We noticed last week that in several of the counties California Local serves, civil grand juries are issuing calls for folks to apply to serve as jurors, as you may see in your News Digest below. Also below, you will find an Explainer that might lead you to look upon California’s civil grand jury process with admiration, if you are not already a fan.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of civilian governmental oversight (woo-hoo!), I want to briefly mention a book that came out this week that happens to sit right in our wheelhouse, and therefore possibly yours.
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, calls for a radical rethinking of policies to make government work better—and offers a stark contrast to the chaos being stoked right now in Washington, DC, in the name of government efficiency.
Abundance began with an essay Klein published in the New York Times sharply criticizing California’s inability to provide its citizens with enough housing, or to make significant progress on big projects like High Speed Rail. He points out that nationwide, we have lost our ability to build big things. An avowed liberal Democrat, he says this problem is much worse in blue cities and states.
For example, avoiding the worst of climate change, Klein says, “requires technologically accelerated solar, wind and battery technology, to the point that we could mass deploy it at a price point competitive with fossil fuels. But we did not have, if you looked at how we built things in America, in blue states, the policies needed for rapid deployment.”
Klein says he invited Thompson to partner with him on the book after reading an essay Thompson wrote in The Atlantic about "the abundance agenda." On his coauthor’s podcast last week, Klein explained: “I was inspired and slightly dispirited by your piece because I read it and immediately was like, oh shit, he cracked it. Like, he cracked the right way to think about this, which was, this had to be a positive vision.
“My piece and my approach was critique. ‘We are doing this thing wrong.’ And what I so admired about your piece, and about your work broadly, is that there was an optimism in it. It wasn't about what we did wrong, it was about what we could do right—the world we could have.”
Like Klein, Thompson views government’s current functioning critically. For example, he believes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) need to have their policies completely overhauled. But ... not at all in the way that Elon Musk would have it.
“I don't think Elon Musk understands the first fucking thing about the NIH,” Thompson says. “I don't think he did any research. I don't think he spoke to anybody about how exactly the NIH works, how it evolved, where it came from, what its habits are, which habits are good, and which habits are bad. What I see instead is—I'm not inside of his head, but what it looks to me like—is a pretty pure play of ideological punishment of universities that they think are woke.
“They're attacking science to punish the cultural ideas of scientists, and not going into the institution of science and renewing it to solve 21st century problems.”
I have been waiting for this book for a long time—it was originally scheduled for publication last summer. Sometime in the next few weeks, we can revisit it. But for now, let’s talk about some other honest efforts to hold governments accountable.
