Finished reading: Abundance by Ezra Klein 📚 The book asks: “What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?” You can imagine an alternate history where Kamala Harris won the election and these questions became a rallying cry. Instead, it’s a vision of a future that takes the can-do attitude of pre-Donald Trump conservatism and the policy sensibilities of modern liberalism and argues the answer to many of our problems is…more. More housing, more energy, more innovation.
Unfortunately, while more isn’t quite a bad word among certain political groups, it’s certainly met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Scarcity may be the safer bet in the short term of an uncertain world, but it’s exactly this aversion to risk that has caused America to stagnate. Can we learn again to be ok with crackpot theories that could lead to scientific breakthroughs? Can we rediscover our comfort with subsidizing a thousand million-dollar wrong ideas to produce a trillion-dollar good one? Can we remember that we don’t have to be bogged down by regulatory, societal, and political baggage?
“Can we solve our problems with supply?”
TBD