How (And Why) To Build More: Derek Thompson on "Abundance"

The coauthor of a new book on creating a progressive culture of growth

The book Abundance, by journalists Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic), came out last month — and during the week that followed, not a day passed without a friend or acquaintance bringing it up. Some praised it, others had critiques, but every conversation was interesting. If Helen of Troy was “the face that launched a thousand ships,” Abundance may be a book that launches a thousand policy debates.

Klein and Thompson argue that well-intentioned progressive policies from decades past actually undermine progressive causes today, like the building of affordable housing and clean-energy infrastructure. They call for a shift in policy thinking — one that prioritizes creating more of the things people need.

As they put it late in the book: “Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Many valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not?”

It’s a brisk and fascinating read, and I tore through it. After finishing, I emailed Derek Thompson a few questions. His replies are below.

---

David Epstein: I want to start with a provocative question that can’t possibly be perfectly answered: If tomorrow you become the emperor of U.S. cities, what is the first change you would make?

Derek Thompson: For too long, liberalism has associated success with how much money the state can authorize, rather than how much stuff we can build. Increased government spending on the needy gave us the New Deal and the Great Society and universal health insurance. These are good things and worth fighting for. But the lack of attention paid to the supply side of the economy yielded a world of severely incompetent government: where Democrats promise to prioritize housing in cities and states with high rates of homelessness and fail to build housing; where California authorizes $30 billion for a high speed rail system that doesn’t exist; where the Biden administration authorizes $42 billion for rural broadband and can’t find a way to get money out the door in three years; where states and cities run by Democrats who say they want to save the world from climate change allow eternal permitting processes that block the clean energy transition.

On Day One as America’s emperor of cities, I can’t fix all these problems at once. What I can do is to communicate to every mayor and public servant that the Sloth Era of liberalism is over. From now on, we’re moving fast and building things. Every job description for public servants will prioritize candidates who have demonstrated an ability to get shit done fast. Maybe Washington experiments with a new program — call it Pay For Speed — that rewards cities and states that accelerate permitting for housing and clean energy. Over and over, I use my imperial bully pulpit to name and shame the cities and states that are moving slowly and praise the cities and states that are moving quickly.

My favorite definition of culture is: “Culture is what you tolerate.” A movement that tolerates racism makes racism their culture. A movement that tolerates failure makes failure their culture. For too long, Democrats and liberals have tolerated slowness and ineffectiveness in government. We need policy change, yes. But one level up from that, we need a culture shift. If I’m czar king of U.S. urban policy, I think I’d try to use my fanciful imperial powers to brute-force a culture shift by saying over and over and over again “speed is liberal!”, “speed is liberal!”, while experimenting with public policy to find the best way to move fast and build things.

DE: I asked urban economist Ed Glaeser that question. In Abundance, you feature some of his work, and do an exquisite job of framing it in the context of why it has become so difficult to build housing in our most productive cities. There are so many sobering stats in this book, like that Houston has the lowest rate of homelessness of any major city because it issues more new housing permits than the metro areas of Boston, New York City, and San Francisco, combined.

One of Glaeser’s answers to the above question was: make business permitting easier so that diverse firms will populate a city, leading to the “spillover” effect in which ideas jump from industry to industry and drive innovation. Here was another part of his answer: “Get rid of Euclidean zoning that stops you from having commercial stuff in residential areas, which just seems incredibly stupid to me in the 21st century.”¹

The trouble, of course, as with so many things, is the power of incumbents to keep newcomers out, whether that’s in housing, business, immigration, you name it. After reading Glaeser, I became a pro-housing presence at some local community meetings. I parroted his line that impeding housing is “like putting an invisible gate on the community.” But one says something like that and suddenly people are concerned about urban deer migratory patterns or any excuse not to have more housing. What tip do you have for someone like me who will go to community meetings and wants to be an effective advocate for more housing?

DT: I don’t think there’s a magical set of words to turn hard NIMBYs into passionate YIMBYs. People fear change. They jealously guard what they know and have. They use the political power available to them to preserve familiarity. These qualities are human nature. And if a bottleneck to our political project were “first things first, let’s change human nature!”, we would be well and truly f&*ked. But we can change defaults. We can make San Francisco’s housing market a little bit more like Houston’s. We can make Massachusetts’s energy permitting regime a bit more like Georgia’s. Yes, change is going to make some people mad. But my bet is that the constituencies that benefit from abundant housing and abundant energy and effective government are majoritarian constituencies. I think politicians who can govern on a record of “government couldn’t do shit; then I won; now government gets shit done,” will find there’s a big group of voters who appreciate their work and support them.

DE: The second chapter of Abundance, “Build,” delves into pressures that stifle infrastructure development. This one resonated with me on a personal level. Before I was a writer, I was a grad student living in a glorified tent in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle. At that time, I absolutely did not think we’d be where we are today with renewable energy. Had I been able to envision that, I would have also thought that we’d be in a much better place right now with respect to the environment. Why aren’t we?

DT: In the 1950s and 1960s, two energy stories developed on parallel tracks.

One story was a legal story. We saw the rise of environmental legislation, like the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, which responded to the extraordinary surge of pollution in the middle of the 20th century. These laws coincided with a new kind of legal adversarialism that encouraged individuals to sue the state and businesses to stop them from altering the physical environment.

Another story happened in technology. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists invented and began to develop solar energy and nuclear power, which would allow countries to produce energy without releasing oodles of carbon dioxide that would change the climate.

Today, these stories are crashing into each other. The U.S., and the rest of the world, needs to build out clean energy quickly to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We are blocked along several fronts, including incumbent companies lobbying to block this transition. But, ironically, one of the blockages is that the environmental and legal revolution of the 1960s has created barriers to growth that make it hard to build the energy production we need. We have to redefine environmentalism for our own age. In the 1960s, blocking development was considered environmentalist. In the 2020s, environmentalism demands that we build.

DE: The “Invent” chapter is about the slowdown in scientific breakthroughs. It drives me crazy when people say the government hasn’t been important to innovation, because that ignores a half-century of world-changing breakthroughs (MRI, AI, GPS, the internet, etc.) that were powered by government-backed research. But, as you note, science has gotten more risk averse. For instance, work that connects disparate fields is less likely to get funded, and less likely to get published in top journals, but, in the long-run, far more likely to become a scientific blockbuster. To remedy this risk aversion in science, you propose a number of things we should try, including an idea I’m a fan of: a lottery for scientific funding. Specifically, I think a modified lottery, where first the worst proposals are screened out. You’d save scientists time on paperwork, and avoid docking high-risk proposals. What do you think stops us from trying stuff like this given the clear slowdown of scientific breakthroughs? Are we risk-averse about our risk-aversion?

DT: The National Institutes of Health is one of the most important and successful scientific institutions in history. I’m very concerned that the Trump administration is slashing through science with carelessness and cruelty. But progressives put themselves in a box when they refuse to acknowledge the flaws of the status quo just because the Trump administration is attacking it. The NIH in its current form is an 80-year-old bureaucracy, and it has accumulated many of the habits and flaws of an 80-year-old bureaucracy. The NIH in its current form is biased against novelty, youth, and speed. It funds older researchers pursuing incremental research, and it wastes scientists’ time. According to several surveys, the typical American scientist now spends up to 40% of their time filling out grants and paperwork rather than actually doing science. This is totally unacceptable! Scientific discovery is the headwater of human progress. If you’re obsessed with making the world better and healthier, you should be obsessed with high-risk, high-reward research and how to get more of it.

DE: In the final chapter, “Deploy,” you write about our misplaced emphasis on the “Eureka!” moment in science. I was psyched to see that, because I think it’s really important, and I write about it late in the book I’m just finishing up. How should we think about the importance of those supposed lightning-strikes of inspiration?

DT: We tell the story of penicillin, which I think is instructive. Many people who are interested in science know the story that the 20th century microbiologist Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in his lab, perhaps because spores of the mold blew in through an open window while he was away on vacation. It’s a great story for Hollywood: the medicine that blew in through the window. But penicillin languished for more than a decade in obscurity and failed experiments. What finally made penicillin a medicine that saved tens of millions of lives is that the U.S. government’s wartime technology development office took up penicillin and grew it, tested it, manufactured it, and shipped it around the world. The invention of penicillin is the story everybody knows. But the implementation of penicillin is the story of how the world actually changed.

It’s so easy to underrate implementation. This is true across many stations of life. For day-to-day productivity: Good ideas are cheap, but executing them is hard. At the federal level: Passing laws that authorize spending doesn’t accomplish anything if you can’t actually spend the money. And it’s profoundly true in science and technology. The U.S. invented the elevator, and nuclear power, and the solar cell, and the semiconductor. And yet, we struggle to build tall apartment buildings in areas in high demand, and build nuclear power plants, and build solar farms, and own the frontier of semiconductor manufacturing. The book ends with a call to arms. Let’s be the country that builds what it invents.

Thanks to Derek for his time. I encourage you to check out Abundance so that you can be stimulated, enlightened, provoked…whatever your specific mileage, I think it’ll prompt lively discussions.

Since Derek mentioned penicillin and I happen to be in Oxford on a research trip this week, I popped over to the History of Science Museum. I checked out the exhibit on Oxford’s crucial role in transforming penicillin from a lab curiosity into a working treatment — a breakthrough that the U.S. government and American labs later scaled into mass production. Below are a few pictures of the exhibit. There was a tricky glare, but they should be readable if you zoom in.

If you found this post interesting, please share it.

And, as always, you can subscribe here:

Until next time…

David

1. Euclidean zoning takes its name from the city of Euclid, Ohio — not from the famous Greek geometer. The city was involved in a seminal 1926 Supreme Court case that helped establish zoning practices in the U.S. (The city, though, is named for that Euclid.)