My book club is reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson this month. The core idea fits on a napkin, so before the meeting I decided to actually check it against real data. Here's what I found, and where it fell apart.

The idea, in one picture

Housing, clean energy, cures for disease. The inputs to all three haven't really moved. Money's there. Technology got cheaper, not more expensive. Roughly the same number of people know how to build this stuff as always did.

What changed is the pipe between the inputs and the output.

Over the decades, every time something went wrong, somebody added a valve. A highway almost bulldozed a neighborhood in the '70s, so now there's a checkpoint for that. An environmental study got added in the '90s. By the 2000s you needed a public comment period too, sometimes more than one. None of these were dumb decisions in isolation. Each solved something real.…