Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again

**Derek Thompson** (0:00)
How can we invent technologies in science that will make people 40 years from now look back in the 2020s and say, God, that world sucked. Right now, science and tech policy at the federal level, I think, is too reliant on what we happened to do 50 years ago. They solve the problems of their age, we have to solve the problem of ours. We're alive, cosmetically speaking, for like three seconds. Why wouldn't you spend your time trying to do the most important, interesting things in the world?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:33)
Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Derek Thompson. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, the host of podcast Plain English, and the co-author with Ezra Klein of the new book Abundance, which outlines a bold new vision for building a more prosperous future. Thanks so much for joining us.

**Derek Thompson** (0:50)
It's a real pleasure to be here, thank you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
Can you paint us a picture? What is the Abundance agenda, and if it succeeds, what could daily life look like in 2050?

**Derek Thompson** (1:00)
So, this book is in many ways a very serious policy book. I mean, we get into the details of housing policy and energy policy and infrastructure building, but it begins with three pages of science fiction. It begins with a vignette of what the world would look like in 2050 if we got everything right. And of course, it's a world of housing abundance, and it's a world of clean energy abundance, where people are waking up in rooms that are cocooned with clean energy, abundant solar and wind, enhanced geothermal, nuclear. But, you know, this is a science and tech show, and I want to talk about the tech that we think would be available if we got everything right. There's a lot of technologies, whether it's vertical farming, whether it's cellular meat, or mass desalination of water, so, you know, you turn on your faucet and it's basically ocean water that's pouring out that you can drink. These are incredibly energy-thirsty technologies. They require an enormous amount of electricity. And then on top of it all, there's carbon removal, which might be one of the most important technologies of the next 30, 40 years, that's also incredibly energy-intensive. And so there's a huge vision in this book of, if we got energy superabundance right, what are the technologies that we could build with that energy superabundance? Another feature in that sci-fi vignette is that this family gets a little ping on their AI earpiece and hear that their friends are taking the long weekend to fly on a supersonic jet from New York to London and the jet is using clean fuel. I mean, these are the kind of technologies that are just on the come up. You know, companies like Boom that are building supersonic technology. But a lot of this needs a ton of energy. It needs more hard tech breakthroughs. And so while this book is absolutely about making abundant things that we know how to build, like say apartment buildings in San Francisco, a lot of it is about dreaming, about the things that we haven't invented yet, and how to build not just an abundance agenda of housing and clean energy, but an invention agenda for all sorts of technologies that are in our fingertips right now.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:02)
In startup world, we sort of have this aversion to deceleration. It seems like if technology is to actually bring us to this sort of 2050 vision, we do sort of have to accelerate, but not without accountability.

**Derek Thompson** (3:19)
We think about speed being a virtue in business. Ezra and I think about speed being a virtue for government. We think about it as being a lost virtue, a virtue that we used to have, that we no longer have. When California authorizes $33 billion to build a high-speed rail system that does not exist, that's a fantastically tragic example of a failure to prioritize speed. And there's another slightly wonkier example. So in 2021, Joe Biden signed the infrastructure bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which he and Pete Buttigieg hailed as the most significant and most important infrastructure bill in modern American history. And it was, if you looked at just the numbers, $1.2 trillion. It included a $42 billion policy to build rural broadband. This is a classic example of a progressive priority. Let's hook up underserved people to the internet so that they can participate in the online economy and even participate in things like telehealth. There was a 14-step process created for the states to apply for that $42 billion pot of money. So first, the FCC had to draw a map of where Americans were underserved by broadband internet, and then the states could challenge it, and then the states could draw their own map, and then there was a challenge period, and then the states could apply for their letter of intent, and then that could be challenged by the Commerce Department, and then they could apply for their funding. And so, those could be challenged because they didn't have the right equity matrices, they didn't have the right workforce development programs. And here's what I find so interesting about the rural broadband story. If you go through those 14 steps, there's not a single one of them that is obviously stupid. They're all kind of understandable. Yeah, we should probably have a map to point out where we want to build this stuff. Yeah, maybe we should have an opportunity for folks to challenge the map, because maybe the map drawers are wrong. Yeah, we should care about equity. Equity is important. Yeah, we should care about workforce development. Yeah, we should care about the certain procurement process. But this is the nature of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a means of decentralizing care in a way that de-emphasizes focus on an outcome. And so what happens is you care so much about every single step that there is no outcome. We are four calendar years after the rural broadband provision was passed.