(Avid Reader Press, March 2025, 288pp, including 66pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
- This book takes the optimistic stance that we are capable of building what we need, and that we can solve many of the problems we perceive today.
- These problems include a right that fights he government, and a left that over-regulates it.
- We need to think bigger, creating risky technologies funded by the government, since the market won’t do it. Get better at weighing risks. Find a vision of the future.
- Authors are liberals, and won’t be appealing to the right, which simply doesn’t believe some of the problems we need to fix even exist. The future the authors want is: abundance. Not just more of everything; more of the things we need to create a better life.
- Then follow five sections on themes about creating abundance: Grow; Build; Govern; Invent; and Deploy. Generally, the book discusses problems that have arisen in doing these things, and explains how these problems came about, better than it identifies how to fix the problems. I’ll compile some specific points.
- A problem with growth is zoning rules in cities, which have brought about homelessness. Boarding houses, once common, were made illegal. Meanwhile, pollution got bad, triggering the environmental movement, and more regulatory laws.
- Fighting climate change may entail ‘degrowth’ despite the human need for more. Prosperity has greatly increasing since fossil fuels were exploited, but inequalities remain. We need to electrify everything. Big projects, like California’s high-speed rail, got bogged down because so many vested parties want their say. And their lawyers go into politics. Now no one trusts the government. We need to find a new balance.
- It’s more complicated than the liberal/conservative government divide. Liberals add too many goals to a project; Republicans demonize bureaucrats. Taking risks, the I95 bridge in Philadelphia was rebuilt in 10 years. [[ But these are the risks Boeing took. ]]
- Government grants for research have become too conservative, too success-oriented. We need more invention. Partly the problem is all the easy discoveries have already been made; part is that everything is more complicated now. And the US should be making immigration, especially with H-1B visa, easier, not harder. The 20th century has seen invention move from individuals to research labs with government control and sometimes ridicule (Proxmire). Innovative labs created the internet. We should experiment with how best to experiment.
- History is mostly *not* about Eureka moments. We’re stuck between a progressive movement that is afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention. History shows that government can pick winners, e.g. NASA, and losers, e.g. Reagan wrecked the solar cell program in 1980. The Covid operation “warp speed” was a success, but no one talked about it — Democrats didn’t want to give Republicans credit; Republicans didn’t want to rile their anti-vaccine base. We need to investigate wisely rather than impose ideology. AI, nuclear, desalination. We can make choices, and create an operation warp speed for any of those.
- We can choose: scarcity or abundance. It’s not about immigrants. Trump is now slashing what the government does; liberals have an opportunity to champion the politics of abundance. LBJ said the same thing about the 1964 World’s Fair.
