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regulators, school systems, local governments, and individual families have all recognized a common interest that allows them to work together to ensure that almost all children in the United States get vaccinated.10 The gravitational center of the near-miraculous degree of cooperation among these fractious institutions and interests is the technology itself — vaccines that yield reliable and desirable outcomes, and thus motivate and justify the cooperation necessary to achieve an enormous public benefit. To get a sense of how miraculous this degree of long-term cooperation really is, imagine what it would take to coordinate a similar diversity of interests on behalf of some broader political agenda like health care or education reform.

The suspicion of technological approaches to social problems is self-defeating, both because it prevents liberalism from exploiting the built-in political logic of effective technological interventions, and because it actually commits liberals to political pathways of social intervention that are not very likely to succeed. When combined with the strong faith in science as a foundation for progressive policies, liberal alienation from technology results in the sort of dumbfoundingly misconceived policy prescriptions that have arisen around the problem of climate change. It was, however, not always thus.

5.

In 1944, David Lilienthal, the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), published Democracy on the March, a passionate expression of the scientific and technological optimism that existed amidst the social and economic devastation of the Great Depression.

Lilienthal was an archetypal New Deal figure, confident that the combination of science, technology, rational planning, and democratic government could help bring the nation back to its feet. His book was an explanation and defense of the TVA, a New Deal initiative aimed at bringing electricity, flood management, river navigability, improved agricultural practices, better health and education, new jobs and economic opportunity, and restoration of the environment to an impoverished region of the United States.

While Democracy on the March seems quaint, if not somewhat scary in its unvarnished confidence in grand technological schemes, Lilienthal was no technological utopian. He treats technology’s power as complex and ambiguous, requiring holistic thinking and democratic oversight in order to fulfill its promise. The TVA he describes was democratically responsive and administratively decentralized. Authority lay not just with formally trained technocrats, but also with those who had local, real-world experience and expertise.

In many of its elements, Democracy on the March reads like a 21st century primer for sustainable development. Lilienthal articulates ideas equivalent to what today we would call systems thinking, sustainable business practices, comparative effectiveness research, devolution of governance, public-private partnerships, adaptive learning, and democratization of science and technology.11

If Lilienthal’s technologically optimistic vision nonetheless sounds naïve to today’s liberal ear, perhaps the problem is with the liberal ear, which seems to find greater political resonance in abstract scientific diagnoses of risk than technological opportunities to improve human well-being. Thus was TVA advanced on exactly the opposite political rationale that liberals adopted, half a century later, for climate change. For TVA’s core idea was this: the best and most direct way to improve the quality of life in the Tennessee Valley was to make electricity — energy — cheap and universally available. What if we imported this outmoded strand of liberalism into the present, and tried to apply it to the climate change problem? The starting place for formulating a politically attractive strategy that honors core liberal values might be this particular fact: 1.4 billion people lack access to reliable energy (and billions more are economically and socially vulnerable to increasing energy costs).12 This number needs to decline