Ariel

“Today's politics are suffused with cynicism and pessimism about government because a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable. in 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Liberals have chosen to trust elected politicians and government workers less and trust regulatory and judicial processes more to ensure that government delivers. That may have made sense in a past era, but given the problems we face now, it is a mistake. Whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Generations from now, inventions that we can scarcely imagine will feel core to modern life: all-disease saliva and blood tests, vaccines that wipe out whole classes of virus and disease, materials stronger than steel and lighter than air, infinite clean energy from fusion reactors. If these things are possible in the realm of physical reality, then they are possible to discover; and if they can be discovered in a century, they can be discovered in a decade, or in a year. These achievements will require a level of risk-taking and ambition that we are too effective at snuffing out. For all the wonders of American invention, it is astonishing to realize that we don't know for sure how the process of discovery actually works. We still don't know how to identify and nurture the Katalin Karikos of the world. To find them, we need a better science of science.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“We are in a period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. The crack up was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in deregulated markets. The climate crisis revealed how much the profit motive missed. The aftermath of normalizing trade with China proved that the prophets of free trade understood neither China nor America.
Throughout the 2010s, a slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans' trust in government, or what was left of it. And between 2021 and 2024, inflation brought national attention to our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance