In November 2021, Joe Biden passed what his government called “the biggest infrastructure bill in generations”, worth $1trn. Part of the idea was to convert the US to green energy, an essential step in the battle against climate change. To cite just one of countless line items: the government provided $7.5bn to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles. Here’s the problem: by March 2024, the number of charging stations actually built and working was seven.
Abundance reminds us that the UK isn’t the only country that has forgotten how to build. But given that American dysfunction outdoes that of any other developed country, there is reassurance here for British readers. Whereas American politics has become a contest of insanity versus non-insanity, the UK’s governing classes have at least begun asking the right questions: how to build millions of homes and a new green infrastructure?
Ezra Klein, a columnist and podcaster at the New York Times, and Derek Thompson, a staff writer at the Atlantic, are journalists with bigger brains and internal databases than is common in our profession. They have sidestepped the current American political horror show to produce something original: a left-liberal manifesto for deregulation, or as they call it, “a liberalism that builds”. Only that can create green-fuelled abundance.
The US used to build, fast. The Empire State Building opened on 1 May 1931, less than 14 months after construction began. But recall the famous 1932 photograph of workers on the Rockefeller Center eating their lunch perched on a steel beam dangling in the Manhattan sky: construction was quick then because there were hardly any regulations. Health and safety inspectors hadn’t been invented yet, and you could pump your pollutants into the sky or the local river.
Similarly untethered by regulations, government used to be free to act fast. In 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite into space, the US was seized by fear of losing the science race. Almost immediately, the Department of Defense set up what became the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agents, or Darpa. This handed out big grants to scientists, who could spend the money almost as they saw fit. “It produced a gaudy résumé of ingenuity,” write Klein and Thompson. “The internet, GPS, personal computers, and self-driving vehicles all trace their roots back to Darpa.” The American government’s tradition as the world’s leading funder of research continued into our era, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company receiving “billions of dollars from Nasa under Democratic and Republican administrations”.
But the American machine of innovation and construction had been sputtering for decades, long before the second Trump administration declared war on science. The authors explain that wealthy, stable democracies tend to amass rules and bureaucracies over time. Britain’s Green Belt regulations, which have prevented most construction in places where people want to live, originated in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. The American equivalents were the suite of environmental laws passed between 1966 and 1973, which gave citizens de facto vetoes over any new pollution or construction in their towns. In one sense, the laws worked brilliantly: pollution from substances like lead and carbon monoxide plummeted. Los Angeles’s smoggy skies cleared.
On the downside, the new rules made it almost impossible to build. Cities such as LA, San Francisco and New York need much more affordable housing and public transport. But anyone hoping to build anything must first take on Nimby blockers in years of local consultations. The Nimbys are now all “lawyered up”, in the unimprovable American phrase, because more regulations means more lawyers.
Public meetings on planned construction are dominated by homeowners who already live in the neighbourhood; the people who aren’t heard are the ones who don’t live there because they can’t afford a home. Scarcity is good for existing homeowners, because it drives up the price of their chief asset. The consequence is predictable. “In 1950,” write Klein and Thompson, “the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it was six times the average annual income.”
Blue states have the strictest rules. It’s much easier to build in Houston, Texas than in Klein’s home state of California, which is why the latter leads the US for homelessness. “In much of San Francisco,” note the authors, “you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicoloured sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families.” In other words, blue states today “are symbolically liberal but operationally conservative”.
Democrats in blue states pretend to favour government action, yet produce regulations that prevent the building of public infrastructure. California has spent decades and billions of dollars not constructing a high-speed line between LA and San Francisco in a fiasco that’s arguably worse than Britain’s HS2. New York’s Second Avenue Subway line was originally proposed in 1920. Construction began in 1972. The first three stations opened in 2017. More may follow one day.
No wonder so many Americans see government as a scam that takes their tax dollars and delivers almost nothing in return. American trust in government peaked in 1964, “when 77 per cent of the public believed that the government would do the right thing all or most of the time”. By 2023, that was down to 16 per cent. Then Americans elected a strongman and professional “builder” who promised to get things done. Trump’s frenzied show of activity in the first weeks of his second term is a pantomime of the instant delivery that many crave.
Thickets of regulation have stifled government-funded science, too. In the 1970s, Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat, began mocking public grants for research projects that he considered nuts, such as “studies about human attraction and why mammals clench their jaws when stressed”. Fear of being accused of waste or corruption can paralyse government. Funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health began demanding endless paperwork from scientists to show exactly what they were going to do with the money. The consequence, write Klein and Thompson, is that “today’s scientists spend up to 40 per cent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents”.
Government also grew scared of funding blue-skies research, because of the risk that it might lead to nothing. That’s a shame, because blue-skies research can produce paradigm-changing discoveries that eventually end up as innovative products. In one brilliant example, scientists in the 1990s discovered that a lizard called the Gila monster carried a hormone that allowed it to go months without eating. A version of that “lizard spit” became the basis for today’s anti-obesity drugs.
No wonder that many inventive minds have clustered in a place where they can act fast: Silicon Valley. When tech companies invent a product, such as Uber or Facebook, they typically launch it without checking with government. Years later, when government finally catches up and tries to impose regulations, the companies try to dodge or nobble them. Freedom to act can make tech a more satisfying career than over-regulated domains such as high-speed rail, says Patrick Collison, chief executive of the online payments company Stripe. He suggests that the internet functions as “a frontier of last resort”.
We can either stick with our overcautious regulatory systems or we can stop climate change, but we can’t do both. That’s because green infrastructure will require a quantity and pace of construction that’s unthinkable under today’s rules. The US’s required wind and solar installations alone would cover territory “roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee,” write the authors. Imagine consulting with just one “community” about whether they’d mind having a wind farm nearby. Current environmental regulations make it impossible to save the environment.
The solution is to identify society’s priorities and fast track them. The authors point out that we have done this before. We invented, made and delivered Covid-19 vaccines in less than a year. In a more recent example, days after Trump effectively abandoned Europe’s defence, Germany weakened its constitutional “debt brake” so as to enable higher defence spending. Six months ago, this would have seemed unconstitutional.
Anyone who remembers the 2008 global financial crisis knows that there are risks to deregulation. Tearing up bureaucratic rules during the pandemic enabled the rapid Covid vaccines. It also enabled British ministers to hand no-bid contracts to Tory donors who pretended they knew how to make masks and gowns in the “VIP lane” scandal that cost the state billions. Similarly, Labour’s plan to relax planning rules will undoubtedly enable some damaging construction. There is an eternal to and fro between over- and underregulation. But it does seem that when it comes to constructing homes and energy, both the US and UK have gone too far one way.
In 2010, Senator Michael Bennet urged people to watch the US Senate floor for a week. “You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, ‘I wonder what they’re doing in China right now.’” China terrifies the American governing class partly because it’s the nemesis that can build. True, building is easy for an autocracy that doesn’t need to bother with consultation. But there is a democratic model nearer to home. I live in France, a country that although dysfunctional in many ways, can still build. Sixty-eight metro stations are opening in the Parisian suburbs from 2024 through to 2030. High-speed rail covers almost all big French cities, and some smaller ones too. Imagine that in the US or UK.
Klein’s trademark po-faced de haut en bas teacher’s tone can grate, and any serious analysis of how things actually work involves a journey into the weeds. But Abundance is a necessary book.
Abundance
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Profile, 304pp, £16.14
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working