Source:
A Simple Plan to Solve All of America's Problems
The U.S. doesn't have enough COVID tests--or houses, immigrants,
physicians, or solar panels. We need an abundance agenda.
By Derek Thompson
During the holiday week, I spent a frigid afternoon standing in a long
line outside the local library to pick up a rapid COVID test. Lines for
essential goods are a pretty good sign of failed public policy. When
food runs low, there are bread lines. Where gasoline is in short
supply, there are gas lines. But there I stood, nearly two years into a
pandemic, shivering inside a depressing metaphor of state failure. As I
bounced from foot to foot to stay warm, I asked myself: How on earth
did this happen?
America's miserable--and miserably timed--testing shortage was a policy
choice. The FDA has continually slow-walked the approval of rapid
tests for development. The Trump administration was utterly
uninterested in any COVID policy outside the vaccines. The Biden
administration and Democrats didn't announce bulk orders of rapid
tests until the Omicron wave had already swept through the country.
Other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, approved more
kits and prioritized their manufacture and distribution, giving their
citizens access to millions of free tests throughout the past year.
America lacks the test abundance of the U.K. and Canada because
instead of choosing abundance, we chose scarcity.
Zoom out, and you can see that scarcity has been the story of the whole
pandemic response. In early 2020, Americans were told to not wear
masks, because we apparently didn't have enough to go around. Last
year, Americans were told to not get booster shots, because we
apparently didn't have enough to go around. Today, we're worried about
people using too many COVID tests as cases scream past 700,000 per day,
because we apparently don't have enough to go around.
Zoom out more, and you'll see that scarcity is also the story of the
U.S. economy. After years of failing to invest in technology at our
ports, we have a shipping-delay crisis. After years of a deliberate
policy to reduce visa issuance for immigrants, we suddenly can't find
enough workers for our schools, factories, restaurants, or hotels.
After decades of letting semiconductor-manufacturing power move to
Asia, we have a shortage of chips, which is causing price increases for
cars and electronics.
Zoom out yet more, and the truly big picture comes into focus.
Manufactured scarcity isn't just the story of COVID tests, or the
pandemic, or the economy: It's the story of America today. The
revolution in communications technology has made it easier than ever
for ordinary people to loudly identify the problems that they see in
the world. But this age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with
a slowdown in atoms-related progress.
Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We
say that we want to save the planet from climate change--but in
practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the
clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down
zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say
that housing is a human right--but our richest cities have made it
excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or
megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health
care--but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA� that
withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately
limits the supply of physicians.
In the past few months, I've become obsessed with a policy agenda that
is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda
would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness
the left's emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the
progressive movement to "take innovation as seriously as it takes
affordability," as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into
libertarians' obsession with regulation to identify places where bad
rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel
the right's fixation with national greatness to grow the things that
actually make a nation great--such as clean and safe spaces, excellent
government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared
wealth.
This is the abundance agenda.
Let's start by diagnosing our scarcity problem. Take a look at this
graph of prices in the 21st century, which shows that some products
have become cheaper, such as TVs and computers, while many essentials
have become more expensive, such as health care and college.
A mainstream liberal might look at the red lines and think: The
government isn't spending enough money to help people out; spend more!
The typical conservative might think: The government is spending too
much money and inflating the cost of these services; slash taxes and
spending! What I'd prefer to focus on is perhaps the real problem: a
national failure to increase the supply of essential goods.
Health care: The U.S. has fewer physicians per capita than almost
every other developed country, in part because our medical-residency
system has for 40 years constricted the supply of U.S. physicians by
forcing them to go through scarce and poorly funded residency-training
programs. Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, the
country's top trade group for doctors, has in the past few decades
blocked nurses from delivering care and impeded foreign-trained
doctors from practicing here. America has tried very diligently to
create medical scarcity, and in typically plucky American fashion,
we've succeeded.
Housing: Homes have become famously unaffordable in many coastal
cities. Since 1980, average house prices in the New York City metro
area have risen about 700 percent; in San Francisco they have
increased by more than 900 percent. Simply redistributing cash or
slashing taxes alone won't do much to fix this problem. The culprits
are largely regulations that prevent the construction of taller
apartment buildings that can hold more units.
College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test
imaginable. They're hardly expanding the total number of
admissions; their share of total enrollment has actually been
admitting fewer of the low-income
students who gain the most by attending elite colleges in the first
place.
Two areas not highlighted on the prices graph, but which I would feel
remiss not to include, are transportation and energy.
Transportation: Building big infrastructure projects on time and on
budget has become nearly impossible, even in liberal states where a
given project, such as high-speed rail, enjoys broad liberal
enthusiasm. This, too, is a policy choice. Since the 1970s, new laws
and regulations have stymied new building projects just about
everywhere. Some of these laws, such as the National Environmental
Policy Act, arrived with the best of intentions. But endless and
expensive impact analyses and environmental reviews have ground our
infrastructure construction to a halt. From 1900 to 1904, New York City
built and opened 28 subway stations. One hundred years later, the
city needed about 17 years to build and open just three new stations
along Second Avenue.
Energy and climate change: Clean-energy technology has made huge
strides in the past decade, but we're not deploying it fast enough.
Solar, wind, and geothermal progress has been impeded by regulations
that benefit the fossil-fuel industry, by antigrowth attitudes among
Americans who don't want new energy projects in their neighborhood, and
by questionable cost-benefit analyses by environmentalists. (To pick
one example: The proposal to build the biggest solar plant in the
U.S. hit a snag when environmentalist groups objected to the possible
impact on Nevada's desert-tortoise population.) It remains a
cataclysmic shame that excessive concerns about radiation have led to
nuclear-power regulations that make it impractical to build new plants.
Nuclear power is 99.6 percent greener than oil in emissions per
unit of energy created and 99.7 percent safer in deaths per unit of
energy. But the U.S. has closed more nuclear-power plants than we've
opened this century.
For the rest of this year, I'll be fleshing out the abundance agenda in
my Work in Progress newsletter. For now, I just want to point out
how much good we can do by simply taking on the enemies of abundance.
Let's start with the crisis of the moment: the pandemic. For more than
a year, Democratic leaders have implored Americans to take the
pandemic seriously by wearing masks, canceling plans, and accepting
broad restrictions to normal life. We ought to serve the question right
back to our leaders: Why isn't a Democratic-controlled government
taking the pandemic seriously by developing a plan to win the next war
with supply-side abundance? The federal government still hasn't passed
pandemic preparedness legislation that would accelerate vaccine
production for the next variant or the next virus, despite both seeming
practically inevitable. The U.S. needs a 100-day plan that includes
creating a super-team of virus hunters to monitor viral strains around
the world and an Operation Warp Speed for building vaccine
manufacturing facilities around the world. Nothing is stopping us from
enacting these policies except our own complacency.
In health care, we could pass laws to increase the number of U.S.
physicians. We can do this by raising funding for federal residency
programs, or by making it easier for foreign-born doctors to practice
here. Telemedicine has been a surprising silver lining of the pandemic,
and reducing regulatory barriers here would also increase access. In
housing, more states and cities should follow the example of California
in banning single-family zoning, or follow the example of Houston
and basically do away with zoning entirely. Increasing the scale of
high-quality education is tough, because close and personalized
instruction seems so important for developing mastery. But we might
foster more experimentation with digital education to encourage
colleges to pull back tuition costs, or to pare back administrative
sprawl.
In clean energy, the U.S. needs to rethink every level of innovation.
We need to dramatically increase high-skill immigration, since
foreign-born geniuses starting American companies--in green energy,
yes, but also in software and beyond--is perhaps the greatest free
lunch in all of economics. We need more research and development in
nascent projects such as carbon-capture technology; more purposeful
deployment of solar technology; regulatory reform to allow for the
construction of more solar and wind farms; and a rational approach to
nuclear energy that encourages the construction of more plants. Some
people think of a clean-energy revolution as the next moon shot, but
it's not, really. In the past 10 years, the price of solar electricity
has already declined by 90 percent while the efficiency of lithium-ion
batteries has increased by 90 percent. What we need is a plan to solve
some very earthbound problems--such as the objections of NIMBYs and
the fossil-fuel industry--and build a green-energy policy that deploys
the tech we've already developed.
One bottom-up way to build this coalition would be to convince a large
group of Americans of the benefits of clean-energy abundance. This
will require a bit of cognitive restructuring. In the new book
Electrify, the entrepreneur Saul Griffith writes that the U.S. is stuck
in a way of thinking about the environment that dates to the 1970s
energy crisis, when the need for Americans to live more efficiently
gave rise to the mantra "Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!" This mindset can be
succinctly summarized: With great sacrifice, the future might be a
little less terrible.
But Americans won't enthusiastically support decarbonization if they
believe that it is the path to pain and deprivation. Building a
green-energy movement requires convincing people that they can still
have big cars and home comforts if we build a clean-energy grid that
electrically powers better cars, better houses, and a better life. To
win the political battle for a cleaner planet, we need an energy
mindset focused on plenty, which says: If we build the right
infrastructure today, your future will be awesome.
An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One
answer that I've given you is: essential goods and services where
productivity rates are declining. But that's a bit fusty and technical.
Let me try to offer a simpler answer. We should aim for abundance of
comfort, abundance of power, and abundance of time.
By expanding access to essential services such as health care, we can
reduce Americans' pain. By going all-out on clean energy--solar, wind,
geothermal, nuclear, and beyond--Americans can power more luxurious
lives, free of the guilt that their luxury is choking the planet. By
focusing on productivity and growth, we can become a richer country
that shares its ample winnings with the less fortunate, reducing
poverty and allowing us to work less with every passing decade, as
economists once hoped.
This is an unabashedly utopian vision. But moving from venting to
inventing, from zero-sum skirmishes over status to positive-sum
solutions for American greatness, requires not just a laundry list of
marginal improvements but also a defense of progress and growth. The
abundance agenda aims for growth, not because growth is an end but
because it is the best means to achieve the ends that we care about:
more comfortable lives, with more power to do what we want, with more
time devoted to what we love.
About the Author
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of
the Work in Progress newsletter.