Ignoring the price signal
How much do prices affect how much electricity we use? It’s an increasingly relevant question, since changing when people and firms use electricity – usually to try to spread out short-term peaks – is often one of the fi…
The price of power, an abundance origin story, and what civil service reform actually looks like
2026-07-29
The Hostile Turn in Administrative Procedure, and the Ad Hoc Exceptions
“Abundance” as a movement has a set of diagnoses of what’s wrong with US public policy, and how to fix it, but it also has a historical narrative behind it, which goes something like this: the US used to be able to build…
Actually Existing State Capacity Reform
Compared to some of the other areas we work on , improving “state capacity” can seem a bit nebulous. The end goal of improving the productivity of government is laudable, but what, specifically, does that mean? With that…
The Two McNamaras
I enjoyed reading Oliver Kim’s article on the two lives of Robert McNamara: one as US secretary of defense and chief escalator of the Vietnam War, the other as World Bank president and crusader against global poverty. He…
The Effects of U.S. Public R&D on Global Growth
Last week, I mentioned a big Congressional Budget Office report estimating the economic impact of federal spending on non-defense research and development efforts (think basic and applied science at the National Science …