How "Abundance" Lost the Left

Summary

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Diabolical Lies – Episode Summary

Podcast Details

• Title: How "Abundance" Lost the Left
• Hosts: Katie Gatti Tassin & Caro Claire Burke
• Date: July 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode offers a deep, incisive, and often hilariously irreverent breakdown of the book and political phenomenon known as "Abundance," spearheaded by Ezra Klein (NYT) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic). Katie and Caro revisit the theory and policy arguments behind "abundance," its sweeping influence and subsequent backlash on the mainstream American left, and why this framework has failed to capture either the hearts or wallets of most left-leaning activists and voters. Through granular analysis, memorable comic asides, and a host of case studies, the hosts dissect abundance’s fixation on supply, proceduralism, and deregulatory logic—and examine whether this project was ever a viable path forward for the Democratic Party.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: What is "Abundance"?

[04:46]

• "Abundance" refers to both a book and a broader political coalition centered around the idea that artificially manufactured scarcities (in housing, energy, infrastructure, etc.) are the root of America’s current malaise, and that solving these with supply-side state capacity is the path forward.
• The "Abundance Agenda," articulated by Derek Thompson since 2022, proposes that scarcity is a policy choice, and abundance can be engineered through better governance and fewer procedural bottlenecks.

Quote:

"Manufactured scarcity isn't just the story of COVID tests or the pandemic or the economy. It's the story of America today." — Caroline reading Derek Thompson's 2022 article, [12:43]

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2. Context: Post-Trump, Democratic Identity Crisis

[07:14–08:26]

• The book dropped amid widespread demoralization after Trump’s second-term win, when many on the left were desperate for new frameworks.
• Ezra Klein’s preeminence as a liberal thought leader set the stage for "Abundance" to gain traction as a would-be roadmap for a demoralized Democratic Party.

Quote:

"Ezra especially went into 2025 with a lot of political clout. He had this prophetic stature in the Democratic Party, and a lot of Democrats...were looking to him to understand what we should do next." — Katie, [08:26]

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3. Dissecting the Argument: Scarcity as Policy Choice

[13:59–28:11]

• The book (and the political project) claims proceduralism (rules, bottlenecks, "liberal legalism") is to blame for why America can't build enough housing, energy, or infrastructure.
• Instead of detailed policy proposals, the book focuses on reorienting liberalism away from redistribution and toward "a politics of plenty."

Quote:

"We aspire to more than parceling out the present." — Book excerpt, [19:17]
"We need a liberalism that builds." — Paraphrased, [28:30]

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4. Reception & Criticism on the Left

[14:32–26:53]

• The left’s main critiques:
  1. Corporate Power Ignored – "Abundance" consistently underplays the role of corporate and oligarchic interests in engineering scarcities.
  2. Neoliberalism in Disguise – Critics see it as a repackaging of deregulation, despite repeated protestations that they're “building state capacity.”
• The tension between abundance and redistribution is called out repeatedly; the book distances itself from the Bernie Sanders wing and European-style social democracy.

Quote:

"They are clearly trying to distance themselves at multiple junctures from a politics of redistribution." — Katie, [20:03]
"Neoliberals want a smaller state to empower the market...we abundists want a state that's more capable of delivering on its promises." — Paraphrase, [26:43]

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5. Anatomy of the "Abundance" Book

[27:12–28:11]

• Structured into five themes: Grow, Build, Govern, Invent, Deploy.
• Focuses on examples in housing, transportation, energy, and health, arguing that procedural government failures—rather than capital, politics, or profiteering—are the root cause of stymied supply.

Quote:

"This book is dedicated to a simple idea. To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need." — Caroline reading thesis, [28:11]

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6. Case Studies & Critiques

a. Health (COVID mRNA Vaccine)

[47:50–52:18]

• The book rightly celebrates mRNA advances but blames paperwork and NIH timidity for delaying scientific breakthroughs, rather than focusing on overall science funding.
• The global vaccine rollout is used to expose how innovation doesn’t always produce fair or abundant outcomes, as inequality persists despite supply.

b. Broadband Example Debunked

[52:18–66:19]

• A viral Ezra Klein/Jon Stewart clip (shared by Elon Musk) attributes delays in rural Internet rollout to proceduralism.
• Deeper reporting shows industry lobbying, not just bureaucracy, played a decisive role—undermining the central thesis of abundance.

Quote:

"The question isn't really, is government proceduralism used to obstruct progress? It's on whose behalf is proceduralism most often being wielded?" — Katie, [65:12]

c. Energy & Transit: Permitting and the Limits of Deregulation

[67:47–77:16]

• Solar and wind capacity are used as illustrations of abundance potential—but again, factors like capital returns, corporate lobbying, and profit incentives set the true limits on scale.
• High-speed rail’s cost and delays are partly caused by lack of public funding up front and outsourcing, not mere red tape.

Quote:

"I'm still waiting to see how this is going to come back to the solar farms thing, but whatever." — Katie, [76:28]

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d. Housing: YIMBYism, Zoning, and Its Contradictions

[97:02–123:27]

• The case for upzoning (eliminating single-family restrictions) in places like San Francisco and New York—the "superstar cities"—is dissected.
• Research and expert interviews: Zoning mostly determines where housing is added, not how much. Major studies show supply constraints have less impact on affordability than income inequality and profit incentives.
• The hosts point out that focusing on two expensive cities doesn’t reflect the broader national problem, where abundance matters little if no one wants to live in newly built places.

Quote:

"Housing is cheap in Cleveland... You should want to live in a superstar city." — Katie, [122:57]
"Regulatory constraints don’t appear to matter... relaxing housing supply constraints may not materially affect affordability." — Paraphrasing research, [123:29]

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7. The Financing and Profit Problem

[128:09–135:38]

• Even as abundance-inspired zoning reforms pass, construction isn’t happening. Why?
  • High interest rates
  • Labor shortages
  • Developers & financiers seeking high returns (not public good)
• Even Derek Thompson acknowledges this gap: “We don’t talk very much about financing... the projects are not penciling out and we don’t have an answer to it.” — [130:06–132:00]

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8. The Limits and Ironies of "Abundance"

[143:25–149:31]

• Subsidizing "private genius" (e.g. Elon Musk) leads to vast private wealth, not always public good—US lags far behind other nations in electric vehicle adoption despite lavish subsidies.
• The effort required to persuade people to act against their material interests is immense, underlining the contradiction at the heart of abundance: it’s easier to change people’s minds than to redistribute real power or resources.

Quote:

"Scarcity is profitable. And as long as your system is organized around maximizing profits... you will not produce abundance." — Katie, [146:08]
"The Abundance theory is... simplifying regulations, that the powerful obstructionary forces are just going to disappear. But the focus is on private development." — Katie, [140:55]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the appeal & vacuity of "Abundance":

  "Abundance is like the Jello Kool-Aid man who kicks down the door and he's like, oh yeah, abundance." — Caroline, [01:29]

• On supply-side optimism:

  "It kind of feels like there's a foundational misalignment between the goal and the mechanism." — Katie, [45:20]

• On Cleveland & American regional inequality:

  "It’s really odd to just focus on these two cities... vast swaths of the country in between are just kind of left out to dry." — Katie, [114:02]

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Notable Timestamps

• 04:46: Explanation of "Abundance" as both book and political coalition
• 13:59: Derek Thompson’s original take on manufactured scarcity
• 20:03: Book’s effort to distance itself from redistribution
• 26:43: Discussion of abundance as "state capacity" vs neoliberalism
• 52:18: Ezra Klein’s viral/controversial broadband example
• 65:12: Deeper dive into who really benefits from proceduralism
• 77:16: U.S. public project costs, privatization, and the role of outsourcing
• 104:53: Core contradiction of American housing as asset speculation
• 122:57: “Cleveland” as the stand-in for overlooked regions
• 128:09: Abundance’s authors admit blindspots about financing
• 146:08: Final summation: why “abundance” cannot deliver abundance under capitalism

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Final Reflections

• The hosts argue (with abundant evidence, puns, and irreverence) that "abundance" is a seductive but ultimately incoherent replacement for a more robust democratic socialist vision.
• The episode closes with a tongue-in-cheek plea for Klein and Thompson to join the leftist side for real, reminding them: “This movement has 54% net favorability compared to like 2 or 3%. It’s not too late to jump ship. Come on in. Water’s warm.” ([156:02])

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Credits and Tone

The episode is dense with research, playful banter (lemonade and potato metaphors abound), and meta-commentary about both leftist infighting and the frustrating popularity of "airport policy books." Katie and Caro combine deep skepticism with a genuine desire for effective left policy, making their critical summary both accessible and incisive for listeners who've never cracked the book or heard of the “Abundance” agenda.

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For further reading, including the cut sections and bonus references, see the show notes.

Transcript

[Ezra Klein]

Foreign.

[Katie]

Was brought to you by the New York Times, the Atlantic, Caro's sexy dreams about having a multifamily housing polycule with Ezra Klein, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Obama ism Vox's Style guide swearing your idea that sounds a lot like deregulation is not in fact deregulation. And a chorus full of air guitars sounding off at once to celebrate an episode coming 18 months too late. Say it with me. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Welcome to Honestly, I'm Bari Weitz. I was reading those pages in a public park in New York City and I was like, wow, this is an amazing fantasy. And I look up, within spitting distance of me, there's two homeless guys.

[Ezra Klein]

That's the jump scare that we're trying to get people to feel to provide a vision of utopian, but also I think actually somewhat realistic. If we developed housing abundance and energy abundance.

[Caroline]

Abundance.

[Ezra Klein]

It's not crazy to think that we could have what we call star pills developed in low orbit.

[Katie]

Abundance.

[Caroline]

Abundance.

[Katie]

Ezra Klein is that any American should

[Derek Thompson]

at least have a reasonable chance that

[Caroline]

they will have the opportunity to meet

[Derek Thompson]

somebody and the economic viability to have a family. I think the left has given up on having even any way to talk about what family structures it believes in. I'm not sure abundance book solves all of that, but it definitely solves enough of it that you should go check it out.

[Caroline]

Abundance is like the Jello Kool Aid man who kicks down the door and he's like, oh yeah, abundance.

[Derek Thompson]

It completely sounded like America shut the up with that.

[Katie]

Abundance. Oh yeah, you had a sexy dream about Ezra Klein last night. That was private.

[Ezra Klein]

Abundance.

[Derek Thompson]

You're not going to vote for them no matter what policies they promise you.

[Katie]

Abundance. Oh, get the fuck over. Amazing. Okay, so first, a quick Update about the Q2 redistribution for our mutual aid Inspired giving. I know that there are some folks that are still kind of waiting to hear back on this. So for the uninitiated, a few weeks ago we sent out an email to our subscribers announcing that we were going to be sending our May and June redistribution revenue to listeners who needed help right now. And we kept it pretty open ended with the submissions so far we've sent payments to I think 140 of you and we have around 100 people left on our list to get to, but we've saved the largest dollar amounts for last because we're just trying to figure out if we can pull those off by adding July redistribution money and if we have to add August as well to make that happen. So we're just still waiting to hear back from our accountant on that since those totals are right now based on projections. But we will send out an email update as soon as the final payments have been made with a little summary of how we approach this. Some of the things your support of the show has been able to do for your fellow liars. If you aren't subscribed on Substack yet, we're going to put a link in the show notes for that. Caro, anything to add?

[Caroline]

I just want to give you your flowers, Katie, because we've talked about this for a long time, but you're the one who kind of initiated that we do it for this quarter and you have put so much work into figuring this out. I have spent multiple weekends essentially fully logged off and just being like, text me later. And Katie has been completely grinding trying to figure out like, multiple payment platforms, like dealing with fraud. Like, we had to move our entire financial thing onto like a different platform. It's just been a whole thing this summer. And I just want to give you your flowers for figuring that out. I think it's really fucking cool and you've put a lot of work into making it happen.

[Katie]

Well, thanks. Well, I want to give you your flowers for dealing with all my bitching about it. And also the fact that the fact that we're kind of coming up short of our goal for this redistribution, Caro has generously offered to personally supplement so that we can fulfill everybody buddies list.

[Caroline]

Okay, well, I didn't compliment you just so that you would compliment me. Here we go again. Circle jerking on our podcast.

[Katie]

Well, that's how that works, baby. That is a bonus.

[Caroline]

And also shout out to our cfa, Ariel, who just deals with our crazy questions all the time where she, like, thought she was signing on to relatively normal white women with a podcast. And then instead we're like, hey, how do we send like small to medium sized amounts of cash to like 300 random people across the country?

[Katie]

And she's like, fuck yeah, Ariel's our cpa. Which is another maybe proof point. That's why I'm money with Katie. And you are.

[Caroline]

You are novelist Karen, a person about town.

[Katie]

A person about town. A thinker about town. Okay, well, the moment we've all been waiting for. I hope everyone has blocked approximately four hours. I reserve the right to make this a two parter if it becomes too unwieldy. It is finally time to discuss a book and movement that has served as a bit of a running gag on this show. Abundance. Now, abundance is of course, the book by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, published almost 18 months ago, that is described in its jacket copy as a quote, once in a generation paradigm shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. Now, this book came out in March 2025, but I want to revisit it now because of two recent news stories. So the first is what I would call the contrast between the excitement about a year ago for the abundance agenda and the momentum that we're seeing this summer for primary candidates who are explicitly running as Democratic socialists. And the second is some recent reporting on abundance related fundraising pitch documents that were leaked in the American Prospect. Now, we should make this clarification up front. It is sort of confusing. There's abundance the book, and then there's abundance the political coalition, which is a much broader thing. And while they are related, they're not the same. So I think the slippage between the two ends up being actually quite important for how these things materially unfold. So my goal today is to look back at what abundance really was. It felt sort of inescapable after the 2024 election. And so I was curious to revisit that phenomenon by actually going back to the text itself, because at one point, abundance really appeared poised to be the future of the mainstream left in the United States. And I think to understand why, you have to think about where we were in spring 2025, two months into Donald Trump's second term. So Caro, do you remember the predominant feeling at this time in March 2025?

[Caroline]

No. No, I mean, I, I don't remember anything from the last two years.

[Katie]

Okay, then I'll tell you what I remember. I remember being really freaked out because Trump got into office and they, they were prepared. They had spent the, their 900 page project, 2025 shit, you know, in order. They were just whipping out executive orders left and right. And it was a real divergence, I would say, from his first term where things took a little bit longer. He wasn't surrounded by yes men. And so I think the Democrats were like, not just really tail between their legs because their candidate lost when they really clearly should have won, but also because Trump was rapidly dismantling like, what we thought of as American democracy. So I think people were feeling really nervous. Now remember one of the co authors of this book, Ezra Klein, was the New York Times opinion writer and podcaster, who essentially said, joe Biden was too old to be the candidate long before that was being widely acknowledged or was even really considered an acceptable opinion to hold. Which is kind of funny to think about now that that was ever taboo.

[Caroline]

But it was a huge deal when he did that.

[Katie]

So Ezra especially went into 2025 with a lot of political clout. He had this prophetic stature in the Democratic Party, and a lot of Democrats, meaning consultants politicians, as well as just regular people, regular voters kind of were looking to him to understand what we should do next, how we should think about the future of the party, and to make sense of our political moment. And it is into that environment that this book was published. The phrase abundance agenda preceded the book. And I'm not sure if like, the political coalition technically came first and then Derek Thompson just used the phrase in the 2022 article that would become the basis for the book, or if he is the one who came up with the phrase and then this movement kind of borrowed it. Like, I'm not really clear on the precise conception there, but in any case, we're going to read from a passage In Derek Thompson's 2022 article, a simple Plan to Solve all of America's Problems. So I'm going to share my screen.

[Caroline]

Do you know, Katie, what Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's relationship was prior to their decision to co write this book together?

[Katie]

I do not. Do you have any sense for that?

[Caroline]

No. They don't seem like. They don't seem like they have a bromance. Like, that's why I'm kind of curious. I feel like I recall Ezra doing an interview where they kind of reached out to one another and realized they were working on similar projects. But I mean, this is maybe a personal aside. I'm just always curious how those things work because co writing a book seems to me to be like a very intimate thing to do. I mean, they're similar, but they very much have their own beats. And I don't often see them still working in lockstep. So I was mostly just curious.

[Katie]

I don't know how obvious it'll be from the text excerpts that I'm like,

[Caroline]

I don't think they're gay for each other like we are. I'm also just eating blueberries on mute while Katie talks.

[Katie]

Oh my God, is this whole episode is just going to be monologue with like the faint sound of chewing in the background?

[Caroline]

I mean, honey, you're talking about housing policy in America. I'm not sure how much I'm going

[Katie]

to to say this is like me in the birth episodes where I'm like, all right, and then the head comes out and then. All right, but wait, what. What happens next? I don't know how obvious it will be based on the excerpts that we're going to read today, but I at least felt when I was reading it, like I could tell which person had written which sections. Derek Thompson has a very identifiable writing style. I think Ezra's a little more methodical and a little less voicey.

[Caroline]

Hmm.

[Katie]

And beyond that, I also think that Derek Thompson does have a more neoliberal view of the world. I think Klein is more progressive than Thompson. That might have some explanatory power for what I am going to call today the, like, internal incoherence of some of their arguments. But anyway, we are going to get back to this article from Thompson that he wrote in 2022. If you will please stop eating blueberries and read.

[Caroline]

It's gonna be so hard for me to not make paternity leave jokes all throughout this episode. Okay, America is miserable. And also, by the way, here we go again. Riley and I have started making it a parental bit where he's just like. Whenever we talk about planning for the baby, he's just like, talking about his reading list. He's like, okay, I think I'm gonna get this book. And I really wanna look into this for architecture Carol.

[Katie]

Anyways, okay, we have 44. We don't have time for anecdotes.

[Caroline]

Okay, sorry, sorry.

[Katie]

No personal asides. Stick to the fucking Google Docs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Caroline]

O. All right. On it. America's miserable and miserably timed testing shortage was a policy choice. The FDA has continually slow walked the approval of rapid tests for development. The Trump administration was utterly uninterested in any COVID policy outside the vaccines. The Biden administration and Democrats didn't announce bulk orders of rapid tests until the omicron wave had already swept through the country. Other countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, approved more kits and prioritized their manufacture and distribution, giving their citizens access to millions of free tests throughout the past year. America lacks the test abundance of the UK and Canada because instead of choosing abundance, we chose scarcity. Zoom out and you can see that scarcity has been the story of the whole pandemic response. In early 2020, Americans were told to not wear masks because we apparently didn't have enough to go around. Last year, Americans were told to not get booster shots because we apparently didn't have enough to go around. Today we're worried about people using too Many Covid tests as cases scream past 700,000 per day because we apparently don't have enough to go around. Zoom out more and you'll see that scarcity is also the story of the U.S. economy. After years of failing to invest in technology at our ports, we have a shipping delay crisis. After years of a deliberate policy to reduce visa issuance for immigrants, we suddenly can't find enough workers for our schools, factories, restaurants or hotels. After decades of letting semiconductor manufacturing power move to Asia, we have a shortage of chips, which is causing price increases for cars and electronics. Zoom out yet more and the truly big picture comes into focus. Manufactured scarcity isn't just the story of COVID tests or the pandemic or the economy. It's the story of America today. The revolution in communications technology has made it easier than ever for ordinary people to loudly identify the problems that they see in the world. But this age of bits enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in Adams related progress.

[Katie]

So Thompson's thesis in this original piece is that manufactured scarcity is the story of America today that becomes like the seed of what will become abundance. And the abundance agenda and the theory laid out in the book is the answer to this manufactured scarcity. Caro, do you want to briefly tell me just like, what your understanding is of the reception to abundance and like, why people on the left either liked or disliked it?

[Caroline]

I mean, I think that there's something about it that is inherently provocative by nature of how obvious it is. I do think we live in a politics of scarcity. And I also think that Democrats have a reputation for advocating for the working class or for feigning to advocate for the working class. So ironically, you would think that abundance would already be within their wheelhouse. But there's something about it that feels very horseshoe theory to me. I don't know, it felt to me like a little bit like third rail in a kind of exciting way.

[Katie]

Oh, interesting. Okay, before we actually get into the positioning and the criticism, I want to briefly touch on two pieces of criticism that I kept seeing that I actually think are bogus. Number one, this idea that they should have been focusing on the right instead and how conservatives actually cause all these issues. I actually think it's completely fine for two Democrats to criticize the Democratic Party or ask why places that are governed by Democratic trifectas are ineffectual. I have no problem with that at all.

[Caroline]

I also think it's fine for people to like, propose a solution. Even if it's a solution you don't end up agreeing with. Sure, like we do need people to think of ideas for how to solve things.

[Katie]

I agree. And number two, that bureaucratic bottlenecks aren't consequential enough to be worth discussing. I don't think it's fair to dismiss that point writ large that systems and organizations become less effective as you add procedure. I wish they would have applied that argument to our welfare system and like all the means testing and like convoluted rules, but whatever. A lot of the criticism of abundance pertains less to some of the specific arguments that they are making in the book, though there is a fair bit of that too, and objects more strenuously to the book's positioning as the future of the Democratic Party. Or like the unifying political theory of our time, there are subtle and not so subtle ways in which abundance is positioned as an alternative to like a Bernie Sanders style vision. It came out during a second Trump presidency where there was a real identity crisis about what the Democratic Party was going to be and it sort of fell vacuum. Now, to give you a sense of that positioning, aside from just the press copy which marketers write not authors, here is a quote from the conclusion about why they didn't write a policy book, but instead are making a more abstract argument for what our political values should be.

[Caroline]

We considered calling this book the Abundance Agenda. We could have easily filled these pages with a long list of policy ideas to ease the blockages we fear. It's easy to unfurl a policy wish list, but what is ultimately at stake here are our values. How do we weigh the role that the current inhabitants of a community should have, and who enters that community next? How do we balance the interests of a town against the interests of a country?

[Katie]

Okay, so I think it's fair to interpret this framing as an argument for a broad orientation of vision and priority, and not just the specific arcane policies that seem to preoccupy them. In this separately, Derek told Lex Friedman this on his podcast, Is there a

[Derek Thompson]

degree to which the left uniquely attacks its own more intensely than maybe other parts of the political spectrum?

[Ezra Klein]

It's possible. You know, you go back to the model that I gave you of 2015 where there used to be these four large parties MAGA, center right, center left and Left right. Now the Republican Party is all maga, so there is no coalitional fight to be had. It's all Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump wants to name a former left wing environmentalist to be the HHS secretary, everyone says, okay, that sounds like a fantastic Idea. That's exactly who we were going to nominate too. Thank you, Donald.

[Derek Thompson]

It's wonderful.

[Ezra Klein]

Tip of my tongue. On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it's happening right now. And our book is trying to win a certain intra left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism, the Democratic Party.

[Katie]

So you hear him naming this conflict directly that others kind of perceive in the text. They're trying to win a certain intra left coalitional fight between the abundance and the far left, or the populist left, as they call them.

[Caroline]

The radical jihadist left.

[Katie]

The radical jihadist left of Mamdanistan. Sorry, Mamdani grad. Someone was like, it's a city, so it would be Mamdani grad. There are also little nods to this tension in philosophy in the book where they seem to differentiate their vision pretty explicitly. Where they say, the world we want

[Caroline]

requires more than redistribution. We aspire to more than parceling out the present. Wait, what does that mean?

[Katie]

The world we want requires more than redistribution basically means in order to have this glorious utopian abundant future, we actually need to invent and innovate more that we can't just spread around what we already have.

[Caroline]

Oh yeah.

[Katie]

Which is interesting. As another example, there's one sort of bewildering line about how, quote, American liberalism has measured its successes and how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark. What, as a means of, like, jettisoning that type of political goal as being ill suited, or like, oh, we tried that and it didn't work.

[Caroline]

I'm sorry. You know, when I think about the last 50, 60, 70 years of American politics, you know what I say to people? I say, we spent too much time trying to model our country and our society after what they're doing over in Denmark. And damn it, it's time to do it America's way. God damn.

[Katie]

The candidates who have come closest in our lifetimes to leading the party based on proposing these types of solutions were sabotaged by the dnc. And then there was. I found this clip from a 2015 debate where Hillary and Bernie are debating and Hillary says, we are not Denmark, we are the United States of America. Like, they have. Like, it's not even subtext. It is in the text that they're like, we're not fucking doing that. So I don't think that their characterization is like intentionally bad faith here. But the point is that they are clearly trying to distance themselves at multiple junctures from a politics of redistribution. And by extension, the abundance agenda is sort of seen as arguing that its solutions are a viable alternative path to redistribution. Now, making matters more contentious in this wave of criticism that followed, the book is who they often attribute the problems to. So, like the repeat offenders that you're going to encounter in Abundance as the source of the obstruction to the things that we need are often environmental groups. The values that were brought forth by the cultural revolution of the New left in the 1970s, consumer protection movements, things that, like, you get the sense they were trying to do the whole. These things that we think of as good liberal causes are actually self defeating and are preventing us from getting the things that we want. And that's probably why the majority of the criticism of this book is that it does not contend with the role of corporate power or oligarchic figures in our outcomes, in part because to some extent they are arguing that we need those types of figures in order to fund the future. So, for example, here is a paragraph from the conclusion where they are quoting a historian that they bring up a few times, Gary Gersel, to lay out what they think a politics of abundance will require.

[Caroline]

Establishing a political order demands far more than winning an election or two. It requires deep pocketed donors and political action committees to invest in promising candidates over the long term. They're like, we need citizens being good. The establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs. A rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies, a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels, the Supreme Court and across popular print and broadcast media and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of the good life life. Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front.

[Katie]

Okay, so the top line is like they're more or less getting most of these things. Fundraising documents for the Associated Abundance Network, which is not formally affiliated with Klein and Thompson, but ideologically aligned. And if they do, name drop them in, the documents showed that there is allegedly $260 million per year going toward, quote unquote, abundance organizing. When you read the reporting, it's like there are some big names in Silicon Valley that are funding this. And Dylan Gouch Lewis's reporting for the American Prospect found this.

[Caroline]

God, you could fill a Family Guy episode with jokes about the phrase abundance organizing. Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such and even frequently use the word elite by choice. Oof, that is damning.

[Katie]

And then the nonprofit cites the work of a number of pundits who are essentially providing the intellectual structure and thrust for this political project.

[Caroline]

Okay, the pair's analysis, quote, came out of a joint 5 year 100 book quest for a again, quote, root disease diagnosis for what is crippling left politics and rotting our American democracy flag that they spent half a decade alongside, quote, a community of intellectuals like Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsis, Jen Palka, Steve tells Derek Thompson, working on, quote, piecing that analysis together via an emerging political ideology called abundance. The goal now is operationalizing it into a powerful political faction that drives political outcomes at scale. The way that they move between talking about like Democrats and the left is kind of interesting to me because also they are criticizing what is actually the left. And I feel like it is, it's one of those, this happens all the time. But you'll see this mishmash between where you're just referencing the left and it's like, well, is it the neoliberal left? Is it the leftists that you claim are like holding the Democratic Party hostage? Like, who are you talking about here? What is rotting the left?

[Katie]

It's antifa. You know what I mean? It's always antifa, Cindy. But yeah, okay, so to summarize the majority of the criticism of the so called abundance agenda coming from the left, the communist antifa left isn't about any one particular tactic in this book so much as it is a global critique of abundance's theory of power in this country. So I'd boil it down to two major points that I want you to keep in mind today. Number one, that forces like corporate interests and lobbying, things of that nature are basically not in this book in any meaningful way. Now, Ezra has been confronted directly and repeatedly with this critique. And we are going to talk about how he answers this question a little later and why I think his response is kind of illuminating. And then number two, it's accused of being neoliberal in nature. Like it is effectively arguing for deregulation. And people are like, yeah, we tried that. Like we're, we're living in the outcomes of deregulation right now. And what Ezra will typically say in response to that accusation is no, no, we are arguing for more state capacity, not less. Yes, he will say that abundance is an argument for more state capacity, that neoliberals want a smaller state to empower the market, basically. And we abundists want a state that's more capable of delivering on its promises. A state that is capable of, quote, making decisions, executing those decisions and implementing them in the real world world.

[Caroline]

And we want that via deregulation.

[Katie]

Don't spoil it. Don't spoil it.

[Caroline]

Okay, okay. I'm already. I'm already lost, but keep going. Fuck.

[Katie]

So now that we've discussed positioning in the environment it exists in, we are going to dig into the text a little bit more. So I would describe abundance as an elevated policy airport book. It has five chapters. Grow, Build, Governance, Invent and Deploy. This reminds you of anything.

[Caroline]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Do you know, do you ever listen to the Daily? And they'll do advertising and they'll be like the story of innovation in five words. Synergy, activism, blah blah, blah. Ryle and I always. And we're like, oh, they. They do that ad so often and it was always so nonsensical. So I love the idea of Ezra and Derek being like the story of abundance in five words.

[Katie]

Okay. For me, I was thinking of Freya. India's filtered, diagnosed, documented, empowered.

[Ezra Klein]

I.

[Caroline]

Hey, I. You quoted me on that. I think Freya ate with that. I liked her chapter titles.

[Katie]

Yeah. What do you give? Grow, build, govern, invent, Deploy. Scale of 1 to 10.

[Caroline]

You know what? I give them tens for accessibility. All right. They definitely took multi syllabic words and shortened each one by at least one syllable to make it accessible to dunces like me.

[Katie]

And that counts. And they introduced the book by explaining their intent to focus on issues of scarcity in housing, transportation, energy and health. I will let you caro read their thesis.

[Caroline]

For years we constrained our ability to solve the most important problems. Why Scarcity is a choice. This book is dedicated to a simple idea. To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That's it. That's the thesis. Okay, I'm skeptical.

[Katie]

So the little sub point that's not included in this particular paragraph but is the argument the book sets out to make is that liberal government proceduralism is the chief obstacle to building and inventing more of what we need. So checkpoints, approval processes, veto power, things of that nature. We need a liberalism that builds. That's like another abundance catchphrase. And that liberalism has lost its ability to carry out great projects. They write that abundance quote reorients politics around a fresh provocation. Can we solve our problems with supply? Any thoughts before we go further?

[Caroline]

I guess. Look, it's obvious I'm not a wonk on this topic, but I'm like, I do feel like we have a lot of stuff in this country. I'm like, I do think that just being like no, we need to make. I'm just like, I don't know. And in the whole game of innovation, like, yeah, of course no one wants to stop innovating, but it kind of gets into the whole capitalism of it all where it's like, well, we'll inevitably innovate in the right directions. And I'm like, well, but we don't do that. Can we innovate to get clean water to towns? Are you going to like innovate a new fucking solar chip in Silicon Valley? Like, not all innovation is the same. And I feel like I am of the opinion that I'm like, a lot of the stuff that we need that could help this country is just like, like frankly, redistribution. I'm like, can we just get clean water to towns? Can we like make sure that all this food isn't like rotting in dumpsters? Like, do we need food deserts? Like a lot of the problems that we have, we don't need new solutions. We just need to like stop being dicks about it.

[Katie]

I know. Well, I don't think anyone would look at the United States of America and be like, the problem is that they don't have enough actually.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

So something that struck me about the scope of this book is that there's a rather unique combination of, of sweeping breadth of subject matter. Like for a 220 page book to cover housing, transit, energy policy and healthcare, that is a huge scope and extremely granular case studies which we will dive into today. So I thought. A writer named Luke Savage described this well. He wrote, throughout the book's roughly 220 pages, its register swings wildly from one of grandness to one of hyper specificity and back again. Its perspective oscillating between the arcane concerns of wonks and resplendent grand narratives of past, present and future. So structurally, it opens with a few pages of utopian fantasizing about the year 2050.

[Caroline]

Wait, what is the utopia? How do they describe it?

[Katie]

Honestly, it sounds like a lot like how rich people already live. It's actually not all that divergent from like a typical upper class less existence, but there's just more like science fictiony stuff. There's like lab grown meat and desalinated water from the tap and things like that. I didn't realize this until I read it, but I think it does some work maybe to explain the feeling of scope Whiplash. The five chapters that follow are either in part or in full. I'm not totally clear on this. Adapted versions of pieces that Thompson and Klein have published in their Respective outline. And so my understanding is that it was not net new material that was developed together for the sake of making this argument as clearly or, you know, as strongly as possible. Which is just sort of shocking when you consider how seriously this book was taken by the party as like, a case on which to build a policy platform.

[Caroline]

Well, was it? I don't recall this exactly, but wasn't. Hasn't Ezra said that he's surprised by the level of attention the book got? I don't want to speculate. I don't want to assume why anything happened. But, like, it's not out of the realm of possibility that these two were like, yeah, this is a relatively good idea. We can use a lot of material we've already written. Let's do a book proposal and, like, put our ideas in print the way thinkers tend to do. And then all of a sudden it's like you have to retroactively be like, oh, shit, this is now like a debate of is this the movement?

[Katie]

I think that's fair. I think that, again, our political circumstances when it came out had a lot to do with that. I think the high that Ezra was riding at the time had a lot to do with that. I think that the press rollout had a lot to do with that. The marketing push was enormous. They were everywhere.

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

So I do want to break their argument into pieces because it's not totally clear from the thesis setting part of this book that their theory of abundance is internally consistent. We'll say so at points, their vision is not altogether dissimilar from the argument being made in Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani, which is a book we've talked about before, which they do quote approvingly in the introduction. So I'm going to have you read two lines, one from Thompson, one from Bastani, that in my mind are kind of making the same argument. So here's Thompson.

[Caroline]

But Americans won't enthusiastically support decarbonization if they believe that it is the path to pain and deprivation.

[Katie]

Okay. And then Bastani.

[Caroline]

The wider social benefits of the shift to fully automated luxury communism must be seen as running parallel to flourishing on a personal scale rather than a sacrifice to some greater good.

[Katie]

Yeah. So both of these thinkers are basically arguing. If you're trying to convince people that we have to regress in any way, you're not going to get buy in. And I think that's. That's mostly right. I think it's going to be really tough to argue for a politics that emphasizes intense personal sacrifice. However, you Will note the difference between abundance and fully automated luxury communism is that only one of these books sees that radical vision of plenty as consonant with capitalism. Abundance is like a fully automated luxury communism. Were written by Chuck Schumer. Interns. That is like the conceit of abundance. That, like, allegedly. Okay, we have an argument that is against manufactured scarcity by increasing state capacity so that we can solve our problems with supply. Cara, we've reached the point in the episode where I'm going to ask you to explain supply and demand.

[Caroline]

You warned me about this. You've given me about a week. Okay, so I'm running a lemonade stand. I'm going to explain. I'm going to explain it to you and to myself. Like, I'm fine. I'm running a lemonade stand. The amount of lemons and water I have to make lemonade is the supply. The amount of people walking past who are willing to spend a quarter on a cup of lemonade, which is what it ran for when I was doing lemonade stands, is the demand. If a lot of people walk by, I've got too much demand. I'm out of lemons. If not enough people walk by, I've got too much supply. I got way too many lemons. So the goal, I would imagine. I'm not entirely sure this is where I would love to get your input. The goal is to merge those two question marks and to have the appropriate amount of demand for how much supply you have. Or I guess the goal is to close the stand at the appropriate time. So basically, if we're turning this into a bakery metaphor, let's say you.

[Katie]

We're switching metaphors. We're switching metaphors.

[Caroline]

Good. Good. Let's say at the end of every day I can get more lemons for my bakery. Then I just need to figure out my demand for the day.

[Katie]

So

[Caroline]

in the bakery metaphor, I feel like the goal would be foot traffic. And you maybe need to think about signage. And then you need to communicate clearly, like, are you going to run out every day? Are you going to promise pastries until the end of the day? And. And I think once more, the goal is synergy. That is the story of supply. Demand, in one word is synergy.

[Katie]

Okay, but how is the block that your lemonade stand is on zoned? I think we should.

[Caroline]

That's. It Is a concern of mine. I do feel like a lemonade stand is giving a little bit too much insight into how embarrassing my childhood was.

[Derek Thompson]

But.

[Caroline]

But I made quite a bit of quarters selling lemonade, and I Will, be honest, I did not make it from lemons. I did make it from powder, which is arguably disingenuous.

[Katie]

Well, that changes everything, so you should

[Caroline]

start over how it does. So I'm really thinking about how many tablespoons of synthetic sugar powder you have to put in the pitcher under the table so that people think it's real lemonade.

[Katie]

Okay, so that was.

[Caroline]

How close am I on a scale of 1 to 10?

[Katie]

That was suboptimal for having had a week to prepare.

[Caroline]

However.

[Katie]

However, you were really only missing one key component, which is the role that I didn't Google.

[Caroline]

I didn't cheat.

[Katie]

That's good if you can tell. Yeah, I can tell. I can tell you didn't cheat. That much was obvious. When you switched mid explanation to bakery foot traffic, I was like, all right, I'm gonna stop you right there.

[Caroline]

I genuinely. Listen. When you texted me. When you. When you texted me being like, okay, I'm gonna ask you about supply and demand. I don't want this to be a sneak attack. I was like, okay. And then I was like, you know what, Caroline? Really think about this. Like, really try to put your head to the paper on this. And I did. So that's the best I could do.

[Katie]

Somewhere Ezra Klein is hate listening to this. Just. Just fucking smugly jacking it.

[Caroline]

Oh, I think he would find me endearing.

[Katie]

Okay, so the only thing that you're really missing here is the mechanism by which supply and demand kind of balances, which is pricing. So if you had a lot of

[Caroline]

foot traffic, theoretically, I raised the price,

[Katie]

you would go, okay, I don't have enough lemons to fulfill all this demand. So now I have to discriminate. It's not 25 cents anymore. I'm going to charge more because I have to suppress my supply.

[Caroline]

I'm in a position of power now. Hot summer day. And then you have to think about temperature. How hot is it?

[Katie]

That's right.

[Caroline]

How hot is it? How humid is it? Are there other lemonade stands?

[Katie]

A decon 201. So we're gonna pause there now. I'm gonna have you read what they say, what Derek and Ezra write about supply and demand.

[Caroline]

Oh, my God, please let it be a lemonade stand. Okay, at the heart of economics is supply and demand. I'm with you there, boys. Supply is how much there is of something. Check. Demand is how much of that thing people want. Agree economies balance when supply and demand meet and derange when they part. Too much demand chasing too little supply causes shortages, price increases and rationing too much supply, pooling around too much demand brings gluts, layoffs and depressions. Supply and demand are linked. At least they are in the real world. In our politics. They have been cleaved. Democrats and Republicans divvied them up. Ah, interesting.

[Katie]

Okay, so in classical economic theorizing about how all of this works, right, because economics is ultimately theories. So the idea is that if there's too much of something, prices will drop and then production will slow or cease because there's now less money to be made in producing that thing. And if there's not enough and demand is outstripping supply, theoretically producers should recognize that demand as opportunity, make money and they will produce more of that good. And over time, this is supposed to kind of even out. Now the idea is that markets are working properly when this balance is achieved. It's more complicated than that, but that's sort of the general idea. Neoliberal thinking essentially points to government interference with that mechanism, with that process, with the market, which is presumed to be natural, inefficient and essentially says that is the reason that XYZ market is out of whack. Right, because the government fucked it up. The government distorted it in some way. So how do Democrats and Republicans divvy them up? Here is how they explain this. First they talk about conservatives doing a bunch of tax cuts with the promise that it will increase supply and production, which is basically trickle down 101. And then they write this.

[Caroline]

The conservative agenda did something else too. It cast production as a function of unfettered markets. Supply side economics was about getting the government out of the private sector's way, cutting taxes so people would work more, cutting regulations so companies would produce more. But what of the places where society needed a supply of something that the market could not or would not provide on its own?

[Katie]

Okay, so right there we have this acknowledgment that there are areas in society where the things that we need are not given to us by quote, unquote, the market, which just means private production, Right? Not like a planned state led effort. And then they get to the Democrats role.

[Caroline]

Yeah, let's come back to that. This is where you might have expected Democrats to step in. But Democrats, cowed by the Reagan revolution and frightened of being seen as socialists, largely confined themselves to working on the demand side of the ledger. Progressivism's promises and policies for decades were built around giving people money, or money like vouchers to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford. So Just really quickly, this makes me think about our rise and Fall of capitalism episode that you did and how you pointed out that like a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism is that people say like, that is innovation will always solve or like work towards our greatest issues. And it's like actually we see that that's not the case time and time again. They're basically describing what is functionally a failure of capitalism. That it's like, yeah, no, it's actually not going to innovate for the things that we need. The only way for us to fix the things that we need would be more control. And then they're also being like, but then no one wants to be a socialist. And it's like, but you're describing something that is fundamentally socialist in nature which would be trying to take over more control of the market to make sure that we're innovating in the right direction. It's like they're retrofitting what they think capitalism should be rather than what it is.

[Katie]

Right. If, you know, you're listening to this and you've never heard that episode is essentially something that, that ironically they explain in more detail in abundance. And we will talk about it today. But this idea that a lot of the most consequential innovation that has happened in the United States in the last hundred years came out of government agencies doing long term projects that had no prospects for profitability and that the state is the source of a lot of these major efforts where a private firm that is working in the constraints of the market where like you're really just looking for a profit is not really going to undertake these efforts. So they do acknowledge this. They kind of, in my mind like mischaracterize again, Democratic policy. Like there's a slight of hand here where it's like, you know, Democrats just gave people money and it's like, I don't know if that's really what happened. But I, I don't know how else to take this setup and this explanation for how we have gotten into this position other than Democrats and Republicans have interfered with the balance of supply and demand, that like Republicans had this one theory of the case where they were like, ah, cut taxes and cut regulations and just let the market do whatever the fuck it wants. And Democrats were like, no, you know, give people money so that they can buy the things they need. And Klein and Thompson are like, and, but like, you know, we gave people money but we didn't actually increase the supply of the stuff they needed. And so now we have this like out of Whack market. Now, I don't think that, like, in broad strokes, this characterization is wrong. However, it is a strange, logical, and narrative basis for what they are ultimately going to argue, which I would describe like this government proceduralism and a lack of proper subsidization are holding us back from creating the supply we need. That is thought to be, like, the source of the manufactured scarcity, as Thompson calls it. It. And that if we remove those procedural blocks and we subsidize production adequately, this is the step that they call increasing state capacity. The result will be an abundance of supply. Okay. Abundance being a word that literally means over sufficient supply. Having more lemons than you need.

[Caroline]

Ah, thank you.

[Katie]

Yes. Wheels are turning. So their explicit goal, for which their project is named, is to get our present system to create an abundance of supply. A word that means more supply than you need. So I read this, and I'm like, all right. Well, it kind of feels like there's a foundational misalignment between the goal and the mechanism as I understand it. So I want to spend most of our time today talking about how that that appears and reappears in the text of the book.

[Caroline]

We should write a book called Just Enough. That's my political policy. Just Enough. Just Enough Lemons. Just Enough Lemons.

[Katie]

Just Enough Lemons.

[Caroline]

Just Enough Lemons is an amazing book title.

[Katie]

The perfect amount of lemons.

[Caroline]

Just enough lemons. That's what I want for everyone.

[Katie]

That's book two coming. Carol Claire Burke, 2027.

[Caroline]

My agent's, like, killing herself. Okay, sorry, go on.

[Katie]

There are four major areas of focus. Housing, transportation, energy, and health. So I want to spend some.

[Caroline]

And there are also four types of lemons. And we should talk about. Okay, I'm done. I'm done. There are over 30. Talk about abundance. There are over 30 varieties of lemons worldwide. Generally, this is an AI overview from Google, but we don't have a lot of time to go to primary sources generally grouped into true lemons, humans and hybrids. The most common.

[Katie]

You're done. You're done. Wait, wait, wait.

[Caroline]

Katie. The top six. Eureka, Lisbon Meyer. Variegated pink Ponderosa, Yuzu. Okay, continue.

[Katie]

Thank you. All right. Housing, transportation, energy, and health. So I want to spend some time with each of these as well as we're going to pull in one example that became popular throughout the Abundance media tour. So we're going to start with what I think here are, like, the smallest potatoes, where I think you and I would have the smallest.

[Caroline]

I will Google potato varieties as well.

[Katie]

We are gonna Smart. With this, We are going to. I swear we did not take gummies before this.

[Caroline]

Oh, are we starting with russet or items?

[Katie]

We're gonna start with what I think are the smallest lemons, where we would have this. The fewest objections. And then we're gonna work our way up to the biggest lemon where the cracks become really undeniable. Okay.

[Caroline]

Okay.

[Katie]

So if you've read abundance, we are jumping around here. We're going out of order. We're going to start with health, which is okay with the exception of like a brief digression about caps on residency programs at the very end, pretty specific to the COVID vaccine. So there is an interesting story that begins chapter four about MRNA technology and how the woman who invented it tried for years to get grant funding from the NIH to study it, to no avail. Right. And how the COVID vaccine then, which ended up using this technology, is estimated to have saved 10 to 20 million lives worldwide and was brought to the public at record speed. And they really hail this as like the technological marvel that it was, but they also frame this victory within the failure of our health institutions to study its potential sooner. And kind of the irony that like this woman tried for decades to get funding to study this technology and then it ended up saving tens of millions of people. They kind of tee this up to talk about how government policy and funding is central to innovation. So here is an excerpt from the book.

[Caroline]

Federal science spending is so fundamental to the overall economy that a 2023 study found that government funded research and development have been responsible for 25% of productivity growth in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Quote, There is widespread agreement that scientific research and invention are the key driver of economic growth and improvements in human well being. The Dartmouth economist Heidi Williams said. But I think researchers do a poor job of communicating its importance to lawmakers, and lawmakers do a poor job of making science policy a major focus.

[Katie]

So this story of this scientist, her name is Cataline Carrico, is actually really cool. She and her partner ended up winning a Nobel Prize for her research research on mRNA, which just sort of solidifies how like, big of a gaff it was. The NIH ignored her for years. The whole premise of this chapter is that public health R D is incentivized to play it too safe and that we basically need to invest more and let scientists take bigger swings and that that's how we used to make kind of crazy discoveries and how cuts to funding and more scrutiny about how money is being spent in the late 20th century introduced more rules, more paperwork requirements that that really hemmed in the ambitions. So here is how they and I think this section is Thompson based on the writing style, but this is how they summarize their takeaway from this.

[Caroline]

If the D A RPA model holds a lesson, it is that the agency works because it empowers program managers to pursue their most radical ideas with an open ended budget and vast connections throughout science and industry. By contrast, as John Donch of the Broad Institute said, many scientists seeking funding today are disempowered to the point of infantilization. Their time is colonized by paperwork and their ambition is pinched by grantsmanship. The American innovation system would benefit from trusting individuals more and bureaucracies less.

[Katie]

So right away you can kind of see how this fits into their broader proceduralism thesis that like red tape is the problem. Although I think this is an example that's sort of indicative of a broader choice this book makes over and over again, which is to focus on rules and paperwork and less on like money itself. Like the paperwork only exists because the government wants to be stingy about how much money it's willing to grant and what that money is used for. All I could think about during this chapter was that transgenic mice thing where they just like command F'd the system for woke buzzwords. The paperwork here is just a means to an end. It's. It's not there for no reason. It's there because you're trying to throttle who gets money and why. And I would say the main focus is that the COVID vaccine was a victory for abundance, style, thinking and innovation. I was listening to an interview that citations Needed did about this portion of the book and they made a good point that I hadn't really noticed, which was that even in this case case, this example sort of undermines their theory of the fact that innovation always produces abundance. Because even when we had the innovation, we had the cure in this vaccine. The rollout was still widely criticized for exacerbating inequality because of the way high income communities and countries were prioritized.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

So the point being made in this example that innovation necessarily creates abundant outcomes is sort of disproven within the example. Okay, so there's one other notable example where something that's touted as proof of the abundance theory of obstruction inadvertently ends up sort of undermining it. So now we're gonna take a brief detour away from the text to cover something that was not in the book, but became a bit of a viral moment for the way that it appeared to embody some of the criticisms that people had. So Ezra Klein goes on Jon Stewart and discusses something called BED, the Broadband Equity and Development Program, which allocated $42 billion to deliver broadband to rural areas. Four years later, no homes have received government funded Internet access. And the clip went viral as being a perfect example of the inscrutable maze of government proceduralism. It was ultimately shared by Elon Musk. So we're going to watch that. Now be warned, it's very fucking boring, as Wonkary tends to be.

[Derek Thompson]

We have to issue the notice of funding opportunity within 180 days. That's step one. Step two, which all 56 state applicants completed, is states who want to participate must submit a letter of intent. After they do that, they can submit a request for up to $5 million in planning grants. Then the NTIA step four has to review and approve and award again planning grants. Not broadband grants, planning grants. And it's still at the NTIA. It's still at the first step. All right, so the NTIA must issue a NOFO within 180 days. States who want to participate must submit their letter of intent. Step three, they can request up to $5 million in planning grants. Just planning. Just planning. Step four, the requests are reviewed, approved and awarded by the NTIA, which currently all 56, you know, three years later, all 56 applicants had passed through at least step five. It took at least, it took more than three years. So it's a long time. States must submit a five year action plan. The states kind of go back and they kind of think about how they're going to do this. And they don't just say, okay, you know, thank you for the money, we're going to spend it. And you can see how it worked out later. We're like, here's our five year action plan. Then the FCC must publish the broadband data maps before NTIA allocates funds. So having done the nofo, the letters of intent, the request for planning grants, then the review, approval and awarding of the planning grants, then the five year action plans in between that, the federal government has to put forward a map saying where it thinks we need rural broadband subsidies. And then of course, the states need an opportunity to challenge the map for accuracy. And you can imagine this doesn't all happen in like a day. Okay? So then the NTIA step 7 has to use the FCC maps to make allocation decisions. Then having already done their letter of intent, the request for planning grants. It's hard even to talk about this man. Step 7 is NTIA must use the FCC maps that were already challenged for allocation decisions. Then having submitted all this, I think this one is actually quite amazing. Having submitted their five year plans or letters of intent. Step eight is states must submit an initial proposal, an initial proposal to the NTIA. Then is that the result of their $5 million planning fund?

[Katie]

This initial proposal.

[Derek Thompson]

But then what was the five year plan? And what the fuck did they apply for? What was their NOFO like? If the five year action plan isn't the initial proposal, then what's the five year? Forget no fo mofo. Step nine, NTIA must review and approve each state's again, initial proposal. By my read, we have had at least two initial proposals here, but that's a different issue. Oh my God. Step 10, states must publish their own map and allow internal challenges to their own map. So the government has published a map, they have invited the states to challenge the map. Then states have submitted initial proposals and they then have to publish their own map and allow challenges. Wait, who's challenging it within the state? Well, you know, organized interest groups, environmental group, like I don't know who specifically, but any, literally anybody. This is, I want to say something because it's very important. I say this, this is the Biden administration's process for its own bill. They wanted this to happen. Happen. This is how liberal government works. Now this is something they instituted for this bill, for their bill. This is a bill passed by Democrats with a regulatory structure written by Democratic administration.

[Katie]

Okay, right.

[Derek Thompson]

Step 11, the NTIA must review and improve the challenge results and the final map. So the NTIA has put forward a map, the states have challenged that map. Then the states have put forward their maps, had other challenges, and now the NTIA must review and approve the challenges to the state maps. Okay, so step we've done step 11. NTIA must review and approve challenge results and final map. We've lost nine of the applicants at that point. Step 12 States must run a competitive sub granting process. Oh my fucking God. At step 12, at by. After all this has been done. Yeah, none of that could have happened along the way. Here. We have now lost 17 more applicants. So now 30 of 56 have completed step 12. Step 13 states must submit a final proposal. This all, all the proposals weren't enough to NTIA. Now that goes to 3 of 56. So we've gone in the last couple steps from 56 had gone to this point to 3 of 56. Step 4 ti the NTIA must review and approve the state's final proposal, and that is three of the 56 jurisdictions and states are there. In summary, colon. States are nearly at the finish line, and it says to stop their progress now, or worse, to make them go backwards, would be a stick in the spokes of the most promising broadband deployment plans we have ever seen. End scene. I'm speechless, Ezra. Honestly, like, it's a far worse than I could have imagined. But the fact that they amputated their own legs on this is what's so stunning.

[Katie]

So that goes on for almost six minutes. And I just have to say I. I still think Ezra Klein is a real cutie patootie. When I watch this clip, I'm like,

[Caroline]

I know I stand by my subconscious mind.

[Katie]

I know I'm about to debunk what you said and that, you know, you. You were wrong on this.

[Caroline]

However, I think you're swallowing.

[Katie]

You're a cutie patootie. And you can keep that. You can have that little forehead kiss. Okay, so that's a six minute clip. It is very boring. Apart from this example. I just want to say I think this clip actually underscores a really critical piece of this, which is that both Ezra and Derek are both very gifted political communicators. They have astounding recall of small details. They rarely stumble, like when you listen to them give interviews, go on these talk shows. They are so good.

[Caroline]

They're good at what they do.

[Katie]

You don't hear an, um, you don't hear a. You know, they're very talented communicators of

[Caroline]

these ideas, but they're also very colloquial.

[Ezra Klein]

They're not.

[Caroline]

They're. They're good at communicating nerdy topics while also seeming like your friend. And I think that's a real talent.

[Katie]

I especially saw it in an interview that Ezra did with Sam Cedar for Majority Report. Even though I agreed more ideologically with the points that Sam was making, I still walked away from that interview being like, Ezra kind of ran circles around him. He had had the details, he had the specifics, he had an answer for everything. You just really can't overstate how important that is in a press tour for making your ideas feel like they are the answer and like they make sense.

[Caroline]

Yeah, you sound smart.

[Katie]

The problem with this clip is that it misrepresents what happened. Washington Monthly, after this goes viral, conducts an investigation into this story. And they speak with almost two dozen government officials and experts that were involved in the design and implementation of this program. And here is what they write.

[Caroline]

To allocate funds fairly, the federal government needed to know how many underserved locations each state needed to connect. The problem was that no accurate and comprehensive data set existed. Thanks to more than a decade of industry lobbying, the FCC's map of broadband availability counted coverage at the level of census blocks, blocks based entirely on provider self reported data, allowing incumbents to keep subsidized competitors at arm's length. In early 2020, Congress finally intervened, enacting legislation to force the FCC to create a granular address level map and implement a system for the public to challenge provider coverage claims. But Trump FCC chairman Ajit Pai sat on his hands for the remainder of his term, claiming that the FCC could not start work on the map until Congress appropriated funds explicitly for that purpose. Purpose. The funds were appropriated in December, but PI was by then looking ahead to a private sector career, first in private equity and later as the president of a major wireless provider trade association. By the time the infrastructure bill was being negotiated, the Biden FCC had just begun work on the new map and staff predicted that it would not be ready until probably next year. Nuance strikes again.

[Katie]

So this is a good example because the dominant narrative in the abundance related discourse about this particular failure ignores the industry interests and instead focuses a lot on how Democrats tried to add climate, labor and social justice procedure to the program's deployment. And then it can be like, oh see they like want to add all this stuff and that slows it down and like we don't have the broadband yet. But according to Washington Monthly's reporting, these requirements were pretty basic, like way less central to the speed of deployment than they were made to sound. So like for example, for labor, states had to ensure that subsidized private providers. So like private companies the state was going to give money to, quote, used strong labor standards and protections where the minimum requirement was complying with local labor

[Caroline]

and employment laws just behave legally.

[Katie]

So it's like, yeah, in order to get this money you have to follow labor law. Okay, for climate that referred to the states conducting, quote, an assessment of climate threat threats to make sure the infrastructure would be resistant to local weather patterns. So in other words, if you live somewhere with frequent hurricanes, you can only have this money if you are showing us that you are building infrastructure that can withstand hurricanes. They're not saying this has to fight climate change, it's just a basic check on, right? Are you building infrastructure that is appropriate for this area? Now maybe the largest point of contention is that the industry groups fought the definition of affordability. So originally the intention of this legislation was to make sure broadband was provided for $30 per month. And the lobbying groups basically said, that is not possible. That is economically not possible for us to do. Klein uses this example to emphasize how the government can get in the way of its own objectives. In actuality, much of the obstruction came from the Internet service providers, who have consistently shown a pattern of attempting to block and derail public broadband projects. One report cited they've spent $230 million on lobbying during a two year congressional term. This is kind of the, the gotcha that shows up in a lot of these examples. Is it wrong for Ezra Klein to abstract from this that government proceduralism can be used as an obstructionary tool? Well, no, not technically, but the question isn't really, is government proceduralism used to obstruct progress? It's on whose behalf is proceduralism most often being wielded to obstruct progress?

[Caroline]

This also just gets into, like, the weird incentives game of publishing. I'm not saying that Ezra Klein knew, knew that it was quote, unquote, Republicans and decided to come up with a different answer, but, like, it is a fact that a book that was just saying that Republicans are slowing things down wouldn't have sold. Like, that's a pretty tired argument at this point. And so it is. That is something I'm just kind of sitting with where it's like, what is the chicken or the eg with, like, the incentive structure for coming up with a new idea, even if the Occam's Razor is actually like, the thing that people have already been shouting for a long time.

[Katie]

We're gonna listen to a little retrospective episode that Ezra and Derek did with a third fellow who wrote like, a similar book around the same time. And they kind of talk about that where, like, Derek's like, well, everyone already knows that, like, corporations and the right are blocking things. Like, I, I didn't feel like I needed to call more attention. So, you know, we wanted to focus on, like, the policy obstruction that's happening from, like, areas you wouldn't expect it to come from.

[Caroline]

I actually do think, like, as much as I am framing this as a criticism, I actually empathize with this quite a bit because I think you and I often. I'll just speak for myself. I think that we've been doing this podcast for two years now, and I can be sensitive to overly referencing the patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism in episodes now because we spent so much time at the beginning of the podcast talking about it, and it just feels, frankly, kind of tired to me. And occasionally I will, like, read feedback and someone might say, like, I just wish they spent more time tying this back to white supremacy. And I'm like, I understand that impulse. And the flip of that is that when you spend too much time talking about that, you run the risk of frankly sounding like a broken record. And so I definitely feel that, I mean, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson been. Have both way longer careers where they've been talking about shit for way longer. And so I genuinely empathize with that challenge where it's like, well, yeah, no shit. Republicans are. Are stymying all of this. We all know that. How many times can we all say that? And I also empathize with the argument of being like, but that's the biggest thing. White supremacy is the biggest thing. Republicans are the biggest thing. And we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees if we don't repeatedly bang that on the head. So it's kind of. Of, I don't know. It's a difficult needle to thread when you're talking about this stuff all the time.

[Katie]

I do come back to, like, is there a world in which they thought they were just going to be adding, like, hey, this is something we probably haven't considered. We should look at this.

[Ezra Klein]

Right, right, right.

[Katie]

And then it kind of became.

[Caroline]

Became the main thing. It was like a side chick that you bang once a month. And then it was like, that's your wife.

[Katie]

And then she got pregnant and you're like, wait. And you're like, fuck. Did not mean for that to happen.

[Caroline]

This metaphor is even worse than the bakery one.

[Katie]

But the only, the only thing that I think undermines that theory is the lengths to which they go to distance themselves from a politics of redistribution and, like, position these ideas as specifically an alternative to, like, a Bernie Sanders left. So I'm like, I don't know. I can, like, see how that could have happened. And I don't know if now maybe they're like, retconning it. I hear what you're saying, though, and I understand that, that even I feel that way sometimes. People like, well, it's capitalism. I'm like, yeah, no, you know that. I don't need to tell you that, you know, it's capitalism. But they're not arguing that. This is actually an argument that is providing an alternative to saying this is capitalism. Anyway, so I think we see this a little more clearly in the energy and transit example. So we're going to move on. Originally, I was going to do these two things separately, but, like, the form of the book kind of makes that hard. They weave a lot of things together. So one thing that they write in abundance is that the well meaning laws of the 20th century that were designed to protect nature now block the very clean energy projects that are needed in the 21st century. And this is a theme throughout all the different focus areas, but especially in these chapters that really focus on energy and transit. So the energy chapter begins by introducing the ideas of a guy named Jason Hickel known as the Degrowth movement and, and similarly to the comparison I made before between fully automated luxury communism and abundance. They basically argue that a political movement that's built on people doing and having less is doomed to fail. So from there they make the case for solar energy and the absolute scourge that is energy that comes from oil and coal. If you will please read.

[Caroline]

Renewable Energy Keeps Crushing Expectations. The authors looked at 2,905 projections for solar costs made by the most popular forecasting models and found that solar costs were expected to fall by 2.6% a year and never by more than 6%. In reality, they fell by 15% per year, year after year. In 2022, the U.S. energy Information Administration released a report estimating life cycle costs for new energy installations in the coming decade decades. Solar was already cheaper than natural gas. Wind was a dollar more. Both were about half the price of coal.

[Katie]

Okay, so they are essentially arguing that it'll be possible to have an economy that runs on clean energy. And then this is how they explain why we haven't done it yet.

[Caroline]

Too many see clearly the costs that dirty energy can impose on the environment, but do not dare imagine the possibilities clean and abundant energy unlocks for it. Okay. The idea that we are not moving towards clean energy because like we just can't see it yet is bonkers. Yeah, that is a crazy thing.

[Derek Thompson]

I know.

[Katie]

I was like, I don't know if it's really a problem of imagination, Mr.

[Caroline]

Oil and Gas is like, hey, can I review your manuscript before you submit it to the publisher? And he's just like holding brass knuckles. And they're like, yeah, let's not just, we're just going to rewrite the climate change section. Give us one second.

[Katie]

So they, they really describe this as like a challenge of persuasion and notably it's persuading the masses that need to be convinced of this. So here's a section about how we need to replace all of our gas powered machines and that that's like a big challenge.

[Caroline]

People need to want these alternatives that I want you to want to buy the solar power. That means the alternatives need to be excellent, which in many now are. Electric cars accelerate faster and run quieter than cars powered by combustion engines. Induction stoves boil water in a fraction of the time it takes those little licks of fire. Because these advantages are not universally known and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones, subsidies need to be generous and advertising needs to be everywhere. Making these replacement decisions needs to be a no brainer every time.

[Katie]

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is part of the problem, they say. The real problem though, though, is that we don't have a enough solar and wind energy to actually power the grid. Like the infrastructure is not there, particularly once everything runs on electricity. So they get into this to be like, you know, the bigger problem though is that we don't have the infrastructure to power all of this stuff. So I thought this section really conveyed like what a big job this is going to be.

[Caroline]

In their 2023 paper, the Greens Dilemma, JB Rule and James Salzman, professors of environmental law at Vanderbilt and UC cla respectively, put this vividly, quote. Consider that the largest solar facility currently online in the United States is capable of generating 580 megawatts. They write. To meet even a middle road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400 megawatt solar facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres every week for the next 30 years. And why? It's also just like, well, why don't we have those solar facilities yet? Are we going to talk about that? That like, do. Are we, like, are you going to talk about.

[Katie]

Not in any meaningful way, no. I mean like, that seems impossible. Like, okay, our largest facility is 580megawatts. We have to add 800 more megawatts every week for 30 years. And you're going to tell me that's a permitting problem? You're going to look me in my face and tell me that's a permitting problem?

[Caroline]

Look me in my face fucking eyes. It's also just like, it's entirely possible, but it would require a political overhaul of the likes of democratic socialism. You know what I mean? It's like at a certain point you have to be like, I made a joke about China. China is kicking our motherfucking asses in clean energy. They are destroying us.

[Ezra Klein]

Why?

[Caroline]

I mean, we could look to the central government planning. You can say that with moral neutrality, that for all of the flaws of Chinese government, government, they can execute something far faster than us. They can produce, quote, unquote, abundance. And I think that's the kind of thing where it's like, no, it's possible. And actually, other countries are doing rapid and profound shifts towards clean energy. But the reason we're not doing it in the US is not because of what you're saying. Like, you have to acknowledge the insane lobbying, the insane stall warding, the, like, just the way that we approach doing everything and its relationship related to how we approach our economy.

[Katie]

It's almost like material interests shape outcomes. It's almost like when you have a giant fossil fuel industry with a material interest in blocking and obstructing this from happening, it doesn't happen.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

But like, I'm on board, you know, I'm like, I see the value of solar. I think renewable energy is the future. I would love to have a world that is powered by solar and wind, because that is a world where energy is basically is truly abundant. It is free. It is, yeah. It is endless. Right. Costs would plummet. So this would be a great place to address why this isn't happening.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

In the book, I'm like, I, I, okay, so why not?

[Caroline]

Plot twist. Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are just author names for BP and Chevron. And they're like, it's the permitting. The permitting is why you haven't gotten the solar yet.

[Katie]

Yeah, Carol, I hope you're hungry for nothing, because now we make a really weird pivot to California high speed rail instead. Okay? So we've, we've introduced all what we need for solar. And then they're like, and you know what else is a fucking problem is California high speed rail. So here's how they summarize why this particular project, California high speed rail, has taken so long.

[Caroline]

What has taken so long on high speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. Concrete. It's negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the build or the design, which costs money. Those negotiations lead to public disappointment and frustration, which leads to loss of money that might otherwise have been approved if the project were speeding towards complete completion. 1. Either Derek or Ezra really enjoys doing things in sets of three.

[Katie]

I think this section was Ezra. I would love for one of them to reach out and tell me if I'm right in my, my guesses.

[Caroline]

But I can guarantee you, Katie, if they reach out, it will not be to talk about that.

[Katie]

Ezra will be like, why'd you call me a cutie patootie?

[Caroline]

Ezra will just not even reach Out. He's just gonna deliver me a restraining order. The only communication we have with them.

[Katie]

You're going to wake up one day in the, in the basement with Annie Lowry just chained to the furnace. To summarize, the government has to consult with all these different interest groups. And this slows things down. It makes things more expensive. I'm still waiting to see how this is going to come back to the solar farms thing, but whatever. And then we get a little blurb about how we get so little for our public investment in the United States.

[Caroline]

States, even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about 609 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for 384 million. Canada gets it done for 295 million. Japan clocks in at 267 million.

[Katie]

Okay, and they're like, you know, conservatives say it's government interference and unions that make this more expensive. But like, all these countries have governments, all these countries have unions. Unions. Governments and unions can't be the issue. But then they don't say what the issue is. They pivot again and they start talking about how construction productivity has slowed and how economists who study this issue are stumped by it. And like, they even include a paper that says outright, quote, they tested regulatory burden against construction productivity. And there was a slight relationship, but nothing impressive. By their own inclusion of this source. Regulatory burden would not appear to be blamed for stunted productivity growth in the construction sector. And as a reader, I, like, wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be taking away from that as it was relevant to either solar energy or high speed rail construction. They cite a few anecdotes from a guy who used to work in construction and now runs a construction analytics firm. And the guy is basically like, well, back in the 1970s, we didn't have so many safety requirements and like, now we have to do three estimates instead of one or whatever. But that's basically where they leave it. Okay, so I'm sitting there, having read privatization of everything, and I'm wondering, well, like, does it maybe cost more to build government projects here for the same reason that America spends way more on Medicaid and Medicare than other countries spend on their entire universal healthcare systems? Is it privatization in the fact that we insist on contracting out layers upon layers of consultants and private firms and contractors and subcontractors?

[Caroline]

Yeah.

[Katie]

And we, like, don't have these, the knowledge base in the public sector itself that we've, you know, Systematically hollowed out this public know how. And we have layers of disjointed people managing these products. Like, I don't know, they don't really explore that. And I can't tell if it's because they don't want to introduce a can of worms that isn't really addressed by their rules and regs argument, or if it's because that's not what they think. But it's sort of an obvious question that just remains unanswered. They do bring it back in a later chapter, briefly, we'll get to that. But like. Like, at this moment in the reading experience, I'm like, these are the types of questions that you want to be plumbed in a little bit more depth if we're really concerned with causality and making a strong normative case for where the Democratic Party should focus its energy and attention.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And that is what's so weird about this book, is that in some places it's decently well researched, it's well organized, it's easy to read. And in other places it's like, yeah, we talked to this guy who works in construction, and he says they're not allowed to walk across the beams anymore. And you're just like. So they end by offering this esoteric and kind of vague theory about how, quote, organized groups are the real issue and that's a consequence of affluent society. So this is the closest we come to, like, a coherent explanation for these three phenomena. That affluent societies produce organized groups with competing interests, and those groups manipulate and wield these choke points to fight for their interest interests. And it's like, it's so close to acknowledging class politics and that, like, our system is inherently creating opposing material interests. But then it's like, and that's why we should get rid of the epa. They don't actually argue for that specifically, but, like, that's how it feels when they're like, an environmentalism.

[Caroline]

Well, it does feel like there is a. I don't know how much this is a problem for them because I already am, like, arguing against myself in my head. But there is something interesting about. About, like, pulling out the phrase deregulation as almost like a trigger word to make people think that it's the solution for things. It's like you're encouraging someone to start ringing a bell in their head that is very, very easily used for other ends. And I feel like that's also just like a fundamental problem with this where it's like, I understand that you think the deregulation you want to do is different than the deregulation that the Republicans want to do or whatever. But like is a pretty significant dog whistle at this point. And it just feels like it's a massive thing for me to get over with this book where it's like, you keep saying that it's not what you want, but it really is what you want. And it's like, it just really strikes me as an interesting route to take at this point in American history.

[Katie]

Totally. It's like there's only so many times you can say that's not what you're arguing for when the anecdotes are just stacking up. And like in every case, that is what you're arguing for.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

So there is also an element of the high speed rail debacle that goes unmentioned in the book. And similarly to the the public funding of research thing that we talked about, it comes back to money. So if you will please read this from the American Affairs Journal.

[Caroline]

The delay in appropriating funding and contract issuance, however, persistently interrupted construction and forced CHSRA to constantly revise revise its plans while delaying work accordingly, given the fluctuating nature of carbon auctions. Moreover, CHSRA's ongoing funding fluctuated significantly by year and as such could neither be planned for nor borrowed against. As Davidoff notes, Brightline west, the in progress high speed rail linkage between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, credibly expects to spend 12 billion between 2024 and 2028, the four years needed for its construction. It has taken nearly four times as many years for CHSRA to have 12 billion on hand. It is standard practice in much of the world, and indeed in much of the United States, to line up funding for the construction of high speed rail before the project begins. CHRSA did not. The trickle of funding delayed the project, empowering critics to deny it funding, further delaying progress. Governor Gavin Newsom, elected in 2018, was among these critics, critics publicly dismissing the project's viability and slashing funding for geological surveys.

[Katie]

Okay, so the book makes it sound as though they had this like endless pot of money that got sort of frittered away through mismanagement and proceduralism. This funding story adds a different dimension that kind of complicates the idea that it was environmental regulations and planning problems that created it. It's possible that both of these factors were relevant, but again, it kind of feels like if you're going to go really deep on one example of failed project, you should probably talk about how it was funded and whether that funding deviated from the way these things typically work in the rest of the world. In the next chapter they add that a major issue with California high speed Rail. And again, this is what I mean when I say, like, the book is organized kind of strangely. The state tried to outsource everything to a slew of contractors and did not have the state capacity. So this is the privatization argument that I was sort of waiting for. And they say pretty explicitly the government needs to employ enough people to oversee how their projects are going. Like, you need this expertise in house. And they favorably cite an example that came in early and under budget in San Francisco, where they did bring more of this engineering work in house, where they had publicly funded and employed people working on it. But in the book, in the larger context of the book, this kind of feels like an assumption side. And this is sort of the thing that I kept wishing was a larger focus in all these examples. Ezra's arguing for more state capacity in these interviews that he's doing about the book. But this is one of the only examples where the book actually argues for expanding state capacity. Where they're actually like, you need to bring more of this in house. There are plenty of calls to revisit legislation or requirements, but this was the first and I, I believe, only book place that I encountered an explicit call to hire more people and outsource less stuff. It was 119 pages in. It was clearly not the central thesis. So, okay, again, the regulatory solution then is you need to remove the choke points. You need to work to eliminate veto points in your building projects so that things can move more quickly. There is this assumption that appears over and over again that if you simply take away, say, these rules that interest groups, various groups are using to quote, gum up the works, then theoretically, things are going to work more smoothly. Now to drive this home, the chapter ends with, I don't know, like a dozen pages about how lawyers and movements to sue the government is a real issue that kneecaps the government's ability to get anything done. Here is an example where they are citing the work of a guy named Bagley, called the procedure your fetish.

[Caroline]

Liberal legalism. And through it, liberal government had become process obsessed rather than outcomes oriented. It had convinced itself that the state's legitimacy would be earned through compliance with an endless catalog of rules and restraints, rather than through getting things done for the people it claimed to serve.

[Katie]

Okay, so I think this is indicative of this pattern I noticed where, like, they'll raise a hyperspecific issue like California high speed real. And they'll suggest that the learnings from that failure can be extrapolated more widely. But then rather than drilling deeper into that specific issue, like the development of mass transit, they tend to zoom back out and do the whole. And that's like this other different thing where Liberals in the 70s sued the government a lot and you're like, okay, yeah, I guess that's true. But like, is that really relevant to like this specific case you're highlighting here? I assume you think it is, otherwise it wouldn't be here in this chapter. Chapter. But like, if that's the case you're making, I'd prefer you kind of make that case directly. And the opposite is also true. Like, they are at their strongest when they stick to one issue. They get into the weeds with one issue and they stay there in the weeds. There is a section about affordable housing where I think it's Ezra really methodically lays out the issues with a particular proposition in LA County. But a lot of the issues here are at the municipal level. It's local government government, which is fine if you are writing a book about how city planning and spending can be more effective. It's just not clear to me that this extrapolates all that cleanly to a national politics.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And I think what they would say if confronted with that is like, well, if people trust liberals to govern at the city level or the local level, like that bodes well for them trusting liberals at the federal level too. And like, yeah, maybe, I guess. But again, I think it's telling that the places where I found the argument arguments to be well structured and compelling, those were the instances where it seemed like most far afield of something that would be relevant kind of systemically and applicable at that national level. So I joked earlier that it feels like they keep kind of stopping short of the root cause analysis that I feel like I'm waiting for where like they almost address like a class politics framing. But then they stop. And it's interesting because the problem is suggested to be proceduralism because it can be abused. But we don't really spend much time with who's abusing it or why. Like in interviews they'll often say we're concerned with wherever power concentrates. And across these examples, it's often different groups with power who are responsible for obstruction. You know, it's not just corporations. We have to look at this across the board. But there is a comment in the liberal legalism section that appears to trace this like paperwork epidemic to a particular source. So I'm going to have you read here.

[Caroline]

These fears reflect in part the age in which the rules were written. The 1946 Administrative Procedure act, which governs much of the federal government's bureaucratic workings, was adopted to soothe the jangled nerves of legal and business communities alarmed by the New Deal and the muscular wartime exercise of state power.

[Katie]

Okay, so I read this and I'm like, okay, well, it sounds like a lot of this is actually just downstream of business. Interesting. Like, why are we not engaging with that more? The interests of businesses, which are like an unmatched force in American politics, particularly at the national level, are sort of minimized and represented in the text at the same level as, like, just a bunch of competing groups, like, oh, you got the businesses, you got the homeowners associations, you got the groups that care about pollution. And it's like, well, no, you got Halliburton. So there is like a meaningful difference. Difference here in influence.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

When confronted with the accusation that, like, this book is ultimately just making the neoliberal argument in different language, the response is always some variation of like, no, we want more state capacity, not less. But I think what's happening here and what I would say is that the abundance model is consistently conflating increasing state capacity with making the process of working with and bidding out jobs to private companies. Companies easier.

[Caroline]

Yeah, okay, dude. Hot take. Donald Trump should have gone for trains that would have given him his third.

[Katie]

The Trump train. Get on the choo choo choo.

[Caroline]

I mean, the alliteration, dude.

[Katie]

I feel like that's how you get that man to do this. You like? He is so manipulatable. You're like, you can put your name on it. And he's like, I love it. Excuse me. I will say, to be fair, I do think they stick the landing in their argument that laws intended to protect the environment should be revisited in light of the matter magnitude of the renewable energy transformation needed in this country. I have no qualms with that. I don't think that's a bad idea. I think two reporters at Washington Monthly addressed some of the claims about particular environmental laws that became obstructionary. So I'm going to have you read this.

[Caroline]

Abundance. Liberals are right that NEPA needs to be reformed. What they don't say is that progressives aren't primarily responsible for blocking that Reform. Reform. In 2022, the Senate took up a permitting reform bill authored by centrist Democrat Joe Manchin. Oh, here we go. That would have greatly restricted the ability to bring NEPA lawsuits. The Measure would also have strengthened the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, ferc, to preempt state and local opposition to the building of electric transmission lines that cross jurisdictions. Another key item on the abundance liberal wish list. A strong majority of Democrats voted for the legislation. An equally strong majority of Republicans opposed it. After the bill died, Manchin, normally the scourge of the progressives, left no doubt which side killed it. Quote, once again, Mitch McConnell and Republican leadership have put their own political agenda above the needs of the American people. Now that Trump is back in office, he is streamlining fossil fuel permits while punishing solar and wind, all without receiving any pushback from his own party.

[Katie]

They being the Washington Monthly. Journalists point out that America's electric grid is under the control of something called regional transmission organizations, which are basically dominated by regulated corporate monopolies. And these organizations lobby regulatory boards to block the transmission and distribution of renewable energy. So again, you can't just ask, ask which rules are being abused but who is abusing them and why? Whose interests are being served by that obstruction and when? The answer is a homeowners association. Klein and Thompson are like pretty quick to name that force directly, but I had to learn about the regulated corporate monopolies thing, the fact that they're lobbying to block transmission lines from the follow up reporting. So when it comes to energy transmission and access, it can be helpful to look at, at the New Deal, which Klein and Thompson invoke from time to time they'll talk, you know, favorably about fdr, about the New Deal. And one such example is the Tennessee Valley Authority. So at the time 1930s, private sector utilities failed to deliver electricity to rural areas because it wasn't expected to be profitable. So instead they just focused on rich people and large industrial customers where the return on investment was more obvious, was more important, immediate. FDR was like, no, that's not going to work. Congress establishes the Tennessee Valley Authority to build and operate dams on the Tennessee River. So the TVA was a federal corporation. It was publicly owned. It owned the dams, it owned the generating capacity, it eventually owned the transmission. It displaced private power in the region. It worked with people outside the government, but it also had a large direct workforce force, tens of thousands of people on the federal payroll. So this is from the Boston Review.

[Caroline]

In the west, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. army Corps of Engineers constructed dams like Bonneville and Grand Coulee on the Columbia, Fort Peck on the Missouri and Shasta on the Sacramento. Private utilities countered that the United States in the midst of the Great Depression was already generating a excess power and the dams would only exacerbate the surplus. The mistake was to see consumption as largely fixed, dismissing the possibility that lower rates would stimulate much greater use. In other words, it took public action to break the hold of privately maintained scarcity and deliver abundant power.

[Katie]

FDR and company had already launched a major rural electrification program called the REA which tried to incentivize private utilities to build with cheap credit. But it didn't work. Incentivizing them with subsidies and like giving them the money to do it, the returns just weren't there. So they didn't do it. Instead they ended up building consumer owned rural electric cooperatives which from my understanding are still operational to this day. And I thought that was really interesting because it's kind of like, like at first, before the New Deal, they kind of tried what the abundance agenda is suggesting you do, and it didn't work because the private providers were like, yeah, no, we'll pass, thanks, but no thanks. So I'm going to have you read from the American affairs journal again here.

[Caroline]

As economic geographer Brett Christophers has demonstrated in his study of the economics of climate transition, environmental law is only one piece of the puzzle. The decisive choke point is profitable. Whenever a project's expected returns sink below the hurdle rate investors demand, developers and lenders alike pull capital whatever the state of the environmental paperwork. This was the case in 2022 when Avangrid's Massachusetts offshore wind contract became so unbankable after turbine price and interest rate spikes that the company chose to pay nearly 50 million in penalties rather than build at a loss in spring 2024. Regular negative price episodes in ERCOT, roughly one in every 12 settlement intervals prompted three West Texas Solar sponsors to cancel tax equity closings they had already booked. Orsted's abandonment of the New Jersey Ocean wind offshore project followed the same script. Once its locked in purchasing price agreement, price could no longer cover debt service. The firm simply canceled and wrote off the 4 billion project project in each of these cases and many more profit expectations and the fear of having to supply electricity at low or even negative cost hamstrung the deployment of clean energy. Finance dreads overcapacity because true abundance hammers the very margins its models depend on.

[Katie]

The argument being constructed here is that these projects will happen if it is easier for them to happen. But ease is not the grease for the wheel if you are talking about private for profit enterprise. Ease can help lower costs, but proceduralism adds costs that are on the whole, often marginal in challenges of this Scale and scope procedure is sort of tangential. Okay, so finally, we've reached, like, the crown jewel of abundance discourse, which is housing. Probably the largest critique of the housing coverage in this book is that they focused almost, almost exclusively on San Francisco and to a lesser extent, New York City. And part of the reason is that these are two very rich, very blue cities with a lot of seemingly intractable political problems. But it's also clear that they believe the concept of the city writ large should be the focus because they produce almost magical productive benefits. So here is an excerpt from the book.

[Caroline]

But economies are not bounded by land ideas. And the technologies and companies and products they power draw the outer borders of growth. The land that matters most is the land that aids in the fiery creation of the new. That land is in the heart of our cities, not at the edge of our settlements. And that land reveals the problem America faces. Now, this is like a really wonky this land is your land. A young family can still follow Horace Greeley's advice and find a cheap home in the rural West. What they typically cannot do is follow Horace Greeley's example and build a life in Manhattan, where the median home now sells for 1.1 million. Or in San Francisco, where the median home sells for 1.3 million. Or in Los Angeles, where the asking price hovers around 1 million. Or in Seattle, where the median home is over 900,000. Or in Boston, where it's 830,000.

[Katie]

Okay, so they rattle off several coastal blue cities in this paragraph to, like, set up the housing chapter. But the vast majority of the contents applies to the state of California. It is conspicuous that the two cities they keep returning to are San Francisco and New York City. And obviously, nearly every state in America has cities. And yet it is much harder to point to, like, the dynamic productivity coming out of Cincinnati, Ohio, or like Kansas City, Missouri. Like, when they say city, what they really mean are tech and finance. That's what they're talking about.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And I think it's important to highlight that when we have conversations about San Francisco and New York City and, like, what these places are doing right or wrong, we sort of skip over why these places are so rich. So, Kara, why might New York City and San Francisco appear to be so productive according to the metrics that we use to measure productivity in the US

[Caroline]

because companies are there.

[Katie]

Yeah. What industries are in both of those places?

[Caroline]

Tech and finance.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah.

[Katie]

At the risk of oversimplifying, New York is rich because of Wall Street. San Francisco is rich because of Silicon Valley. At one point, they explained that everyone used to flock to cities to build their fortunes and, like, take the escalator to the middle class. But now only rich people can afford to live in these cities. And so they're building toward the point that this divergence, the, you know, the people who used to go to cities to find upward mobility are now priceless out. And now they have to live in Cleveland. And, like, that's sad for them.

[Caroline]

That sucks.

[Katie]

And who wants to fucking live in Cleveland? Right? As the explanation for income inequality, it

[Caroline]

is then no surprise that income inequality began rising in the 70s and reached such striking peaks in recent decades. We took a process responsible for much of the march toward income convergence.

[Katie]

Okay, so that's there. Referring to people moving to urban centers, basically.

[Caroline]

Okay, and we threw it in reverse. We made mobility. Sorry, I'm going to read slowly here so I can try to understand what they're saying. We made mobility into an engine of inequality, and we did it on purpose, using policy levers that made life in dynamic cities too costly for the poor to afford. But the we here is hiding some uncomfortable culprits. It's liberals, and particularly a strain of liberalism that began to develop in the 60s and 70s that bears much of the blame. I don't understand what they're saying.

[Katie]

Yeah, this is a doozy of an argument. I tried to, like, go bit by bit through this chapter and be like, okay, I really want to understand what it is you are claiming, because it sounds like what you're saying is that I might have my face in my hands. I'm like, it sounds like what you're saying is we used to have a more equal society because, like, people could live in cities where it's super productive, but then we, like, changed policies and now people can't afford to live in cities, and now they're moving elsewhere, and that's making things more unequal. I don't know. It's just, to me, this argument is kind of a mess. And then it builds to this thing of like. And the reason why is because of this particular strain of liberalism that developed in the 60s and 70s. I feel like knowing what we know now about the consequences of, of deregulating the finance sector, of offshoring, of nafta, of tax cuts. Like, there are so many things that I think their explanation here is on just really shaky ground. Like, you would almost have to know nothing else about American history in the 20th century to accept that the rising cost of living in cities, which they attribute to regulations put in Place by liberal environmentalists and cultural norms of the new left. And like I embarrassed hyperbolizing was the primary cause of diverging economic outcomes. It feels to me like they're trying to do too much. I know both of these men are smarter than to try to suggest that income inequality is the result of, like, people not being able to afford living in Manhattan. But, like, if I didn't know that and I were just reading this book, I'd like, these people don't know what the they're talking about. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Sense.

[Caroline]

Do you know what each of them needs? Katie?

[Katie]

Lemonade.

[Caroline]

Now I'm going to do another callback to another joke I've made. What they need is to each have another paternity leave so that they can read more. Because I feel like they need more free time. And I think that that's why they both deserve a hefty paternity leave.

[Katie]

See, and that's why they should have supported Bernie. Sanders. Sanders.

[Caroline]

Because then they would have all comes back to socialism. That's why we should be Denmark. You would get your paternity leave. Derek would be amazing if we tried to be more like Derek.

[Katie]

Think of how many books you could read.

[Caroline]

Think of how many books you can read.

[Katie]

Oh, my God. Okay, let's return to the text because I want you to see how this argument continues to build. So from here, they introduce zoning, which will end up being positioned, mentioned as the causal factor for the rising cost of housing.

[Caroline]

The concept of zoning, unheard of in 1900, covered 70% of the U.S. population by 1933.

[Katie]

Okay, so I read this and I'm like, all right, well, we didn't have a housing crisis until like, you know, the last couple of years. So if zoning has been in the picture since 1933, like, what. What happened? What changed? And the argument that follows is, I would say, pretty cohesive, but again, it's pretty specific to the state of California. So here is how they describe the scale of the problem.

[Caroline]

In the 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year. Since 2007, California has never once permitted more than 150,000 new homes.

[Katie]

So, like, all right, what happened in 2007?

[Caroline]

It's kind of like floating, quoting numbers.

[Katie]

Yeah, I'm like, yeah, well, something specific did happen around that time, and that, like, probably should play a causal role here and like, the explanation. But again, you're like, all right, well, why? Right? So this is them quoting a 2015 investigation by the California Legislative Analyst's office.

[Caroline]

First and foremost, far less housing has been built in California's coastal areas than people demand.

[Katie]

Okay, and why is this? That. And they write this, after all, if

[Caroline]

you already own a home, scarcity makes the asset you own all the more valuable.

[Katie]

Okay, okay, pause. So constrained supply is what you get in a system that incentivizes constrained supply. Set the housing crisis aside, set the, the great financial crisis and the, the financial meltdown. Put all of that aside, like at a very, very basic level. This level line, if you already own a home, scarcity makes the asset you own all the more valuable. To me, kind of tells the whole story because it's like, yeah, we've created a system that incentivizes constrained supply. And what are you getting now? Constrained supply. This is a system where it is profitable for demand to outpace supply. And so that is what happens. And what kind of shocked me honestly is they even provided this interesting history of how housing became an asset. If you will please read.

[Caroline]

Prior to 1970, housing wasn't a prime asset. You bought a home to live in it. But that changed in the 1970s. Inflation was part of the reason. One of the main aims of federal housing policy has been to make possible the 30 year fixed rate mortgage, a peculiar financial device that wouldn't survive a day in the economic wild.

[Katie]

Okay, so like the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Mortgage is specific to the United States. This is not really a loan product that you can get elsewhere, mostly because there'd be no incentive for a lender to offer you a fixed interest rate for 30 years where inflation is just going to deflate the value of that money. So expand that argument further. Right. It's also beneficial for the people who make housing for prices to say high. And this is the core contradiction of the idea that the market would prevent produce abundant supply on its own. So Malcolm Harris wrote about this here. I'm going to have you read.

[Caroline]

For example, capital is reluctant to enter industries that are easy to enter for fear competition will drive out the profit. The abundant solution to a lack of housing is to make it easier for developers to build for increased density. The more units that come onto the market, the less landlords will be able to charge charge. But the same supply mechanism that pushes down prices discourages capital from the sector. If what developers experience as an excess of supply stops them from projecting the same high rent levels, their lenders might just decide to put their dough in crypto instead. There's no reason to assume a market equilibrium point at which investors are satisfied with their projected returns. And Americans of all income levels enjoy an abundance of high quality housing.

[Katie]

I think this goes for really all of the things we've talked about today. You build where something will make money. This goes for housing, this goes for transportation, this goes for energy. So like, part of what allows profit is demand for the thing, but the other part is cheap inputs. So places with cheaper inputs are going to be more profitable. And sure, regulations and permitting, again, that does cost time and money to be sure, but it's not at all clear to me the extent to which that factor in particular, like, it seems like pretty small lemons compared to these other

[Caroline]

very small leavens, would you say? Eureka.

[Katie]

Lemons. Very small lemons. It's very small Meyer lemons. About whether or not that's going to make or break. Like if a project is pursued in the first place or is seen through to completion really quickly. On the zoning piece, I, I originally was just going to focus this episode on housing, but then I thought that was kind of cheap. So I was like, okay, we're not going to spend as much time on zoning. But I interviewed an economist from the University of Kansas who's been studying housing since the 1970s, and he told me that, you know, in general, the tricky thing about zoning is that it changes where housing gets built. It does not typically affect how much housing gets built, because what affects how much housing gets built is more of these profit seeking. Where can we make money? What can this market bear? Basically, so this is a really good example of, I think, the slipperiness of some of this argument. And we're like, you could probably accuse some of this as being the narcissism of small differences. But it's not that I'm arguing against zoning reform. I'm just arguing that zoning reform is unlikely to pull the lever for the problem you are suggesting it will address. In this book, for example, a comprehensive study from the Urban Institute of Land use reforms across 1,136 cities from 2000 to 2019 found that they increased housing supply by only 0.8% sent within three to nine years of passage of these zoning reforms. Where you're like either not eliminating single family zoning, that's more unusual. Like, Minneapolis eliminated single family zoning in 2019. In the following several years after that, they added like 255 units. Los Angeles had 211 applications for multi family construction in the year after the law getting rid of single family zoning when it's into effect. And so the point is that zoning will determine where you are putting Things, but it's not borne out in the data that it really impacts how much you're going to get. So I think what abundists would say is that they didn't eliminate enough regulations in these cases. Single family zoning is only one piece of zoning referral forms. There's also parking requirements and things of that nature. They'd probably say, well, you just need to go further, you have to eliminate more. And okay, like, fair enough. I'm honestly not opposed to that. I am just not convinced that these tweaks will produce 3 to 7 million more homes that we are supposedly short. And I say supposedly because. And this is where things come back to this like, regional inequality thing. The Kansas economist was like, well, technically there is more than enough housing in this country. Country. It's just in places where people don't want to live. I think that's kind of an interesting example of how inequality happens in real life. That it's not just about how much money you have, but that where you live in the United States makes a humongous difference into your experience of this country.

[Caroline]

Yeah, it seems like a real game of dominoes to be arguing that the way to solve, solve really foundational problems of inequality in America are to just like jackrabbit housing in the most expensive cities in the country. I'm like, listen, I'm no economist and I'm no housing specialist and I'm also no politician and I'm also not a wonk. And I also barely understand what we're talking about, but I have a very strong instinct that you are going to have a number of levers that get flicked if you suddenly just build, build like 15 high rises in San Francisco to accommodate all of these people. It just seems like a, it almost seems like a, a really non functional band aid. Are you really just arguing for more housing in San Francisco? Like, like to make housing more affordable in San Francisco?

[Katie]

Because like, that literally is kind of what they're arguing.

[Caroline]

And I do think there isn't. I, I'm aware that there are affordability crises in these cities that we have to address, but is that really the end goal? Is that really what's going to like solve inequality? Or is that just.

[Katie]

That's the thing is like, is that going to solve inequality? They're not even like positioning these things as ways to quote, unquote, solve inequality really. I guess there's that one explanation in the beginning of the chapter where they're like, oh, we've turned what used to be an engine for progress into an engine of inequality. So I guess there, there is a mention of it. I guess when I was reading it, to me, the bigger flashing red light kind of appeared to be be like, it's really odd to just focus on these two cities that are like, yes, unaffordable and yes, very popular. But I think it's clear that like, what. What you need to improve affordable housing in Manhattan is really not an issue for 98% of the land mass in this country where, like, housing is not right. Going to be responsive to the same theory. Theories of the case.

[Caroline]

Yeah. That is interesting that it's like a book for, I don't want to say coastal elites, because a lot of people living in these cities are struggling to get by. But it is a fundamentally coastal problem that you're talking about. Like, you're not actually even pretending for this to be a problem that applies to a large number of cities.

[Katie]

Yeah, it's like the vast majority of Americans. It just for me, kind of inadvertently called attention to the fact that. That such a huge issue in this country. It's that like, the vast majority of the country is now poorer because finance and tech have sucked all the resources and attention to the coasts. And like vast swaths of the country in between are just kind of like left out to dry. Like, why?

[Caroline]

And that's where we see the Venn diagram between hillbilly elegy and the bundle.

[Katie]

Literally, I'm like, yeah, well, why don't people want to live in Cleveland? Why don't people want to live in Detroit? Like, these used to be bustling places. Is the idea that, like, we're just going to kind of keep marching down this path and we're going to try to fit everybody into these two places. Like, surely that's not the answer here, but.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

I think that, like, your point about transit is well taken that like, a lot of the issues with housing is that there's nothing around. Like you have to build out. So there's sprawl, but they're not actually building there. There is isn't like thriving economies in these places.

[Caroline]

I also want to say, I think that we've really been on Cleveland and I, I just want to say I think Cleveland is a metaphor for America. So if you live in Cleveland, we're not really talking about Cleveland. We're talking about America.

[Katie]

This is like that time that I made a joke about how having to live in Tampa, Florida was punishment enough.

[Caroline]

And someone from Tampa was Salahazzy. It was Salazar.

[Katie]

I was like, me listening. I'm Listening to this in Tallahassee and I don't feel good right now. I'm like, I'm so sorry. It was just a Florida poem.

[Caroline]

Yeah, it's just like a cancellation crisis I don't want to deal with.

[Katie]

Yeah. You're like, okay. And in defense of Cleveland, when I say oh, you say IO. Okay, moving on. I think the proper scale and focus for zoning in this conversation should be about shifting the character of our communities in this country to focus on walkability, mixed use developments, avoiding the single family only. These are things that they talk about. Right? And I broadly agree with most of that. And obviously public transit infrastructure and shifting away from car reliance is a pretty unavoidable piece of all of that. And in that respect, zoning is very important. But from the evidence that I have seen and the experts that I have listened to and I think cards on the table, just kind of my understanding of and perspective on the role of political economy, it does not seem to me like zoning is the right hammer for the nail of supply. Specifically, like, these are. These are related questions, but they are ultimately different questions. And so, yes, zoning would appear to play a role. But I think if supply is your main concern, if you want are concerned with an abundance of supply, the mechanism has to be more targeted to produce the outcome you want. Financing has to be central to that. So we're going to end our little zoning detour here with something from the Boston Review, which builds on this idea.

[Caroline]

Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to customers construction. They are looking not only for positive returns, but for higher returns than alternative options. Home builders in particular will not build unless they have reason to think they can achieve sufficiently high profits. Those that outperform land, banking, speculation or other forms of investment. The much touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point. After a few years of above average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010.

[Katie]

The Austin example is extremely illustrative here. There really was a post pandemic construction boom. But since its peak, construction has stalled. Why has it stalled? Because lenders who finance these projects want returns, developers want returns. And like, this is the system we have created. That's how it works. Once they started to approach something like, like supply that could drive prices down, it was like, okay, no more of that. Like we're done with that. And I think that's, that's what's odd about the housing section of this book because they more or less make the same argument. Like, they acknowledge all these same paradoxes in their analysis of American housing policy and how we got here and the forces that created these conditions, almost identical, beat for beat. What I would tell you and what I have told you before on this podcast, that we created the policy conditions for these applications outcomes. That is why it's so strange when they basically ignore those incentives and the interests that they have created entirely in the proposed solutions. I. I don't want to be like conspiratorial about it, but I'm like, well, you seem to have a pretty good grasp of the problem to the point that, like, I can't really imagine that you actually think eliminating parking requirements is going to meaningfully change anything.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I think that is my forever challenge with this book is that that even again, as someone who knows certifiably nothing and is relatively unqualified to talk about anything in relation to this conversation, it's just the entire argument has always been to me like you see in

[Katie]

the C section episode.

[Caroline]

Yeah, exactly. As like a. As like a neutral third party observer with absolutely no relevant insight into the matter. My whole thing, even from the jump, even before people like you were like, actually, this doesn't really bear out. My whole thing was like, well, yeah, and this can't possibly be the most. And the other thing that I think is kind of funny is that it's also not sexy. It's like, not only is it not really, you're like, bored as fuck right now. No, I'm like, I just like, I can see when people diverge from the most important thing, if they have like a sexier topic, but it's like they're arguing to reorient the entire Democratic party over some. Something that seems, number one, to not be the solution for anything they're talking about. And also number two, something that will require them to do like six minutes of explaining on the Jon Stewart podcast. You know what I mean? It's just kind of like it's. It's kind of amazing to me that this is the route. And I guess it really speaks to their savvy that they've been able to make it into something that it has become at least a brief, impactful topic or idea or whatever you want to call it.

[Katie]

Yeah, I had like this whole section about the environmentalism piece in the housing chapter, but we've already been talking for like three hours, so I'm going to skip it. I'll put it in the show. Notes if you want to dig into that specifically. But to summarize, cities are where people want to live. We should make it easier for people to live in cities because there's economic productivity there. Part of the reason homes are so expensive is because the American tax law and financial incentive structure has turned them into an asset class used for investment purposes. But also environmental regulations are now used to block new development. It's like not the most airtight argument, but ultimately the most charitable explanation that I could offer you is that they're saying these regulations are basically wielded cynically to be obstructionary to protect home values. And this is another instance where the internal logic of this theory is not coherent to me because it seems like they're saying if you remove those barriers, right, people won't be able to use them to obstruct government action anymore. The government will be able to move quickly. But the entire folk focus is on private development and how these hindrances prevent private developers from building stuff. So my reading, they're not making the case that like the government should be building housing. It's like the government should make it easier for other people to build. So are we trying to increase state capacity and build a stronger state, or are we trying to make it easier for private businesses and publicly traded companies to do the things that they want to do? And like we are just a assuming that the things they do will be good for us.

[Caroline]

Cosine, cosine.

[Katie]

To go back to our supply and demand conversation from seven hours ago. They basically apply the argument to the housing chapter. Like this.

[Caroline]

Gonna have you read, make sure. Oh, I have to read. Okay, well then I'll do the lemonade stand conversion. Okay, okay. Housing follows the laws of supply and demand. Okay, I'm with you so far. When supply, supply is thick and demand is light, many lemons, low foot traffic prices fall. The average lemonade stand, aka home in Cleveland, sells for about $115,000. When lemons are tight and foot traffic is hot, prices rise. That is the story of the pricey blue cities listed above. America used to be adept at building homes, aka lemonade stands. In 1950, the US Census Bureau reported that America had added 8.5 million units in the previous decade. Even with interruption of a world war, that's a lot of lemons.

[Katie]

Okay, so housing is cheap in Cleveland. The subtext is nobody wants to live in Cleveland. That's why it's cheap. You should want to live.

[Caroline]

That's what they said, not us. We are not saying that about.

[Katie]

I am not Discriminating against Cleveland or Tallahassee, Florida. Let the record reflect equal opportunity. Shit talker about American cities. You should want to live in a superstar city. They say. They literally say housing costs are highest in the superstar cities that now drive the economy.

[Caroline]

So like, what a crazy phrase.

[Katie]

Tech and finance. I know this has Derek written all over it. Like the hot chick cities, the superstar cities. Okay, so like, yeah, it's true, the housing is most expensive there. And, and it is not clear at all that zoning is to blame for that fact. There was a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, so this is not a peer reviewed paper, but these findings are interesting, so we're going to talk about them. That actually came out this same month that abundance was published, coincidentally. That essentially says you can map rising incomes to the rising cost of housing. Okay, so we obviously can't blame them for not including a paper that came out the same month that their book was published. But I think it's worth talking about it. The paper suggests that housing tracks income. So from 2000 to 2020, they say, we find that higher income growth predict predicts the same growth in housing prices, housing quality and population, regardless of a city's estimated housing supply elasticity. They conclude that these results, quote, imply that estimated housing supply constraints are unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among US cities. So to be very clear, they're not saying supply of housing doesn't matter, but that income growth is a better predictor, a more reliable predictor of the cost of housing than how relatively easy or difficult it is to build in a given place. They say regulatory constraints don't appear to matter. Quote, relaxing regulatory housing supply constraints may not materially affect housing affordability. This is a pretty cut and dry case for the idea that inequality, quality itself is driving these outcomes. Areas that have a lot of inequality, that have like really, really high incomes, see the housing price growth driven by that upper bound of the income distribution. And then the more unequal incomes are through that distribution, the more you're going to find that median and below median earners are going to really struggle to keep pace. Again. It is a much less sexy story in some ways because this is a more uncomfortable problem. Like this is a problem that implies you actually do need a class plan politics in a way that the win win solution of like, hey, good news, it's just like the rules about the parking and the sea turtles and like, we don't actually have to confront any of this, does not. And then here's the thing. Housing affordability issues are also not unique to cities. So 30% of rural households and almost half of rural renters struggle to afford housing. So I'm going to have the you read from the American Affairs Journal in its double review of Abundance and a similar book called why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman.

[Caroline]

Perhaps both books neglect the politics of land use in rural America because they do not map neatly onto their market first frameworks which suppose that overregulation is the primary cause of housing unaffordability in the United States. Even if rural towns wanted to upzone, many lack the basic infrastructure. Yeah, sewers, water, roads, broadband to support new construction. Profit margins for developers, moreover, are slim to non existent. Capital is scarce, and where rural housing has been successfully delivered, it has only been because the state guaranteed it through USDA's Section 502 and 515 programs, for instance, that funding has been gutted. Section 502 direct loans alone were slashed by nearly a third between fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

[Katie]

Okay, so fast forward, forward. Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and this Mark Dunkelman guy, the one whose book was also being reviewed in the little passage you just read. They got together for a little retrospective one year after Abundance was published. And Ezra plays a clip of Gavin Newsom citing abundance on Kimmel and asks Thompson, like, what are your thoughts on this? Like, how does it make you feel to like listen to Gavin Newsom talk about abundance?

[Caroline]

President of our Hearts, Gavin Newsome. That's my president already. Gavin Newsome. Go on Katie.

[Katie]

So at this point, Thompson points out that in the six to nine months since an Abundance informed housing reform bill was passed in California, housing starts or new building has not happened. And to his credit he says like, hey, we, we care about outcomes like, and we still are not seeing movement here. And they get into some of the criticisms that they see as valid to the book. So we are going to watch.

[Ezra Klein]

I definitely don't want to give the same answer to every question, but I hear the governor of California describing a legislative victory in terms that literally quote our book, A Liberalism that Builds Abundance. He's being asked questions by a late night host that are basically like LLM summaries of our books. But then you look at the outcomes and California still hasn't actually increased housing starts in in the. What is it now, six months since that bill was signed. Nine months after the debate over that bill really began. That's not the fault of that legislation necessarily. You could think of it a couple ways. You could think one, that there's A set of problems that have accumulated in California over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing. And this is one important step to ungunk that process. That's maybe that's an optimistic, optimistic way to frame it. Another way to frame it is that, you know, legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction. We're in an environment with an elevated interest rate where Trump is waging war against legal and undocumented immigration, which is complicating the fact that I think 40% of construction workers in California are foreign born. So the labor supply of construction work in California is scarce and therefore very expensive, also raising the cost of housing. And you look around the country and there just aren't a lot of housing construction triumphs at all for a variety of macroeconomic reasons. I care about outcomes. We care about outcomes. And if California, Illinois, New York, they're going to pass laws that hold up abundance as the inspiration or motivation or philosophy of those laws, and then three months, six months, two years later, we still don't have the fruits of abundance, whether it's building more housing, building more clean energy. I am to willing worried that that speaks to a gap between what I call the legislation vibes and the outcomes.

[Derek Thompson]

Well, here is, I think, also another way of thinking about this that I've become more sensitized to in the year after publishing the book that I'd like to hear your thoughts on. So whether a housing project gets built can depend on a series of things. But I think you can often break it into, into three things when there is demand for it. So one is just legally, can you get the damn thing built? Can you get the permits? Could you get the agreements? Can you, you know, get through if it's a big enough project, the city council or the planning board or whatever, and we focus a lot on that. I would say when I look around that there's been at least the intellectual victory where there is something getting closer to a broad consensus that you should be able to build legally. That should be possible in places where we need housing. But then there's a question of can you finance the build? And then there's a question of how much does the build cost? What is the cost of construction in terms of materials, in terms of labor, in terms of how much you're paying labor in terms of what kind of thing you need to build. And I think a good critique of the book that I've heard is one, we don't talk very much about financing. And one thing has been Hard is that even as a lot of yes, in my backyard, bills are passing, as you sort of mentioned quickly, the financing environment has gotten much worse because interest rates went way up after the inflationary period. And the second is that cost of construction in a place like California is a very fraught topic because nobody wants to see wages go down. There's a big deportation agenda happening under Donald Trump, which, as you mentioned, is making labor more expensive. But even as there's been a lot of victories on zoning and exempting things from, you know, environmental reviews, the financing side has gotten harder. I've definitely talked to mayors and others who say, look, I've got all these projects I want to see go forward and we've made it possible for them to go forward, but the financing, the, the projects are not penciling out and we don't have an answer to it.

[Katie]

So there's an interesting admission happening here where it feels like there's an acknowledgment that, like, money and who controls that resource is a huge piece that sort of goes unspoken in the book. And I think that that's largely the critique that I had while reading it. And I want you to listen now to Derek's response.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah. The framework that I've developed for this, which I think is a critique of that first chapter of that housing chapter, is that to really understand housing in America, you need to understand a 50 year story, which is mostly about rules, a 20 year story, which is about business cycles, and a five year story, which is about the incredibly weird business cycle cycle that has followed the pandemic. Chapter one of our book, the housing chapter, does, I think, a very good job explaining the 50 year story of how a set of zoning and permitting and environmental legislation and rules that accumulated around the 1960s and 1970s has slowed housing construction across the country. But in particular in blue cities and blue states where there is very, very hot demand. I think it did a good job of explaining that 50 year accumulation of rules. But there's also the 20 year story, which is that after the Great Recession, the construction industry in this country was decimated and that led to the 2000 and tens being the decade with the fewest houses built per capita of any decade on record. That's not just a rules story, that's a story about macroeconomics. It's a story about the fact that after the Great Recession, there just wasn't demand or available labor or companies sufficient to build the kind of housing that we would need in the 2020s. And then what happened in the 2020s was just like one piece of mayhem after another. You had the pandemic. You had inflation. You have now, I think, a scarcity of construction labor, which makes it more expensive to build in many places. And so I do think that to really understand the problems that states that governors and mayors face when it comes to housing, you do have to understand that there is this kind of, like, Russian nesting doll of problems. 50 years of rules, 20 years of maximum macroeconomic crisis, and then 5 years of macroeconomic and financing crisis. And that's really put us where we are. And so I agree.

[Caroline]

I just feel like when I watch this conversation, it's not that I doubt that they have a legitimate position. It just genuinely feels like I'm listening to someone speak a different dialect of America where I'm like, if we're. We're talking about the last, like, Derek Doing, like, 50, 25, that's how you understand. I'm just like, why? I just don't relate to it. And I'm sure it just has to do with, like, my interests versus his interests. But I'm like, I don't know if that explains income inequality in America or the fact that people can't afford homes. Like, it's just. It just really strikes me as a reaffirming of this wonkish. Like, no, no, don't follow the Occam's razor. Follow this very specific road that we're creating, creating for why people don't have houses.

[Katie]

Later in the answer, he basically says, like, well, how do you ensure you have the financing to keep these developers adequately incentivized? How do you make sure that these private developers have enough money to build the things that you want them to build? And like, Ezra builds on that answer and says, you know, it's hard because the state wants more housing, and the person who just bought this plot of land might want some housing on it, but, like, the neighborhood doesn't. And at the municipal level, there's still an obstruction, construction happening. So, Carol, just a quick check one more time. Why might someone in your neighborhood not want another house built? Why might a developer look at an area where it's easy to build and still be like that? The projected returns are low because it'll

[Caroline]

change the cost of the houses that are already there.

[Katie]

How would you feel right now if I said the purpose of a system is what it does? Like, he's giving you this very convoluted, like, the 50 year story, the 20 years. Well, you had this, and you've had this and, well, there's been the interest. And it's kind of like, it honestly reminds me of like back when I would like do personal finance assessments for people and they'd be like, well, this month was weird because I had this and this and this. And like last month was weird because I had this. It's like, yeah, but that, that's life. Like, like the weirdness.

[Caroline]

Katie's like, you're an idiot, sweetie.

[Katie]

The weirdness that you're describing of like all these things that like, made your budget unusually expensive. It's like, but that happens. There's always going to be things that do that. So it's like, that's how I feel when I listen to him say, like, well, we're just in a weird period. It's like, no, you're. What's happening is you are pointing to obstruction and you're mistaking it for a bug when it is in fact a feature of the system we have built. And like, the idea that we could remove that feature, it's like, no, that is the system. Like, you're literally pointing to the way it was constructed to work. You can't. There's no way around that without addressing that particular.

[Caroline]

Yeah, I also think, I mean, we haven't talked about in this conversation today specifically, but I know that in the abundance conversation there's been a lot of focus on nimbyism and like breaking apart nimbyism, the whole not in my backyard movement. Small neighborhoods coming together to basically prevent big affordable housing buildings and all that. And obviously I agree with the type of necessary forces that create housing and break that apart. But I actually find it very great when there is no time taken to understand, like the root emotional and spiritual and practical reasons for NIMBYism, where I'm like, Americans have never been more unstable. Most Americans have a lot, if not all of their retirement in their home values. There is a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma here where it's like, yeah, people are self interested and we should talk about that and make sure that someone's self interest doesn't hurt someone else's ability to find housing. And we should also address the, the fact that like, we have an obsession and an investment in our home values that other countries don't have. Yes, other people can live in homes without it being the primary vehicle for their safety and security into their final years of life. And that is not the case in America where you have, if you're lucky, you have a 401k and then you have your home Value. And for people who have been lucky enough to buy into the, the American housing system, that's their retirement. And so there is an element of empathy and understanding that you have to have and also an understanding of like why people are so terrified of the system changing. It's because they feel like all of their stability and security relies on them riding out the system that they bought into. And it just feels negligent to not acknowledge that.

[Katie]

I think that that's a really good point. The other thing about the NIMBYism that I think is worth pointing out is that all NIMBYism is not created equal technically. If you are like in a, in a neighborhood that you don't want to be gentrified and you're like, well I don't want a fucking sweet green to replace my 50 year local restaurant. Like also kind of NIMBYism, right? Like there this, this argument of like, yes, sometimes people don't want things built in their town and there's like a legitimate reason for that. I appreciate that comment about needing to have empathy for the fact that people have a of sense essentially followed the rules of the system that is in place.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

And now we have recognized that that system is creating bad incentives and like the answer can't just be, well, the NIMBY have to get over it. There has to be a better solution than that.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

One thing that I would point to here is as the, as a, you know, a good example of like where their argument is not actually for state capacity. In Sweden, for example, there are municipalities owned housing companies that develop, rent out and manage the units for anybody who wants one. And this has the bonus effect of driving prices down in the private housing market. That's increasing state capacity, incentivizing private developers and like hoping that they do with the money what you want them to do. That's not state capacity, that's just subsidies, which like we've been doing to your point, that doesn't necessarily literally address the insecurity piece. Like if you're going to really undermine housing values, you do have to bring in security for people in other ways. You have to decouple people's long term security from the values of their homes. That is a piece of this puzzle that like we do have to think about. So I'm going to briefly bring back the section from the author's conclusion about what they believe abundance and other political orders need to succeed.

[Caroline]

Deep pocketed donors and political action committees to invest in promising candidates over the long term. The establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs a rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies a capacity to share political opinion both at the highest levels the Supreme Court and across popular print and broadcast media and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of of the good life. Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front.

[Katie]

Why do you need all of this? Well, you need all of this because you are trying to persuade people that their interests are not what they think they are. They're not trying to change the underlying interests, they're trying to persuade you out of pursuing them. That goes for working class people in this scenario. That goes for rich people. The NIMBY in question question does not need to be persuaded of the broader public interest. She has correctly identified her class interest, a class interest that is produced by the political economy. It is a feature of our housing system as presently constructed, that supply will be suppressed and the NIMBY is merely acting in accordance with the interests that that system prescribes and the state is reinforcing for her. There is no amount of editorial materializing from the argument and other like Abundance Forward publications that is going to convince this person that what is in her class interest is not in fact in her interest. But that's that is what this project has to become when you're not really interested in dealing with people's material interests and the way that they conflict is it becomes a project of persuasion. So the Abundance theory is long largely that by removing choke points, simplifying regulations, that the powerful obstructionary forces that are currently abusing those choke points, knowingly or not, are just going to disappear. And as a result, their argument that's ostensibly about building state capacity focuses almost exclusively on those rules. And while it is true that too many rules may in fact slow down an undersized governing body, I think a true state capacity argument would be to add capacity to the state to navigate those rules. Or at the very least do both right? Build your state expertise, build up your resourcing, and then use that resourcing to revise those rules and decide where. Maybe these things are self defeating, but when your every anecdote serves only to highlight how considering multiple perspectives and points of view or like how various groups is going to take too long, you're not actually making the state capacity argument. I really think the inclusion of Elon Musk in this book in this respect is instructive for both how they seem to envision this working as well as what can go wrong so at one point in the book, I think it's Thompson writes that Elon Musk and his companies are an example of what private genius and public subsidy can achieve together. Like, that's one way to put it. Here is another way to put it from Matt Brunig.

[Caroline]

Matt.

[Katie]

Matt, the Bruno.

[Caroline]

We have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world. And then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform. And then the government kill me.

[Katie]

It's worth noting that if personal electric vehicles are truly our future, I'm not sure that subsidizing the private markets to produce them is really giving us what we want or doing that good of a job. If we're going to hail Musk as proof of concept for the success of publicly subsidizing, quote, private genius as an effective means of compelling the market to produce what we want it to, we kind of have to contend with the results of that Approach. Approach. Around 2% of cars on the road today are EVs. Around 10% of new vehicles sold are EVs. For context, 97% of new car sales are electric in Norway. I know that the irony is like, they're a huge oil exporter, but whatever. China is at 53% and they produce 65% of the vehicles sold elsewhere.

[Caroline]

That's crazy.

[Katie]

The UK is at 33%. Like not at. Not a socialist utopia. The US is at 10%. So I'm like, I don't know, would we consider 10% penetration, like, good for the amount of money that has been thrown at this problem? Is it possible, based on the results that other countries have gotten, that we maybe could have had this type of progress or better without creating a trillionaire along the way? And like, I think this example just really illustrates where the abundance framework seems to faultiest to me. Because if you, if you push it to its logical extreme, if you make the argument that things will happen faster and more efficiently if you don't worry so much about actually building state capacity or like making this stuff publicly owned or concerning yourself with egalitarianism, and you're more comfortable just directing public money like a fire hose at a bunch of different private businesses, you run into this issue where like, sure, you're getting innovation of some kind, probably, but like, what you're exchanging for it is worsening inequality because public funds become private wealth and that is the world we already live in.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

Sometimes when I was reading Abundance, I felt like they were basically arguing that like this trade off is more or less fine because the resultant innovation will be expansive enough to supply that it just won't matter. And I'm like, I don't know man. I don't really feel like present reality bears that out in any sense.

[Caroline]

Yeah, you're really playing with fire.

[Katie]

So abundance asks the question what is scarce that should be abundant. What inventions do we need that we do not yet have? And when you ask what is scarce? I think the natural next question should be why is it scarce? And the abundance largely believe that the reason these goods are scarce can be located in well intentioned government proceduralism run amok. The tricky thing is that sometimes government proceduralism really is inefficient, sometimes it really is an obstruction. But it's not the reason goods are scarce. They are scarce because someone's material interests are being served by the scarcity. Scarcity is profitable. And as long as your system is organized around maximizing profits, as long as markets are the primary mechanism by which resources are allocated, allocated and lemons are determined and lemoning and lemons are lemoning and supply and demand are balanced, you will not produce abundance. Where abundance is profitable, capitalism will produce abundance. But where scarcity is more profitable, it will enforce scarcity. This isn't a conspiracy. Like even if you're saying this with complete moral neutrality, it is literally just how the rules of the the system were designed to work. Profitability in every case is like what it is designed to maximize for. And funnily enough, Klein and Thompson end sort of confusingly by like misquoting Karl Marx and how, how Marx imagined this like shared abundance and unleashed production. And I was actually thinking about Marx a lot while I was reading Abundance because Marx as a thinker was sort of ironically skeptical of the value of intellectual debate and rhetoric. He was skeptical that like persuasion really mattered because he believed that material conditions are what inform people's opinions and behavior full stop. And a political project like abundance requires an enormous amount of top down money and think takes and media opinion shapers because it needs to do that impossible task of convincing people to change their minds about these things. I think if you were to actually see a lot of this stuff go through the most likely outcome of a more effective government, if nothing else changes around it, is that we're just going to get more data centers built more quickly with like fewer.

[Caroline]

Right.

[Katie]

Fewer blockades in their way. Which could be why Silicon Valley is like all about this. I don't know. But you might say, hearing all of this, listening to this three hour breakdown of this entire argument. Well, that might be right. Like that's, that's all well and good, but like the reality is that capitalism is a system we have and we need solutions and thinkers and movements that are willing to manipulate the margins to get us closer to something better. And like abundance may not be perfect, but it's the most realistic and achievable path we have. Like this is ultimately the path of least resistance. The problem is that abundance is extremely well known if you are like a terminally online love lefty. But despite all of this media fanfare, it is still pretty obscure as a policy vision for the future. So I'm going to have you read this breakdown of a recent poll.

[Caroline]

Abundance. We have spent three hours talking about this and I can still honestly say that this requires so much pre knowledge that it's never going to work for people. But I, I do think that it can work very effectively for politicians to just steal the word and then say we need to build more and then make people like that.

[Katie]

Yeah, okay, maybe I did a bad job explaining.

[Caroline]

No, no, no, I think you've done a great job.

[Katie]

I did have a lot of moments where I was like, I just feel like trying to summarize these arguments is not possible because they're so multi layered.

[Caroline]

And like, I think that's my point. It's not. When I think about the power of like a Zoran mom dynamic, Donnie. It's because it's not just that he's, it's not that he's speaking more simply, it's that he's making very simple arguments which is like, this is the problem with your life and this is what the solution is. Okay. A recent New York Times Sienna poll found that of potential Democratic Party supporters, 91% had not heard of the Abundance Movement. LOL. While those who had were split on whether they had a favorable view of it, with 2% of men and 3% of women saying they were somewhat favorable to it.

[Katie]

And that's the cutie patootie boost.

[Caroline]

Oh my God. And 1% of men and 2% of women saying they were somewhat unfavorable. Socialism by comparison, had a net favorable rating among men of 54% and among women of 45%. Wow, that's surprising. And only 18% of people said they hadn't heard of it. Wow.

[Katie]

It's different because that's just Jacobin readership. It's like all dudes. That's the skew you've got. You've got. Got the cutie patootie bump for women liking abundance more, and you've got the Jacobin bump for men liking socialism more for men. Yeah, but like, my thing is just that. Okay, first of all, that's a higher net favorability rating than the Democratic Party writ large. So, like, that feels important. Socialism is a word. Like, I fully concede that. That is a concept that, like, because of the red scare, definitely has some mindchanging to do. So I don't want to suggest that, like, oh, we don't have to persuade anybody, right? But as you can see, it's increasingly popular and like, the underlying argument that socialism is making, which is for a democratized economy with distributed power, freedom being defined as ownership of your life and time, resting back control from these corporations and extremely, extremely wealthy people. These are not conditions that people have to be convinced of. Like, that already reflects their material.

[Caroline]

It's intuitive.

[Katie]

It's intuitive. And like I said, I've been thinking about a lot about Marx and reading Abundance, and one of Marx's critiques of capitalism wasn't that it wasn't capable of producing and delivering goods or that it didn't drive society forward, albeit at great cost. Like, he was like, yeah, capitalism produces a lot of shit for sure, but that after a certain point it would collapse under the weight of all of its own contradictions. His eventual predictions, addiction, was that capitalism would eventually lead to a point of stasis or stagnation where people would recognize it is no longer in their self interest to continue going along with it anymore. And at that point, capitalism would produce socialism. This kind of brings me to my final point of this episode, which is that what's happening right now, I would submit to you, is extremely, extremely nascent evidence. Evidence of us inching just a little bit closer to realizing that reality. The quote, unquote far left, speaking simply to people's material interests, are winning electoral victories in Democratic primaries right now in a way that they have not in a very long time, if ever. Like, there is still a long way to go. I don't want to overstate the progress that has been made, but we're on the way, baby. But what I'd point out is that the theory of power and how change works on the left often boils down to building organizing capacity. And that can be wielded again and again and again. Like, you don't need four donors from Silicon Valley to like, keep turning the money faucet on. When you effectively organize a community that is a distributed network of people where there is now no single point of failure, you have the opposite of an abundance, top down framework of winning. It's not about finding these big whale fundraisers. It's not about, oh, aligning all your think takes and like, building out your propaganda arms. Whether the leftist candidates being supported by these organizing efforts win this time around or not, this is much harder to stamp out once it starts. If we had four more hours, we could talk about the ways in which, like, that attempt is being made now and like the clamping down and like, chilling effect on speech with like sentencing people to years in prison for distributing antifa literature, whatever the fuck, distributed movements and organizing of that kind are just much harder to stop. And so I am going to have you read to close today a snippet from their conclusion because I think that this passage is correct and I am just coming to a very different conclusion of what it means for the future.

[Caroline]

Oh, wait, sorry, I thought this was the end.

[Katie]

You have to read. She's like, God damn it. How is there more process?

[Caroline]

How is there more trying so hard to add anything of value over here? I'm like, oh, can I make another lemon joke? Is that tired? I don't know.

[Katie]

I don't know.

[Caroline]

Okay. When the spell of a political order breaks, ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable.

[Derek Thompson]

Wow.

[Caroline]

This happened in the night 1930s, when the Great Depression created space for the rise of Roosevelt's social Democratic collectivism. It happened in the 1970s, when an upswing of individualism changed the way people thought about taxing and spending, regulating the economy, and managing our relationship to the environment. It may be happening again. Throughout the 2010s, a slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality and an affordability crisis 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 affordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

[Katie]

They are falling.

[Caroline]

Hell yeah.

[Katie]

So, Derek and Ezra, this is my plea to you. You are both clearly very intelligent. You are well read. You are gifted communicators. I. I know that you, on some level, subconscious or not, you must know that this. Good try. It's not happening. Come fight for our side. Come apply your platforms and your pressure and your connections and your talent to this, because this movement is going somewhere. This movement has 54% net favorability compared to like 2 or 3%. It's not too late to jump ship. Come on in. Water's warm.

[Caroline]

Derek, you can read for a year. You can read for a while. You can read for a year.

[Katie]

Where we live. It's a wet hot socialist summer where our politics exist.

[Caroline]

You could have a whole year of reading on paternity leave. We would love to have you.

[Katie]

Okay.

[Caroline]

Ezra already is a socialist. I'm convinced.

[Katie]

Come on out, buddy. You know you want to. I'm like, I, I can't for a second read that history of how housing policy works and walk away thinking that he thinks zoning is the answer. I'm like, I'm sorry, I just don't buy.

[Caroline]

I don't. If Ezra ever finds out about us, he is going to have nightmares where of just hearing our voices going, come on out, buddy, come on out. He's like, oh my God. See you in my absolute nightmares.

[Katie]

Just a little tickle under the chin. No, dude, see you in my sexy dreams. You make clap now.

[Caroline]

Wow. Wow, Katie, you really said, I'm about to do a deep dive and you fucking.

[Katie]

Did I say as we were going through, I was literally crossing out sections because I was like, Caroline's gonna fall asleep. She's gonna fucking fall asleep if I make us talk.

[Caroline]

There's a big difference between boredom and just listen. I'm just like, you just educated me. You just fully fucking educated me. You really did your research.

[Katie]

Well, guys, that's it. Abundance.

[Caroline]

Incredible.

[Katie]

The 18 month long time coming Abundance.

[Ezra Klein]

Jeff.

[Caroline]

Wow.

[Katie]

I fit it into three. I. I was wondering if it was going to be a two parter and I was like, no one's going to want that.

[Caroline]

I'm blown away. I would have brewed a coffee for you.

[Katie]

Caroline is going to break up with me if I make her talk about this twice. Good night and goodbye.

[Caroline]

Amazing work, Ezra.

[Katie]

It's not too late.

[Caroline]

Cleveland is where you wanna be Cleveland, it's home for you and me

[Ezra Klein]

it's

[Caroline]

got a bright new shine about it

[Katie]

and all the world will come to see

[Caroline]

It's a place that never leaves your heart

[Katie]

In a world of passing

[Caroline]

strangers it's home right from the start.