(2022-01-16) Thompson A Simple Plan To Solve All Of Americas Problems

Derek Thompson: A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. During the holiday week, I spent a frigid afternoon standing in a long line outside the local library to pick up a COVID-19 rapid test. Lines for essential goods are a pretty good sign of failed public policy.

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.

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.

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 (supply chain) crisis.

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.

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.

This is the abundance agenda.

et’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 tuition.

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... Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, the country’s top trade group for doctors, has in the past few decades blocked nurses from delivering care (Occupational Licensing)

Housing: Homes have become famously unaffordable in many coastal cities.

College: Elite colleges are failing every abundance-agenda test imaginable. They’re hardly expanding the total number of admissions;

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.

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.)

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?

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 clean energy, the U.S. needs to rethink every level of innovation. We need to dramatically increase high-skill immigration

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... Americans won’t enthusiastically support decarbonization if they believe that it is the path to pain and deprivation.

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.