A while ago I began wondering where all the optimistic leftwing voices went. The rest of the camps, I thought, were well represented:

	Left	Right
Optimistic	??	"To the moon!!!"
Pessimistic	Climate doomers de-growthers	Automation and fear of job loss

Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson attempt to define the left-optimistic camp. Abundance is a rallying cry which provides a positive vision of what the world should be like. This is rare and difficult to pull off. It's much easier to diagnose problems than provide solutions.

Abundance is a good summary of reform minded, technocratic liberal policies from folks like Matt Yglesias and Saul Griffith. I especially liked the section on state capacity and why it has been hampered in the US. The environmental movement enabled modern lawfare, and the judicial system governs everything around me.

Most importantly, this book is important because it is popular. Its prominent display on airport bookshelves is an early symptom of a much-needed democratic reckoning. It is a tacit acceptance of the excesses of progressivism and Democratic policy failures.

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I already knew that solar got cheap faster than even solar advocates thought. I knew that US zoning laws were problematic and Japan had way better ones), and about the power of cities. Likewise, I'd heard about the possible deceleration of scientific discovery, and the pain and expense of academic grant writing. This book synthesizes these things and far more. My notes on the most interesting and new-to-me bits:

State capacity over size

Ultimately, the government should neither be big nor small. Instead, it should strive to increase its state capacity. It should be in the business of being a bottleneck remover. An effective example is one that compares two contrasting visions: one a conservative utopia in which oil and gas pipelines crisscross the country and highways are wide and well maintained. The other in which solar panels cover everything and combined with nuclear plants and wind turbines provide all of our abundant energy. Both of these visions require the government to have an ability to build. For more on state capacity I really enjoyed a paper called States and Economic Growth by Johnson and Koyama.

US zoning laws proliferated very quickly

In 1900 no US cities had zoning laws. By 1930 70% of them did. Zoning laws began as a pragmatic split between residential and industrial zones but soon became specific and prescriptive, imposing rules about what sorts of residential housing was appropriate for different parts of the residential zone. Another example of one of my favorite lenses Two Watersheds — excess institutionalization is bad.

Lawfare was amplified by the Environmental movement

Lawfare, "democracy by lawsuit", was begun by the environmentalist movement arguably from the roots of Carson's Silent Spring and weaponized by associations with high Asabiyyah such as the environmental organizations. Organizations like the Sierra Club learned to lobby the government on behalf of the environment, and if needed, pursued sued the government. Ralph Nader and his raiders viewed government as a force to be stopped rather than helped and opened more holes through which they could legally attack the government and win. This in turn led to a government on its back foot, defensively introducing more and more regulation.

The legal system in central to the US bureaucracy

In many countries policy is decided by bureaucrats (think EU), in America it is effectively decided by the judicial system, since all law will quickly go through the legal gauntlet.

No individual law will address this many individual blockages at so many individual points in the system. What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation. **Liberalism acted, across many levels and branches of government in the 1970s, to slow the system down so that the instances of abuse could be seen and could be stopped. Now, we need to act across many levels and branches of government to speed the system up.

Adversarial legalism in the US is not new. Tocqueville write about it. And America has 4x as many lawyers as in Germany and 2x as France (per capita). This is in part because of the American distrust of government, which leads to more lawsuits of the government for various reasons. Subsystems that integrate conflict can lead to more resilience.

Trade-off denial vs climate denial

A good lens new to me: the capitalist right suffers from "climate denial", questioning whether human caused change is real. But the environmental left suffers from "trade off denial", where they don't see that their environmental regulation have tradeoffs.

Favor pull over push policies

• Pull policies encourage behavior in the market. For example, you can setup bounties for corporations to reach certain outcomes. The government can create subsidies for companies exhibiting certain desirable behaviors, or working in some industries.
• Push policies involve a bidding process in which multiple companies compete for a government contract. This is often a protracted up-front process with strong whiffs of nepotism, which leads to situations where you have a small select of gigantic favored contractors, like Primes in the military contracting world.
• Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was successful because it reduced barriers and created subsidies for COVID vaccines, but didn’t have a bidding process or exclusive deals with a specific company. This increased the competitiveness of the process and reduced slowdowns.

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One evening I was listening to Abundance in San Francisco, walking towards a bar to meet up with some FLUX'ers. I passed Chinatown's iconic lanterns and crossed Grant street just as I heard a page out of a vignette about Katalin Karikó: "Every night it would be grant grant grant. The answer would be no no no.". This coincidence made me so happy, as if a divine being was beside me, manufacturing serendipity.

Abundance does a great job of synthesizing myriads of observations and policies in a neat little package. Most importantly, it makes these wonky ideas accessible and addressable under one memorable word: Abundance. In these times of pith, "a liberalism that builds" feels sufficiently meme-like to change the discourse. One can hope?