Abundance Review

After writing a review based on the public conversation around the new book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, I am back after reading the book. I have had my thinking changed by the public conversation around Abundance, although not for the reason the authors probably hoped. The argument made in Abundance is so clearly stated and bold that it being wrong actually can teach us things. Most wrong arguments are muddy and confusing, leaving you unenlightened. I may follow up in the coming weeks as my thinking settles.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson play what I can only describe as a skillful shell game in Abundance. To understand it, you need to appreciate that there are two causes of scarcity used in the book.

1. There is scarcity because there is some emergency and no powerful opposing constituency. There is no constituency for a mask shortage during a global pandemic for example.

2. There is scarcity because some constituency has won the battle to keep it that way. For example, doctors restricting the supply of new doctors to maintain their negotiating position as professionals.

The authors of Abundance make regular use of both causes of scarcity in the book. However, their use of each cause in their argument is anything but interchangeable. They are interested in the second cause of scarcity almost entirely. However, whenever they go to give an example of policy in real life it is always an example of scarcity by emergency.

There was a significant discussion of Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania and his response to a bridge collapse and his efforts of getting it repaired incredibly quickly. While undoubtedly a lesson of political leadership that can teach many lessons, it teaches lessons for a politician faced with scarcity caused by an emergency. Whether it can reasonably be applied to the scarcity caused by a powerful coalition in society or not is left un-argued by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Instead, they play a shell game between the causes of scarcity without much comment, leading a reader to draw the obvious but incorrect conclusion.

The danger of conflating these causes of scarcity may not seem too great a sin. However, consider where we usually come across this tendency. Paranoid government conspiracy theorists. In the recent conspiracy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world faced a genuine emergency where the lives of millions were at stake. There was no serious constituency of the world that was pro death and disease. Given the lopsided equation of equities, governments were able to do things they’d ordinarily be unable to do. Looking at the use of emergency power, some sophisticated conspiracy theorists began prophesying the coming of the “Great Reset” where rights of the people would be trampled in general for other noble objectives of the powerful.

What was meant as an inspirational line in Abundance could be plugged in word for word as the primary axiom underlying this flavor of conspiracy theory.

“It’s up to us to decide what is a crisis”

This statement is flatly untrue. The fact it is untrue may be the single greatest cause of the abject failure of the Trump administration. When campaigning, they could convince a critical mass of the public that there were crisis from a dozen directions, but deciding something is a crisis does not wish away real coalitions with opposing interests.

When Trump declares an emergency that America onshore our manufacturing, it would be different if ships were being sunk by drone boats every day and we needed to do it. Or if there were an actual crisis of an invasion by a hostile violent power that threatened the United States, the resistance to his violation of due process may ring out in a few places, but his chance of success would be dramatically improved.

The shell game of interchanging the politics of emergency with ordinary politics where there are interests at cross purposes is one we should not engage in. We can take on entrenched interests passionately, but we cannot deceive ourselves that we can make the politics the politics of a genuine crisis.

Through much of the book discussing causes of scarcity, I was unable to evaluate the factual merit of the claims made. They involve detailed journalistic and historical claims I cannot easily evaluate.

However, they ventured into terrain I was able to assess when they began to discuss American research. I ended reading the book less confident than I began that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are trustworthy tellers of fact, whether I may end up agreeing on a political vision for the left. It puts many of the claims I was not able to evaluate in doubt.

They spend nearly an entire chapter opining on the trend away from groundbreaking advances in science to a slower more incremental progress in many areas of science. Most intensely, they focus on the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is the single largest funder of medical research in the world. They make many claims about how the NIH has contributed to the trend towards a slowdown in scientific progress.

In Abundance, there are two primary claims made about the NIH.

1. The NIH is not taking enough risks, favoring research that is too likely to succeed which is slowing major breakthroughs.

2. The NIH grant process is causing huge amounts of time to spent seeking funding versus doing science and is shaping the research of scientists to ¨study for the test¨ to get funding.

To solve these problems, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson propose that what we need is a science of science to figure out how to make this governmental process work better. My immediate reaction to reading this is “that’s really obvious. There is no way this isn’t being done.” Lo and behold, even a cursory search for research on the NIH funding process will reveal that it is an area that has received considerable attention. There is a science of science, it just doesn’t show what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson want it to.

The NIH is run by medical researchers, for medical researchers. It represents the height of a mission oriented government versus an interest in procedure that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson oppose - scientists that are on professional quests to vanquish cancer or heart disease. There are an abundance of worthy lines of inquiry being proposed by medical research institutions around the country and not enough funding to go around. I think this funding should be expanded substantially, but until we do, researchers that care deeply about the goals of their research will compete aggressively for funds to make their visions a reality.

Even a cursory scan of the science of science of medical research will reveal that the problem is quite the opposite of a gameable grant process. In fact, the major problem is a large degree of arbitrariness to who will receive funding based on the peculiar interests and biases of the scientists reviewing the grant applications. There are broad criteria applications are graded on like significance and feasibility, but success for an excellent application may come down to whether you get a reviewer that really likes lasers or not.

Also, contradicting the claim that grants are directed towards too ordinary and predictable projects, there is a reproducibility crisis in medical research like in many other areas of science. The biasing incentives in science are not to play it safe, but find something that will get you a speaking slot at a convention.

After coming in and telling medical research scientific community they are failing to live up to our potential in innovation, Abundance goes on to say America has lost the art of implementing technology like we used to.

There really is nothing to support this claim. All that can be offered in defense of this thesis is to cherry pick specific technologies which the U.S. has not had a market for and have not been of significant public interest. As an example, the authors discuss the solar energy industry where the U.S. has not been the leader in developing the technology, but neglect the fracking revolution in the same market.

I wouldn’t use the tremendous deployed innovation in fracking to prove the opposite point being made in Abundance. But it is suspicious to use an industry in which the U.S. is the world leader in engineering prowess as a prime case of U.S. decline of implementing cutting edge solutions. You may hate the U.S. fossil fuel industry, but it is U.S. companies that are sought around the world as partners for the prowess they have.

More generally, it’s an understandable impression that the U.S. does not know how to improve the mass production of advanced technology because so much of it has moved overseas. This is an illusion though. America still has a huge footprint in the designing of production processes and technology used around the world.

Their claims that America is slow to adopt technologies is ludicrous as well. The U.S. is the fastest country in the world to adopt new technologies, with a fetish for the newest technology and a willingness to pay for it that is unmatched in the world.

It is a disservice to our country to not recognize that the United States is still at the center of global innovation in research, technology, and engineering. Other countries competing will only make us all better.