Factually! with Adam Conover - Why America Can’t Build (Yet) with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Could many of America’s biggest problems be solved by simply building more? The theory of abundance suggests that from the housing crisis to the climate crisis, we could make real progress���if only we had the will and the systems to build boldly and swiftly. In their new book Abundance, Ezra Klein of The New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic lay out this ambitious vision. This week, Adam talks with Klein and Thompson about what’s holding America back—and how we might finally get out of our own way. Find Ezra and Derek's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything.

I don't know anything. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, if you live in America, as I do, and I think many of you do, you might be looking around the country and asking yourself, hey, why can't we do shit anymore? You know, America used to be a country that built massive bridges and transcontinental highways, major social programs that transformed the lives of the elderly and the poor. And our government accomplished all these impressive, ambitious things, and it did them quickly.

That era of government, though, feels like it's over, especially in liberal states like the one that I live in. When I moved to California ten years ago, California was about to build a high-speed rail system all the way from Los Angeles To San Francisco that was really exciting. I love trains. I was really excited to take that train Well a decade later. They're still about to build high-speed rail in California The project has barely advanced at all. Why and what's the last major social insurance program we passed in this country? It was Obamacare, right? Well, Obamacare, which was a titanic achievement by the political standards of the day, it was like the best they could possibly do after expending huge amounts of political will and effort.

Well, what was the effect of it? It made health insurance a little bit better, like a little bit. Like, you know, while what we have now is preferable to death, most people in America still think health care in this country sucks ass despite that massive effort to improve it. And it seems like there is simply nothing else to be done to improve the situation. Very few politicians outside of, say, Bernie Sanders, are even talking about what could be done about health healthcare in this country, as though it's just impossible and we've given up.

But clearly, it's not impossible to do big things and to build stuff. You know, the housing crisis that so many states are going through isn't as much of a problem in some states, like Texas and Florida, as it is in places like California or New York. And meanwhile, China is transforming its economy by the day, building massive cities and a transportation system that connects them. So we have to ask, what has happened to America that has made it so hard to build the things that we want to build, particularly in liberal states? Well, on the show today, we have two commentators, writers, and deep thinkers to discuss their theory of how the government got so ineffective and why it has become so impossible to build. Their names are Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

They have a new book out called Abundance, and this book has really been a phenomenon in discourse circles. There has been an incredible amount of argument, discussion about this book. I am so thrilled to have them on the show and get into it with them today, because I think it's one of the most significant conversations that is happening in America right now. Now, before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show

and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free. We'd also love to have you in our awesome online community full of other people who love thinking and arguing as much as you do. And if you wanna come see me on the road, see my brand new hour of standup comedy,

well, guess what? This weekend, May 9th through 11th, I'll be in Charleston, South Carolina. Beautiful Charleston. Hope you come see me there. After that, September 12th through 14th, I'll be in Oklahoma. September 21st, Brea, California 12th through 14th, I'll be in Oklahoma, September 21st, Brea, California.

And then in October, I'll be in Tacoma and Spokane, Washington, head to adamkhanover.net for all those tickets and tour dates. Now, one last thing before we get to the interview, I wanna say that, again, there's been a lot of argument and discourse about this book.

And so I really led with that in this conversation because I was really interested to hear what Ezra and Derek would say to, you know, some of the counter arguments that I've heard to their thesis. And they give really, really fascinating answers. I do think that came at the expense of it being a sort of friendlier, warmer conversation. So I want to make it really clear. I really enjoyed this book. I thought the arguments in it were really provocative. I think they're really useful to both liberals and people on the left, and hell, I think people on the right as well. I found it really fascinating and I'm a big fan of the clarity and the depth with which they think, even though I don't always agree with them

on every single issue. So I think for that reason, you're going to find this conversation really interesting. Please welcome Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson from the Atlantic to discuss their new book, Abundance. Ezra and Derek, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. I'm a fan. Ezra, I've listened to your show for quite a while.

I sometimes do my own little private impression of you when I'm on this show without telling anybody. So I'll do my best to keep pace with you guys here. I enjoyed the book very much. There's been a lot of discourse about it, which I don't think we need to jump into immediately. We'll work our way there. For those who have not been immersed

in the conversation about the book, what's your general argument? Just lay it out for folks who are not familiar. I'll start. Look, this is a book about the idea that to build the future that America wants, we need to build and invent more of what we need. It's a really, really simple statement,

but it's profoundly important because in many parts of this country, and unfortunately in many parts of the country where Democrats have the most power, we do not build more of what we need. There's a housing shortage in California, you're in Los Angeles, there's enormous amounts of homelessness in Los Angeles, the number of people who are leaving California because it's so unaffordable, numbers in the hundreds of thousands

over the last five years. But it's not just housing, it's also clean energy, it's transit, it's infrastructure across this country. We just can't build very well in the physical world. And this represents a really important and significant change. Between the 1930s, 1960s, 70s, America could build and build and build. And something happened in the last half century, something changed in our relationship,

our legal relationship, and maybe even our philosophical relationships, the physical environment, where we've written rules that have made it harder to build housing and transit and infrastructure and clean energy. All of these things that I think America needs and I think that liberals rightly argue that America needs. That's the building part. And there's also invention. You know, I believe in a future, I know Ezra does too,

that has a lot of stuff that we don't have in abundance right now. I think it's important to dream about a future of, you know, meat that we can grow rather than cut out of animals and say cellular plants, mass desalination facilities where we can take ocean water and pipe it to people's homes. They turn on the faucet and it comes right out of the faucet and fills their pans when they're making pasta. Cures for diseases, whether it's cancer,

pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, diseases like inflammation and dementia, Alzheimer's, science and technology is what is responsible for making any one particular generation better than the generations that came before it, where people live longer and healthier lives. And America right now doesn't have a true and honest invention agenda. In fact, in the Trump administration right now, we have something close to the opposite. We are slashing and burning the NIH and so much scientific funding. So right now, you know, big picture, Adam, I feel like we have a government with Trump and Musk and Vance that really is slashing and burning across Washington and across the country. And we need an opposition

that is popular and that is effective. And right now we have a democratic party that is incredibly unpopular. I think last polling in CNN at 27%, which is its lowest rate ever. And really not very effective in a lot of the places where we hold the most power. And so a part of this book is asking people to imagine a world that's better than the one that we have. But a lot of it is a very serious and often very detailed critique of where liberalism went wrong in the last 50 years so that we can fix it for the next generation. Yeah, thank you for that.

That was a very effective distillation of your entire book. Why did you write a whole book if you could do all of that in 90s? You have to write the book in order to have the distillation, right? You need to go through the 300 pages. I really want to argue with this because I've been thinking a lot about a podcast become a substitute for the book. And the lived texture of the book, the book is so we can give you a really deep, detailed walkthrough, like what it is like to do these policies and what goes wrong.

Please, you absolutely have to buy the book. This podcast is going to give you something totally different. You won't understand the book if you only buy one. We understand you're here to buy the book this podcast is gonna give you something totally different You understand the book if you only buy one We understand you're here to promote the book and I listen to it on audiobooks So which which had the effect of being nine podcasts back-to-back, but no I I That is still do very well And look I again I live in California. I agree with what a lot a lot of what you're saying, California You know is the bastion of liberal government

and fifth or sixth largest world economy, as is always said, then why are there so many folks living without homes? Why are roads crumbling? Why is, when I moved here, we were about to build high-speed rail, we're still about to build high-speed rail. Or in fact, we're maybe,

have even gone backwards a couple of steps. And so if you wanna pose, hey, Democrats can do it better, about to build high-speed rail, or in fact, or maybe have even gone backwards a couple steps. And so if you wanna pose, hey, Democrats can do it better, you actually have to do it better and show that your state or your life under you is better than under the alternative. So what is, in your view, the wrong turn that liberalism took?

It was the rise of these rules and regulations around building fundamentally? I think it is important to say it was not a wrong turn. It was the right turn for the time, and now we're in a different time. So a very potted history of this is like, you have New Deal liberalism, and New Deal liberalism builds a lot

and builds quite recklessly at a certain point, and it does despoil environments. And look, I grew up outside of LA at a time when you would wake up in the morning and choke on the smog. So there was a time when we were, you know, Robert Moses was cut in his highways through black communities. There was a lot going wrong. And that birthed a reaction, right?

Ralph Nader and his sort of set of associated organizations that emerged to sue the government in order to make sure it lived up to various commitments and procedures, Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, what we call the new left. And so liberalism ends up having this divided soul. And what a lot of the architecture of new left policies end up doing

is creating processes through which you can delay projects in order to gather information about them. That's not a crazy thing to do. You know, you delay it through going to court, you delay it through making sure you do very complex or increasingly complex environmental reviews. There are all these ways in which we embraced delay. And that was good for a time when the problem was we were probably building too much and thinking about it too little.

Then you get to a time, which is what we're in now, where you're building too little and thinking too much. So our environmental problem is not how do we keep things from being built, but how fast can we build solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage, and transmission lines, it gets all that electricity from where it is generated to where it needs to go. We're not doing any of that nearly fast enough. So if you believe in decarbonization, like if you believe in it, you have to believe we need some other set of laws allow us to do this. We are not nearly on pace to succeed with what we have attempted, what we've begun attempting to do.

Housing, very similarly, and housing is such a good example because there's nothing conceptually difficult here. Austin and Houston have not managed to maintain a codex full of the secret knowledge that allows you to build an apartment building that Los Angeles and San Francisco have somehow lost. Like, we know how to build apartment buildings. We just made it too hard. And one issue is that processes get captured over time. They get captured by all sorts of forces, corporate interests, local homeowners,

you know, environmental groups for good and for bad. In California, CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, changes to it are fought very hard by unions. I'm pro-union in general, but they use CEQA in order to create a delay as a weapon of negotiation. I sort of get why they want to do that,

but I prefer to make unions stronger through direct labor law, not through indirect environmental law. Over time, what you built in one era is not appropriate for the next. And so you have to renew the institutional and statutory structure of liberalism in order to meet your goals.

Now look, if you're already meeting your goals, if you think this is all going great, then you don't need to do anything. But if not, then you do need to back up, look, if you're already meeting your goals, if you think this is all going great, then you don't need to do anything. But if not, then you do need to back up, say, listen, this is what we've promised. It's not getting done. Why isn't it getting done? And then work backwards through those obstacles.

And the book, in very large part, is an effort to do exactly that. So, let's just talk about housing specifically, right? If we've had laws passed in California that make it easier for people to gum up the works, you referenced Robert Moses, right? Robert Moses, I think the reason I love that, you know, Robert Caro's book about Robert Moses, it's a book about power.

It's a book about urban planning, but it's mostly a book about how did this one man get the ability to build highways wherever he wanted for something like 40 years, to the extent that he could not even be fired by successive mayors of the city, right? There's a famous case where he is fired and he throws the, whatever,

the notice of firing back in the mayor's face and says, I refuse to be fired by you and won that battle, right? And what you're talking about is a shift in power to the communities around the thing being battle, right? And what you're talking about is a shift in power to the communities around the thing being built, right? That, I mean, the broad story is that, we used to run highways through those neighborhoods, and now we ask everybody, would you like a highway run through your neighborhood?

And those people say no, and they have the power to. Now, of course, that metastasizes into rich homeowners saying, don't build anything near me, because that way housing remains scarce and my property values keep going up. But taking power away from the people who live in a community seems to be a difficult thing to do. And so I guess my question is like,

A, how would you reform those laws specifically around housing? B, who should have the power to decide what gets built then? It's a really wonderful question. Let me start to take it and Ezra can clean up what I leave on the cutting room floor. In many ways, what Moses represented was an era that required a remedy. It was morally indefensible for the highway architects, the 1950s and 1960s, to demolish low income areas, build highways through them,

and just throw out the people who were living there, and specifically target the low income and American minorities. That is not a world that we necessarily want to reincarnate in the 2020s. But the remedy that we used to make sure that no Robert Moses could ever live again, right? That medicine of the 1960s has contributed

to the disease of the 1920s. We're so worried about the ability of developers to build where we wouldn't like them to build. In a place like San Francisco, here's a story to match that of the of the highways. Twenty twenty one. There was a highway. There was an apartment development.

It was going to be built in the parking lot in the valet parking lot of a Nordstrom in San Francisco. I mean, this is exactly where you would want to put downtown housing. You're not displacing anybody, except the cars that are parked by people that give their car to a valet person while they shop for shirts and shoes in Nordstrom, right? But the environmental review process wasn't took so long that eventually the apartment building was denied by the board of supervisors and apartment buildings like that and infills across the state of California and many other places in this country are essentially denied because we have made it so easy for neighbors to determine that around them new apartment units cannot new housing units cannot be added. And this is a result of really a

matrix of changes that happened in the 1960s, 1970s. It wasn't any one thing. Number one, we had the rise of exclusionary zoning, zoning which in the early 20th century was much more about cutting up the city to say what kind of businesses could go here and here. Exclusionary zoning became much more likely to say, you can't build anything that isn't single-family housing in this entire swath of area. So that made it much harder to add density to America cities.

And a lot of it was explicitly racist, et cetera. There are a lot of horrible reasons for those zoning laws. Horrible reasons for them, horrible reasons for them. And even if this is important to say, even if sometimes the origin of the law wasn't racist, the outcome of the law was to make it harder for low income Americans who are disproportionately non-white to live in the most productive cities in America, which forces them out of the parts of the country

that are best for upward mobility, the American dream. So even if the motivation wasn't racist, the outcome was to exacerbate racial inequality in this country. And that wasn't all. We also had legal changes that made it easier for people to sue as Ezra was describing. We had environmental laws that made it easier for people to sue, as Ezra was describing.

We had environmental laws that made it easier for someone to say, I have a question that I want to raise, so I need that developer to fill out, do a study for four years to determine the environmental impact of the new apartment building they're gonna add to this downtown area. And when you put all of these laws together,

what you go from is an era of building in the first half of the 20th century to an era of easy blocking. It's so easy now to block new housing developments in America's most productive cities that housing simply isn't added. And as a result, the working class finds that living in those cities is not affordable and they have to leave. And that is an enormous problem for at least two reasons. Number one, if you're going gonna be the Democratic Party and say, we're the party of the working class, you have no leg to stand on if the working class

is actively trying to leave the areas where you hold the most power because they're too expensive. But also at a broader level, a kind of an aesthetic level, it makes Democrats look like hypocrites. When they talk and they use these lofty terms about the importance of housing and housing as a When they talk and they use these lofty terms about the importance of housing and housing as a human right, and they put these signs in their front lawns and say,

you know, no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. And their back lawns are zoned for single family housing and they do everything they can to hire lawyers to prevent a new apartment complex being developed down the street. That's not a party that is walking the walk. It's gaining community liberalism, yeah.

Yes, and so I think it's really important to recognize that even if the origin of some of these laws was to stop people like Robert Moses from flattening minority districts in downtown areas, the result of these efforts is to create an area, is to create a world in which we are actually denying low income Americans the ability to live in cities in a different way, not by knocking down their houses, but by preventing the houses where they could live

from being built in the first place. I agree with so much of that argument. My question though is still, who then decides what is built where, right? Like if we don't want Robert Moses, we don't want the rich homeowners in the gated communities, you know, having protective zoning laws and exploiting the process, which they do, right?

And by the way, they don't just do it through zoning, they do it through direct influence on their elected officials who see those rich homeowners as their main voters, their main donors, and are loathe to disrupt them. So it's a huge thing. It would be a huge thing for say, the elected leaders of Los Angeles

to buck those wealthy voters and put these reforms in place. But the question I still have is who then decides, right? Like if we need to take some power away from those rich homeowners, and also probably some poorer homeowners who also go to the community board meetings. How do we determine who actually should have the power?

So different places can give us different answers to this. So one version is in California, it took about 20 some years of like passing legislation and fighting over the legislation and then fighting over the ways people found to foil the legislation. But we eventually passed the laws that were clear enough such that if you own land and you want to build an ADU on it and it conforms to pretty straightforward rules set forward

by the legislature, you just can. And I think that's actually a good principle here in a state facing a severe housing crisis. The default should be that you can build places for people to live as long as you're following the basic standards set out by the political system, probably statewide. And you need a fairly extraordinary reason to stop somebody from doing that, as opposed to it needs to be extraordinary for you to get over all the obstructions to doing that. And we know this can happen. I mean, I assume we've all been to Austin and when you go to Austin, it doesn't feel

like, you know, entering to some kind of like authoritarian, crazy space. But people have been moving to Austin and Austin has been responding by building apartment buildings and rents have been going down. And I think that's a pretty straightforward way to do it. Yes, we have democracy and we elect people who run cities and run states, and they should make clear rules, you know, in consultation with the legislature

and the community. And then those rules should be quick and easy to follow and then you can build things. That should not be true, by the way, for everything. When it comes to environmental rules, I believe one of the problems with our environmental legislation is it just doesn't make distinctions. It cares about process, not outcome. So if you're building, in my view, a set of things that we know are net-net good for the environment, solar panel arrays, wind turbines, a set of things that we know are net-net good for the environment, solar panel

arrays, wind turbines, that kind of thing, it should have a much easier process than if you were proposing to build a new oil refinery. We don't need to be so stupid as to treat everything as exactly the same level of environmental danger. There are categories of things that we can look at differently. And by the way, we do this all the time. We exempt things from these rules constantly. And nationally, the Chips and Science Act,

the semiconductor fabs built under that were exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act because they just said, look, this is a national security priority. We can't have these held up for three or four or five or six years under environmental review and litigation. So they carved it out. We do make distinctions when we want to.

Weirdly, we just don't do it for things that are good for the environment. So like, for example, maybe when we're trying to build high-speed rail to reduce the amount of traffic going between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we could reduce the burden of environmental regulation on that project because it is in fact an environmental project.

Instead it took, we started environmental clearance on high-speed rail in 2012, and by the time we were fact checking the book at the end of 2024, they told me they were almost done. So I think it shouldn't take 12 plus years to do that. Or New York City, where I am now, they passed congestion pricing, which we know from, you know, this is a, you know, they're taxing cars for coming into the congestion zone and then giving the money to mass transit. We know from other places have done this like London and Stockholm.

It's very, very, very good for the environment. It is functionally green redistribution. And it got held up for three or four years in environmental assessment like the little brother of environmental review. Instead of somewhere somebody was able to being able to say, look, this is highly pro environmental policy. It's basically just hanging sensors on poles. Let's run it through the process really quickly.

So not everything should have the same answer to it, but I think you should be connected to what it is you're doing and connected to the urgency of what you're doing. There are things where it's okay to take a long time to get it right. But in California right now, where you've got, what is it, 12% of the nation's population

and nearly 50% of its unhoused homelessness population, building housing fast is a real, like it's urgent and you should build a process by which that urgency can be made manifest. Folks, this week's episode is sponsored by Delete Me, a service that I have personally used and trusted for many years, years before they ever reached out about sponsoring this show. Look, a frequent point of conversation, unfactually, is how the internet used to be a lot more fun before everyone became terminally online. Now the internet is a stressful place, filled with online bullying and politically motivated

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Go to hungryroot.com slash factually and use code factually. That's hungryroot.com slash factually, code factually to get 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Hungryroot.com slash factually, promo code factually. I want to talk about the government itself, because when we're talking about housing,

we're mostly talking about private developers, and you're basically making a deregulatory case that we need to remove a lot of rules or restructure the rules to make it easier for people to build things. I agree with some of that. In terms of the government itself building things, is it just a matter of the government getting it in its own way? Like, what is preventing our federal government or our state governments from building more high-speed rail projects or from building public housing, for example.

So this, I think is such an important point to look at. And you'll notice, because you've read the book, that the two housing stories we focus on in real detail are both publicly subsidized affordable housing, or at least philanthropically subsidized affordable housing, right? Because I, in some ways, want to avoid this market rate debate altogether.

I do believe we should deregulate market rate housing, but I was actually trying here to focus on the kinds of housing that all my friends on the left actually want, which is affordable below market rate housing, and in this case, both in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Deregulation is a word that people attach more to it than they really should. Because I think as soon as you say it, what comes to mind is deregulating the market, right? Deregulating private developers to do something. Nobody operates under more regulation than the government itself.

There's a RAND report that came out after our book. And it's a fascinating document because what it does is it got all this data on what it costs to build both market rate and publicly subsidized affordable housing in California, Texas, and Colorado. And in California per square foot, it's about 2.2 times as expensive as in Texas

for market rate housing. And if I'm not misremembering, it's four times as expensive for affordable publicly subsidized housing. And we show why this is in the book, the layers and layers and layers of added rules and regulations and standards and goals and projects that the government has to agree to when or has to abide by when it constructs housing raises a cost raises creates delays makes it much

much harder to build. I am all for building palatial like mass levels of public housing. I mean I want it to be well done, but it should be part of our answer to the housing crisis. It cannot be part of it if the government is under a series of rules and regulations that basically make it unaffordable for it to build that. I do wanna note here, Colorado, in Colorado, which sort of has housing costs between California and Texas,

in Colorado, at least what they found in this study, is that the affordable housing costs less per square foot than the market rate housing. That I think is how it should be when the government is doing something that is a huge urgent priority. It should be arranging things so that they're more efficient and more resources are brought to bear more rapidly. So I haven't dug in enough to what Colorado is doing to really understand that story, but it doesn't seem obvious to me from first principles that for the government to build publicly subsidized housing

It should be doing that at 2x the square foot cost of private developers when you've gotten to that point You've got into a problem that is making it on that is making us unable To achieve the goals like the government itself is promising people it can achieve Yeah, I mean if the housing is supposed to be cheaper than the housing should be cheaper, right? If it's public, it should be public. It should be it should be proving that when the government does something, it does so more efficiently and effectively. And I've heard you on other podcasts make the argument that the left should agree with this position because, hey, if you want a lot more public housing to be built, then you want it to be built as cheaply as possible.

You want as much of it as possible. You don't want it to be impossible to build. And we've had plenty of taxpayer funded resolutions here in Los Angeles that were supposed to allow us to build a lot of permanent supportive housing, the most important kind of housing to fight homelessness, but we have not been able to build it because it's so expensive and it's so caught up in so much process. But I do though come back to the question of power.

Like is the problem, the process itself, is the problem that the government has gotten in its own way, we have too many rules, we need to get rid of the rules, or is it the problem that there are people who have power in our society who don't want the thing to be built? Whether it's rich homeowners, whether it's developers who have other use for the land. One of my main questions for you is,

if we remove those rules and those process problems, well, who's to say that the same forces that are trying to stop the housing from being built now won't be able to do it in the future through all of the other levers at their disposal? Are we just removing our ability to choose what voices to listen to? to do it in the future through all of the other levers at their disposal? Are we just removing our ability to choose what voices to listen to?

I think it's really important to think about legal defaults and the way that the legal defaults are different in California versus a place like Texas or Utah, right? You don't have an outbreak of incredibly moral neighbors in Houston or an outbreak of like some extraordinarily different kind of of government competence in Utah, despite the fact that I think they have perfectly good mayors and a perfectly good governor. The difference is that there are some cities where the rules exist to make it easier for neighbors to determine what can be built around them. And so I think that we need politicians

to make the case as clearly as possible that if housing abundance is truly a progressive priority, then why is it that so many progressive states find ways to make it harder to build housing, right? I think the argument has to be made at the legal level first before we start to get into questions of do we take power away from cities and located at the state level? That's what some people are interested in. I don't know that I'm ready to go all the way there yet.

I think you need to recognize that the problem is in the laws that we've written. And if we wrote them in the 1960s and the 1980s and the 2010s, we can write new laws today. But the argument has to be made and has to be made in part, I think, by making liberals feel embarrassed by the fact that their priorities once they're making contact with the physical world are melting upon contact. There's a study that my colleague, Yoni Appelbaum at the Atlantic found,

where in the state of California, every time a city adds or grows its progressive vote share by 10%, the number of houses permitted in that city declines by 30%. There is a problem here that has to be called out and has to be Made apparent to people so that we can recognize that we are doing this to ourselves

So that that's the first part of it but there's a second part of it that I really want to make sure that I'd emphasize here, which is that delay is expensive because time is money and Any wise government policy has to recognize that if you have a priority, then it is incumbent upon you to build that thing quickly. And we have examples from recent American history of the government recognizing a public priority, and then advantaging speed, and then becoming successful. One is the example that neither liberals or democrats when it

were liberals or Republicans want to talk that much about because it's operation warp speed. The previous land record for developing a vaccine was 10 years. We developed a synthetic mRNA vaccine for COVID in 10 months. Not because we held on to the laws and processes that existed, but because we directly and purposely wrote a law

that created a glide path to create the fastest vaccine approval process in human history. That's number one. Then you think about the physical world, right? What was it? Two years, three years ago when the I-95 bridge fell down in Pennsylvania and Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania essentially said, look, we can go through

the normal process here, we could build, rebuild the I-95 bridge across which 600,000 cars crisscross every single day. We could rebuild it with a normal processes of environmental assessment, environmental review, and the procurement laws. It'll probably take 24 months. And in that time, tens of millions of people's commutes and travels up and down the East Coast will be disrupted. Instead, he waived environmental review,

he waived the procurement laws, he identified two contractors in the area, both working with union labor, he put them to work for 24 hours. They rebuilt the bridge in 12 days. Josh Shapiro is not less popular now because he paused those laws for an emergency. He's more popular because he acted like a leader,

not acting like someone who's entirely strewn with legalese and therefore he can't act on behalf of the public. So a part of this, I wanna be clear, a part of this is about legal changes and that's its own fight. But a part of this, Adam, is about political courage. It's about identifying the fact that sometimes, sometimes the fallen bridges around us are very literal fallen bridges. They're a bridge that fell down. But homelessness in Los Angeles, I think that's a proverbial fallen bridge.

And homelessness in San Francisco, I think that's aial fallen bridge. And homelessness in San Francisco, I think that's proverbial fallen bridge. And the fact that we've barely permitted a single new apartment building in San Francisco this entire year, that's another bridge that's fallen down. And when the bridge falls down, you got to pull it back up by declaring an emergency and saying, this is not normal and this is not right. And so a part of it is political courage, not just a legal battle. Because I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm doing a show this week that is gonna I think revolve a lot around this. It's I've been reading a lot of critiques about

power and, um, I think about what it is I actually like how to actually describe a theory of power that makes sense. Because I think often when people talk about power, they have, and I think this is particularly true on the left. They tend to think about stable equilibriums in which one group has too much power and you want to move it to this other group, right? Corporations have too much power and we want to move it to the people is I think generally the cut people make. It's not that I disagree with that,

it's that in all of these cases, power tends to pool in a lot of different places simultaneously. And one of the real dangers is that it pools out of sight. So the danger you're describing, Adam, where you pass a bunch of laws, and it turns out people are able to do the same things that they're always doing through a different mechanism. I mean, that is the story of California right now. We have passed dozens and dozens and dozens of pro-housing laws, and we are not building more housing in that state than we did 10 years ago. And that's in part because, as exactly as you say, right, like we pass things and, you

know, the things we passed created a bunch of carve-outs and they created like ways that, you know, interest groups are able to come back in and pervert the outcome again. And the things we passed created a bunch of carve outs and they created ways that interest groups were able to come back in and pervert the outcome again. But also it gets to me, it's something I think pretty important, which is it a good principle is you want to see where the power is being used. And a lot of process that we created at all different levels of government from noticing common periods and federal rulemaking down to environmental review and lawsuit, down to sort of planning board meetings at the local level in California, we did it with a sort of direct democracy

theory in mind, that we are going to make sure that there were a lot of points in the process at which people affected by the process could come in and say, hey, stop. Like, you have to hear something that I have to tell you. And over time, this got captured by the people with the money to send all their lobbyists to the notice and comment rulemaking meeting. Or people who have the time and already live in the community, which is not the people

who would move into future affordable housing, come to the planning board meeting, right? Or the people who have the lawyers to file, you know, a bunch of environmental review attacks on say, UC Berkeley for expanding dormitories under the theory that more students cause an environmental hazard to the Berkeley, the UC Berkeley surroundings. I think it's really central to say that power should be to the extent we can create this, exercised in the open so it can be seen and it can be argued over and fought and redistributed.

And one of the sort of failure modes we've entered into systemically across levels of government, across states, across the federal government, is creating such baroque processes that it creates all kinds of spaces in which power can pool itself and act very quietly. There's an attractive nuisance for power to come and do what it does. Like those particular meetings. I've covered a lot of federal legislating and then I've now covered a lot of basically what happens after the law gets passed. And we in the media, we tend to cover the big fight over the bill, the Affordable Care

Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act. And then the thing, it either doesn't pass or if it does pass, it's like, okay, good job everybody, like moving on. And I have often found that what happens after is much worse. Because at least what happens before, there are a lot of people covering it. But then when I go back and I look at what happened in the process and why the thing didn't happen the way I thought it was going to, it turns out that the much quieter rulemaking process is a place where the special interests can come to feast. And that's just on some level creating entry.

If you take power very seriously, you should want to be very careful about how many entry points you create for it to operate outside of public or press view, outside of normal modes of accountability and embarrassment. And that's a thing where I think we need to do some real rethinking. Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, isn't it weird how the things we turn to for comfort often end up making us feel worse? I mean, I've definitely caught myself doom scrolling or getting stuck in an endless social media loop

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The thing that I wonder, I've been reading a lot of the, let's get into the discourse. I've been reading a lot of the discourse on the book. I've listened to your podcast with Matt Iglesias where you basically spent the entire hour responding to the discourse. And I think that you've raised a lot of hackles on the left that perhaps are unnecessary

or in places where you are actually trying to create consensus Between you know center liberals and progressive and progressives and leftists, whatever you take those words to mean But as you're talking I agree with your process critiques But for me part of what is left out a bit is a willingness to show Leadership and say who's who is actually causing the problem. Who is exploiting the process? Like Derek, you said that when a progressive vote chair goes up, we build less housing. Well, I'm involved in LA politics. I go to meetings on housing.

I have been following it for the entire time that I've lived here. And what I've noticed is that the people who really seem to be stopping building are right-wing Democrats. They are Democrats who, they vote for people who run on a Democratic party line, they call themselves Democrats, but their actual ideological commitments are, they hate homeless people.

Like they actually hate them. Like I've been in meetings where you can see the bloodlust in their eyes. They want the cops to come smash heads. They want the people taken off the streets. That's all they want. They don't want them housed. They want them in prison, right? That's literal.

There are literally people in our society who want that. They're, I would call that a right-wing position, right? And my problem is not that, sure, there's a process problem that those people are able to take advantage of meetings, but that is to me maybe a second-order problem. Isn't the first-order problem that we are not saying, hey, there's some people who wanna solve this problem

and some people who don't, and the people who don't are fighting against it. Yes, there's, say on the left here in Los Angeles, there are left yimbies, right, who really, who would really, really agree with your book. And then there are leftists who care more about tenant protections, care more about keeping people in their homes. But when I look around, those are not the people who are really stopping us from building an apartment building, right? The people who really are, are the right-wingers who call themselves progressives,

but are not being labeled as, you know, having right-wing views. And I could make the same argument about, say, you know, corporate power, like a lack of willingness to call out that, coming up the process. But I wonder if part of the, part of the objection to your book is the focus on process rather than on like, who is exploiting the process to stop things, right? Like who are the bad guys in the story? Who are the villains?

Your story does not actually have that many villains in it. And the ones that are there are generally folks on the left. You know, you bring up Ralph Nader as, hey, he did some good things, but there's some bad outcomes. You know, the sort of unintended consequences of people who had good intentions, as opposed to the folks who are like really maliciously

trying to stop us from doing these things. Let me back up to something you said at the beginning, because I've been thinking a lot about this. You said that the book has unnecessarily raised hackles on the left. And I've heard a lot of people say that. And I think I sort of had that view at the beginning. Like, look, there's a very important version of left abundance, which I think I largely believe in. And if you want to do the Green New Deal, if you want to do public housing, you need some version

of this set of ideas to get it done. But I'm always, I think, try to be pretty careful about thinking people are mistaken about their own politics. And so I've been trying to rethink that intuition and think, okay, if people are reacting to this badly, who I think should be allied to it, what am I missing about their position? And I think what I was missing initially about their position, but I've come to appreciate

more is actually we have very different views of what to do about power. Not in every individual case, but in a journalist case. So what I heard in sort of your presentation there, Adam, was a comfort with a certain kind of villain. Now, I've covered a lot of housing meetings too, and I agree that sometimes it is right-wing Democrats. I have also seen housing blocked by left-wing Democrats. I've seen it blocked by Democratic socialists, but I've also seen it blocked by Republicans.

In my view, it's usually just blocked by incumbent homeowners. And the fact that Houston and Austin and Utah and so on are better at building housing than California makes me think that this is not a simple left to right dimensional problem we're facing. And that if I just take it as one, I'm not going to come to an answer that works. But the broader disagreement I've come to realize, I think I have, is that I think about power and coalitions much more situationally and less categorically. So I think there's a view that many of my friends on the left hold that the right way

to think about power is sort of, it's like John Kenneth Galbraith's countervailing forces. They're a set of like major forces in society. There's unions, there's corporations, there's government, et cetera. And what you're trying to do is to distribute power across these countervailing powers in a way that gets you to like a stable equilibrium that makes your politics work out. And so one thing I see people being sort of upset about is places where power might redistribute because you're changing process. But here's the thing, in the things that I cover, and the things that I spend a lot of time writing about in the book, which is clean energy construction, which is health care, which is housing construction, which is healthcare, which is housing construction, which is the way we create policy inside the federal government more broadly, things like rural broadband

and electric vehicle chargers and all that. I've just not seen it be a simple story where I can tell you with a straight face, oh yeah, the real problem here is the corporations. Or as people like who are a little bit to my right always want me to say, oh, the real problem here is the unions and the public interest unions. Or the real problem here is just homeowners. These are all highly complex groups that we categorize singularly corporations, unions, et cetera,

but they're diverse, they're factional, they are with me. Parts of them are with me on one issue and not on another. If you just look at California, there is complex union politics between the carpenters and the building trades right now, where the carpenters are more on the side of a lot of the IMB bills and the building trades have been more in opposition. And so just saying unions doesn't allow me to get at any of that complexity.

And you got this other problem, where I think we have a lot of groups we want to give power to. This is an argument Dave Dayen of the American Prospect has made explicitly against abundance politics that you want to be using policy to empower your allies and your friends. And so this sort of process where they can come in to the rule making, etc, and get all these cutouts and carve outs is a good process because what you're trying to do in any given program isn't just achieve the program's goals. You're also trying to redistribute power in society. But what I see us

doing is often not achieving the goal at all and also not effectively redistributing power. We're just not building California high-speed rail because we gave everybody such a cut of the process. So I am very, very happy to say that there are a ton of issues where what's standing in my way is like corporate power of one sort or another, although often that's complex. Like on energy, a lot of solar panel companies are my allies and a lot of oil companies are my enemies.

But at the same time, I think we have to be, the fact that so many of these problems are worse in blue states than in red states really has to make us wonder if the villains are all gonna be ones that we are comfortable with. If Texas is better at building both houses, by the way, affordable and market rate, and clean energy, then your median blue state,

is it really likely that every problem here is one that we're going to be comfortable solving? That's sort of not like my thing here. I'm a Californian. I grew up in Irvine. I wrote a lot of this book, my side of it from San Francisco. I've watched California do poorly. It is not affordable. It is losing it has been in most years losing very large numbers of people. And it's sort of me trying to confront like failures of liberal governance failures of things that I agree with to work out. And when it is a people I find myself in opposition to, right, the right wing Democrats you described at the meeting, and I know many of exactly the sort you're describing, I'm completely with you. And I've also seen a shit ton of market rate development that we needed in San Francisco blocked by an unholy alliance of left wing groups that have say,

this will either be gentrification, or it all needs to be affordable. And right wing groups had allied with them because they didn't want the housing at all. And right, that's why I'm kind of a yimby and I'm just like more housing all of it in a state where we have that much of a housing crisis. I don't have a problem naming enemies. They just shift issue to issue, fight to fight, place to place. And so I want to be very tight on what are the outcomes I'm trying to achieve.

And then I will give you a granular account of what's going wrong in every one of those. But I'm not going to give you because I don't believe in a single stable account of how power is apportioned right now and how we just need to shift this set of apportionments or take down this set of villains to get to the world that I want to create. I don't think it works like that. Can I play a role of conciliator here, which is sometimes my nature, and say, there's a way in which you both are so right,

that Adam, what you said is right, and what Ezra said is right, because you, Adam, are correct that a villain to identify in local Los Angeles NIMBY politics is right-wing Democrats. But also if what we're interested in is understanding the entire national picture of why do some cities and states build housing and why other cities and states don't,

the answer cannot be the mere distribution of right-wing Democrats. There's no way that if we're interested in answering the question, why does Austin build so many houses and Los Angeles doesn't? Why does Austin build more than LA? Simple question, and let's just like be a detective

about trying to answer that question fully. The answer cannot be that folks in Austin don't care about public order and folks in Los Angeles are too obsessed with it? The answer has to be something else because clearly the distribution of public order conservatives in Dallas and Houston and Austin can't be so much lower

than in Los Angeles, which is a much more progressive area. It seems much more likely to me that homeowners are conservative. Lower KC conservative homeowners are jealous about their housing values. They don't like to see chaos around them. They hate it when parking standards change. They hate it when there's new traffic and they really hate seeing people around their children who make them feel unsafe.

And that is as true for folks living in Beverly Hills as for folks living in Plano, Texas in the suburbs of Austin. The difference is not the national distribution of these types of folks, even if they are the enemy, Adam, in the meetings that you go to in LA. The difference is that the meetings you go to in LA

in many cases aren't even happening in Austin and Houston and Dallas, because there's a different zoning and legal default, which means it's much less likely for the sure racist and public order obsessed centrist and conservatives and liberals in those areas to even think, why am I going to waste a Tuesday night going to a meeting that doesn't even exist or might not even be that important

because fundamentally there is no zoning in Houston or there is no easy recourse for me to stop this apartment building in Austin. The difference is so often the law rather than individual personality. And so I personally, and I think Ezra's the same, but I always wanna make sure that I talk about myself personally.

I'm not interested in running cover for real villains or pretending that there aren't people who are blocking progress and the good in this country. I mean, we could just do a whole other hour where I list all the people who I think are truly enemies of progress. But I really, really want to understand why. Why do some cities, especially those that are such bastions of liberal

excellence in so many ways, make it impossible to build the very thing that is central to the liberal agenda, which is a house that makes life affordable for working class families. And I do think that if you're interested in answering that question really concretely, city by city and state by state, we can't say that it's just about personality types. It has to be about something underlying them.

Those are great answers and I thank you for them. And I agree that, I agree that at the very least, we need a form of like progressive leadership that prioritizes outcomes over process. I think you make a great argument on that, that we need to be building things. If you're an AOC or an AOC,

someone who aspires to be a president AOC, whether or not that's her, you should be, you know be trying to think like, yes, we need to build the high speed rail. Like if we want there to be public goods, if that's a commitment of liberalism or leftism or progressivism or whatever you wanna call it, we need to focus on building the actual thing.

And I really like the title of the book and the concept of abundance versus scarcity as a way of thinking about that. I think that's a good prod to the left to be thinking about how do we make more of the things that we want and how do we avoid a scarcity mindset. As your book came out, I was already thinking about scarcity a lot, because the Trump administration seems to be founded on this notion of scarcity, premised on this notion of scarcity, that we don't have enough to go around, so we have to have less immigrants, we have to cut everything, we need to have less money going out

so we can give it more to the people who matter. And if we instead have a mindset of there's enough to go around for everyone, that's better. We can build more things. That's a more optimistic mindset. That's a good aesthetic shift that I think you're prodding everyone into. One thing though that was missing from the book

that I'd love to get your opinion on is I think when a lot of Americans experience scarcity, it's not coming from the government or coming from their elected leaders. It's coming from capitalism itself. Like, there's a very strange trend in America where you go to the CVS and you are waiting for 45 minutes because there's only one pharmacist working that day.

And why is there only one pharmacist working at CVS? Why is there only one employee at this massively profitable store? Right. People have this experience of profits going up, but everybody getting less in their lives. Oh, we have to make cutbacks at our business. Why? You know, that's not, that's another difference in America now than in the 1950s, right? Used to be, hey, GE and GM were doing great. So, you know, lots of money being thrown around, you know, even in my own industry here in Hollywood,

it's like I've seen budgets go down for shows that more people are watching, right? I used to get more, you know, I had an easier time getting a million dollars an episode to make a show on True TV on cable. Much harder time getting on Netflix a couple years later. A couple years after that, nobody's even green lighting anything anymore, right? Except that more people are watching the shit, right? More people are subscribing. There's been underlying industry changes, but as an overall trend, it's been underlying industry changes, but as an overall trend, it feels like in corporate America, they have more but we get less, right?

And you talk in the book about, hey, redistribution isn't going to get us all the good things that we want in life, but I feel like a lot of people have felt that abundance has been redistributed away from them. Right? And so I wonder like, you know, is this a word and a concept that is worth applying to more than just what the government does? Like why don't we have abundance in the for-profit sectors of our economy where, I mean, at the stock market lines going up into the right most of the time

Except you know recent weeks notwithstanding Right, but for the last 15 years Yes, except that people are experiencing more scarcity in the parts of their lives They're being provided by that sector of our society by capitalism. Yeah, so two things on this So one redistribution won't get us the future we want, but it gets us more of the present that we want. You know, most of my career is covering things like the Affordable Care Act and child tax credits.

And we should do, I mean, we say this in the book too, but we should do more redistribution and do it better. One argument the book is making is not that everything that liberals believe is wrong. It's that there are things we are not good at anymore, specifically around building. And one thing, by the way, that where I do think these two things connect is the speed at which we are able to do social insurance and other things within the sort of redistributive world. So Medicare, the original Medicare program, gave out Medicare cards one year after it was passed into law. The Affordable Care Act took four years to give people health insurance through its main

provisions. And the most popular thing Joe Biden did, which was Medicare prescription drug marketing, and even then only on a subset of drugs, it took them more than three years to put that into play. So the first time it will happen is 2025 2025 and Donald Trump will be able to take credit for the lower prices that seniors are paying. So there is something by the way about process and a lot of these projects. It doesn't have to work that way. We did redistribution extremely fast during the pandemic. We're able to get out stimulus checks really rapidly when we want to. We were

able to do unemployment insurance really rapidly, although there's obviously problems with that process. But we should want people to feel government's hand in their lives, particularly when we are redistributing much faster than we're often able to do it now. And I just, I mean, I can read you some quotes from people in the Biden administration about this who are very, very frustrated about the experience they had. Then the broader point you're making about capitalism, capitalism goes through different phases. I mean, that period you were talking about in the 50s was also a version of capitalism. And I think that this has, I mean,

there's a lot going on here, but I don't think Derek or I, not only do we not have an argument with, but I think we have a view that what we are trying to do is use government power to force markets to create more of the things people need so those things are cheaper and more plentiful for the lives they want to have. Now, I don't like it's a separate structure to talk about like wage separate conversation

talk about wage structures. But I think we just are we have we have a whole section in the beginning about why it's important on the one hand to have growth, but on the other hand not to think about growth as a static entity. The market doesn't know if you're getting rich by building coal plants or by laying down solar panels. And government is going to have to shape markets so they're incentivized to do one and not the other.

And in the sort of industries you're talking about, I mean, there you do end up in questions about power, questions about sectoral bargaining, for instance, for unions, questions about whether we should be regulating these companies in different ways and making it impossible for them to make money in some of the ways they've made money. And I think all that should be very much on the table. I don't think these are completely disconnected from some of the broader questions we're asking about how governments run and how the regulations are made because these are places where these things get cut up into pieces. But if the argument is, hey, look, like, this is becoming much, much, much richer country, and people are not feeling a lot richer, then yeah, that's a huge problem.

We agree with it. But I do think part of where that gets you is part of where we go, which is, look, if you look at what has gotten cheaper and more plentiful in the economy in the past 30 or 40 years, you're looking at consumer goods. It's gotten real cheap to get a flat screen television, a laptop computer, you know, an iPhone, things you couldn't even had 40 years ago. But can you go to a public college for four years,

tuition free, debt free, probably not. Are there enough homes in the places people most wanna live? There aren't. Is there enough childcare for the people who need it? In a lot of states now, it is more expensive to get childcare for a four-year-old and a six-month-old than to send a kid to college. And so we have this sort of thing that has built, that has been named, my partner, Andy Lowry, is one who uses this term first, the affordability crisis,

about the incredibly rising, the incredible rising price of the things on which people build their lives elder care for their parents. And bringing those down is also part of that abundance. Democrats should redistribute redistribute. They should also be very, very, very focused on the cost of living. And that does mean being engaged in reshaping markets and shaping what is produced by them and in what quantities. I would just add, Adam, you mentioned a lot of economic problems in your question. And I think they're interesting, but they're also very different. The question of does America have enough pharmacists? And of those pharmacists, does CVS hire enough of them

to fulfill their consumers' needs is one very specific question. And there's another very specific question that you asked about the evolution of media from analog dollars to digital dimes as virality becomes more abundant ironically and therefore cheaper, views don't mean what they used to mean.

These are very different questions. And it's not obvious to me that every interesting economic question introduces a new essential job for government. Like I don't, not that you were suggesting this, but I don't know that government like needs to intervene in every single problem that exists in the market. Now I do think that by the way,

and there's a part in the book, that the way that we have capped medical residency slots has made it very difficult to become a doctor and very expensive to become a doctor in America. And there are reforms that you could have in this country to make it faster and easier and cheaper to become a doctor in America. And that would maybe pay cash benefits

in terms of having more pharmacists, not only nationwide, but also at your local CVS. But I do wanna make a more general point here about like the stult of what you're pointing to, right? Like that there's a feeling that capitalism isn't working for us. I think it's worth like really trying to pin down that question.

Like, what down that question. What is that question about? What is this feeling that capitalism isn't working for us actually about? I don't think it's about the abundance of flat screen televisions or the abundance of electronics or AirPods. I think it has something to do with unaffordability.

The fact that life feels unaffordable to people. And at the core of that, we sort of decompose the typical family's budget. The biggest item is always housing. There is a national crisis of housing right now. I mean, the median age of home buyers, I was just looking this up, rose from 31 in 1981 to 56 in 2024.

That's not just America getting older. from 1981 to 56 in 2024. That's not just America getting older. That's young people being entirely priced out of home ownership. So when I think about this big question you're asking, what's wrong with capitalism? Why do Americans feel like the market isn't working for them? I don't think you can start with anything before you start with housing.

There is a crisis that we have done to ourselves because as Ezra said in his first answer, housing is not like a synthetic mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. It's not something that has to go through three phases of clinical trials to figure out how to do it. We know how to build it. We just have different rules in different places that dramatically limit the number of houses that can be added to many of the places that Americans most want to live. That is an enormous problem,

not only because it makes the American dream feel unaffordable for people, but also because it prices them out of where they want to live, forcing them into parts of the country that tend to be more low income. And so therefore, again, they feel like they're not getting the American dream.

So not to literally talk my book here, but when you point to this general feeling that capitalism is failing, I'm not gonna overrule any particular thing that you said. There's a number of enormous frustrations, but I do think that the biggest frustrations that people feel is that they're falling behind, their wages are falling behind the thing they most want in the world, which is the feeling

of financial security. And at the core of that feeling is a feeling that you can afford your rent or your mortgage. And it's there where America has failed. And it's there where I think our book is trying to be very, very specific about what are the rules and the laws and the places with the rules and the laws that are getting in the way of housing abundance. I mean, you raise a good point that I'm talking about very different issues, very different parts of the economy.

The connection that I'm trying to draw is that I think for a lot of people, it feels like there's a hoarding of wealth that is happening. Like in my view, what, the connection between the industry that I work in, the industry that other people work in, the way that when you go to a store there's nobody working there anymore, like it seems like it is no longer serving its purpose, is because we felt that there's like a squeezing out

of good things from the economy, right? They wanna control their labor costs. They want to drive down every expense of running the business so they can spread more money around on top. This is like, again, it's anecdotal on my part. And I think you also do a really good job of pointing out this can't be the answer to every single problem, right?

I think it's correct that the left tends to have a monomaniacal focus on like certain villains in the economy. But it also I know it seems to be salient that. I think we should tax wealth. Very blunt about this. I don't know how to intervene in every single industry to, like corporations are going to cost cut, right? Yeah.

I don't know what to do about, I also find going to CVS often to be frustrating. It seems to me they've under invested in labor. In theory, the market should correct that and maybe it is because I now get my, I now go to other pharmacies that I prefer to work with. So like maybe the market can handle that one on its own. But I don't think there's a doubt. It's like you look at the Forbes 400 list and over the decades, the people on it have more money.

And we have cut down, our income tax structure is pretty highly progressive still. And it's gotten more and less so a little bit, depending on which administration you're looking at, it'll probably get less so again in a year or two if Trump renews and expands his tax cuts. But it's not like we don't have progressive taxation. What we don't do a decent job of at all is wealth taxation. And wealth is a more potent form of political power.

And wealth is a more potent form of political power and wealth is a more potent form of intergenerational inequality and it's not easy in every respect to tax but it's not impossible either I mean there are many many many different proposals for how to do it I also tend to be a fan of pretty high estate taxes which not everybody is but I don't think you should be able to pass on all that much money I think that if it were the case, you could only pass on, I mean, my God, what a disaster if you could only give a hundred million dollars to your children. Right? Like, how would they survive?

And so, I think that there are areas of, I mean, we call it redistribution, I would call it tax policy in this particular case, that, yeah, we could do a very different job on. And, you know, I mean, some of this stuff, it's like, it's so well argued through that it feels like, you know, like, like barely like it needs to be repeated, but we tax work at a much higher rate

than we tax capital investment and capital returns. There's a lot we could do. We should do it. I think that might be a little bit different than some of the market structure and experiential questions you're describing, right? If your worry is the pooling and hoarding of wealth, then the most straightforward way to get at that worry is going to be through taxation. If your worry is that we have entered an era of capitalism that has become, I would call it hyper efficient in various ways.

Or you believe like, you know, it's anti-competitive, right? They're different. The problem is I'm a little bit loathe to say something super clear because the problems in different industries are different. And in some industries, what you might have is a monopoly problem or a monopsony problem. In some industries, you might just have very, very, very intense competition, leading to people cutting to the bone. In our industry, in media, I think it's actually something pretty different. I mean, I've been a media entrepreneur. I was one of the co-founders of Vox and worked at Vox Media in those years. And there was supposed to be a business model on the

internet, where you would attain much larger audiences than you were able to get before, because you were working with these platforms like Facebook and so on. Then you would turn those platforms that that audience into money. And then you would turn that money into reporting salaries. And then you would build big businesses like Conde Nast and the New York Times for a new generation. And what happened is that the platforms kept the money from the audiences that they generated. Correct. That's not an easy thing to solve. I actually don't think breaking them up would solve that. You can do that across a lot of platforms or across a few.

You could do things that are more aggressive where you're sort of forcing payments out to groups that you're getting value from. I've seen a lot of things there, but I think broadly speaking, tax policy is going to usually be your most straightforward answer for the hoarding of wealth. Yeah, the reason I bring this up is because, again, I love your overall commitment. I love the title of the book.

I love the sort of position of abundance as something we should prioritize. What I'm questioning is the focus on liberal process issues as the main restrictor of that abundance, right? That, like, I feel scarcity in a lot of parts of my life. Like, I largely agree with you on housing policy, for the most part. I think that we could do, I think it might be the hardest thing for the liberal Democrats

to call out the right-wing Democrats. That might actually be the harder choice, in my opinion, that they need to make. We might differ on that. But I agree with you about housing. But when I think about what feels scarce in my life, it's, you know, there are bigger things than process issues in liberalism.

For instance, you talk about the NIH and NSF and the grant making process and how, basically the bureaucracy has more power than the scientists. The scientists should have more power to decide what they research. And I listened to that part as amen. I love those agencies. I did a television show about them.

And I agree we could have a couple scientists who spend a little bit of money unwisely if that means that, you know, the 99% of scientists who we trust are going to do a good job, right? However, we live in a world where, you know, one party just dismantled both of those agencies. That's not happening at all anymore. And, you know, did it at behest of the forces that control them. Like, it's not obvious to me that the problem that really needs to be solved with the funding of science in America is the bureaucracy at the NIH. It's the, you know, it's simply the anti-government ideology that's metastasized

that has destroyed the NIH and the NSF. And that seems to, when I follow the line all the way back, go to the highest reaches of capitalism. You know, you talk about in the book that we need to invest highly in AI in America, as like sort of government infrastructure around AI, government data centers, things of that nature. Without getting into the nitty gritty of like what AI can actually do, when I look at the forces that are saying most loudly, AI is real and we need to invest in it, it's going to change reality, it's the same people who, who are currently taking apart the federal government.

It's Elon Musk and the people who funded Donald Trump. And so it seems, there's a lot of contradictions in here that I'm trying to work through. And yeah, I'd love to hear you speak to any of them. Well, I hear you saying a couple of things. One thing that I hear you saying, which I like, is that you're taking this concept of abundance and you're seeing it not as something

that literally applies just the chapters that we've enumerated, housing, energy, government, but you're applying them to your own life. You're thinking about what about abundance in, it's almost like what about abundance in human decency? What about abundance in terms of a moral tax code? There's a way in which I love that. I love that idea that a book like this can serve not only as a text for where we've gone

wrong in some very particular sectors, but also as a kind of launching point for people to try to look at the problems that they want solved on the supply side. How do I create a better world in my own area by taking the principles of this book and sprinkling them across society? I think there's something beautiful to that. There's also something that you said that I think is,

is complicated, which is that this is a book that was finished in October and November of 2024. And now we're talking about it in April of 2025. And so there's all sorts of issues like the tariffs and the fact that the Trump administration wants to cut the NIH budget by 40%, which was just impossible to comment on in October of 2024. Right? Of course. And so we're, and so we're, and so. And so we're talking about the ways in which this book lives in an environment

that it could not directly anticipate. I wanna make a really strong argument here that the principles of this book apply incredibly potently to this moment of politics. What you have with the Trump administration, I would say, at the bottom of all of it, is an individual, a personality, that doesn't believe in the concept of positive sum human interactions. That might be the core kernel of Donald Trump's personality DNA. And it

manifests itself in his attitude toward trade. He doesn't believe that trade is possible. And in part, that's because trade is the ultimate positive sum interaction. It's me saying, I have money and I want a shirt, and a factory saying, I have a shirt and I don't have money. And then us trading the money for the shirt and both of us feeling richer for the exchange that we're better off in this world

than we were in the world before that exchange happened. That's trade, It's positive sum. And the president doesn't believe it's possible. And because of his disbelief that positive sum human interactions are possible, he is destroying the American economy, the manufacturing sector, the farming sector and the stock market, not to mention the bond market, not to mention the value of the dollar, et cetera. So there's a way in which I think this inability to see positive

sum interactions as being something that can exist, like is like the core personality driver of this terrible moment that we're in. And that a book called Abundance that asks people to look at the positive some side of so many interactions in the economy and in government is a very valuable introduction. The very last thing that I would say when it comes to science, because I care so deeply about scientific discovery, and I'm glad that you do too, and I know that you've done a lot of work on scientific discovery and helping to popularize it.

What's happening right now is an absolute disaster for science, a 40% cut to the NIH, a war against some of the greatest research universities that we have. It's absolutely horrendous and there's no silver lining to what's happening today. It's just bad. But I think we're going to have an election in 2026, knocking on marble. I think we're going to have an election in 2028. I think we're going to have elections every two and four years for the next century. And the NIH, the NSF and DARPA, they're going to be rebuilt. How do we rebuild them? Do we rebuild the NIH that happened to exist in 2023?

Or do we rebuild something that we have caused to think will allow the best scientists in America to express their curiosity even more extravagantly and efficiently and gloriously so that discoveries of synthetic mRNA and GLP-1 drugs and all sorts of other diseases or medicines, I should say, to cure diseases that we can't even imagine right now are pulled into the future.

That moment of rebuilding, it is coming. We're going to need some kind of playbook to rebuild these incredibly important institutions. And the values that we talk about in this book, the values of curiosity, of allowing, I love the way you said it, allowing the capital S scientist to be bigger than the capital B bureaucracy.

We're going to need those values and we will need a project like this to make them salient for people. I agree with you, but my question is still, what is the biggest barrier for us getting there? Is it the process issues that you highlight, and I agree with, again, so many of them, or is it the fact that there are really, really powerful people who are against what you're talking about, who are on the other side of all of your commitments.

Let me try to answer this from a different direction. So one thing I hear you say a number of times here is like what we're focusing on is process issues. It's not really how I would describe it. What we are focusing on is there are a series of domains where people need an abundance of something, housing, clean energy, working public infrastructure, scientific discovery, whatever it might be. And we are trying to track back why they don't have it.

The problem is not process qua process, although if you look at any problem in a complex society, at some point you're dealing with process. The problem is we don't have enough homes. And like, I don't know if you would call, you know, a renewed public housing system, like a process fix. I wouldn't, right? I would call it a commitment to building enough homes. Right?

So I want to put that there because I think when you call things processed, it sounds very small, but process is just the mechanisms by which we get the things done that we need to get done. Now to your second point. I think you're conflating a couple different forms of powerful people or powerful institutions. If the titans of capitalism wanted what Donald Trump was doing, the stock market would be up and not down. Donald Trump and Elon Musk and JD Vance and so on, they're doing their own thing.

And they are very, very, very powerful, very malign people in my view. But they are not all doing the bidding of, you know, Jamie Dimon or something. If they were, again, like we would see a union between the mechanisms that tell you if corporations and, you know know expectations of future profit flows are happy and what they're what they're attempting their destruction of the NIH and

the NSF is a highly ideological project. I mean past Republican administrations have expanded both even amidst the Republican war on government eras. Trump is a pretty distinctive force. We did a poll here I think it was a New York Times poll I definitely saw it on our site today and it was about Doge. And the poll basically said, do you think Doge is a good idea, something like Doge? And it was like plus 18 or plus six. I forget which of these was which. And then I was like, do you think government is inefficient? And it was plus 18. Do you think Doge is a good idea?

Plus six. Do you think Doge is doing a good job minus some large number? Do you think Elon Musk is doing a good job with Doge like minus an even larger number? And one thing I take from that is allowing not just the perception but the reality of profound government inefficiency and incapacity is dangerous. One way you beat dangerous movements is you prove the success of your own. If California's politicians from Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsom could run on the nationwide belief that California is the best governed country or the best governed state in the nation, maybe Donald Trump doesn't get elected. And

if people believed that the government was good at delivering what it promises, maybe they would be less open in the first accounting to people who emerge to say, government sucks. I'm going to cut it up and make it work for you again. Now, Musk has not done, I think, the thing that he promised to do, which is why his actual carrying out of this project is unpopular. And I don't think this is like, I don't think anybody wanted him to gut the NIH or the NSF, right? And again, it's why I think his project is actually unpopular. But nobody should be more committed to creating

not just the perceptual sense, but the lived reality that American government works, then the people want to defend it. And I think that one place where maybe you and I part a little bit, I just think corporations, corporate power, the rich, etc. They're complicated here. They want different things. Some of them I really disagree with. Some of them I probably agree with more. But there is absolutely a populist right in this country, a counter-revolutionary ideological force. You've had Corey Robin on the show.

I think the reactionary mind is like one of the good, the one of the key texts of this era. I was rereading it recently and it describes Trump 2 better than it describes Trump 1. It's a really, really important book, I think. Trying to drain the energy from that movement is essential. And one way you do it, I think, is by delivering the things you promised. I just did a bunch of interviews with Biden administration people about, because we were

arguing a bit about this. There are a bunch of big headline projects they did that just people could not feel in their lives by the time the administration ended. We passed $42 billion for rural broadband. It didn't hook anybody up. We passed $7.5 billion for a nationwide electric charger network. It didn't build more than a couple hundred electric chargers. We had all this money going to roads and bridges, but the bridges and roads were not fixed before the election. We made these changes to Medicare, but they didn't go into effect before the election.

And I realized as I was talking to them, they would quibble with me on this or that point, but they wouldn't, they actually would then say, oh, but the whole situation was worse than you knew. One of the people I talked to was Jake Sullivan, and I wanna read you a quote from him that I just sort of found a little bit shocking. I'm gonna pull this up for a second here.

Please. Uh, and he says, we had an agenda to build and that meant we hit the obstacles to building and those were very radicalizing. It's the sludge of so many different built up processes, regulations, and ways of doing business. You try to build anything and you're stepping into quicksand and the harder you struggle against it, the more you get sucked into it. I don't believe politics is a single factor equation through which the delivery of government

services and goods leads to the victories in politics of the people I like. But I don't believe that's irrelevant to it either. I heard from so many people who practice actual politics that the fact that people remembered that Trump had given them stimulus checks with his name and giant letters on them mattered. They remembered him fondly for it. They didn't want Elon Musk to kill the NIH. They wanted money in their pocket. They wanted the prices that they've experienced during the Trump administration as opposed to during the Biden administration. And so making a government that delivers to me is not like a minor procedural point.

And it's not a way of like evading the role of power. Like every process that is affected and warped is in some way warped by different groups wielding different kinds of power. But if you don't want to let these people get into government and destroy it, then the people who promise that we're the party of government and we're going to do all these good things from you, from rural broadband to high-speed rail to affordable housing, well, then you better be able to fucking feel those things when those people are governing. And if we snap the cord of accountability between promises and some usable timeframe,

right, if you get your roads 10 years after you pass your bill you get your bridges five years after that You get your Medicare prescription drugs negotiated down, you know Three or four years after you pass it when we built the Medicare program in one year Then yeah, you've opened the door to something pretty dangerous. You don't have an orderly border You've opened the door turns out to something pretty dangerous. You don't have an orderly border. You've opened the door, it turns out to something very dangerous. So I think you should be pretty obsessed in that world with government delivery because it turns out that the other thing isn't Mitt Romney.

It's Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Russ Vaught. And like if the thing that is hanging in the balance is like liberal democracy and not just whether or not we fund the NIH, whether or not we disappear people living here to El Salvador and torture prisons Then you're gonna have to fight on all fronts simultaneously But definitely one of the fronts you got to fight on is making it so you don't have plus 18

You know a net positive 18 result when you say to people is government terribly inefficient. Yeah and I think I agree with so much of that and I think that Yeah. And I think, I agree with so much of that, and I think that, again, your prodding of the left to focus on the results of the commitments that they actually have is important. And, yeah, we should end there because I know you folks have to run. It's been a wonderful conversation. You can, of course, pick up a copy of the book at our bookshop factuallypod.com slash books. Where else can people find you online all over the place?

At the Ezra Klein Show, available right to get your podcasts or YouTubes in the New York Times. My podcast Plain English, my writing at the Atlantic. Thank you so much, Derek and Ezra. Thanks so much, Adam. This was a pleasure. Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Ezra Klein

and Derek Thompson for coming on the show. Once again, their book is called Abundance. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, FactuallyPod.com slash books. When you do your purchase and support, not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. I hope you'll check it out. If you want to support the show directly,

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