation, further illustrating the intersection of policy and technology in shaping the future. Technological invention is important, but it is more important when coupled with policy implementation.

“The most important lesson of AMCs is that they make government a more active agent of invention, by identifying bottlenecks in public demand and filling them.”

The idea of the government as a bottleneck detective is important throughout Chapter 5, and Klein and Thompson introduce how the government can utilize pull funding to guide scientists and companies into creating necessary technology. Where the market will not provide, the government must step in.

“If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism—both galvanizing action and rewarding success—we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis.”

Thompson’s optimism appears at the end of Chapter 5, as he and Klein look at the positive side of moments of catastrophe being motivators for progress. People can decide what their definition of a crisis is and utilize it to bring about an abundant future.

“We have chosen to create a system that rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking and risk in scientific research. We have chosen to embrace a political economy that encourages offshoring the development of American inventions that are key to our national security and flourishing. None of this was inevitable. These policies are the fruits of human decisions. They are artifacts of our ripely picked world.”

The idea of choice is essential in these sentences. Klein and Thompson highlight how the scarcity-oriented society is the result of communal choices to adhere to the status quo, a status quo severely lacking in domestic innovation. The authors refer to the policies as “fruits of human decisions” and “artifacts of our ripely picked world” to emphasize that these choices have been cultivated over time, ripening into the current flawed system. This metaphor demonstrates both the deliberate nature of these decisions and the necessity for reevaluation and change.

“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 concept of political orders is only introduced in the conclusion, but it is important to the understanding of Klein and Thompson’s claims about abundance. The US is at the precipice of huge change, as one era ends and an unknown new one looms. Klein and Thompson hope the scales tilt in the favor of an abundant future.

“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 lush language that Klein and Thompson utilize to describe the similarities between the housing crisis, the climate change crisis, and the state of American science adds lyricism to the text. The use of the specific terms “rhyme” and “echo” also illustrates that while these issues have similarities, they are not the same; the key to creating abundance in the context of each issue must be unique.