Abundance

The Book in 3 Sentences

This book argues that building and inventing more of what we need is crucial for creating the future we want. It examines how abundance through technological progress (like cheaper renewable energy and medical breakthroughs) can solve major challenges, while highlighting how regulatory barriers, bureaucracy, and outdated systems often impede progress. The book also explores the political consequences of scarcity versus abundance policies, particularly in housing, energy, and scientific research.

Impressions

A timely and thought-provoking analysis that connects technological progress, policy, and politics in unexpected ways. The author makes a compelling case through diverse examples - from housing crises to mRNA vaccines to climate solutions - showing how artificial scarcity often stems from policy choices rather than technical limitations. The historical examples and data points are particularly effective in illustrating how abundance-focused approaches have succeeded in the past.

My Top Quotes

• This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.

• “If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions,” Biden said. “You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer. That’s the choice.”

• The only reason we have even the barest hope of avoiding catastrophic warming is that the cost of solar power has fallen by 89 percent and onshore wind costs by almost 70 percent in ten years.

• But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump,24 with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP.

• In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power. If current trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right; even adding Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the states Harris won won’t be enough for Democrats to win future presidential elections.

• “Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas,”

• A child born poor in San Jose has three times the likelihood of ending up wealthy as a child born poor in Charlotte. Among

• There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically” conservative but “operationally” liberal.

• No suburban development epitomized this go-go era more than Lakewood, California, a planned community built on open farmland just north of Long Beach. Between 1950 and 1953, more than 17,000 homes went up.35 At its most furious pace, the city’s builders finished a new home once every seven and a half minutes.

• California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population, 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population.

• Boardinghouses were a common place for adults to live through much of American history. They worked something like today’s college dorms: The rooms were small, the bathrooms and kitchenettes shared, and the cost was low. They weren’t as nice to live in as a single-family home with a detached garage, but they were far nicer than a tent in the middle of an encampment in the dark of winter. So where did they go? The answer is that they were made, in most jurisdictions, functionally illegal. By the 1950s, rooming houses were already a target for city planners looking

• Does it really “protect the roomers” to move them from a boarding home without parking spaces to a tent beneath the overpass?

• But the federal government backed those mortgages and made the interest payments on them into large tax deductions, and so they became the cornerstone of the American housing market. But they became something else, too: a hedge against inflation. A fixed-rate mortgage holds payments flat on an appreciating asset. While inflation eats away at the real value of those payments, the value of the thing the payments are going toward—the house—just goes up and up.

• In 1943, Los Angeles residents woke up to air so dark and noxious that they feared the Japanese had launched a gas attack.

• In Pittsburgh, midcentury drivers had to use their windshield wipers to clear away the soot so they could see the road.

• “Between 1972 and 1975, twenty-nine thousand proposed homes in the Bay Area—roughly a fifth of the region’s total housing production at the time—were subject to environmental litigation,”

• When Erik Voeten, a political scientist, picked through the political consequences of recent climate policies, he found that “people who bear the cost of climate policies increasingly flock to the far right.”

• Without energy, even material splendor has sharp limits. Mann notes that visitors to the Palace of Versailles in February 1695 marveled at the furs worn to dinners with the king and the ice that collected on the glassware. It was frigid in Versailles, and no treasury could warm it. A hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson had a vast wine collection and library in Monticello and the forced labor of more than a hundred slaves,11 but his ink still froze to the tip of his pen during winter.

• Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that is six or seven times the death toll from traffic accidents and hundreds of times the death toll from war or terrorism or all natural disasters combined.

• The authors looked at 2,905 projections for solar costs made by the most popular forecasting models and found that solar costs were expected to fall by 2.6 percent a year and never by more than 6 percent. In reality, they fell by 15 percent per year, year after year. In 2022, the US Energy Information Administration released a report estimating life-cycle costs for new energy installations in the coming decades. Solar was already cheaper than natural gas. Wind was a dollar more. Both were about half the price of coal.

• New cars, SUVs, and trucks that run on gas today are more than 99 percent cleaner than in 1970.74

• In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”

• The prevalence of lawyers in American life is unusual. But their dominance at the top of American politics is startling. “Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate.

• Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state,”

• Pahlka and her team were told the number of backlogged applications was around 230,000. It took them seven weeks to organize the databases such that they could be precisely counted. The true number was 1.2 million.

• On January 11, 2020, Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the virus. Within forty-eight hours, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine recipe was finalized. By late February, batches of the vaccine had been shipped to Bethesda, Maryland, for clinical trials.

• In 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who struggled for years to get a dollar of funding from the NIH, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a technology that saved millions of lives.

• In the 1930s, there were just 80,000 professors across all US universities;34 today there are more than 1.5 million.

• American science funding has become biased against young scientists and risky ideas. What is most obvious is that American science is getting older. In the early 1900s, some of the most famous scientists—Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger—did their breakthrough work in their twenties and thirties.

• Today’s scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents, rather than on direct research.

• This was a theme of Katalin Karikó’s years in the wilderness. “I wasn’t very good at kissing butts,” Karikó said bluntly. In Breaking Through, she wrote that she felt success in academia was more about marketing and status than it was about hard science:

• “If Bell Labs had a formula, it was to hire the smartest people, give them space and time to work, and make sure that they talk to each other,” Gertner said.

• Penicillin saved the equivalent of full battalions by reducing the mortality rate of bacterial pneumonia in soldiers from 18 percent to 1 percent. One source estimated that 1 in 7 wounded British soldiers lived thanks to the drug.

• For secretary of energy, he appointed James Edwards, a dentist with no expertise or interest in developing nascent energy technology.26 Solar R&D spending under Reagan fell by over 60 percent his first year in office.27 Some of the dismantling was painfully literal: in 1986, Reagan removed the solar hot-water panels installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter.