Democrats need to do something

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0:01:03 If I had to pick one word to really capture American politics, for most of my adult life at least,
0:01:07 it wouldn’t be hope or change or forward or future.
0:01:11 The word I’d choose is inertia.
0:01:15 It doesn’t matter what the slogans are or what the speeches say.
0:01:21 In terms of getting things done, or fundamentally changing how we do things,
0:01:24 both parties seem slow to solve problems.
0:01:27 Slow to build new things.
0:01:29 Slow to change anything, really.
0:01:33 Until now.
0:01:39 As you know, the Trump administration has been passing executive orders
0:01:43 and implementing new policies at a breakneck pace.
0:01:50 Attempting to remake entire swaths of the federal government.
0:01:53 And you might not like what they’re doing.
0:01:54 I don’t.
0:01:56 But they are doing something.
0:01:59 And the Democratic opposition?
0:02:02 Well, they don’t seem to have the answers.
0:02:09 At the very least, they cannot articulate a different vision for America’s future that the country wants.
0:02:11 Why is that?
0:02:17 Why couldn’t Democrats craft a message that resonated with voters in 2024’s election?
0:02:22 And why, in the face of Trump and Musk and Doge,
0:02:25 in a relentless attack on American institutions,
0:02:30 are Democrats unable to convince America that their way of governing is better?
0:02:36 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:43 Today’s guest is Ezra Klein,
0:02:45 the former host of this podcast,
0:02:49 the current host of The Ezra Klein Show at The New York Times,
0:02:52 and the co-author of a new book called Abundance,
0:02:55 which he wrote with journalist Derek Thompson.
0:03:04 Ezra argues that in states run by Democrats,
0:03:07 policy failures have contributed to the rising cost of living.
0:03:09 to address this crisis,
0:03:12 and really any crisis America is facing,
0:03:17 it needs to be easier to build and invent the things that America needs.
0:03:21 And in our current system, that’s almost impossible to do.
0:03:26 Not because we don’t have the means, the technology, or the know-how.
0:03:28 We have all of that in spades.
0:03:31 What we don’t have is a political economy that makes sense.
0:03:36 Ezra believes that this idea should be the major,
0:03:39 maybe the only focus of liberal politics in America.
0:03:42 So I invited him onto the show, his old show,
0:03:43 to tell me more.
0:03:49 Ezra Klein, welcome to the show.
0:03:53 Ah, it’s like stepping back into an old couch
0:03:56 that you’ve sat in so much that it slightly has an imprint of your body.
0:03:57 I finally feel like I’m back home.
0:03:59 We’re glad to have you.
0:04:00 I’m glad to be here.
0:04:03 All right, let’s get to the book, Abundance.
0:04:07 You want this book to reorient liberal thinking in America.
0:04:10 Tell me, what are you looking to change?
0:04:15 I think it’s important for liberals, for progressives,
0:04:22 to recenter technology as an engine of social progress.
0:04:25 Most liberals can tell you which five social insurance programs
0:04:27 they’d like to create or substantially expand,
0:04:29 but they can’t tell you which five technologies.
0:04:32 They want the government to really organize resources and intention
0:04:34 towards pulling in from the future into the present.
0:04:38 So the idea of Abundance is that to have the future we want,
0:04:41 we need to build and invent the things we need.
0:04:44 Some of the things we need to build are things we know how to build,
0:04:47 like housing, like clean energy, like high-speed rail.
0:04:50 Some of the things are things we need to invent.
0:04:52 We are not going to hit our climate targets.
0:04:54 I mean, we’re not currently on pace to hit them at all,
0:04:56 but we’re definitely not going to hit them
0:04:57 if we cannot figure out things like green cement
0:05:00 and low-carbon or low-emissions jet fuel,
0:05:02 things we literally do not have,
0:05:05 certainly not at an affordability point we can scale.
0:05:09 There are problems you cannot solve without innovation.
0:05:13 So this is really an effort to put building and innovation,
0:05:17 the expansion of supply, at the center of liberalism.
0:05:20 Well, one thing I do appreciate about the book
0:05:24 is that you’re not trying to offer a suite of policy solutions.
0:05:26 It’s more about articulating the questions.
0:05:29 You think our politics should revolve around.
0:05:33 Why do you think it’s important to begin with the right questions?
0:05:35 You see what you’re looking for.
0:05:40 And I think that American liberalism has learned to look
0:05:42 for opportunities to subsidize.
0:05:44 Health insurance is too expensive.
0:05:45 Can we make it subsidized?
0:05:49 If people need housing, we give them a rental voucher, sometimes.
0:05:53 If they need to go to college, we give them a Pell Grant.
0:05:55 If they need food, we give them SNAP.
0:06:00 If they need income as a retiree or as an elderly person,
0:06:01 we give them Social Security, right?
0:06:06 We know how to look for opportunities to do money or voucher-like things.
0:06:07 That’s really important.
0:06:12 But we do not look for opportunities to expand supply.
0:06:13 And that creates two problems.
0:06:18 One is that if you subsidize something and you don’t have enough supply of it, you will just
0:06:20 have price increases or rationing.
0:06:25 The other is that they’re just things you need that if you don’t increase the supply of them,
0:06:26 you’re just not going to have.
0:06:31 And look, I’m a Californian, and when I look around my home state where I lived for much
0:06:35 of the writing of the book, and I think, what has deranged Californian politics?
0:06:40 Why can Gavin Newsom not run for president in 2028 as he wants to do and say, elect me,
0:06:42 and you can all have the California dream?
0:06:44 Because nobody thinks it’s a dream.
0:06:45 It’s losing people.
0:06:46 And why is it losing people?
0:06:47 Because the cost of living is too high.
0:06:49 And why is the cost of living too high?
0:06:50 We don’t have enough of the things we need.
0:06:53 We don’t have enough supply of housing, child care, et cetera.
0:06:59 And so you will get different answers to the question of how to expand different things.
0:07:03 If you ask me why it’s hard to lay down transmission lines, that is a different answer
0:07:06 than why is it hard to build affordable housing in San Francisco.
0:07:10 But just simply asking the question of how do we get more of the thing we want,
0:07:15 that I think is a more productive place to start and one that just honestly a lot of
0:07:18 liberal governance is going to ride by not centering.
0:07:24 Well, you know, people will hear these kinds of complaints and they will immediately think
0:07:26 of all the ways the other side is to blame.
0:07:34 But you do say pretty early on that some of these outcomes reflect an ideological conspiracy
0:07:35 at the heart of our politics.
0:07:37 What’s the argument here?
0:07:43 So I think that liberals, frankly, conservatives too, are comfortable with the narrative that
0:07:49 we had a conservative movement that arose in the latter half of the 20th century, has attained
0:07:54 yet more power in the 21st, that is anti-government, that wants to, as Governor Norquist famously
0:07:56 put it, strangle government in a bathtub.
0:08:03 That doesn’t really explain, though, why governance in places where conservative Republicans have
0:08:08 functionally no power, California, Illinois, New York, is pretty bad.
0:08:14 And to understand that, you have to start looking at something else that does not get as much
0:08:19 narrative weight in our politics, which is starting in, again, the back half of the 20th
0:08:26 century, there was a liberalism, the new left, that arose in response to the New Deal left.
0:08:30 And what New Deal liberalism put at its center was growing to build things.
0:08:32 We had a rapidly expanding population.
0:08:34 We were this, you know, new superpower.
0:08:36 And we went on this orgy of building.
0:08:37 And we often built recklessly.
0:08:39 We built in ways that damaged the environment.
0:08:44 We, you know, I grew up outside of Los Angeles at a time when you would have that curtain of
0:08:47 smog descend and your eyes would water and people would cough.
0:08:49 And it was really bad for kids and, frankly, adults.
0:08:55 And so this sort of liberalism emerged that was about making it harder to build, that was
0:09:00 about making sure government couldn’t do what, say, Robert Moses did in New York and cut
0:09:02 a freeway right through, you know, a marginalized community.
0:09:07 And frankly, more than that, it ended up being a liberalism that really made it impossible to
0:09:09 cut a freeway through an affluent community.
0:09:13 And a lot of this was not just well-intentioned.
0:09:14 It worked.
0:09:15 We cleaned up the environment.
0:09:17 We cleaned up the air.
0:09:18 We cleaned up water.
0:09:22 We did make it harder for government to do stupid things or act without thinking about
0:09:22 its actions.
0:09:26 Over time, those things grew and grew and grew.
0:09:30 Those statutes, those processes, those movements, liberals became more affluent.
0:09:31 They had more to defend.
0:09:36 And so in places even where you didn’t really have a strong conservative movement, what you
0:09:44 did develop was a way of doing government that was so coalitional, that had so many opportunities
0:09:50 for veto, had so many opportunities for individuals or nonprofits to sue the government, that you
0:09:51 just couldn’t get shit done.
0:09:57 And so construction productivity has been functionally falling in America for a very long time or stagnating
0:09:58 in some areas.
0:10:03 And so as the years have gone by, we’ve gotten really good at building in the digital world.
0:10:07 We can make cryptocurrencies and AI and this whole expansive internet and really quite
0:10:09 shitty at building in the real world.
0:10:17 Look, I think rattling off a bunch of numbers isn’t awesome, but I have to just at least mention
0:10:21 a couple here because it just illustrates the problem, right?
0:10:22 So this is from your book.
0:10:29 It cost about $609 million to build a kilometer of high-speed rail in the U.S.
0:10:31 $609.
0:10:32 Just rail, not high-speed.
0:10:34 Oh, even better.
0:10:37 In Germany, it’s $384.
0:10:39 In Canada, $295.
0:10:41 Japan, $267.
0:10:44 And in Portugal, fuck, they’re really doing something right.
0:10:46 It’s only $96 million.
0:10:48 How is that even real?
0:10:53 So one thing to note about that is that conservatives will say, yeah, the government sucks.
0:10:54 Don’t use it.
0:10:56 But those countries have governments.
0:11:00 Those countries actually have higher union density than the U.S. does.
0:11:04 So there is something about the way we do government here, the way we do building here.
0:11:06 And there’s a bunch of different answers to that.
0:11:10 One of the big ones is we are very focused on adversarial legalism, as it’s called.
0:11:17 We make it the primary way we let people constrain the government is by suing it.
0:11:19 Suing it takes a long time.
0:11:24 I mean, and, you know, at this moment, people are glad we have a way to sue the government under Donald Trump.
0:11:27 So the point is not that it is always and everywhere bad.
0:11:36 But nevertheless, there is a dimension where we have made it so hard for the government to act, so slow for it to act, that it just functionally can’t act.
0:11:43 And one thing about those numbers that you then see is that we just don’t do as many big infrastructure projects anymore for all kinds of reasons.
0:11:47 We’re very afraid of doing anything that requires tunneling in a way they’re not in other countries.
0:11:50 The Second Avenue subway in New York City is like a total nightmare.
0:11:55 And we have just created ways of building that don’t work.
0:11:57 I wish they did.
0:11:58 What’s the Second Avenue subway?
0:12:07 Oh, it’s a subway extension in New York that has been planned for a very, very long time that was supposed to be much more ambitious than it will now be.
0:12:15 Look, when they began building the New York subways, they opened the first 28 stations, I think it was, in four years, if I’m not wrong.
0:12:20 It takes decades now to do anything, to do like one station.
0:12:44 You would think, with the advances in machinery we have, with the advances in imaging we have, with the advances in 3D computerized drafting that we have, I mean, you would think, with everything we have built, advanced machinery-wise, since 1908, we would make things bigger, better, faster, right?
0:12:46 We would be just way better at building things than we were then.
0:12:48 But we’re just not.
0:12:50 I mean, we are safer at building them.
0:12:53 There are things we were better at planning for when we build them.
0:12:55 I don’t want to suggest that no advancement has happened.
0:12:58 But they built the Empire State Building in a year.
0:12:59 A year.
0:13:01 We just can’t do that anymore.
0:13:04 And the reason isn’t that we have forgotten technique.
0:13:11 And the reason isn’t that we haven’t had things advance in terms of machinery and building.
0:13:13 The reason is we’ve made the politics of building very, very difficult.
0:13:16 And we’ve made the process of building very, very cumbersome.
0:13:21 I talk about the example of California high-speed rail at some length, but I think it’s a good one.
0:13:24 And I could say a million things about it, but I’ll say this.
0:13:27 High-speed rail replaces cars.
0:13:28 It’s pretty clean, right?
0:13:34 It’s a good—the reason to do it, in part, is it is an environmentally friendly form of transportation.
0:13:41 The effort to environmentally clear the high-speed rail line that California intended to use began in 2012.
0:13:48 By the time I wrapped the book, at the end of 2024, it was almost, but not quite done.
0:13:51 12 years, and it was not finished.
0:13:59 And the question that that environmental review was asking was not, was high-speed rail having it better than not having it?
0:14:10 It’s in every individual parcel of track, had they considered all the possible consequences of having it?
0:14:14 Mitigated all the possible downsides, which, of course, the status quo does not have to do.
0:14:21 And, you know, most importantly, bulletproofed themselves as much as they can against lawsuits, which can take years to play out.
0:14:26 This replicates across clean energy efforts.
0:14:32 Congestion pricing in New York City was held up for years in environmental assessment.
0:14:35 And these are for things that are good for the environment.
0:14:43 So this is—it’s one example, but these are liberal policies that liberals defend that make it very hard for liberals to deliver on the things liberals say they are going to give people.
0:14:44 That’s a problem.
0:14:54 I just want to stress that part of what makes this so maddening is that it’s an outcome basically no one really wants, right?
0:15:04 It’s the system, it’s the incentive structure, it’s individuals making narrowly rational decisions, which in the end produce incredibly stupid, unhelpful results.
0:15:07 That is definitely a big part of it.
0:15:11 Some things are drift, some things are accidental, some things are unseen, and some things are intended.
0:15:19 When we talk about housing, which is different than something like rail, you’re dealing with a problem that housing has become a core financial asset.
0:15:26 And that asset is often made more valuable, or at least people believe it will be made more valuable, by scarcity.
0:15:39 And the idea that, you know, you’ve got this house on a block of San Francisco or Brooklyn or whatever, and you don’t want a large affordable housing complex going up down the street, it’s not crazy.
0:15:41 I mean, that might actually hurt your parking.
0:15:44 That might actually hurt your home values, depending on how it plays out.
0:15:54 But now you’ve got a real problem, because you’ve made the engine of wealth something that the only way people can feel comfortable to keep going up is to make sure we don’t build enough housing around it.
0:15:56 But we need to build enough housing around it.
0:15:57 And so who’s winning?
0:15:59 You know, the people already who have the assets.
0:16:05 And liberalism has to ask, like, does it hold the values it puts on lawn signs?
0:16:07 You know, human being is illegal and kindness is everything.
0:16:12 And, you know, or is it, you know, and I got mine?
0:16:15 You know, sorry you didn’t get yours ethos.
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0:19:14 Look, I guess we’re a couple of months into this new administration.
0:19:19 People feel as though the government is acting very rapidly.
0:19:21 How do you make sense of that?
0:19:27 I mean, is that just because it’s basically breaking shit and breaking shit is significantly easier than building shit?
0:19:39 Elon Musk and Donald Trump decided, certainly Musk decided, that he just wasn’t going to treat a lot of things that have constrained past administrations as real and binding.
0:19:45 And it turns out from watching them, there’s a lot more you could do than people thought you could do.
0:19:48 The civil service protections were not nearly as binding as people made them seem to be.
0:19:55 I do not like what Elon Musk is doing in terms of indiscriminately and ideologically firing huge swaths of the federal workforce.
0:20:01 But I believe four months ago, and I believe today, that it was way too hard to hire and fire in the civil service.
0:20:11 And because liberalism never fixed that in a way that was conceptually and morally appropriate, now we’re getting this burn-it-down approach.
0:20:13 And I think that’s true in a lot of things.
0:20:20 If you do not make government work, someone else will eventually weaponize the dissatisfaction with it and burn it to the ground.
0:20:30 And liberals had no really good things to say about cost of living and affordability in the 2024 election, in part because they themselves have been bad on cost of living and affordability.
0:20:32 The places they govern have become unaffordable.
0:20:37 And that was part of why they lost to Donald Trump in an election that was about cost of living and affordability.
0:20:42 I don’t want to put everything on liberals or liberalism.
0:20:48 The right deserves – the right has to take responsibility for its own actions, its own failures.
0:20:51 The things they want are very different than the things I want.
0:20:53 But yes, Musk has come in.
0:20:54 Trump has come in.
0:21:01 And they have not treated process as binding or even something worth respecting in the way liberalism has.
0:21:09 And I think the two coalitions have developed mirror image pathologies, which is liberals are much too respectful and obsessed by process.
0:21:15 And the right now has functionally no process and no respect for it and no respect for the legality of things.
0:21:26 And, you know, I would like to see something that is more thoughtfully integrating of these perspectives.
0:21:29 I mean, look, can I just vent for a second?
0:21:30 You know what, man?
0:21:31 It’s a podcast.
0:21:32 It’s your podcast.
0:21:36 I mean – okay.
0:21:39 So, Democrats believe in government, right?
0:21:41 Have used government, as you were saying, to do great things.
0:21:51 And I agree that they have created or helped create a wildly sclerotic system that makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to build stuff and do stuff.
0:21:58 But meanwhile, Republicans don’t really believe in government except for defense and national security.
0:22:00 They want to dismantle it.
0:22:01 They want to privatize everything.
0:22:07 And this dynamic is eternally to their advantage because, again, breaking shit is easier than building shit.
0:22:13 And in their efforts to break government, they’ve increased the public’s disgust with it because it keeps not working.
0:22:15 And this is the doom loop.
0:22:20 And I definitely take your point about absurd liberal proceduralism.
0:22:28 But I do think having one of our two government parties enter into politics with the explicit aim of making government not work is a problem.
0:22:34 And I don’t know how liberals and Democrats can solve that because this is a 51-49 country.
0:22:36 Well, maybe it wouldn’t be if we were better at governing.
0:22:37 You think so?
0:22:38 I hope so.
0:22:44 This thing liberals do, where it’s like, oh, man, they’re so bad.
0:22:45 And they are.
0:22:47 Like, I am fucking furious.
0:22:57 And you know what I also am is I’m fucking furious that liberals gave up the, like, mantle of people who would fix your problems to this band of idiots.
0:22:59 It makes me angry.
0:23:01 Like, it should make other people angry.
0:23:05 And just telling yourself endlessly that they are so bad, what are we going to do?
0:23:07 Well, you know what would be good if we did?
0:23:11 Created a situation where people said, California, that’s a well-run state.
0:23:16 Maybe one of any of the 18 national-level figures it has recently produced should be president.
0:23:19 New York, there’s a big economically important state.
0:23:23 Maybe somebody from it should be a plausible national figure.
0:23:33 You can’t, like, it is easier to run for president as a governor of Texas or Florida than the governor of California and New York.
0:23:35 Now, that’s not true for everywhere.
0:23:36 Jared Polis has done a good job in Colorado.
0:23:38 And you know what happened in Colorado in 2024?
0:23:46 They didn’t suffer a complete collapse of the Democratic vote share in the way that happened in California and New York.
0:23:48 Because on some level, governing will does matter.
0:23:55 And, like, I don’t think being a nihilistic party is highly popular, but being an ineffectual party is also not highly popular.
0:24:05 So what you’re preaching, right, doing big things, building big things, actually leading, governing, investing in the future, people will say, well, you know, Joe Biden kind of did this, right?
0:24:06 Or he appeared to do this.
0:24:09 He passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
0:24:10 He did the Chips and Science Act.
0:24:12 He did the Inflation Reduction Act.
0:24:13 And it’s like it never happened.
0:24:14 He got no credit.
0:24:16 It passed away like a fart in the wind.
0:24:19 So, like, what is the lesson of that for you?
0:24:25 Did all of that just fail politically because maybe the money was allocated, but for all the reasons you’ve outlined, nothing actually got done?
0:24:27 Or is it something else?
0:24:28 There are a couple things here.
0:24:34 So, one is that there was a huge problem with running Joe Biden for president a second time.
0:24:35 There just was.
0:24:38 I mean, obviously, with somebody who was not in favor of that.
0:24:49 But I think Joe Biden, if you change nothing about the election except Joe Biden into 65 and can effectively tell a story about his own administration, I think he would have won re-election.
0:24:49 I really do.
0:24:53 Now, his record alone was not that strong.
0:24:58 Part of that was inflation, which they bear a modest amount of the blame for.
0:25:05 It is the case that they put too much demand into the economy at a time when supply chains were choking, and that ended up being a bad idea.
0:25:15 But, yeah, on the other side, when you make it slow to get these things built, it really does harm you.
0:25:20 So, they got $42 billion for broadband access in poor communities.
0:25:22 How many people got broadband?
0:25:23 Approximately zero.
0:25:28 So, yeah, Biden’s a complicated case because I do think there are movements towards abundance.
0:25:34 I don’t think there was a serious effort to show that they’re making government spend in a way that was, you know, meant to benefit people.
0:25:47 I think it’s fucking a problem that Doge is a dark Republican con as opposed to something that was a bright Democratic idea.
0:26:05 I would have loved an actual Department of Government efficiency that was acting with real aggression, not the illegal and almost nihilistic levels of aggression under Elon Musk, but was really, really, really upset about places where government was failing and was making a big show of that.
0:26:10 And you saw something like this under Bill Clinton with the Reinventing Government Initiative, which Al Gore got.
0:26:17 But under Biden, they had this hyper-coalitional approach to politics and hyper-bureaucratic approach to the federal government.
0:26:22 And, you know, they didn’t have any real—they never bought themselves credibility on that.
0:26:25 They never seemed upset about things like they were doing wrong, right?
0:26:27 Everything just kind of got explained away.
0:26:36 And so, yeah, then at the end of the day, people felt prices had increased a bunch, and they were going around saying, no, no, no, we’ve spent all this money to spark a manufacturing boom.
0:26:39 And, you know, the two things didn’t connect.
0:26:42 Okay.
0:26:48 So, let’s talk about how to fix shit, okay?
0:27:04 If the big problem—and this is a book written broadly from the left, by the left, for the left, and the big problem on the left is this soul-crushing proceduralism, what is the solution to that?
0:27:06 There is no one solution.
0:27:11 I’m not, you know, it’s not one weird trick to get rid of your belly fat here.
0:27:22 What I see us as trying to do is build—in certain ways, rebuild—an ideological tendency in politics, but on the left.
0:27:26 And it will take time for that to take root and do big things.
0:27:30 It will take time for it to change processes, if it ever does.
0:27:33 It will take time for it to do new legislation.
0:27:43 You know, one of the most inspiring of the movements here that I think are part of, like, this broader sense of refocusing on supply is the YIMBY movement.
0:27:45 Can you just say what the YIMBYs are just for people to know?
0:27:56 The Yes in My Backyard movement, which is basically a sort of tendency—they want to be bipartisan, but at least began, like, as an intra-liberal fight over saying, no, no, to be a liberal, you can’t be fighting this development.
0:27:58 You can’t be fighting new homes.
0:27:59 You can’t be fighting affordable housing.
0:28:02 You can’t say we can build nothing and then say you’re a liberal.
0:28:07 Liberalism requires building enough that living in this city is affordable for the working class.
0:28:10 And they’ve had incredible intellectual victories.
0:28:13 Kamala Harris is running on building three million new homes.
0:28:18 Barack Obama, you know, brought up functionally YIMBYism during his DNC speech.
0:28:23 But again, in the place where it is most powerful, it has not moved the needle in a significant way.
0:28:27 And it’s because it’s still been bogged down in these coalitional fights.
0:28:31 And, you know, I was talking to somebody who is a developer down there, and I was saying, look,
0:28:36 they’ve passed all these bills in California to give you a fast track to build housing.
0:28:38 Why aren’t you building more housing?
0:28:39 He said, oh, I don’t use any of those bills.
0:28:41 I said, well, why?
0:28:46 He’s like, well, in order to use those bills, I have to agree to a whole new set of standards.
0:28:49 I have to pay higher wages, prevailing wages.
0:28:50 I have to do all these different things.
0:28:56 So in the end, the fast track of that would end up costing me more than just not doing it all.
0:28:58 And he’s like, that’s how I am.
0:28:59 That’s how all my developer friends are.
0:29:01 Like, the budgeting of it just doesn’t work out.
0:29:05 And, you know, all these things are good on some level.
0:29:06 Like, I want people to pay high wages.
0:29:12 But when you have a housing crisis, right, California in 2022, it had 12% of the country’s population.
0:29:14 It had 30% of its homeless population.
0:29:18 It had 50% of its unsheltered homeless population.
0:29:21 California is an astonishing homelessness crisis.
0:29:23 And that is driven by a housing crisis.
0:29:33 When you have a housing crisis and you’re passing a bunch of bills to build more housing and your bills aren’t working, well, then you have to ask, like, are the coalitional decisions you’re making good ones?
0:29:42 Or do you have to deal with the housing crisis in your housing crisis bills and try to think about wages and do an income tax credit or whatever you want to do in other bills?
0:29:46 But if your bills to solve your crisis are not solving your crisis, you’ve got to do something different.
0:29:48 It’s not going to be easy.
0:29:57 It’s going to take a political movement that, you know, over time begins to just see things differently at a lot of different levels and chip away at things in a lot of different ways.
0:29:59 And it will take aggressive leadership.
0:30:03 Again, you know, I don’t want to see what Elon Musk and Doge are doing to become the norm.
0:30:13 But I would like to see much more aggressive leadership from liberal politicians who are furious at government not working and insistent that it has to work and has to deliver the outcomes they actually promise.
0:30:31 This week on Unexplainable, the final installment of Good Robot, our four-part series on the stories we tell about AI.
0:30:36 So what I want you to do first is I want you to open up ChatGPT.
0:30:38 This time, the robots.
0:30:46 And I want you to say, I’m going to give you three episodes of a series in order.
0:30:47 Come for our jobs.
0:30:49 Why are you laughing?
0:30:50 I don’t know.
0:30:51 It’s like a little creepy.
0:31:01 Good Robot, a four-part series about AI from Julia Longoria and Unexplainable, wherever you listen.
0:31:27 Okay, so let’s just assume that we are able to clear the way for big innovations and invention.
0:31:32 What do you think we most need and how quickly do we need it?
0:31:35 So we’ve had abundance of some things for quite some time, right?
0:31:39 We’ve really built the global economy to give us an abundance of consumer goods.
0:31:46 Forty years ago, you could go to public college debt-free, but you couldn’t have a flat-screen television.
0:31:48 And now it’s basically the reverse, right?
0:31:50 You can have a flat-screen television, but you can’t go to college debt-free.
0:32:05 So we’re sort of more interested in abundance in the things that are the building blocks of what we think of as not just a good life, but the building blocks of a kind of creative and generative, productive life.
0:32:17 So the things people really need that allow them to do other things, education, health care, and inside of health care, it doesn’t mean just everybody having insurance, but it means having cures to as much as we can, right?
0:32:28 The value of health insurance, you know, my partner, she’s written a lot about this, so this is not me speaking out of turn, but, you know, she has a bunch of very complex and strange autoimmune diseases.
0:32:40 Our health insurance would be a hell of a lot more valuable to me if it had cures for all of them, you know, and this is true for anybody who, you know, who knows people or loves people or they themselves suffer from difficult diseases.
0:32:43 So what, like, the pace of medical innovation really matters.
0:32:55 Housing, like, you just need to be able to build homes, and I want to see working-class families be able to live in the big, economically productive cities.
0:33:11 And that matters not just because, like, it’s fun to live in New York City or San Francisco, but because it is a fundamental path to productivity and to social mobility and to opportunity to have all classes living in the places that are the biggest economic engines.
0:33:21 And one thing we’ve seen that’s a very, very worrying trend is it used to be that poor people migrated to rich places, and then they got richer, and now they migrate away from them because they can’t afford to live in them.
0:33:27 And that takes away all the opportunity those rich places used to offer to people who weren’t already rich.
0:33:30 Michael Bloomberg used to talk about New York City as a luxury good.
0:33:33 Cities are not supposed to be luxury goods.
0:33:39 They are engines of opportunity, and when we gate them, we have turned off something very fundamental in the economy.
0:33:50 So I love the section at the end of the book about these periods of political order where there’s a broad alignment of values, right?
0:34:02 So after the wreckage of the Great Depression and World War II, we have this spirit of solidarity and collective action, and the power of the state expands enormously, and this is the New Deal era.
0:34:15 And then this consensus collapses in the 70s, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, and we get the neoliberal era, which is defined much more by individualism and consumerism.
0:34:26 And I guess my question to you is, to undertake the sort of project you’re talking about here, this era of abundance, that will require a shift in priorities and outlook.
0:34:33 And do you think that’s possible in this environment, in the absence of some kind of truly epic calamity?
0:34:37 Like, do we have the attentional resources to course-correct as a country anymore?
0:34:43 I never think things happen all the way or none of the way.
0:34:46 Like, there was no pure neoliberal era.
0:34:48 Nothing in this period was pure neoliberalism.
0:34:53 Now, there are ideological tendencies that win out during periods.
0:34:56 But, you know, the neoliberal era is full of contradictions.
0:35:02 What is opening possibilities right now are very real problems that people have to figure out how to solve.
0:35:05 Now, history is not, to me, teleological.
0:35:07 I don’t believe the arc of history bends towards abundance.
0:35:10 I think that it could go very badly.
0:35:17 One of the things that we see with Trump is, look, that guy could have run as a sort of conservative abundance.
0:35:19 I mean, he would want different things than I do.
0:35:21 The values would be different.
0:35:23 But he’s not.
0:35:26 He does not want to bring the Texas housing policies to the nation.
0:35:34 He and J.D. Vance have repeatedly used the housing crisis as a cudgel against immigrants and an argument for why we need to close the border, right?
0:35:35 That’s a scarcity approach.
0:35:40 He doesn’t want to increase the flows of international trade by making us build more stuff.
0:35:43 He’s using tariffs to cut them down.
0:35:52 Like, Elon Musk is not expanding what the government can do, given that the government is what allowed him to build Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity.
0:35:55 He is trying to slash and destroy what the government can do.
0:36:01 Right-wing populism loves scarcity because at the core of its politics is a suspicion of the other.
0:36:09 If there is the feeling or the reality of there not being enough, then we look with a lot of suspicion on those who might take what we have or what we want.
0:36:12 So I do think it’s going to be up to the left to try to embrace abundance.
0:36:19 But if we don’t or if we fail, yeah, scarcity could just be the politics that wins out in the day.
0:36:21 It has in many eras of human history before.
0:36:33 I wonder if you think we’ll need a fundamentally different kind of communication environment shaped by different tools in order to have something like a constructive form of politics that makes these sorts of changes possible.
0:36:34 I don’t think that.
0:36:36 Why not?
0:36:37 I hope you’re right.
0:36:44 Because I think that the current information ecosystem is bad.
0:36:47 I think it has been often bad in human history.
0:36:52 I don’t think the specific way it’s bad is really at the root of many of the things that I’m worried about.
0:36:59 And I don’t think the information ecosystem cares one way or the other about local permitting.
0:37:06 I don’t think the information ecosystem, like, frankly, I think it’s actually quite friendly to all sorts of different forms of futurism.
0:37:14 I think that it’s not standing in the way of all progress or all change.
0:37:25 And like one just good example of that is that, you know, it in some ways created Trump, Musk, Vance.
0:37:28 But it’s not stopping them from doing things.
0:37:34 And Trump won by the popular vote by 1.5 points.
0:37:40 So, you could very much imagine a Democrat, you know, like, imagine a different world.
0:37:42 Joe Biden does not run for re-election.
0:37:43 We have a Democratic primary.
0:37:48 Maybe Kamala Harris wins it and has more time to put together a campaign that has more to say about the issues of the moment.
0:37:49 And she’s better at talking about them.
0:38:00 Or maybe Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer or, you know, someone else, Pete Buttigieg, Wes Moore, you know, wins the primary and they run.
0:38:01 Like, you just can’t tell.
0:38:06 Like, the thing, this did not all just turn on the information ecosystem.
0:38:10 Or to the extent it did, it could have, you know, turned in many different ways.
0:38:18 And we see different things happening in different states, even though all the states are exposed to the same information ecosystem.
0:38:21 I think you’ve got to get a little less monocasal, my friend.
0:38:28 I’ve never been indeterminous, but I think I’ve just increasingly become one.
0:38:31 And look, you can talk me off the ledge here.
0:38:45 I mean, I think part of, or one of my hang-ups is that I think we’ve lost the capacity as a society to tell ourselves a coherent story about who we are, what we are, where we’re going, what we want.
0:38:54 And I guess maybe the question is, do we need, do we need, do we actually need to tell ourselves a coherent story in order to move a political project like this forward?
0:38:57 Did we ever really need a coherent story?
0:38:59 Or did we ever really have a coherent story?
0:39:11 I think if your view of politics is that it needs some extremely high level of informational and narrative cohesion to function, then your politics has a real problem.
0:39:14 Because that’s very, very, very rarely on offer.
0:39:24 I think one criticism you’ll get from the left is that, you know, what do you attribute to liberal ideology?
0:39:29 Because part of the problem here is the rules written by liberals decades ago being used to prevent building stuff today.
0:39:44 Well, that’s really about wealthy, powerful people using their wealth and power to block progress, which is more about class politics than liberal ideology, that these people aren’t really liberals in any meaningful sense, just rich people protecting their turf.
0:39:46 I don’t know.
0:39:47 How do you tease that out?
0:39:49 Does that distinction even make sense to you?
0:39:54 I don’t have a class politics where I’m like, rich people are always bad and anybody else is always good.
0:39:56 But there are places where rich people are a huge problem.
0:39:58 And you get a lot of it in nimbyism.
0:40:06 You get a lot of it in, you know, Ted Kennedy, the late Ted Kennedy, helping to organize against an offshore wind project near Cape Cod.
0:40:15 I just think you’ve got to be specific about what you’re talking about and then work through what you think the political opposition is and what the problems are and what the process is.
0:40:19 I don’t take that as a particularly useful blanket claim.
0:40:25 Even in the place where you’d expect rich people to speak the most with one voice, should we raise taxes on rich people?
0:40:27 They actually don’t anymore.
0:40:38 The way polarization is structured itself, the way income polarization is structured itself, Democrats are doing better and better with rich people at a time when they’ve become more and more likely and insistent on taxing the rich.
0:40:41 And so, like, that’s a kind of interesting fact of our politics.
0:40:43 It has scrambled a bunch of things.
0:40:48 Democrats sort of think they can, they will get the working class voters they want by saying we’re going to tax rich people.
0:40:52 They’re weirdly winning more rich voters and fewer working class voters.
0:40:55 And instead, you have more working class voters for the first time voting for Donald Trump.
0:40:59 It’s easier if your only problem is rich people.
0:41:04 It’s hard in the sense that they control a bunch of resources, but it’s easier in that that narrative is super clean.
0:41:07 What happens when it’s not, though?
0:41:15 What happens when some of your problems are just, like, upper-middle-class people who are the core of your constituency and you don’t want building happening around them?
0:41:26 What happens when a bunch of your problems are actually other parts of the government you yourself run that over time have developed turf and funding and kind of stakeholder dynamics?
0:41:29 And now all of your processes are incredibly difficult.
0:41:32 So, yeah, rich people are sometimes a problem.
0:41:34 They’re not the only problem.
0:41:37 I just, I don’t have a lot of patience for monocasal politics.
0:41:41 Oh, that feels like a low-key shot there.
0:41:43 I feel attacked.
0:41:46 Oh, well, you know, I have more patience for monocasal media politics, maybe.
0:41:52 I just think everybody, we all have, like, look, abundance is also not a full politics.
0:41:58 Like, asking the question of how do we solve problems you supply does not tell you every problem.
0:42:03 It’s not going to tell you how to solve or even what position to take on a bunch of very difficult cultural and social issues.
0:42:07 It is one set of problems that we could do a better job on.
0:42:08 And better would be better.
0:42:17 Yeah, I mean, one of the things I like about it is that it doesn’t necessarily mat neatly and predictably onto partisan cleavages in that way.
0:42:29 But look, you know, there’s also a movement of people, as you know, who say the only sensible response, actually, at this point in history, is to do the opposite of what you suggest.
0:42:30 Which is degrowth, right?
0:42:36 That this whole model of late-stage consumer capitalism has been a moral and ecological catastrophe.
0:42:40 And we have to scale it back in order to save ourselves.
0:42:42 To that, you say, what?
0:42:43 No.
0:42:45 Say more.
0:42:49 So I have a long, we have a long discussion of degrowth in the book.
0:42:49 Yeah.
0:42:56 And I have a lot I could say and want to say about degrowth, but I’ll say a couple things that are, I guess, maybe narrow.
0:43:04 One, I do not agree that this era has been, like, a moral, it’s been a bit of an ecological catastrophe, but not a moral catastrophe.
0:43:11 It’s still not for human beings who, as part of, I do think degrowth has too little preference for human beings in it.
0:43:16 And the amount of people we’ve pulled out of poverty, the rise in living standards, those are not things to take lightly.
0:43:20 Then I think, again, you’ve got to, like, look at what your problems are.
0:43:27 Degrowth has this kind of interesting dynamic to me of being both too much and not enough of a solution to something like climate change.
0:43:43 If we had not invented our way towards genuinely cheap and plentiful solar energy, wind energy, the possibility of advanced geothermal, new generation battery storage, the only answer we would have to climate change would be sacrifice.
0:43:46 And sacrifice is just a terrible politics.
0:43:47 It doesn’t really work.
0:43:51 If you’re, I would love to see some people run on it and make it work, but I just, I’ve not seen it.
0:43:53 It doesn’t seem to me to happen.
0:43:54 Definitely not at this speed.
0:43:59 And so, our only real shot, in my view, on climate change is technological.
0:44:05 We have to deploy unfathomable quantities of clean energy as fast as we can.
0:44:12 And that will also, as we do that, because of the way these sort of innovation curves work, we will get better and better at using the energy.
0:44:13 It will become more energy dense.
0:44:20 What has happened to solar and wind and battery storage is genuinely miraculous, has outpaced all expectations.
0:44:27 And that is at least a viable politics, promising people that they can actually have, like, great technologically advanced lives.
0:44:36 And it can be built on, you know, abundant clean energy, which is completely conceptually and physically and technologically possible.
0:44:38 Like, that’s a viable politics.
0:44:45 Well, the politics of degrowth, degrowth as a political proposition, is like the platonic ideal of a dead fucking end.
0:44:52 Well, what’s worse is that it doesn’t hold out the possibility that you miss your climate targets by three-tenths of a percent or something.
0:44:59 It’s that you empower a populist right that promises to burn their way back to prosperity, which is what they are doing right now, right?
0:45:00 And I think it’s really important.
0:45:04 Like, when your politics doesn’t work, it’s not like you get half of what you wanted.
0:45:07 You get, like, the opposite of what you wanted.
0:45:15 Like, you really have to be, if you care about these problems and you think these problems are near term, hard-nosed about the political consequences of what you’re about to do.
0:45:18 Well, to that point, I know we’ve got to go soon.
0:45:31 A lot of what’s happening right now is you have an administration in power that is doing their very best to render government inoperable.
0:45:43 Does it concern you that damage might be done that will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to do any of these things after they’re gone?
0:45:47 The damage that will be done concerns me hugely.
0:45:54 The idea that it would then be impossible to do any of these things, I think if decent people win back power, that’s not accurate.
0:45:59 I think the damage that will be done is going to be less than the damage of the Civil War, right?
0:46:08 I mean, less than the—I mean, we have seen countries destroyed by all kinds of natural disasters and wars that were then able to build strong states fairly rapidly afterward.
0:46:14 I am not one of the people who has a view that what they’re going to do is permanently wreck state capacity.
0:46:21 But they could create authoritarianism, right, which would weaponize state capacity in a different way.
0:46:34 My concerns have more to do with democratic backsliding than they do with the idea that we would never be able to rebuild a capable Department of Energy after they shut it down or otherwise corrode it.
0:46:36 Yeah, and just so you know, I’m not even thinking in terms of permanence.
0:46:38 I’m thinking just in terms of that 10-year window.
0:46:40 Oh, you mean on climate change specifically?
0:46:41 Yeah, specifically.
0:46:42 Yeah, I’m very fucking concerned.
0:46:43 I don’t know what to tell.
0:46:58 Like, I’m more worried, again, than that we won’t be able to do good policies in the next administration, if you imagine a better administration following them in 2029, than I am that they will do everything they can to retard our progress in the next four years.
0:47:03 And they are trying to, as we speak, destroy the solar and wind industries.
0:47:06 And this is a really, really, really crucial period.
0:47:09 I am hair on fire about that.
0:47:16 But I don’t have a lever to stop it, you know, like, we’re in the timeline we’re in.
0:47:23 I mean, you also say, too, that you think this era features too little utopian thinking.
0:47:25 I think you’re right about that.
0:47:30 But I also know that utopian thinking gets a bad rap.
0:47:36 But what do you really think of as the practical value of a little utopian thinking?
0:47:37 What do you mean by that?
0:47:39 I think you should think about what future you’re trying to create.
0:47:41 And that helps you work backwards.
0:47:45 I think that too often we settle for parceling out the present.
0:47:50 We think about the present and we think about making it a little gentler, a little kinder, a little fairer.
0:47:53 I think we can think about futures that are quite different.
0:47:57 And we don’t do that enough for a lot of different reasons.
0:47:59 The right tends to be relentlessly nostalgic.
0:48:04 And the left tends to be very just focused on the injustices of the past.
0:48:07 And in that way, I tend to be more on the left with that.
0:48:10 And I think there has been a lot of injustice and we should try to do a lot about it.
0:48:13 But thinking about ways the future could be different I think is important.
0:48:19 I think for a long time for American liberals, the sort of hoped-for future is Denmark or France.
0:48:23 It’s a future with a European-level welfare state.
0:48:25 That has been the grail of where they’re trying to get to.
0:48:27 And that’s fine.
0:48:30 That would be better in a bunch of different ways from my perspective.
0:48:32 But Europe is a basket case.
0:48:33 Productivity is really low.
0:48:35 It’s poor compared to us at this point.
0:48:40 Canada, which a lot of us think of as a much more humane place.
0:48:45 If Canada were a state, it would be like Alabama level in terms of income per capita.
0:48:52 You really do create wealth and dynamism differently in America.
0:48:55 And I think we need a vision of the future that, yes, is kinder.
0:48:56 Yes, is fairer.
0:48:57 Yes, is more humane.
0:48:58 Yes, is more compassionate.
0:49:02 But also imagines, like, amazing things happening.
0:49:06 I don’t think that you have to give up on good ideas from Europe or Canada.
0:49:09 But that shouldn’t be all of it, right?
0:49:11 We can do better than Denmark.
0:49:13 We can do better than France.
0:49:14 We can do better than the UK.
0:49:15 I’m going to leave it right there.
0:49:19 Once again, the book is called Abundance.
0:49:23 Ezra Klein, my friend and former employer, thanks for coming in.
0:49:25 It was great to be back with you here, Sean.
0:49:26 Really, really enjoyed it.
0:49:35 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:49:42 You know, whatever comes of this call for a politics of abundance, I do think there is
0:49:49 enormous value in trying to articulate a new vision forward or a new framework for liberals
0:49:56 in particular, because we are stuck right now, stuck in our old categories, stuck in our
0:49:56 old models.
0:50:03 And even though there’s a lot of angst and uncertainty right now, there’s also, for
0:50:08 the same reasons, a lot of potential for something fresh and maybe even hopeful.
0:50:12 And I got a lot of that in this conversation.
0:50:16 But as always, we want to know what you think.
0:50:24 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com or leave us a message on our new voicemail line
0:50:28 at 1-800-214-5749.
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0:50:41 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian
0:50:46 Ayala, fact check by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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