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- [00:05]
A
Hello. So we're trying something new on frankly, Fukuyama. My name's Leo Barclay. I'm head of podcasts at Persuasion, which includes American Purpose. I'm here to interview Frank about your recent series on abundance. So what made you start writing this new series?
- [00:19]
B
Well, I am, I would say, a big fan of the abundance movement. This is based on the book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson called Abundance. And it suggests a new agenda that really has both a political and a kind of underlying policy purpose. The policy purpose is really to take away the obstacles that have prevented not just the United States, but I think, other liberal democracies from actually building things, particularly housing and infrastructure. There's not a single modern democracy that doesn't face a crisis of affordability in terms of housing. Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's a particularly acute one. We've got a huge homeless population that nobody seems to know how to. And I think the ultimate issue is that there's just not enough housing in the area for everyone. So that's the policy reason. I think the political reason is that we're living under the burden of Trumpism, which is basically feeding an authoritarian turn in American politics. Donald Trump does not want to be constrained by law, by rules, by norms, by any of the conventional restrictions on executive power that we've come to understand is critical to the. To American democracy. And I don't think that we can simply defeat this kind of authoritarian mentality by just criticizing it. You know, in a way, the 2024 presidential campaign was based on criticisms of Donald Trump, but the Democrats were not trusted because they didn't offer any kind of a positive vision of what would happen if they were. If they were allowed to come back into power. And so I think that for both these policy and political reason, important to clear the way towards a new vision. It doesn't have to be the Democrats. It could be a bipartisan coalition of people that want America and other democracies to be able to accomplish things that are tangible, that serve public interest and the like. Now, that argument has been laid out, and I think it's actually dividing the left because there's still a lot of people in the progressive side of the ledger that are very distrustful of things like permitting reform and deregulation and so forth. Forth. And I think one of the problems is that the argument was laid out by Klein and Thompson in a very abstract form, but there's not a lot of detail as to exactly what needs to be done in order to facilitate a Country that can actually do things like build Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, things that it did in the 1930s, but seems to be unable to accomplish now. And so what I'm hoping to do in this series is that I and other people will begin writing about the concrete changes in the way we do business that would facilitate, you know, the actual implementation of an abundance agenda at some point in the future when we are back past the current, you know, quasi authoritarian administration that we have.
- [03:26]
A
Great. And you, you start off the series by talking about public participation and why that can hold back getting things done and getting things built. So why is that such an issue in the States? It feels like there are a lot of ways for people to get involved. Why does that hold back projects and infrastructure building?
- [03:41]
B
We teach a couple of cases. I have a program here at Stanford called the Leadership Academy for Development, and we teach a lot of case studies. And there are two in particular that I think illustrate the problem. One is about Stuttgart 21. So Stuttgart 21 is a high speed rail station in the city of Stuttgart in the state of Baden Wurttemberg in Germany. They started planning for this station back in the late 1980s. They cut, they broke ground on it sometime in the 1990s. To this day, it has not been completed because I think they mismanaged the public participation process. They didn't actually consult with people as to whether they wanted this train station. I think they could have gotten the assent of the people living in the city of Stuttgart if they had been more careful about the way they asked the question. But instead, you got a cycle of protests that actually dethroned the Christian Democratic government of the state of Baden Wurttemberg because of people's resentment at the way that the issue had been decided technocratically. The other case that we teach is the Toronto sidewalk case. So the city of Toronto has this big undeveloped waterfront on Lake Ontario. They decided to go with Sidewalk Labs, which was a subsidiary of Google. So that in itself, you know, created some distrust because Google is all about surveillance and, you know, violating people's privacy. But again, this was a case where it turned out a majority of people in the city of Toronto actually were very open to this project, but the opponents were very well organized. And again, the public consultation process was mishandled. And in the end, the project collapsed. And so I think that we need public participation. Nobody thinks that it's adequate just to vote every few years for a representative, and then the representatives debate and pass laws and that, that's democracy. I think that particularly for something like public Infrastructure that's actually going disrupt the lives of a lot of real people. If you don't consult the people that are affected what they think and, you know, what adjustments and compromises they're willing to make, you're just never going to, you're never going to succeed. But those processes really slow down the process of building things. If you want to build, let's say, transmission lines to take electricity from the center of the US where a lot of it is produced, out to the, the coasts, the permitting process often takes close to 10 years and a lot of that time is spent in either doing public consultation or anticipating public objections and then trying to bulletproof your plans against them. And I think that the progressive side of the ledger is finally waking up to the fact that if they really want to deal with something like carbon emissions and climate change, you have to build stuff, you have to build transmission lines, you have to build wind farms, solar farms, all these sorts of things. And you're not able to do that because of these rules that were put in place years ago that really require very high levels of public input, but without any kind of structure. So that's the part of the problem I've decided to start working on is how do you actually incorporate public participation in a way that is deliberative, that really engages important interests in civil society, is not captured by powerful interest groups that I think in every democracy really are the main interlocutors, but don't necessarily represent a broad public interest. So that's a kind of line of questioning that I'm starting with my next frankly, Fukuyama podcast. I'm going to record tomorrow with Jim Fishkin. Fishkin is a professor who runs the Deliberative Democracy center here in my home institution, the center on Democracy Development of the Rule of Law at Stanford. He does something called deliberative polling in which he invites a random selection of people to sit down, provides them with background information, and on a face to face basis, they have to actually sit in a, in a hotel room over a long weekend and work their way through an important controversial public policy problem. One thing that he's found in doing this over many years is that if you actually put people in this kind of face to face meeting and provide them with commonly shared information, they're actually able to deliberate. They can actually usually come to sensible decisions, they can make compromises, they can do trade offs and the like. And it's one way possibly of solving this problem of how do you get people to deliberate and participate, but in a more structured Manner that doesn't leave simply an open ended invitation for people to. Well, frankly, a lot of times people, organized groups use public participation as a way of blocking things that they don't like. So that's really going to be the next podcast and there'll be further pieces along these lines.
- [09:03]
A
I'm really excited to hear all about those. I was just wondering, based on what you were saying, I mean, how would you get normal people really engaged in that process though? I mean, it seems to me that a weekend just debating these issues, it kind of sounds like a very intense jury trial or something. But surely that would exclude a lot of people with young families or. I mean, how would you get normal people who really don't get engaged in politics and don't get engaged in policy, but maybe need to be part of this process? How would you get them excited about it? That also seems to be part of the issue.
- [09:31]
B
Yeah, well, just on the question of deliberative polling itself, you know, one of the big issues is if you have a public meeting in any democracy and allow anybody to come, that seems very open ended and democratic. But the truth of the matter is that you have a lot of very organized interest groups. So, you know, in the San Francisco Bay area, where I am, there's a severe housing shortage. If you hold a public hearing on a housing project, who shows up? Well, it's the labor unions, it is the contractors, it's the Sierra Club or other environmental groups. They're all highly organized, very professionalized organizations. And the people who are not represented are precisely those ordinary people that you talk about. So for example, one of the consequences of the housing shortage is that young couples trying to buy their first home can't do it because they're priced out of the market, but they don't have an organized lobby group that advocates for their interests. And so they get left out of these public meetings. And so the question is, how do you actually get more genuine representation that actually reflects the views of the whole community and not just well organized professionally run interest groups. Now the way Fishkin does it is by a process he calls Sortition, which harkens back to the ancient Greeks where you actually selected citizens on a random basis and, you know, had them do the deliberation. He has a version of that where they have a random sampling of citizens and they're the ones that are asked to participate. And in his view, it, it gets actually at a broader democratic representation than simply an open ended process where anyone's allowed to show up. In Europe, you know, you have citizens assemblies in Denmark and certain other European countries, and they're facing very similar kinds of issues in how do you get that broad based participation? One idea actually is to go back to something that political scientists label corporatism, where actually not anyone can show up. You actually have to have certain requirements for attending the meeting. You have to represent different parts of the society. So these are all issues. I don't have strong opinions about this. And this is one of the questions that I think we want to deal with in this series. It's both a normative and a practical matter. The practical matter we've talked about already. You need deliberation, you need people to buy into these ambitious projects. And we don't have a good way of doing it. But it's also normative because one of the complaints about liberalism and liberal societies is that they don't foster a strong sense of community. We think back to Athenian democracy, where really the whole community participated. Or we think back. Alexis de Tocqueville talked about the New England town meeting that he said was a school of democracy in the 1830s when he visited the United States. The trouble is that these ideas don't scale very well. Athens, the number of citizens in the city of Athens at the time of pericles was maybe 25,000 people. And so you could reasonably hold a meeting of the whole citizen body and it would be representative. In the United states, we have 340 million people. And how in the world do you get a deliberative body out of that mass of people? And so I think that this is one of the big problems we've got to solve, is we want to supplement existing electoral and legislative procedures with some opportunity for greater citizen involvement. Because frankly, it's a normative theory that people should not just be passive recipients of the benefits of government, they should actively participate in government. Right now, in most democracies, the only way you actively participate is by paying your tax taxes and by voting every few years. But I think that these kinds of assemblies or public consultations offer another potential way in which people could get involved in the discussion of common public issues. And so I think it also has a normative justification as a way of building citizenship and creating people that are oriented to thinking about public problems.
- [13:57]
A
I know you're not its biggest fan, but do you think social media could help with that at all? Or would that just exacerbate the tensions we already have?
- [14:03]
B
I think that social media actually exacerbates those problems. I've never seen a, you know, a kind of Reasonable discussion on social media of a public policy problem. You know, the first problem is it's, it's for the most part anonymous, right. That you can make comments and you can be disparaging and hateful and, you know, disruptive without actually having to reveal who you are. I think that real deliberation really requires face to face communication because human beings evolved that way. You know, they didn't evolve to talk to each other via electronic mediation. They evolved to speak to each other in groups. And once you are in a face to face conversation, you have to observe certain norms of civility. You can't just insult people. Right. You know, from the outset. The other thing that social media doesn't do is to provide reliable information. You can't have a reasonable discussion. Let's say, you know, you want to create a desalination plant and it's got pluses and minuses. It uses a lot of electricity, it costs a lot of money. There are other competing needs that the money might go to, you know, all of these sorts of things. And people have to know, you know, what's the budget for the city that this is going to be built in? What's the need for the, you know, the clean water and, you know, everything else. And, you know, when's the last time you've seen a social media discussion that actually began from a common base of, you know, of empirical knowledge. So I do think that we really need different, we need to get away from this form of, you know, electronic intermediation towards a more direct form of human deliberation and contact.
- [15:45]
A
Definitely no, I don't think I've ever seen a sensible discussion on social media. So that definitely makes sense. Speaking kind of a controversial topic. I know obviously Zorranam Dani recently was elected mayor of New York City and a big topic that he's talked about is affordability. And you wrote a blog post about affordability and abundance arguing that we need a new definition of affordability and linking that to abundance. So could you just talk through what you. Why we need a new definition of affordability?
- [16:11]
B
Sure. So actually affordability is a nice word because nobody knows exactly what's meant by it. You know, one obvious meaning is it's just about inflation. You know, that people's grocery prices and fuel prices and so forth are going up, up. This is what's measured by the consumer price index in the United States. It's really what brought down Joe Biden because there's a lot of inflation under his presidency and he denied that it was happening. But everybody could see that their grocery bills were going up. So that's an important aspect of affordability. But there's a hidden part of it which really is housing costs. Statistically, housing costs as a proportion of the average workers monthly budget has been going up steadily over the last 20 years. And it really stems from this lack of housing supply, which in turn is related to the difficulty of actually building new housing, especially in many urban areas. In the rich world we also have measures like the Gini coefficient that economists use to measure income inequality. And that's been going up and so that's a problem. But the Gini coefficient doesn't measure things like wealth, whether people own a house and whether they can afford to own a house. And that has become more and more unequal because in many communities, older people, people in my generation who bought their houses 20, 30 years ago are sitting on a big, big asset because of housing price inflation. And younger people are priced out of the market because they don't have the assets to trade in, you know, to buy their first home. So it's a big source of inequality that is really not addressed by seeing affordability simply in terms of consumer prices. Those are important. You have to be able to buy the groceries and put food on the table. But I think a lot of the discontent that exists among especially younger voters is the fact that overall they don't have the ability to afford the kind of lifestyle that their parents had. And a lot of that is housing. And therefore, if you are going to address that problem, the answer is not, as Zoran Mamdania suggested, rent control. It's actually building more housing. That's really the only way that you're going to solve the problem long term. I lived in Santa Monica, California during the 1980s, which had a very strict rent control law. And it was terrible because, you know, the housing stock was very limited. If you had a rent controlled apartment, you clung to it for dear life. You try to figure out how to turn, turn it over to your children. The competition for a rent controlled apartment was intense. People would bribe other people to give them access to a rent controlled apartment. So in the long run, that is not a solution to the housing price problem. The only solution is to build more housing. And therefore I think that if you want more equality in the society in the long run, you know, you've really got to turn to something like abundance and get rid of the obstacles to actually creating more affordable housing.
- [19:20]
A
Yeah, I totally agree. Obviously we have the same issues with housing in the UK and some parts of Europe. As well. So, yeah, I share your views there. But my concern with abundance is that if you're not very informed on it, it sounds like a lot of very expensive projects. And it's hard to see that direct link to kind of how it impact your everyday life in a positive way. So I'd be curious, how would you make that case to voters who haven't followed the abundance debate closely, but it just sounds like building some high speed RA somewhere that isn't here. How would you make that case?
- [19:49]
B
Well, I think that one starting point is to think about public infrastructure. It's very interesting. In China, there's actually a high level of satisfaction with the government because it's been so good at building public infrastructure. They have the world's biggest high speed rail network. They have more urban transportation, you know, metro systems. In many, many Chinese cities, you know, things seem to be working well and being very visible to people. And I think that if we could actually produce public infrastructure, you know, in ways that didn't take, you know, 10, 15 years to materialize, voters would see that, yeah, the government can actually do things. It can actually make people's lives better in a very visible way. The other thing is, if you're really serious about building housing, I don't think that it's that hard to convince people that, that the public authorities are really trying to solve a very visible kind of problem and bring housing prices down. I mean, maybe in the short run you'd want to control rents, but I think that in the end voters should be intelligent enough to understand that if you have more housing, they're going to be able to find affordable housing more easily. But it requires argument. So that's why we have journals like Persuasion. Right. You have to persuade people of things that are not immediately obvious at first glance, but once you explain things to them them, they begin to understand why it's important.
- [21:17]
A
Yeah, totally. And then my last question is that, so I know you're thinking very much about when the Democrats come back into power, like what should be done, but what can we do in the meantime to sort of bring forward this abundance agenda and start building infrastructure projects? What can we do?
- [21:33]
B
Well, in the United States, there's actually what's called a Build America Caucus in the House of Representatives. That's a bipartisan group of Congress people that actually is onto this agenda. There's going to be a big fight within the Democratic Party because the progressive wing has not bought onto this. They are very distrustful of anything that smacks of deregulation or permitting reform, because that's been a traditional Republican talking point for many years. And so I think that at the moment, there's kind of an intellectual struggle going on to convince people that if, for example, they really want to deal with, you know, carbon emissions or global warming, they actually have to get behind a series of measures to streamline the process for building resilience against climate change. So actually, I think the main thing that needs to be done now is a kind of intellectual process of making arguments and convincing people that this is the way to. The way to go. You'll get later next year in the United States, we'll have a midterm election, and you got to get the right people elected. There is going to be a struggle within the Democratic Party between the kind of centrist and progressive wings. And so that's something also to keep in mind in the short run. But right now, I actually think that the main problem is a kind of intellectual one of making the right arguments to make people understand what the problem is and what the solution might be.
- [23:02]
A
Yeah. And your series on abundance is clearly a good first step to raising awareness and being part of that discussion. Discussion. So thank you so much for your time. It was a great discussion.
- [23:17]
B
Thank you for listening to the Frankly Fukuyama podcast. If you like this podcast, consider subscribing to American Purpose and my Frankly Fukuyama column at www. Persuasion.commun.