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- [00:01]
Bill Simmons
Hey, it's Bill Simmons letting you know that we are covering the White Lotus on the Prestige TV Podcast and the Ringer TV YouTube channel every Sunday night this season with Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson.
- [00:11]
Derek Thompson
Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I.
- [00:13]
Ezra Klein
Will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.
- [00:21]
Bill Simmons
Subscribe to the prestigious podcast feed, subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch these podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus Go.
- [00:35]
Joanna Robinson
This episode is brought to you by Audi the all new fully electric Audi Q6E Tron is a huge leap forward featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever. Experience technology that puts you center stage with a panoramic digital stage plus an optional screen for front seat passengers. The Q6E Tron is not just a new EV, it's it's a new way to experience driving. Learn more@audiusa.com always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted. This episode is brought to you by indeed. Hiring someone new for your business can be a big move, and I understand you probably want to take your time to make sure you've found the right person, but playing the waiting game could do more harm than good because that's extra work and extra stress you're putting on you and your team, and it's not a healthy work environment when it comes to hiring the right people. Fast Indeed is all you need. Their Sponsored Jobs Move your job post to the top of the page, letting you stand out first to relevant candidates. It makes a massive difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Another great thing about Sponsored Jobs is that you're only paying for results. You don't have to worry about monthly subscriptions or long term contracts. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com plane that's Indeed.com plane right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com plane terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need today. Abundance in his recent address to Congress, Donald Trump promised a Golden Age of America. But when you take a closer look at his policies, when you squint through the blur of tariffs added and removed and re added and re removed, I think the picture that moves into focus is something very different than an expansive.
- [02:51]
Derek Thompson
Vision of the future.
- [02:53]
Joanna Robinson
It's something more like a pinched vision of the present. Again and again, the Trump White House has pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. They say America cannot afford our debt and therefore we can't afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn't have enough manufacturing and so we must accept less trade. They say America doesn't have enough housing and so we need fewer immigrants. Less for less. This looks to me like a regime of scarcity. Now, of course, Republicans will disagree. They'll argue that in the long run, their politics is designed to solve America's problems. We can already see many ways in which the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place are being exacerbated by his first policies. Take, for example, affordability and housing. Housing costs are too high in this country, obviously, and home construction has lagged for decades. The problem is particularly bad for young people who shifted significantly toward the Republican side in 2024. The median age of first time home buyers in America recently surged to an all time high. And delays in home buying are having a ripple effect. They're playing a part in the decline of dating and marrying and starting a family. What do Trump's tariffs do to help this situation? Well, don't ask me. Ask the national association of Homebuilders. Because in a March 7 memo, they pointed out that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada threatened to drive up the cost of two of the most important materials for building a house. Soft lumber, which we import from Canada and drywall, materials, which we source from Mexico. An America that has to source all of its own wood and drywall is not a richer country than the one we have today. It's a poorer country where American home buyers have to pay the price for pointless protectionism. Now, here is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the politics of scarcity. But they don't. In many places run by Democrats, what they're offering instead is just another kind of scarcity. Many cities run by Democratic leaders are laden with rules and litigation norms that block new housing, new transit, new energy. As my Atlantic colleague Yoni Applebaum told us on a recent show. In California, cities where the share of progressive votes goes up by 10 points, the share of housing permits issued declines by 30%. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar. And where the availability of homes is constricted, homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. They're all run by Democrats. If Trump's opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to build a new kind of political movement, one that aims for what my co author Ezra Klein and I call abundance. Ezra and I are liberals. There's no getting away from that. We believe in taxing and spending on healthcare and Social Security and welfare and schools and science. But we also believe in a liberalism that is different in character from the one that's emerged in the last few decades. In the last half century we write, folks on the left became so fixated on spending money that they lost sight of what spending actually does in the world. This emphasis on process over outcomes, dollars over deployment, is evident everywhere you look. In 2008, California approved more than $30 billion for a high speed rail system that has lingered in construction purgatory for more than a decade. In San Francisco, procedural Kludge famously drove up the cost of a public toilet to $1.7 million. Yes, for one toilet. Chicago's mayor recently bragged that his city invested $11 billion to build 10,000 affordable housing units. That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. This is a shameful record of ineffectiveness. It's pathetic. The places where Democrats hold power shouldn't be advertisements for how bad they are at wielding it. If Democrats want to be the party that believes in government, they have to show that government can actually build what it intends to build. What Ezra and I propose in our book is a political movement that does just that. A liberalism that works. A liberalism that builds. Today's guest is the New York Times Ezra Klein.
- [08:04]
Derek Thompson
We talk about abundance, the book and why it exists.
- [08:08]
Joanna Robinson
And we talk about abundance, the idea.
- [08:11]
Derek Thompson
And why we think it matters.
- [08:13]
Joanna Robinson
I'm Derek Thompson.
- [08:15]
Derek Thompson
This is Plain English. Ezra Klein, hello and welcome.
- [08:41]
Ezra Klein
I am thrilled to be on Plain English.
- [08:44]
Derek Thompson
What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting. We're going to answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of what can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won't even think to ask us? And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So, in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological Progress in America. I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because as it turns out, writing a book is, among other things, a total pain in the ass.
- [09:35]
Joanna Robinson
But.
- [09:36]
Derek Thompson
But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation. Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to change the world. Ideas are cheap, building is hard. And I'm rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in the New York Times that's called the Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting. And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you write it?
- [10:13]
Ezra Klein
Ah, 2021. You know, even when I go back to that essay, you can. You have moments as a writer, I know you do, and where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time cohere into one thing. You realize you've been thinking about one thing and not many. And so there are a couple things floating in my head over the sort of years before that. One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology. And this had happened, in my view, after the 2016 election when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won. But also, and I don't actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were becoming filled with toxicity. And because the leaders of the social media platforms sort of represented tech, they had become synonymous with tech. And they were these mega and quite unaccountable billionaires. I felt that the left had, in its anger at these companies, begun sort of giving up on technology. But then at the same time, two other more positive things were happening. One was the YIMBY movement, which was the sort of emergence of a strain of, at least at that time, I would call it progressivism, centered in California where I was living, which was not just saying we should build more houses. I think this is actually a quite important distinction. And I would really recommend Conor Doherty's book Golden Gates, which is just a fantastic history of the yimbys. But it was not just saying we should build more homes. It wasn't just like, here's the supply and demand curve. It was saying that was illiberal, that you were not a social justice focused progressive. If you lived in a big economically important city like San Francisco or Palo Alto. And you were fighting the building of these homes. It had to be part of the self definition of progressivism that we were making it possible for the working class to live in the cities that were the end regions of American opportunity. And I felt the YIMBYs were, and I am a YIMBY, the most exciting ideological faction to emerge in a very long time. And I was very involved in climate change policy reporting. And it had become very clear to me that there was only one pathway, a very narrow, narrow pathway, which I don't actually think with Donald Trump we're all that likely to be on in the way I'd hoped, but. But at that point we were maybe on by which if we were going to avoid the worst of climate change, it was going to be because we had technologically accelerated solar, wind and battery technology to the point that we could mass deploy it at a price point competitive with fossil fuels. And that might actually work, that a politics of sacrifice was going to fail, but a politics built on clean energy innovation and, and then rapid deployment might work, but we did not have, if you looked at how we built things in America in blue states, the policies needed for rapid deployment. So we were going to need something like yimbiness for clean energy. And then the final thing, and then I'll shut up with this long thing, was I had moved back to California. I'm a Californian. I lived in California from when I was born to when I left college to go to DC. I then lived in DC for 13, 14 years, 2005 roughly to 2018. And then I went back to California and the state, in my view, just was not doing well. And when I looked around at why it wasn't doing well, why it had become so unaffordable, why it had such a bad homelessness problem, why people were so upset, why so many people were leaving, right? California was and is losing people. It was really just clear we hadn't built enough. The things we had wanted to build, like high speed rail, had not come to fruition. We did not have enough mass transit. There was no functional, I shouldn't say functional. There is no good subway system in Los Angeles. It would be such an amazing city if they'd had a good mass transit system. But we weren't building enough homes, we weren't building enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals. That California's problem was not its commitment to justice, but its commitment to expanding supply. And that was like the set of things like knocking around in my head that somehow cohered into that essay.
- [14:54]
Derek Thompson
So I read your essay and I'm inspired by it. I'm inspired by.
- [14:59]
Ezra Klein
I'm happy to hear that, Derek. That's a sweet thing of you to say.
- [15:02]
Derek Thompson
I absolutely was. I was inspired by the substance of it, this fusion of liberalism and technology, which I found important, but didn't quite find an interesting way to articulate in an important way. But I'm also inspired by a semantic move that you make. You take this concept of this ideology of progressivism, which in recent years has been judged and defined on the demand side. Progressives ask in many cases to be judged on how much they spend to make the world a better place. And you do this really clever maneuver where you flip the yardstick. You say, what if we judged liberalism not by what it spent, but rather by what it built? That's what yimbyism does. It says, how much housing have you built? Not much. How not how much have you spent on housing? That's what yimbyism for clean energy would be for, not just what how much have you authorized to spend on solar? How much solar have you deployed? And I'm thinking about it as it meets my own project about this distinction between invention, implementation, and maybe similar to you. There's a bunch of ideas that are swirling around in my head waiting to be conjoined into one idea. And it's January 2022 and I'm standing in line in the freezing cold in Washington D.C. waiting for some rationed COVID test because omicron is circulating and it's col and I don't do well in the cold. And I'm just angry. It's been two years since the pandemic started. There aren't enough tests, and before that there weren't enough vaccines, and before that there wasn't enough ppe. And as I'm getting angrier and angrier, I'm thinking, if you zoom out, there's been a supply chain crisis in the pandemic in the post pandemic era. And if you zoom out again and look at the entire century, it's been defined by a housing crisis and a clean energy scarcity and even a shortage of doctors. And I write this sort of controlled screed that says this is a century that has been pockmarked by scarcity. And what if we could fix that with an abundance agenda? I'd write this piece, the abundance agenda piece. And I have a sense now of where the story goes in my head. But what do you recall is the bridge that takes us from this moment to us getting Together and deciding fatefully, to work on a book together.
- [17:20]
Ezra Klein
Well, a few things. So, one, I also was. I was inspired and slightly dispirited by your piece because I read it and immediately was like, oh, shit, he cracked it. Like, he cracked the right way to think about this, which was, this had to be a positive vision. It did it my. My nature, but definitely my piece and my approach was critique. We are doing this thing wrong. And what I so admired about your piece and about your work broadly is that there was an optimism in it. There was, what if we did it right? Right. In the same way that you said I flipped the yardstick on what to judge progressivism by. I think you flipped the yardstick on what was this about. Right. It wasn't about what we did wrong. It was about what we could do. Right. The world we could have. And I don't know. As we were both writing about this, it was just clear to me we were both gonna write books. But also, you and I, I think, share a. I think it feels more common at this exact moment. Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt less common to me then. Like a genuine interest in optimism, maybe, but an openness to optimism, definitely. About technology. I don't know if you remember this, but I have a strong memory of this. I think this is probably before the abundance, the supply side progressivism piece. But I remember calling you, being like, hey, I'd like us to chat, and calling you, like, in like, 2020 or 2021. I was on Mission street or Valencia, maybe NSF, just to talk about, like, crypto and what you thought of it, because, like, what is the position we. Like I should hold on crypto, which seems like it has some modest use cases, but seems like a huge amount of energy around something that does not have, like, an obvious way that it is improving anybody's lives. And the culture around it seems very grifty and scammy to me. But you were the person I called on it because I thought that you would have a sort of openness to the idea that it would be good paired with a politics that would protect you from the idea that it either must be good or must be bad. And so that was, I think, one of the reasons I thought there was enough affinity here when I sort of reached out to you on the broader book idea, because, you know, a lot of people are gonna write, you know, over this period, there was no getting away from the fact that liberalism was going to have to face problems of supply, constraints of supply. Right. That's what the EMBs already were. That's what, in halting ways, a climate movement was already doing. I mean, it's doing it in the ways it is more comfortable, right? Putting money to build things as opposed to releasing the things that make those things hard to build. But you could see that we would need to figure out how to build fast. There are a bunch of things here that I thought were just clearly going to be part of the agenda and. Or already were. But in terms of building a usable politics around it, you know, I thought that you had a orientation and like a bridge to technology and a sort of more positive corporate thinking than a lot of other people, you know, than a lot of other people I could have imagined covering it. And again, I think it's why your Abundance essay hit as hard as it did. Cause you could see the better future, not just the worst past or the disappointing present. And so to me, that was the bridge. At a certain point, I was like, it doesn't make sense. I didn't think for us to be racing each other to this, but also I felt that we would both bring things to the project that the other one wouldn't. I wasn't exactly sure what they were. You never know how a collaboration is gonna work out before you do it. But I just sort of had a sense that we were temperamental. Like, similar enough in the important ways and then different enough that it could be additive. I'd also say I found writing my first book super lonely. Like, I did not like it. I like being in collaboration. All the great projects of my life from, you know, blogging in a weird way, was like such a tight community in its early days. And I want to say here for a moment, like, rest in peace to Kevin Drum, who passed away yesterday. Cal Pundit, who was one of the early Wonkish bloggers and huge inspiration and even a mentor to me and to Iglesias. And a lot of us who came up after him reflect the work Kevin was doing. So I'm really saddened by his passing. But blogging was a real community effort, and that was at the American Prospect and Wonk Blog. And I had this wonderful partnership for many years with Dylan Matthews and Sara Kliff and Brad Plumer, and at my show with Roger Karma and my editor, Aaron Retica. I like doing things with other people I think best in collaboration and communication. So it seemed like a cool thing to do to. To try to join forces with it. I'm curious what that was like for you. Like, I sort of called you and I'M like, hey, I got an idea. What was your, what was your thinking on it? So long as you're really doing the deep, the deep history here.
- [22:23]
Derek Thompson
Let me answer your question directly. Just after I reflect in the crypto conversations, if I recall, you called me and essentially said I there's a piece of this technology that many people I consider smart are so interested in, that I want to be similarly interested in. Are you interested in it? And the feeling that I had about crypto in 2021 is for better or worse, very similar to the feeling that I have about crypto in 2025, which is that I think it is historically remarkable for any technology to become or to mint multi billion dollar wealth before it demonstrates a use case outside of creating an asset class to bet coins up to the moon. And I'm still incredibly confused by it. And I was confused about it on the phone in 2021 and four years of thinking about it has unfortunately not revealed much more to use a teleism, a definite optimism about this technology. But it was. I remember that those conversations about crypto.
- [23:17]
Joanna Robinson
Were sort of the beginning of our.
- [23:19]
Derek Thompson
Being in touch in a different kind of way in the run up to this project. What I do remember maybe the day of or the day after publishing the Abundance Agenda essay is that you texted me and essentially said what you just said here on this call, you said, I think we might be circling the same book and we could race each other to the finish line or maybe we should write the book together. And I texted you back and said yeah, maybe we should write this book together. And I tell my wife, hey, you know, I think I might write this book about abundance. The Abundance Agenda with Ezra Klein. And she takes my phone and she does that thing where you, you pull back the text message, you can see the timestamp and she sees that you sent your text at like 12:47pm and that I responded to the text at 12:47pm and she's like, you didn't have the forbearance, the self respect to wait 15 seconds before saying yes. You were so desperate to say yes to this project in less than a minute. And I was like, yes, I think this could be like a really fun thing. I do think that we are coming at this idea at the same idea from opposite sides. Anything else we should hit about the run up to the collaboration on this book before we dive into the book itself?
- [24:30]
Ezra Klein
Well, as long as we're just doing intellectual history, I wanna just call out, it's nice to be able to do this because I hope we are very generous with credit in the book. Like this is not just our idea somehow, by any means. And so, you know, in that a couple other people I just think were really, really important in this. There was the whole progress studies world, which was sort of started by Tyler Cowan and Patrick Collison. Jason Crawford has been, you know, a big driver of. I think that was very, very influential in the book you were writing sort of before it morphed into our collaboration. The Niskanon Institute had an awesome paper that was very influential and was essential part of my sort of first piece on this, that economic mistake piece called. I don't remember what the paper is called, but its idea was Cost Push Socialism, which was this idea that it wasn't just accidental, that you often had very, very high prices for things that liberals wanted to subsidize, that it was the obvious outcome of subsidizing a good that you were at the same time choking off the supply of. And that's to jump in.
- [25:37]
Derek Thompson
Yes. The paper is called Cost Disease Socialism.
- [25:41]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, Cost Disease Socialism.
- [25:43]
Derek Thompson
Sam Hammond and Daniel Takesh and Steve.
- [25:45]
Ezra Klein
Telles, I think is a big influence here. Really, really thoughtful, smart guy, political scientist who I've known a very, very long time. And then at that same. Also at his canon, they had a great state capacity project under Brink. Lindsay, who wrote a book that was in part about. That was very much about abundance. Jen Palka, whose book on Recoding America that came out after and during the period we were working on this, but she's sort of affiliated with them now. So Niskanon has, I think, really been a very important intellectual hub of this kind of work. You know, and then there are a bunch of writers. It wasn't just the YIMBY movement. There are a bunch of writers who were doing just extraordinarily great work on. On housing in particular, but in ways it generalized. So I think Matt Iglesias just is a genuinely unsung hero of just forcing progressives to take this seriously for a decade. Right. He had a Kindle single back when people used to do that called the Rent is Too Damn High. And I mean, I don't remember what year that came out, but it was some time ago now. And he was just really, really pushed At Jerusalem. Dempsis, who is at Vox and is now at the Atlantic, and my partner Andy Lowry is also at the Atlantic. She has done, I mean, covered housing forever. We are always talking about these things. But she had this idea that she published in 2020 about the affordability crisis. And she published this right before the pandemic hit. And it's like an idea I've never stopped thinking about. And now everybody uses a term. I think I'm her partner unfairly, without crediting her. Like everybody talks about the affordability crisis, but it's her term. And the affordability crisis was this idea. And again, people thought the economy was really good in 2020, so they weren't talking about its problems. But she writes this piece and says, look, if things that people really need to build a good life and a secure life, if you look at housing, if you look at education, if you look at elder care, if you look at childcare, if you look at medical care, there might be others. I'm forgetting here, they're all skyrocketing price and have been for a long time. And so consumer goods are really cheap. Inflation looks very low. But if you are looking at these things that are essentials to actual human beings, you can do without a flat screen television. It's really difficult to do without good medical care or a home. There's a huge problem building here. And then you have the pandemic hits. And so like that piece had gone very viral, but it sort of cuts the. I remember like it just like, I think that piece comes out in February of 2020. So just cuts, or maybe even early March. It cuts the conversation over that. But that had always like bounced around in my mind. Then you have pandemic inflation, which focuses everybody on prices. And then the pandemic inflation recedes. But now they're really looking at prices. And the affordability crisis. Prices don't, the affordability cr, prices don't recede. Right. Because that's been this multi decade building problem. And I think that's a really big part of this. For me, that was one of the things that clicked into place. Oh, the next era of politics is going to be different. Like we were focused on demand and insufficient demand for a really long time. I mean, that was a problem post, in some ways pre, but very much post financial crisis. But the affordability crisis is going to define the economic conversation in the post pandemic period because it is a completely unsolved problem. Nobody even has a really good way to solve it right now. And we're gonna have to think about it and that's gonna have to be supply oriented. So while we're doing just like this intellectual genealogy, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a million people, but I think it's worth saying like, you know, all these People and many more, you know, had huge parts of. The idea is that, you know, as we were sort of, like, trying to weave things together and think about them were really important.
- [29:16]
Derek Thompson
And on the topic of liberals needing to care about productivity in a new kind of way, especially when interest rates are high, I would also want to throw out Eli Dorado and Noah Smith, who I think did really good work on setting the table for a lot of ideas that make their way into the book. So, speaking of.
- [29:32]
Joanna Robinson
Yeah.
- [29:32]
Ezra Klein
Noah's idea just is of ch. What is it called? Checkism, where progressives only care about the number on the bill. Right. Like, you know, whatever is a bigger number on the bill. A bigger number on the climate bill. Like, that's better, but without actually following through to be like, how much did that money actually build us? This is great. I think it's a line sort of like, you know, like, numbers on legislation don't build things. Like, what actually matters is how much you built with it. I've always thought that's a really. Not just, like a useful concept, but a very true critique.
- [30:04]
Derek Thompson
Yes. Someone asked me recently how my vision of the book shifted from the original Abundance essay to the final book, Abundance, and I loved this question, so I want to turn it toward you. How is the book that exists now different from the one you imagined in, say, 2022?
- [30:23]
Ezra Klein
Ooh, that's a good question. I ended up doing a lot more historical work than I thought I would be doing. So I ended up being very influenced by Paul Sabin's book Public Citizens, which as long as we're. I actually, I'm so excited we're doing this show and just can thank all these people. But Mark Dunkelman, who just has a new book out that's very along the lines of ours called why Nothing Works. And it's. He had written this piece years ago about why it was so difficult to rebuild Penn Station, which sucks. And I think that, if I'm remembering it correctly, I think that piece turned me on to Paul Sabin's work in the book Public Citizen or Public Citizens, which was very much about the rise of nadirite progressivism, the rise of Rachel Carson, the rise in the back half of the 20th century of a progressivism that was actually about. Or liberalism actually about checking what the government could do. So there's New Deal liberalism that's about expanding what government can do. And then you have these people like Nader who emerge and say, no, no, no, no, no. Government is devastating us right now. It's not doing Enough. What it's doing is bad for the environment. It's building heedlessly. It's captured by corporations. And a lot of those points were correct. But they build this architecture of legislation and process and regulations and a huge nonprofit movement that exists to sue government and exists to slow government down and exists to force more veto points into government. And in doing that, in following that line of historical work, I think I began to understand something I had not understood about progressivism, which is how unbelievably insufficient the idea that the cleavage in this country is. Liberals think government is good and conservatives think government is bad. Really is. Like, that's just not how it works. Conservatives often do think government is bad, except if it's national security government or the police state, in which case they think it's great. And, like, you can just pick up anybody you want. And now, I guess on the day we're talking, throw them. Have ice. Throw them into a jail in Louisiana because you don't like the things they've said. Concerns are, are very comfortable with a government, I think, of terrifying levels of surveillance and police state power. But liberals are very divided in their soul on government. There's a liberalism that wants big government and a liberalism that is terrified of government running over marginalized communities, doing the bidding of corporations not being good enough to liberal constituencies like unions, and so trying to unearth what was happening that we had chosen to hobble government in these ways. What had happened that this was so true in California, which was a state where you couldn't blame everything on Republicans. That was something I don't think I realized I'd be doing when it began. I needed explanations for things that I could see the thing was happening, but I didn't understand why it was happening. I'm curious what your answer to this is, though. How is it different then? Or what did you learn, I guess, that you were not expecting to learn? Or what did you go down a rabbit hole on that you found revelatory?
- [33:32]
Derek Thompson
I think the biggest difference between the essay and the book is the level of political critique. I think that in part maybe due to my own personality, which is pathologically agreeable and seeking optimism wherever I can find it. I did not initially see this book as requiring the depth of political critique of liberalism in the last 50 years that the book that we wrote has. And I think that that critique is utterly necessary to understand the problems of the last 50 years and how to fix them. I mean, just to pivot off of your point about the degree to which Ralph Nader and the legalism of the 1960s and 1970s changed the character of liberalism and in many ways define the character of modern liberalism. There's a great line from what is this? Page 89 of the book. This is in the chapter that we have about energy and the way that liberals have gotten, in their own way, in terms of building precisely what they want to build, say, clean energy like solar and wind. PBS news anchor Jim Laird once asked Ralph Nader why he was qualified to be president in 2000. And Nader could have said, no one can make government work better than me. No one is better at understanding how to make government effective than me. But he didn't say that. What he said is, I don't know anybody who has sued more agencies and departments. There was this idea, this identity of liberalism that said that the way to prove that you're a good progressive is to stop governments and businesses from changing the physical world. And maybe that was in some places a responsible response to the environmental degradation of the middle of the 20th century. But now that our problems aren't, what can we stop building, but rather, what have we stopped building? The houses and the solar farms and the wind turbines. We need to have an identity shift from a liberalism that's proud of suing government to a liberalism that's proud of making government actually work. Sabin has a great line in the book Public Citizens that you were calling out, where he says, in the 1960s, 1970s, quote, it was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again. And in many ways, I never thought of the book project emerging from the Abundance Agenda as being a book project about identifying the ways that liberalism took the bicycle apart. But I think it's really important to figure out how liberalism took the bicycle apart, if, in fact we're going to get it properly running again. To dive into the book itself, there's any number of ways that a book about liberalism and the future of politics could begin. You could start with culture. You could start with taxes and redistributive welfare policies. We start with housing. Our first big chapter is about housing. The problem of rising housing prices and the problem of constraints on housing construction in many of the places where people most want to live, like San Francisco. Why is housing so foundational to your sense of this project?
- [36:51]
Ezra Klein
So I wonder how much we're just going to bore everybody with this. But we eventually had a theory of the book and how to write it, that each chapter should be doing three Things simultaneously. It should be really good at walking you through a fundamental problem of supply that has been caused or could be fixed by policy. So chapter one is housing. Chapter two is really built around high speed rail and decarbonization. Chapter three is state capacity. Chapter four is about invention and, and chapter five is about implementation. So it should be doing something on that level. And you should really. I hope if you read this book, you'll learn a lot about housing. You'll learn a lot about decarbonization. You'll learn a lot about how we build things in America and it's a legal system. You'll learn a lot about how China captured solar technology and the production of it from us and sort of took that over. You'll learn a lot in a great chapter Derek did about penicillin. And then it should be kind of of giving you like a piece of the history here. And then it should be giving you a sense of like one of the fundamental ways we have thought about doing things that doesn't work. And so chapter one is about housing. One, because I do sort of buy into the housing theory of everything as it gets called that housing is just fundamental. People need a place to live, but more than they need a place to live, or maybe not more, but alongside needing a place to live. If we are going to have a strong economy, we need to let people live in the economic engines of the economy. One of the things I was most proud of, I think on a book like the Joys of It, given that most of writing a book is absolutely miserable, one of the joys of it is when you come to a really new economic idea. I'm sorry, a new idea, a new epiphany. And I was really struggling with this question of, well, why should we, why do we care so much how many units we build in San Francisco? I mean, you can live in other places. Montana's not full of people. And the sort of theory that I eventually, I think cracked was that the big megacities are increasingly the engines of the American economy and they are the frontiers that the frontier of the. You know, we used to worry about the closing of the frontier because we thought it was like this expansive land America had that was the guarantor of our prosperity. But it was never the land. It's the ideas that emerge in the land. In a modern economy, what matters is being on the frontier of ideas, being able to turn those ideas into technological or somehow commercial or service oriented artifacts that you can then sell domestically and globally. Right? That's how the economy actually works. And then being, then there are things like, you know, that happen that are not high productivity sectors but really benefit from being near them. Like you make more money as a barber, barber working near the Googleplex than you make as a barber working in rural West Virginia. And this is just an absolutely ancient path to mobility and prosperity. A huge amount of the inequality we cut in the 20th century just came from people moving from poorer, more low productivity areas to high productivity areas. And then we sort of threw that into reverse. And now people leave those areas. The working. Like I actually find this number, this research, so shocking. But people are leaving working class, people are leaving the high productivity areas to move to low productivity or lower productivity areas because it's just too expensive to live there. You know, there's Genang and Shoah, whose work I quote in the book. They have this sort of thing about like the janitor and the lawyer. And it used to make sense for a janitor to move to New York City and it made sense for a lawyer to move to New York City. Both of them would make more money there. Now it still makes sense for the lawyer to move to New York City, but not the janitor, because the janitor can't afford a house. House can't afford a place to live. So in gating the megacities by constraining the supply of housing such that they became unaffordable to live in, what we've done, in addition to making them inaffordable, is shut off a driver of opportunity. You in that chapter sort of quote some of the Raj Chetty research too, that shows people tend to be more innovative living in innovative places. But interestingly, they innovate in the exact same ways of the place they grew up in. Right. You're much more likely to, you know, if you're a kid, you know, you're the son of like a, you know, somebody who works in a factory in Northern California, you're the son of an auto mechanic. You're more likely to patent in computer science because you grew up there. Whereas if you grew up in a place that was like big in the defense industry, you'd be more likely to patent in the defense industry. Like, this is really, really good, interesting research. And so we are shutting off, you know, the ways in which you used to have, you know, kids grow up in a kind of ecosystem of innovation and expertise and connections. And we have the research to know that really matters. And so the fact that like, while I was working on this book, like I knew people who were Firefighters who were driven out of living in San Francisco because the city they were protecting from burning down was unaffordable for them. Right? That just fucking sucks. Like, that's immoral in my view. And so, so, you know, housing is at the center of a lot. It actually really matters for innovation because cities are engines of innovation. Like almost all of the major AI research is happening within what, 50 square miles in America. 50 square miles. There's not one big AI firm, not one frontier level AI lab in New York, not one in Los Angeles, not one in Boston, not one in Miami, not one in Atlanta. Nowhere. Right. It's right where it is because these eco, these agglomerations of talent and knowledge and know how they are really hard to replicate elsewhere. You cannot just do it by force. You actually have to build the thing and it's sort of a little bit random and you know, and then once it's built, you have to let people be near it. And so housing to me was very, very central because one, I think the YIMBYs were the best example of a supply side liberal movement at that moment. And two, it just kind of affects everything else. But then three, you could see what I think was at the heart of a bunch of liberal pathology here, which was the fundamental skepticism of growth and the fundamental idea that had taken hold in California, among other places, that having more people move to your city was bad. It was gross. They were like locusts. Right? I have these quotes from the San Francisco Chronicle in this period where they talk about people coming there. It's like the people already live there are treated like stewards of the land, the authentic voice of the Bay Area, of Marin, of San Francisco, and anybody who might want to come now is like a consumptive hoard. I mean, these are not like the people writing the My Land column in the San Francisco Chronicle are not like indigenous to the region. So I don't know, that's a lot of answer. But that for me it was like so much was bound up in housing and to sort of understand what had happened, you had to begin untangling it not just as a supply and demand problem, but as an ideological problem. Like is a way that liberalism begun to think really incorrectly about the places it governed, about their function. You had Michael Bloomberg talking about like New York as a luxury good. It should not be a luxury good. It's not a penthouse, it's like an escalator. And you know, so we just really gotten something so wrong there that trying to untangle that not just at the level of we need to build more houses. But how had we thought about this such that we had gotten into this situation in the first place felt really necessary.
- [44:30]
Joanna Robinson
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- [45:36]
Derek Thompson
It's your turn.
- [45:37]
Joanna Robinson
Get started@servicenow.com AI Agents this episode is.
- [45:43]
Bill Simmons
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- [46:24]
Derek Thompson
There are a lot of conceptual tensions in this book that I think are very important. Scarcity versus abundance being one of them. And you've really dilated on this right now within the housing market. This idea that in many places people who call themselves liberals and progressives and even sometimes people that have lawn signs in their front yards that say kindness everything, nonetheless sit in houses zoned for single families and resist and often sue to block the development of affordable housing units that would cast a shadow over their own house. And so a part of this project is redefining liberalism away from the liberalism of the clenched fist toward a liberalism that recognizes that growth itself can be a good. Another really critical tension here that really echoes throughout the book in almost every chapter is the tension between process versus outcomes in government. I think maybe the best way to make this tension crystal clear to people is to see it through a prism that you call everything bagel liberalism. Why don't you do here for everything bagel liberalism, what I asked you to do at the top of the show for supply side liberalism? What is this idea? Where did it emerge from and why is it important?
- [47:42]
Ezra Klein
So I did over the past couple of years, one of the I my not as good as abundance language, but the best language I ever came up to describe what I was talking about here was a liberalism that builds which people really like. But often in my own head I thought of this as a liberalism of the details. And what I had come to believe is sort of related to Noah Smith's checkism concept was that even pretty policy oriented liberals tended to turn off once the bill was passed and they didn't dive into the details of what was happening after it. And they tended to be affectively hostile to say, the view that, oh, these regulations are really unwise, or there's some reason we've ended up trying to build a $1.7 million public restroom in a small park in San Francis. So one of the things I started trying to do was really, really, really dig in to what was happening in projects that I cared about. I got a email, I got connected to somebody who had helped in the construction of this affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tehanan. At another point, I ended up looking into pretty deeply what was going on with something called Measure HHH in Los Angeles, which was a bond measure to build affordable housing. It was not built that like, you know, some number of years later at this point had built like a couple thousand units. And they were costing about $700,000 per unit, right? These publicly subsidized, affordable, like housing units were costing as much as a full place would cost you in Denver. So something was wrong. And I began like going to these places and talking to the people who were building the homes or building the complex or people consulted on the building of that kind of thing, or the people in government who are working on it. And what I began to realize when I would say, okay, tell me how this got to $700,000, or in the case of Tahanen, which was built much cheaper and much faster, is done through modular construction et CETERA tell me how you avoided getting there. And what I basically began to hear a lot about was the layering on of standards, expectations, processes and additional goals. So it sounded good to have a big preference in the San Francisco contracting rules, first for minority owned contractors, and then that was made illegal by the people of California. So then it became for small and micro sized contractors. But that was shooting cost up because like one way you get that if you are a very efficient contractor who's really good at building things, you're probably going to get more revenue. And in getting more revenue, you actually became someone disfavored by anything that was getting public money to build affordable housing in San Francisco, right? Like we actually were punishing publicly companies for being good at what they did. To say nothing of like, if there was like a national company that was really good at using modular construction on an off site factory to build affordable housing cheaply, like we just, you just couldn't do that. So they were able to get around a bunch of, you know, there were more things, right? Like there was a mayor's disability commission, which these, these projects were already ADA compliant, but the SF mayor also had their own sort of like disability agency that had to come in and do its own inspection and would come in and say like at the end of a project, we don't think these doors are quite wide enough. You gotta change all of them. And like that would cost however many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and take another month and a half. Cause you had to find this contractor who could do it and they were already overbooked. And you just begin to hear story after story, right? I was talking to people who did this work in Los Angeles. Again, affordable housing, publicly subsidized. This is the housing that liberals tell me they want, right? They don't want this market rate bullshit. They want affordable housing. So here, the people of la, the taxpayers, they put the money into it. So what had they done? Well, because they wanted to lower the amount of money that the taxpayers was paying. What they were trying to basically do is use the taxpayer money, the bond money, as seed funding. And if you could use it as seed funding, then it would be like, okay, cobble together other money from philanthropies, from public tax programs, right, that are there to do things like address veterans homelessness, et cetera, to finish it. So in theory you're stretching the amount of money that the taxpayers were offering. You were leveraging it. But when I talked to the comptroller, he was like, oh no, we've Made a terrible mistake. The guy who was actually trying to figure out how to save the people money. And I have this quote in there from him, Ron Galperin, I think it was. But he basically says, look, what they're doing, and I heard this from everybody, is that they're having to cobble together all these different funding sources. And each one has its own strictures, its own audit structure, but it also wants different things. This one is for veterans housing for homeless veterans. So you need to find these homeless veterans. This one is for pregnant women who have been in abusive relationships or people with mental health issues. And. And all these come on their own timeframes. And you gotta wait for the funders to make their decision. And the timing costs money, and then you've missed something else. And so that cost you money. And the people you're gonna contract with, they've moved on to another job. And it was all very well meaning the green building standards are very high for these affordable housing complexes. Somebody, Jasmine Tong, was telling me who works on affordable housing, was telling me about situations where. Where she, you know, that they, the planning commission made them or someone made them put in, like, really, really high level air filtration. Because, like, the affordable housing was near a freeway, which is on the one hand, fine, like, great. Like, I want everybody to have really good air filtration. But it was much better than was normally required. And the alternative was these people were living in a tent under the freeway. Right? We were really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And of course, there were like the NIMBYs coming out to things, but everything bagel liberalism was the idea and it was coming. I'd watched the movie Everything Everywhere all at Once, which at the center of that movie, there is like an everything bagel where you truly pile everything onto the bagel and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. And it began to feel like that to me that, you know, we were piling so much on that these things just weren't getting done, or they weren't getting built quickly enough, or they weren't getting built at a level we could afford. And so we weren't solving the problem. And then I'll try to wrap this up, but I saw it happening nationally because we had just passed the Chips and Science act, which I was very big supporter of, but that at its core is subsidies for semiconductor fabs in the US and then I noticed that the notice of funding opportunity, it had all these things about preferences for minority subcontractors. And did you have childcare on site. And what were you doing to increase the percentage of women in your construction workforce? I'm like, does the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing Corporation really know how to. To change the percentage of women in construction? If we want to do that, fine, but just pass a bill that addresses that directly. And there were all these different things. How are you going to make this climate friendly? A bunch of good ideas. I supported them all individually, but we were making this project harder and we were doing something that might fail entirely. The history of industrial policy is not a history of whenever you try it, it is successful. And so what I began to see was like, liberalism had adopted this approach to implementing things, had passed where it would pass a thing and say, we're addressing affordable housing. And then like in all the meetings to turn that intention or proposition into action, it was larding them up with all these other goals that then was making the final thing fail or making it really late or making it really expensive. And of course, people were losing faith, but also, we just weren't solving the problems. And like, that was a culture. Like, that is not was is currently. It is still happening. That is a bad culture, right? It is a culture where we are, like, not saying no to people in process, and then we are disappointed in the outcomes, and we need to be working backwards from the outcomes. Doing this stuff is hard. You need to be focused.
- [55:46]
Derek Thompson
The chapters in this book are housing, energy, government, science and technology. And I do think that one of the strengths of the final product is the rhyming of themes. One wouldn't necessarily think that the problems in construction would be similar to the problems in, say, biomedical breakthroughs, but in fact, we have empirical evidence showing that productivity in construction is flatlining or down at the same time that we have evidence that productivity in biomedical science is flat or down. The same way that you just pointed out that an abundance, unfortunately, of paperwork is slowing down the construction of affordable housing in places like California. Well, if you look at American science, by some surveys, scientists say they spend between 30 and 40% of their time filling out paperwork, either filing for grants or checking the boxes after those grants are filed or won. And so in many cases, the problems that governance has and the problems that liberalism has developed rhyme across housing and energy and building and government and science and technology itself. And so I do think it's one strength of the book is the degree to which, without pushing on this rhyming too hard, you can see the same problems raise their head again and again and again in place after place.
- [57:09]
Ezra Klein
And I Do think because they're cultural?
- [57:11]
Derek Thompson
Yes.
- [57:12]
Ezra Klein
Before you ask your question, I want to get you to expand on something that you jumped quickly because I know you're driving the, you're the host on this one, but I want to get you to talk about this for a second because you drove a lot on things like the NIH and the slowdown in biomedical research, which one a lot of people don't believe is happening. Right. Ben Wallace Wells and his mostly very kind New Yorker piece, but was like, look at this, we have these GLP1s, how much more biomedical advances do you need at the moment? But two, at this moment, you have Elon Musk and Doge and RFK Jr. You know, now in charge of the federal government and slicing through the nih, the hhs, the cdc, right. They're putting critics in charge of these agencies. They're firing huge numbers of scientists. What is your critique of the way we are funding science? Or what is the book's critique? I guess. Cause I'm at least somewhat involved. And how is it different than theirs? Right. When you're seeing them do this and in fact we end up quoting research from the guy they've eventually put in charge of the nih. How is what you want, how is what we want different from what they are doing?
- [58:29]
Derek Thompson
I think that the way that we fund science in this country is a unbelievably important. The National Institutes of Health is probably the most important biomedical institution in the world, baby. It hasn't changed very much in the last 70 years. And if you or anybody listening knows anything about bureaucracies, if a bureaucracy doesn't experience some kind of institutional renewal generation after generation, it's going to build a series of habits that even its practitioners agree are bad. And in fact, the scientists, the practitioners that I spoke to about the way the NIH works told me pretty much invariably that it was biased against the most important high risk research, that it tended to waste scientists time, and that it advantaged conservative ideas and older scientists. While we have a good understanding that much of the best work that's been done in scientific history have been radical ideas from young scientists. I mean, this is absolutely core to a Kuhnian theory of paradigm shifts. The idea that it was not a group of graybeards who came up with Quantum mechanics, the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, it was people like Einstein and Planck buildings on a couple discrepancies that they were finding in the record to build an entirely new theory of how the world works that has in fact been core to not only the development of nuclear power, but also the electronics revolution. Great ideas often come from young scientists, and it is young scientists who say the system isn't working. There's a great quote from John Dench, who serves as the Director of Research and Development in Functional Genomics at the Broad Institute. And he told me, people need to understand how broken the system is.
- [60:06]
Joanna Robinson
So many really intelligent people are wasting.
- [60:08]
Derek Thompson
Their time doing really, really uninteresting things, writing progress reports, coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science. I mean, again, you take so many of the criticisms that you described about the construction of affordable housing at Tahannan.
- [60:24]
Joanna Robinson
And you just change a few words.
- [60:26]
Derek Thompson
Here and there from funding source to public and public housing to RO1 grants and checkboxes for scientific funding, and it's essentially the same. So we have, I think, an urgent need for institutional renewal at the National Institutes of Health, given how important their discoveries are to improving and extending human life. I don't think Elon Musk understands the first fucking thing about the nih. I don't think he did any research. I don't think he spoke to anybody about how exactly the NIH works, how it evolved, where it came from, what its habits are, which habits are good and which habits are bad. What I see instead is I'm not inside of his head.
- [61:12]
Joanna Robinson
But what it looks to me like.
- [61:13]
Derek Thompson
Is a pretty pure play of ideological punishment of universities that they think are woke. So they're going after Columbia, they're going after Harvard because the indirect costs are 55, 65% there. They're attacking science to punish the cultural ideas of scientists and not going into the institution of science and renewing it to solve 21st century problems. So that would be the pretty clear cut that I would draw between our approach to understanding the NIH and fixing it, and the Doge approach to slashing and burning the NIH because they have a cultural bugaboo about the ideas of scientists. I can pick up there. But there's also a pretty. There's a. There's a. There's a couple questions about the sort of the book Making Contact with the World that I want to get to. Let's do it before we have a heart out. So I. I don't think I'm violating some unspoken covenant with our editor Ben, our wonderful editor Ben, by saying that the original publication date of this book was actually last year. The original plan was for Abundance to come out in the middle of the summer of 2024 to make contact with that presidential election June 2024 and March 2025 are completely different worlds. From a political standpoint, they're practically different planets. And for the sake of the world.
- [62:35]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, you don't need to give a kid now.
- [62:39]
Derek Thompson
The kid was born in 2023, so that's the same world. But I guess 18 months is a different world from nine months. Certainly on the sleeping front, but. But, you know, for the sake of putting together a readable and finished product, I think we absolutely needed to take those extra months. But every few days, I think to myself just how differently this book would have existed inside the news cycle if it came out during, say, a Biden to Harris handoff period versus today, which is an era of just lurid chaos in the Trump administration. How do you think the timing of this book's new publication date deepens its message or complicates it?
- [63:22]
Ezra Klein
Remind me again what the original one was. When were we doing it?
- [63:26]
Derek Thompson
It was going to be published in the summer of 2024. I don't remember exactly the date. I think it was.
- [63:31]
Joanna Robinson
It was supposed to come out just.
- [63:32]
Ezra Klein
Before, just around that first debate, maybe.
- [63:35]
Joanna Robinson
Just before the dn.
- [63:35]
Derek Thompson
It was supposed to come out just before the DNC convention because we wanted the book to influence the DNC platform.
- [63:45]
Joanna Robinson
Take it away.
- [63:45]
Ezra Klein
Yeah. Like maybe May or June of that was when we were thinking. As I remember now, I think given what happened, that would have been a pretty tough news cycle to enter into. I think that the upside and the downside, I don't even want to call it upside down, just the reality of it hitting now is you have two things that affect the way it's gonna be received and not just the way it'll be received. I will say for myself what I am trying to do with it. One is that the Democratic Party, which is a party I am first and foremost trying to influence because I think that I share more of their goals and so they might be open to more of my. And our ideas is at a real liquid moment, and it doesn't know what it needs to be next time. It has exhausted the fumes of Obama ism, because that's really where we've been. Barack Obama represented a different tendency in politics. He created a different coalition. He had a really strong governing philosophy. And then after him, you know, Joe Biden. Joe Biden would not have won in 2020 if he had not been Barack Obama's vice president. And now there were real differences in how Biden governed. I mean, he had a huge influx of people from the sort of Elizabeth Warren movement. They were much more attent to monopoly and concentration power. They did a lot, frankly, that I think is pretty abundance like and helped inspire us in the book around the inflation Reduction act and so on. But in terms of the story, Joe Biden could tell it was ultimately the exhaustion of the Obama story, right? He was the sort of the final part of that. And then Kamala Harris did not have time to come up with a new story, right? And she was in this strange bind between, you know, was she gonna run as a champion of an unpopular administration or was she going to unconvincingly try to separate herself from an administration where she was the vice president, Right. So in the end, the loss has, I think, destroyed that period of the Democratic Party. Right? It's done. It needs to figure something else out. And I think the, you know, and I think everybody understands that the thing it needs to figure out is gonna have a lot to do with cost of living. Living, because Donald Trump is not lowering the cost of living. And that was the dominant voting issue in 2024. Now Democrats want to, you know, run against Donald Trump because he's not brought down the price of eggs yet. They see that as his real vulnerability. But ultimately, to be a nationally dominant party, they're going to have to have genuinely, they need to rebuild credibility and cost of living. And so I think that's one way that our book enters into a live conversation there. Then you have Doge and Steve Tullis keeps needling us that Elon Musk and Doge are what he calls dark abundance. And the point is that we are saying in many ways government is inefficient. I was listening to a clip on Search Engine Great podcast From Elon Musk's 8 Hour Marathon interview with, with Lex Friedman where he says building high speed rail in California is basically illegal. And he is not wrong. He is not wrong about that. Now Musk is going in, Doge is going in. And instead of reimagining what government can do, of expanding government capabilities, making government work, he's just destroying the thing. Now his defenders will tell you, oh, this is what he does. He turns things on and turns them back off, or turns them off and turns them back on to see what breaks. But this is not like running Twitter. And he is. When you fire a bunch of really talented people, which they are doing, you can't just turn that back on. They want ideological control of the government and they have not. You know, I've heard other people say, oh, they're doing zero based Budgeting, that's not fucking zero based budgeting. When you do zero based budgeting and you try to start from zero and have things justify themselves, you have measures and metrics and goals upon which they can justify themselves. If anybody has offered that in the Trump administration to the people working at USAID in a real way, I have not heard it. In fact, as Marco Rubio just canceled, I think it was 88% of the contracts, a bunch of the people who were supposed to justify them were told they had more time to do so, and the cancellation notice came before they were even given their opportunity to make the case for what they were doing. They are not trying to make government work better. They are trying to break government. So it is a thing that they can control, control. But because they are attacking government inefficiency, at least in a rhetorical way, it sort of intersects with us. And my fear is that the Democratic Party, the liberal movement, which had already become, in my view, way too pro institutional, as you like to point out, all those yard signs, like, in this house, we believe in science. They don't actually mean science. They believe in scientific institutions. They believe in the institution. Institutions, right. And when those institutions are not good for fundamental science, like they don't know, they don't care, they don't try to do anything about it. So I'm worried it will push Democrats into reflexive support of everything in government. I don't think I've ever been particularly naive about Doge. Some people I really like, I think were more optimistic about it than they probably should have been. But there is a need for the thing. Doge pretended to be right. We actually do need efficient government. I think I say in the excerpt I publish something like, we're sort of caught between a party that doesn't make government work and a party that wants government to fail. And I would like to create, or be part of creating some third poll. I would like a, like a liberalism that is absolutely RIP shit if government is failing, but because it wants it to work and will make it work. And frankly, I would like a conservative movement that, you know, maybe has different goals than I do, but actually wants a functional government, not just to retool it as a zone of corruption and ideological mastery. But, you know, this is gonna be a very different moment. Like we're talking to a Democratic Party reforming itself. We're in, you know, we're watching people try to destroy much of the government that we are interested in, you know, facially using critiques that sound similar. It's Both much more, in a way, possible for the ideas to take root, and it's much more dangerous for them because, yeah, you could just get this rally around. Anything the government does affect that actually would not, in my view, be healthy. Like, I hear Gavin Newsom out there on his podcast, and I like that he's doing a podcast. I think it's good he's bringing on MAGA people. But the big news he's making is about, you know, whether you're going to have trans kids in sports. The problem for California, for Gavin Newsom to even run for president, is housing. And California is not like, you could look at Fred Data. It does not have more private housing starts today, or at least in January, than it did in January of 2015. That's what I want to hear him confront because he believes in more housing. What's gone wrong? Why has this been so hard? Right. That's like the thing where I want the liberalism to ask, why did it fail in governing? Not just. I think in some ways, these cultural arguments are easier for it to have than to actually ask. Why are so many people leaving California? Because the cost of living is so high after years now of Democratic rule and in an era where there's not one statewide elected Republican. Like, that's what I want to hear Democrats confront. And I worry that Doge is going to give them a way to not confront it. Because, you know, if you're. It's like, easier to be the alternative to people just trying to thoughtlessly wreck and corrupt government than the alternative to yourself who has maybe not been, you know, running government in a way that is really what people are looking for.
- [71:45]
Derek Thompson
Ezra, Our friend Tyler Cowen has this term that I love called a Straussian read. And a Straussian read of a book is an interpretation of the book that is not explicitly inside of the book itself. It's a vibe of the book that you pick up off the page, even if it's not articulated in the letters themselves. And we were recently on a podcast the other day that made me wonder about a particular Straussian read of this book. The parties, as you know better than anybody, are polarized by education. I wonder what we think of this idea that they're also polarized by personality. In many ways, the character of liberalism that we are trying to shift is overly deferential to process, to infinite listening, and not sufficiently committed to action and outcome. That's how you get what Nick Bagley, as quoted in the book, calls the procedural fetish of our side. On the other hand, I think a criticism that you and I both share of Donald Trump is that his style assumes a kind of kingly power in the executive branch in a way that assumes something close to absolute power and is inclined to run roughshod over norms and bureaucracies and laws that exist to channel voices to reach a consensus. This might be a simplified diagnosis, but one interpretation of the personality differences between the modern left and the modern right is that the left believes in language and process and listening and trusts bureaucracies and rules that respect those, while the.
- [73:25]
Joanna Robinson
Modern right believes in a kind of.
- [73:27]
Derek Thompson
Extreme centralization of executive power that actively seeks to destroy bureaucracies. I wonder if you see this personality polarization as a live wire in politics right now. And if so, is what we're asking for is for liberalism to have a bit of a personality shift, not a personality flip all the way to the other end of Trumpist extreme authoritarianism, but a personality shift that values process a little bit less and values outcomes and action a little bit more.
- [74:08]
Ezra Klein
I do believe this. I mean, absolutely. My line on this is that the personality of the right is too autocratic and the personality of the left is too bureaucratic. And I think that has a lot of dynamics, including, by the way, Matt Iglesia says this line, the crank realignment right, RFK Jr used to be a Democrat. Now he and the people like him are Republicans. The Democrats used to have big parts of it that were very skeptical of corporations, even of the government. I mean, when we're talking about this new left, the new left was skeptical of the government and it was inside the party. And you know, we're trying to unwind some things that it did. But that balance between different tendencies I think was important. And as the Republican Party's become the party for cranks, for skeptics, for people who believe in conspiracies. And it's attracted both the left and right wing variants of this right, the QAnon people and the anti GMO people. On the one hand, that's made the right way too skeptical of systems, institutions, structures. On the other hand, the left has become too rallied in defense of the professional classes of the institutions they run now. I think the culture, the governing culture, in which you really try so hard, at least domestically, not to disappoint your coalition is more new. I think that the move from the Obama to Biden eras was significant there. I think that the Obama people are much more willing to make hard choices. It made people in their own coalition and angry, obviously, on foreign policy. That happened a lot with Joe Biden, but I think he was himself a lot less engaged on domestic policy. And that led to a kind of coalitional approach where you're always trying to keep Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC feeling happy with things. In the end, they were huge defenders of his when a lot of the party was trying to push him out. And obviously on the right, you needed to hold the moderates. And so that sort of ended up in this, this highly consensus oriented culture. And the other thing is that there is a level, not just holding the coalition together, but of just believing in everybody's expertise and trusting it. Jen Palka tells these stories of the way the lawyers will interpret statute more and more and more rigorously in order to defend against any possible lawsuits. On the other hand, Musk and Trump routinely do things that are facially illegal and like, fuck it, sue me. Me. You know, like, I'll take the lawsuit. Like, we'll fight that out in court. I'll see you there. I got great lawyers and I don't love what they're doing, but if there's one lesson I would like Democrats to take from them and from Doge, it's that a lot of things, strictures, rules, you know, interagency working groups that they were treating as solid are just norms. Like, you can break a lot of that. I don't want to see these mass idiotic firings, but I do want to see civil service reform. It is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service. That was true four months ago, and in a legal way, it is true today. And so, yeah, but I also want to see. I think you solve the problems, you know how to look for. And I don't think this is just like a personality type. I mean, I know lots of very grumpy people in democratic governments. I think it actually came to be a view, a view around inclusiveness, a view around what makes a good meeting, a view in what kinds of approaches to governing had created problems in the past. Adam Smith, who's a House member from Washington State, has been very eloquent on this point. And I think that view, that approaching government this way, like, really trying to say, well, what are the environmental justice groups saying? Like, we really need to listen to them. They represent something we wouldn't necessarily know otherwise. And, like, they need to be signed onto this if we're gonna believe this is fair. That culture, like, it was not just a temperament, it was actually a response. It was a response to periods when, frankly, you did need more of that. And it overgrew itself. Like anything, the solutions of the past become the problems of the present. And now you need to swing the pendulum in the other direction. And you need to swing it harder than I think the left has been comfortable with. And the way I know you need to swing it harder than they're comfortable with with is we are not on pace to meet our decarbonization goals. And even in the big blue states that say they want to build more housing, we are not building significantly more housing. So we are not achieving our goals. And that's where in the end, what matters is being outcome focused. There are a lot of ways to due process and there are ways to do process that are very inclusive and do listen to things. And at some point somebody has to say, does this actually fit the outcome we have promised people? And if it doesn't, then you have to start making hard choices and disappointing people. And like that's what leadership is. And I think there are a lot of people, a lot of Democratic governors who want to lead. You can't tell me Josh Shapiro has actually been very good on stuff like this. I think Wes Moore has been pretty good. I think Richard Whitmer has been pretty good. But you can't tell me these Democratic governors, they don't want to lead. I think in many ways they've been convinced that they shouldn't or they don't have the ability to overwhelm the interest groups in their own legislatures that are stopping them from passing some things. But I think that's changing too. I don't think this is all a personality type that we need psychologists to unwind in the Democratic Party. I think it is also a set of ideas that they have been convinced of about what makes for good leadership and they got overly convinced. And now we actually need a little bit of a return to strong leadership where somebody, some executive at the end of the day is there and says, I hear you, and the answer is no. Because what we have promised is we're gonna build these homes, we are going to lay down these transmission lines, we are going to build these windmills and site these solar panels. And these problems we are solving are so important that we are going to accept these trade offs. And that to me is the corrective we need not to burn government down, but to make it deliver what it is promised.
- [80:11]
Derek Thompson
I agree the pendulum needs swinging and I'm grateful that you helped me try to swing it both in the book and in the show. Ezra Klein, thank you very much. And I'll talk to you in 35.
- [80:23]
Ezra Klein
Minutes and vice versa. This has been so fun, Derek. Thank you for doing this.