Abundance, Indoor Air and Socrates
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Abundance Book. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson finally published their book on Abundance. To have the future we want, we should build and invent more. Lest you think it is only a longer version of the techno-optimist manifesto, they believe abundance requires a renewal of institutions and we should build certain types of things. They emphasize that the US needs more housing (building), clean energy (building), and better healthcare (investing) plus more state capacity. Aside from reading the book, here is a good summary of related ideas from the substack Modern Power. Or you could listen to Ezra on many podcasts. A few things of note:
They want the left to ask new questions: What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What do we need to invent? The left has focused too much on procedural fairness (and saying no) and too little on outcomes (and saying yes to what we want).
A big area of focus for them is building more green energy, requiring faster government approvals.
Examples of positive state capacity include: the covid vaccine creation and distribution effort Operation Warp Speed. Spending billions to save trillions. We had never gone from vaccine design to its wide distribution in 10 months! Lots of government planning and money went into making this happen and no private actor was in position to do the same. Some of the key tools were advanced purchase orders. We should use this and prizes more often to spur spending on innovation and scale up. Or cutting through red tape and taking more risk to complete a 12 day rebuild of I-95 in Pennsylvania. Should the normal process be closer to this “emergency one”?
In the book they highlight that science research funding is too risk averse and too often skips over younger scientists with newer ideas. Not all the low hanging fruit has been picked but the culture and system of science encourages too many to look in the same trees. (On the right, similar conversations are called progress studies.)
An interesting quote from the book is “If the left underestimates the need for invention in their politics, the right underestimates the role of policy in invention.” I’m excited by all the discussion of building and inventing and hope we do it!
If these ideas move you, join the Abundance Network or form a local chapter.
Clean Indoor Air. The 21st century sanitation project is clean indoor air. Indoor mold testing and awareness seems more common. Some local jurisdictions ban the installation of fireplaces or gas cooking stoves. We required carbon monoxide monitors in more places. Monitoring the amount of particulates in the air is easier with new devices. Yet we could do a lot more about infectious diseases spreading indoors. Stigma around the miasma theory slowed the understanding that some pathogens do in fact persistently float on indoor air. What should we do to remove, deactivate or dilute those pathogens? I’m intrigued with germicidal ultraviolet light or similar techniques to safely and inexpensively deactivate germs. Blueprint Biosecurity drafted a report about Far UVC for germicidal ultraviolet light. I’d be curious if you know much about it? Also, do we have a LEED-like standard for public spaces designed and operated for human health including reducing the spread of infectious diseases? WELL Health-Safety Rating looks relevant, does it have enough emphasis on infectious disease spread?
True Socratic Inquiry. Open Socrates is a striking book and yet left me wondering if I really understood it. The author argues that we misunderstand Socrates, who was the most important figure in philosophy. There is an important branch of philosophy that is not consequentialist, utilitarian or virtue ethics, or others you may be aware of. She argues that Socrates was an expert on death, politics and love. Since Socrates (like Haidt) believes that people can only grasp truth in collaboration with others, let me know if you want to read and discuss the book.
Until next time,
Miles