In all, the US government spent less than $40 billion to develop, produce, and buy mRNA COVID vaccines.63 It might be one of the best bang-for-buck policies in US history. COVID vaccines prevented up to 20 million64 excess deaths worldwide, with several million of those saved lives directly attributable to the acceleration of the Pfizer and Moderna

But the world of abundance has trade-offs, and trade-offs require choices.

In this era of rising right-wing populism, there is pressure among liberals to focus only on the sins of the MAGA right. But this misses the contribution that liberal governance made to the rise of Trumpism.

Why is home construction in America dominated by such small firms? The researchers pick through the data and find that firms are allowed to build on less and less land, and are subject to more and more land use regulations, in ways that choke off their ability to grow and scale their work across cities and states.

Pahlka has come to think of government technology—and the regulations that control it—as layers of sediment. As new problems emerge, new layers are added. But the older ones are rarely removed. “Each successive layer is constrained by the limitations of the earlier technologies,” she writes. “The system is not so much updated as it is tacked on

“This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.”

The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little and we are too often paralyzed by process.

Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present.

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built.