Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein on Abundance

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The book begins by asking the reader to dream. This particular dream is of a world in which clean, abundant energy flows from nuclear plants and rooftop solar panels; medical advancements have made life better and longer; and artificial intelligence has come not to doom us but to save us from the drudgeries of work. This is the shared vision—part techno-optimism, part liberal reverie—put forth by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and The New York Times’ Ezra Klein in their new book, Abundance.

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In their telling, what stands between humanity and this future are not just the usual culprits—conservatives and Big Business—but also liberals. The self-described champions of clean energy, transit, and affordable housing have allowed those goals to fall by the wayside while they prioritize onerous regulations, processes, and a myriad of competing interest groups.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, Thompson and Klein join the show to talk about why states like California and New York struggle to achieve the priorities they claim to have. Why is high-speed rail nothing but a dream? Why does Texas build more utility-scale solar than California? Why is New York, a state run by Democrats, unable to tackle its affordable-housing crisis?

“My first book about polarization, Why We’re Polarized, was very much about how polarization, particularly asymmetric polarization on the right, has deranged national politics,” Klein told me. “But I think it’s also important, then, to ask: Well, okay, in the places where liberals govern—you know, California, Illinois, New York—how come I can’t point to that and say, Hey—look at utopia over there?”

“Liberalism should be an advertisement for liberalism,” Thompson added. “Democrats should be able to say, Vote for us, and we’ll make America like California. And instead, Republicans can say, Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California. They’ll turn America into Portland; they’ll turn America into Oregon.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Jerusalem Demsas: The United States is the wealthiest nation on Earth, at a time when the world is richer than it ever has been, and yet our politics are defined by scarcity. Scarcity of housing, of energy, and even of space has allowed zero-sum thinking to permeate the electorate, and that has been a boon for the forces of illiberalism.

Donald Trump rode to victory last November fueled by zero-sum thinking. If there’s not enough to go around, then he’s your man. And now the question is whether the liberal response will be to fight him on his own terms or change the script.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

In a new book out today titled Abundance, by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, the authors argue for a sea change in how liberals have approached politics. It’s a great book; we’ll put the link in our show notes. And I’m quoting from them here:

“We imagine a future not of less but of more. We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good.”

That paragraph is like catnip for people opposed to Donald Trump, but there are some very difficult intra-coalitional fights that will have to be waged in order for this world of abundance to become reality—because what’s standing in the way of abundant housing, transportation networks, and renewable energy is not only Republicans in Washington, D.C., but Democrats in California, New York, Massachusetts, and beyond.

It is Democrats who have stood up policies and practices that have allowed scarcity to fester in their own states, fueling a cost-of-living crisis unparalleled in Republican-led jurisdictions.

Here to talk to me about this are the authors of Abundance. Ezra, Derek, welcome to the show!

Ezra Klein: Thank you. Good to be here.

Derek Thompson: Great to be here, Jerusalem.

Demsas: You guys co-wrote a book, and in the book, you write “our” and “we” a lot. And I had a fun time playing mini detective, trying to decipher which parts felt more Derek and which ones felt more Ezra. But what were some places of disagreement you discovered while writing the book? Are there ways you think differently about the problems of scarcity, Derek?

Thompson: I don’t think we disagree in the conclusions of the book, but I do think that our approaches are different. I think that I’ve never really been a politics-first writer or a politics-first podcaster. And when I wrote the original abundance-agenda essay, that was me dipping my toe into politics.

And I’ve always felt a little bit more comfortable starting with economics or technology and then working my way into politics. And so I think that working with Ezra, who is so much more versed in modern politics and political history, was really educational in terms of thinking about many of the ideas that I debuted in that abundance-agenda essay as firmly political issues.

And I think that as we worked together and talked on the phone and read each other’s drafts, there was a theme that’s not present in that original abundance essay, really very much at all, that we began to see as being absolutely essential for this book, which is the theme of: If you’re going to remake liberalism for the next generation, you have to take very seriously the shortcomings of liberalism in the previous generation. And that, for me, just speaking entirely personally, is something that absolutely emerged in conversations with Ezra, rather than appeared initially in my first conception of an abundance book about progress.

So that’s, I think, one place where it’s not so much a matter of disagreement as a matter of, sort of, our differences in approach leading to what I think is a very fruitful combination.

Klein: So I think you can really see the differences between Derek and my approach if you just look at the titles of our two original essays here. So Derek, as he mentioned, had this great piece on abundance, and, you know, the framing of that is so sunny and optimistic, and everybody’s for abundance. And my piece was called “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting,” and I called it “supply-side progressivism.”

And in that way, I think one of the really great things about working together on this is that Derek brings, I think, a forward-looking, sunnier optimism. And I bring a somewhat hard-nosed, Where the fuck did all this policy go wrong? you know, jaded-policy-reporter sense that I think creates a book that has the two sides of the coin that it needs.

Demsas: Despite growing up on the East Coast—I feel like I’ve said this to Derek a bunch of times—he’s, like, the most West Coast East Coaster I’ve ever met, just perennially optimistic about the future.

Klein: Sure. (Laughs.)

Demsas: In a way, that just seems super wrong. But, Ezra, you’re actually from the West Coast, so it’s like you’re switching.

Klein: I’m the West Coaster, which is why I’m so pissed, because I was in California while doing all this work and thinking about why California was performing so terribly, despite being the greatest state the world has ever known.

Demsas: So I’m going to ask you to harness some of that anger now, Ezra. So who are the roadblocks to abundant housing, clean energy, transportation, and tech innovation? Give me a villain.

Klein: Just a nice, small question there.

Demsas: Yes, exactly.

Klein: Well, they’re different in the different areas. I think that’s one thing to say.

But I’ve thought about the set of roadblocks here as in different categories. So one is interests. You can think about trying to build an affordable-housing complex in San Francisco, and you get interests that are lined up against it for different reasons.

So one set of interests might be local homeowners who do not want a six-story affordable-housing complex down the block from them. They think it’ll hurt their parking. They think it will bring people they don’t want to the neighborhood. They think it’ll hurt their home values. So that’s very classic. Then you might have—depending on how this is built, you might have—unions, right? If the complex does not want to use union labor or does not want to pay prevailing wages, or they want to do modular construction off-site—as in one of the examples I reported on—you might have unions begin to fight that. You also have, just in general then, what I think of as policy drift. So there are certain programs, procedures, approaches that came into being at one time, maybe without anybody even really noticing it, and they become binding and difficult over time, but nobody’s ever revisited.

So again, holding on to the affordable-housing example, there is this kind of strange process in San Francisco—it was in California, I guess, but this specifically in San Francisco—around this thing called 14, I think, B or D; I forget which one. It began life as a racial preference. So it was meant to give the—in city contracts, you would have a preference for minority-owned contractors. Then the California Supreme Court—or no. I’m sorry. It was actually a proposition. California voters said, You can’t do that.

So then they went back, and the state, the city of San Francisco edited that procedure. And they said, Now it’s for small businesses and subcontractors, micro subcontractors, right? We, in San Francisco, have a rooting interest in making sure we have a healthy small-business ecosystem, and so there’s going to be a preference here for small businesses over big contractors, either in the city of San Francisco or even coming in from the outside.

And everybody kind of knows that, in terms of how the city looks at it, it’s still sort of also a racial preference, if you can get there. But specifically, in language, it is a small-business preference. Most people just don’t know that’s there. That’s not really interests—I mean, small subcontractors do. But in general, that’s not a well-known thing. It’s not even doing the thing it was initially intended to do. So just over time, it’s become more binding. It’s drifted. It’s become a kind of procedural crust that I think would not be passed into law today if somebody was thinking about it. So that’s another one.

Then you have sort of overlapping and complex authorities. You get this a lot in environmental issues. So, like, when you’re dealing with transmission lines, the number of players who have to sign off on something: Sometimes it’s local; sometimes it’s state. There’s overlapping federal authorities. That’s really difficult. You have very fractured authority. Nobody can consistently make the decision. So you begin to just have sort of category after category of things that, when you stack them, it just makes it very, very hard to get anything done.

But they’re not all ideological. They’re not all interest based. They’re not all anything. It is the problem of, as Steve Teles once called it, like, a “kludgeocracy” that has evolved over, you know, many decades.

Thompson: Let me jump in there. I think Ezra provided a really nice zoom-out answer from the local individual level to the higher-level factions and groups, starting with voters and homeowners, moving to economic factions, moving to the regulatory and legislative drift that exists in the laws and rules that are written, and then the overlapping authorities.

I do want to introduce here the most macro answer to your question, Jerusalem, Who’s standing in the way of progress? Sometimes, it’s just the federal government, and I think it’s sometimes the federal government, in terms of the way that a lot of these policies that seem to be policies that would forward progressive ends end up stymieing progressive ends. There’s an incredible echo of that story that’s unfolded in the rollout of broadband-internet construction across the country after the Biden infrastructure bill.

And so the top-line headline that I think a lot of people read in the Politico article, or other articles about the slow rollout of broadband construction, is that Biden authorized $42 billion to build broadband internet, and just a fraction of that money was spent, because of the paperwork required.

But why wasn’t the money spent? Why didn’t we actually do what we wanted to do? And I was asking people about this at a dinner that I went to recently, where everything was on background and not for attribution. But, you know, suffice it to say that people at this dinner had job titles that made it very clear that their testimony was highly relevant to the question of why it was hard to build rural broadband in this country when the government put $42 billion behind the effort.

And their answer was: It wasn’t so much about the language of the legislation as the funding rules published by the Commerce Department that had workforce requirements and pricing requirements and climate-change requirements and bidding requirements, and so on and so on. And so essentially, you have the federal government saying, On the one hand, here’s federal money. Go forth and achieve a Democratic initiative, which is raising living standards for low-income Americans. I mean, just the most classic bread-and-butter progressive initiative. But also, they made the application process so onerous that nothing was built. And so, in fact, very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards.

And I think this is a question that goes to—and this is a theme throughout, I think, Ezra’s answer—trade-offs in policy making and taking those trade-offs seriously. I think climate change is an important thing to care about. I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online.

But by holding those values so closely and creating an application and funding process that extended the time that those authorized dollars were actually spent by two, three, three-and-a-half years, we accidentally built just about nothing. And now the entire program looks like it might just be, like, block granted to Elon Musk Inc. so he can do Starlink for America.

So this is what happens, I think, when at the federal level you also have this confusion of process versus outcomes, of wanting to fit everything in Ezra’s everything bagel into the process such that every you’ve stymied your ability to actually achieve the outcomes that you’ve indicated.

Demsas: In both of your answers, I hear, and I think many people will hear, a critique that conservatives and libertarians have been making for a long time. From Ezra, I’m hearing, you know, there are too many interest groups that are demanding that their priorities be preferenced over the outcomes that benefit a broad number of people. And from Derek, I’m hearing pretty straightforwardly that government is standing in the way, that regulations are standing in the way, that process is standing in the way of free enterprise, of government. And in the book, you have, like, heavy citation of Mancur Olson’s work. And what distinguishes your project from the conservative kind of critique of liberalism? Is that—are you just trying to lib-wash conservatism?

Klein: Goals.

Demsas: Yeah?

Klein: Goals, very simply. Which red state has decarbonized? Which red state is even trying? Which red state has high-speed rail? Which red state is even trying?

I hear this sometimes from people, and I always think it’s weird. I always think it’s libertarians and conservatives so underselling their own project. Their project isn’t just deregulation. In many cases, they’re adding lots of new powers. Right? Like, look at their relationship to the surveillance state. Their project is to actually do things. It’s to gut Medicare and Medicaid because they feel that it is an unwise use of money to spend all that money on health insurance for poor people and the elderly.

Their project is to actively impede the construction of solar and wind [power], as we see the Trump administration doing right now. I was thinking about your question a second ago, Jerusalem, and thinking that the much cleaner answer I should have given was the villain is liberals in government who’ve oriented towards process and not outcome. The enemy is people who have said they’re going to deliver something, who believe in delivering that thing, and then have accepted process in which they do not end up delivering it, and then they explain it away, or explain away how hard they worked.

But by the way, this is how all the coalitions work. What is ultimately meaningful is outcome—the kind of world you are trying to live in, the kind of world you are trying to build. When Elon Musk and DOGE go in and decapitate USAID and cut off that funding, what they are doing, their outcome, their intention, their aim, their goal is not deregulation or cutting the federal workforce a little bit. Their aim is to stop delivering aid to poor people. That is what they believe that “America first” means: You do not spend our money preventing HIV/AIDS from infecting children in Africa. I think that’s monstrous. But that’s the aim. That’s the goal. And the means—decapitating USAID is the means to the goal.

So the difference between, I think, Derek and I, and conservatives and libertarians, is that we have different outcomes we’re trying to reach. I don’t think it makes sense for me and Donald Trump’s Department of Energy lead to debate how best to decarbonize, because he doesn’t want to decarbonize. Right? So I’ll have different things to do from that.

Demsas: But does that matter? Because, I mean—

Klein: Yeah.

Demsas: No, but, I mean: in terms of the outcomes that you’re talking about here. So, I mean, in the book, you even cite this, but in response to your question about whether Texas has decarbonized: No, but they’re sure as hell siting a bunch of renewable energy. And when we talk about high-speed rail, I wouldn’t call it the highest-speed rail, but Brightline is reviving passenger rail in Florida; it might be reviving passenger rail in Nevada. It’s possible that Texas might even be given the opportunity to do high-speed rail now.

I mean, there’s ways in which I, as a liberal myself, hear this all the time. And I struggle with this question because these places, despite their lack of interest in many of the goals that the three of us may have, are still executing on these goals.

Klein: Yeah. I think that speaks to the power of defaults. And, I mean, we talk about this in the book. I mean, we cite specifically that Texas is building—and by the way, so is Georgia—a lot of renewable energy, but that’s because the default in Texas is to build things very easily. And so when the market sees an opportunity to make money building things—which, particularly under the IRA, it’s seen a very big opportunity to make money building renewable energy—it’ll be able to build it there, because they’ve simply made it straightforward. Although it is a question, I think, how long that would last for. You see a lot of political efforts in the Texas legislature to make it harder to build renewable energy.

And now you see at the Trump level a lot of efforts to destroy the solar and, specifically, the wind industries, right? They’re actually trying to make that actively harder. So I think over time, there might be a lag before policy catches up with politics, but typically they do eventually begin to align on, you know, efficiently or inefficiently. You know, there are other things where Texas has just, like, way better affordable housing than California does, but conservatives don’t oppose affordable housing.

So I do think it’s absolutely true that you have places where there is a default, a path dependence that has made things happen even when you wouldn’t really expect it from a policy architecture. And in many ways, you know, probusiness conservatives should probably look at California and ask, Well, why does California dominate technologically to the extent that it does, given that you all seem to think your low taxes and your probusiness environments are so much better? Why aren’t any of these new AI companies located there? Why are they in California and not in Texas, and not in Oklahoma, and not in Florida?

And some of that is California. But some of that is things that have been going on there for a long time. So the default is very, very, very strong. But that’s more how I look at that. Like, I think you should, as a liberal, look at how much easier it is to build renewable energy in Texas, and feel ashamed and try to change things. But I don’t think in the long run you will get liberal outcomes through conservative government, and you will not get the reverse. You will not get conservative outcomes through liberal government.

Thompson: I’ll pick up where Ezra left off, and then I’ll wind it back to your question, Jerusalem. I think it’s fantastic that Texas builds so much housing. I think it’s fantastic that Texas sites so much solar energy and has so much wind power. That’s a wonderful outcome for Texas and scale to be a wonderful outcome for America. But you know who doesn’t seem to recognize that? Our national libertarians and, more importantly, conservatives, right? Donald Trump could have run on the message, Let’s make America like Texas. Let’s build more solar. Let’s build more wind. Let’s build more housing.

But instead, despite the fact that he was lofted to power by, I think, in many ways, lots of frustration and furious anger about the state of housing in America, what is his housing agenda? He’s raising tariffs on essential housing materials that come from Canada and Mexico. He’s certainly doing nothing to help the construction industry, which is 25 percent foreign born, meet the demand that is absolutely going to be necessary to catch up with the housing deficit that we’ve built up over the last 20 years.

So while, yes, I think we should give Texas credit for the fact that its defaults lead, in many cases, to outcomes that liberals would want, it is not at all clear that at the national-politics level, this has trickled up into some kind of positive vision for how to remake America in a way that would help liberal ends. In fact, I think in many ways, it’s the opposite. And it brings us right back to, I think, Ezra’s great first answer to your question.

The difference between us and libertarians, and certainly the conservatives, is a positive vision of America. And I think it’s cool that this book starts off with, in maybe a little bit of a surprising way, a sci-fi vision of what America in 2050 might look like if we got everything right.

What would clean-energy superabundance look like? What would AI look like? What would clean supersonic travel look like, and how would that change people’s lives? How could we eliminate so much of the suffering that’s been the result of chosen scarcities over the last 20 years by fixing it in the next 25?

So this book, in a very clear way that I don’t think you would see in a lot of conservative manifestos, starts with a very clear vision of a future that I think is unembarrassed about the degree to which its priorities are progressive. But I do think that the processes that progressives have built up over the last 50 years get in the way of making that future buildable.

Demsas: So I absolutely loved the intro that you all wrote. As a sci-fi reader, I just felt completely immersed in that dreamworld. I want to ask you, though, about— there’s a sense in the book that many of the roadblocks to abundance are almost unwitting, right?

Like, you talk about environmental regulations from a past era that were developed to block highways and pipelines, and to clean up the air and water, but are now, unfortunately, blocking solar power and transmission lines and affordable housing. Or that procedural rules—the ones that, you know, Ezra and Derek, you both outlined—are meant to prevent corruption and are, instead, preventing getting contracting done quickly and efficiently.

But, you know, here’s a place that I struggle because that’s a really, like, friendly story to liberals. It’s a story like, you know, You made a mistake. You know, now it’s time to fix it now that, you know, we’re pointing it out to you. But there are a lot of pieces of evidence that indicate people are not unwitting; they simply disagree. I’m sure you’ve come across this in your reporting, but, you know, there are environmental-justice advocates that have been loud critics of carbon-capture-and-storage technologies, who are fine arguing, to quote, “We simply cannot replace Big Oil with Big Renewable.”

Another example is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is actively undermining her most successful affordable-housing program because it was too good at getting housing built, and is layering on a bunch of process onto a very successful affordable-housing program because of complaints that it was actually siting multifamily housing.

So how much is this a story of liberals just, you know, We have laws and procedures that were well meaning from another era, versus there being a lot of liberals who simply disagree with these goals, even if they’re not willing to say it explicitly?

Klein: I don’t think the story we tell is that it’s just unwitting. I mean, I quote you in the book, Jerusalem, in the housing chapter about the way in which part of the difficulty in building enough housing is that there is an ineradicable tension between making housing a core financial asset and building enough of it—because financial assets, valuable ones, become more valuable in conditions of scarcity. And so there is good reason for people who already live on a block where the housing, you know, is going up and up and up to not want to see that block suddenly get a very large apartment building in it.

Now, there is a kind of alley-oop between the overhang of past legislation, statute, regulation, process, and some of those interests. I don’t think—in fact, I think I tell: I think the story is pretty clear that when California passed the California Environmental Quality Act under [then-Governor Ronald] Reagan—under Reagan—and nobody thought it was a very big deal, and the LA Times didn’t devote a single, sole article to its passage. And then, only later, after a series of court cases, did it apply not just to government projects but to any project requiring government permitting, which is sort of every project, actually, in California.

So all of a sudden, it becomes a much bigger deal than it was when it passed. And now it becomes a tool to stop housing, not just to do what the legislature initially intended. Well, then that’s different, right? You have a sort of union, then, between a bill that maybe you could not have passed under that argument, but now interests that have learned how to use that bill to follow their current interests.

So I don’t think—I mean, I would say that if I’ve given anybody the view that I don’t think this is going to be a series of unbelievably bloody fights in liberalism, I apologize. But I don’t actually think that’s the nature of the book. We do try to have a relatively optimistic tone throughout, and we do try to be understanding, because I do believe this to be true—and so does Derek, I think—that much of what was built in past statute-wise, much of what was built in the ’60s and ’70s was built for good reasons. Many of the things we need to unwind today were not villainous constructions. They were thoughtful responses to problems of another era that do not fit our current era.

One of the lines I like that we have is: Institutional renewal is a task that faces every generation anew. You can’t expect all the institutions and laws and bills and processes from 40 years ago or 50 years ago to fit the moment you’re in. But it’s just, I think, not the case. And I’ve been part of a lot of these fights already that that we’re particularly naive about whether or not people are protecting their interests here. Of course, they are.

Thompson: The origin of zoning and the origin of these environmental rules was absolutely inextricably bound up, in many cases, with pure, old-fashioned racism and a kind of selfishness for which neither I nor Ezra have any patience. I mean, Yoni Appelbaum in his book, Stuck, I think very clearly sets out the case that the first zoning laws in California in the 19th century were rather explicitly about finding legal ways to oppress and segregate and ghettoize the Chinese population after the Gold Rush.

I mean, there’s no question that many of these rules have explicitly racist aims—had explicitly racist aims. And when you look at the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, for all of the objective good that it did—I think you’ve written about the fact—some people used the overhang of environmentalism to essentially just be people against people.

And it’s no accident, I think, that Rachel Carson’s book and [Robert] Caro’s book also happened to come out at the same time that [Paul] Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. And a lot of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s was in cases of fear of and an almost aversion to the idea of masses of people living on this planet. And we have no patience for, certainly, the most racist and hateful aspects of those laws from 60 and 70 years ago.

That said, I do think that it is true that some liberals today are simply antibusiness in a way that’s I’m not antibusiness. But I also think that it’s important to be fair to the environmental movement that came up in the 1960s and 1970s by pointing out that it was trying to solve problems that, in many cases, we don’t see in the same way today, because those problems were, in many cases, solved.

The air was disgusting in the 1950s. The rivers were disgusting in the 1950s. The amount of pollution that came out of tailpipes was freaking gross. And we passed a set of rules with the Clean Air [Act] and [Clean] Water Act and all sorts of other laws and regulations that cleaned up the air and cleaned up the water so that every time someone inhales in order to criticize environmentalism today, they are blessed by the fact that the air they inhale is cleaner as a result of the movement that they’re criticizing.

But to Ezra’s point, institutional renewal is the job of every generation, and we have allowed, I think, in many cases, wise rules that answered problems in the 20th century to become a disease of the 21st century, which is the inability to build in ways that would actually solve those problems, especially when it comes to, you know, rules like NEPA getting in the way of citing and constructing clean-energy technology.

So I want to be fair to what I took to be the thrust of your question, which is that, yeah, there were a lot of nauseous pieces of this ideology as it came up. But I also want to be fair to the fact that the environmentalist movement had very serious problems to respond to, in many ways solved lots of the problems they intended to solve. But now we’re left with the overhang. We haven’t done institutional renewal in this generation, and it’s time.

Demsas: So both of you have touched on this a little bit in your answers, but the book is pretty explicitly written to liberals. You write, clearly, quote, “We don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right.”

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your decision to make that so clear. I mean, there are a lot of books where you can implicitly tell that it’s written to a specific audience. But, you know, the YIMBY movement, the Yes In My Backyard movement, has been really, really focused on trying to maintain bipartisanship and not cast the housing-abundance element of this as being a problem just for Democrats to focus on. And you, in your book, of course, cite this as well. So why is this book written for the left?

Klein: I think you have to, in any writing project, decide what your problem that you’re trying to solve is. And, you know, Derek and I probably have different versions of this, but for me, some of the genesis of writing this book was simply what has gone wrong in California. California’s my state. I love it. And in California, every statewide elected official is a Democrat.

You had to sort of—my first book about polarization, Why We’re Polarized, was very much about how polarization, particularly asymmetric polarization on the right, has deranged national politics. But I think it’s also important, then, to ask: Well, okay, in the places where liberals govern—you know, California, Illinois, New York—how come I can’t point to that and say, Hey—look at utopia over there? You know, like, It’s going great. So that’s one dimension. I mean, there’s actually just a question for me I was trying to answer.

Although, I will say, then, to the other side of it, I think that people on the right are going to get a lot out of this book. And I think in some ways, the decision to focus this as a kind of conversation among different flavors of people on the left will make it a little bit easier for them to hear it. Now, it’s going to come into this context of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and J. D. Vance and Russell Vought trying to destroy the federal government. So the right’s got its own sort of questions it’s going to need to figure out.

But in terms of state-level issues, in terms of, you know, affordable housing, I think there’s a funny dynamic right now around YIMBYism particularly, where, look—the YIMBYs, they want to be bipartisan, but they arose in California, right? That has always been, in its initial incarnation, a movement that is different flavors of Democrats talking to each other. But they have had a bigger effect, I think, in some ways, on red states than on blue ones, because as much as their intellectual victory has happened among liberals of different sorts—you heard, you know, Kamala Harris promising 3 million new homes and Barack Obama talking about the DNC—like, as we both know, as we all know, there’s not a housing-supply increase in San Francisco, where YIMBYism really begins. There’s not a housing-supply increase in California.

Like, I was just looking at FRED data for private housing starts over the past 10 years, and it is lower in January 2025 than it was in January of 2015. On the other hand, Montana has put forward great YIMBY policies, right? Florida and Miami, in particular, have done some really, really good things. And I don’t want to take away. Like, there was a good upzoning in Gowanus, in New York City. The “City of Yes” policies in New York, I think, are promising.

But I do think sometimes other coalitions can look without having to activate all their internal defenses at a fight happening on the other side and think, Okay, what can we learn from that? So I think our hope is to have constructive conversations with people on the right, as well. But specifically because a lot of this book is about achieving liberal goals, it just, I think, didn’t make sense to try to say that the problems were going to be the same everywhere, because a lot of the things that the right is doing that I don’t like, they’re doing it because they want a world I don’t want. And telling them they’re wrong to be doing it then doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Thompson: Certainly, a good excuse for us is that a book about how the left needs to get better at focusing is a book that explicitly focuses on its audience and says in the opening chapter, here’s who we’re writing this book for. Because if you’re writing a book about what went wrong in America over the last 50 years, there is maybe an infinitude of stories that you could tell, an infinitude of audiences you want to tell those stories to. But I like the fact that we say, This is a book about how we want liberalism to change. And telling liberals to not be conservatives is essentially telling them to not do the thing they’ve already decided they definitely don’t want to do.

So that’s a way in which I think the focus of this book, even though you’re absolutely right that it says from the start, Look: There are conservatives who are doing their own thing. We wish them well—I think that’s the line explicitly—this is a book about how we want liberalism to change in America, because we have a vision of America that we believe to be in keeping with liberal outcomes and liberal priorities.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Is localism standing in the way of abundance?

[Break]

Demsas: So I definitely want to come back to the electoral side of this, but before then, because you both are trapped on my podcast, I’m going to ask you about my work, which has been really focused on decentralization and localism. And this is a thing that I think you know: I loved your book. I think it’s great. I think everyone should buy it. We will put links to everything you are saying at the—

Klein: You gotta say that at the top, Jerusalem. (Laughs.)

Demsas: It’ll be in the intro. Don’t worry. (Laughs.)

Klein: You can’t hope people are going to make it all the way here. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Yeah. People aren’t going to make it to even minute 30 of this podcast.

So, you know, I think the thing that’s missing in your book, for me, was a discussion of decentralization and localism, because something I have become pretty strongly convinced of is that even when you have alignment of a lot of these interests towards abundance, towards growth, the thing that becomes difficult is: It’s really, really hard to do anything if you have to get a thousand people on board.

And so you get the situation where, you know, someone who I was talking to who works really strongly in transportation told me that he’d had a conversation with a Swedish transportation planner who was shocked to realize that when a project got a right of way, when it got permission to use an area of road from one part of the government, it did not mean that it didn’t have to go to multiple other levels of government to get that. Like, he just could not believe that’s how we did things here.

And so to me, I think that this is a core problem of abundance that abundance has to deal with. And I think it’s one of the hardest parts because there’s a way to get people animated about housing. There’s a way to get people animated about energy. I mean, these are core things that people think about in their lives. But trying to get people on board with a vision of how you streamline government, in a very boring way—putting together offices, making sure there are fewer local governments in consolidation—like, this is not a popular thing, and it’s not a thing that people are willing to focus on. So is the fact that it’s left out an indication that you don’t view this as a core part of the goals of abundance? Or what’s going on here?

Thompson: Jerusalem, you know the dynamics of localism better than I do, but I’ve done a bit of reporting on opposition to housing and the [Research] Triangle area, in North Carolina. And the layers here are very interesting because you have NIMBY residents who understand the machinery of opposition. So if there’s a new development that’s up for a vote, these folks know where to show up. They know what council meetings to make statements at. They know how to pitch those statements directly to the council.

And then in many cases, the council members are, in some cases, antibuild activists who ran for office and pride themselves in standing up against developers. And so it’s not just about changing minds in the public; it’s also about the phenomenon of these meetings. And it’s about the people who sit on the councils.

And I’ve asked people down here in government, What would change this? What would change this dynamic and make it easier to build housing? And some of it they said is just, You need new people in the city council who are going to vote for housing rather than associate good governance with the ability to always discover reasons to oppose new developments, right? Some of it is just a matter of personnel in the city council.

Some of it, they said, is a matter of retail politics and persuasion. It’s a matter of making the case when you’re talking to folks that you’re the mayor or you’re the city council because your priority is to expand housing development no matter what. And you’re going to repeat that priority at every city council meeting over and over and over, and it’s going to be your north star. And you’re not going to allow other process-oriented priorities to eclipse it.

But sometimes it’s just a matter of political courage. It’s a mayor or a city council member standing up in one of these city council meetings where the audience is, you know, 80–20 against new development and pointing out a fact that I believe you, Jerusalem, have told me many times, which is that: For every one person in this room who has the time and energy and resources to appear here, there are 10 people not in this room who will be helped by housing abundance. And so what we are seeing, what we are seeing in this room in the city council meeting, is a meeting that is oriented around caring for the people who get up in front of the microphone. But being in government means caring about the people who don’t have time to come here and step up to the mic.

And I think that kind of political courage is akin to—not equivalent to, but akin to—what we saw in Pennsylvania with [Governor Josh] Shapiro and [PennDOT Secretary Mike] Carroll essentially saying, Look—we’ve got a bridge that fell down in I-95, and we can go through the regular processes, and it can take—What?—12, 24 months to rebuild this bridge. We can have, you know, procurement rules, and we can have bidding rules, and we can have environmental review that goes on and on, and we can have permitting. But fundamentally, we need to put this thing up in two weeks. And so that’s what they did. They put it up in two weeks. They said, No environmental reviews. We’re going to get this contractor over here, and this contractor over here to build the damn thing as soon as possible. And they built the damn thing as soon as possible. It took 12 days and not 12 months.

So I do think that a lot of this comes down to political courage, and it’s going to take political courage to do what you are talking about, to take a culture of federalized localism and say, You know what? I think we might be better off if we limit the number of opportunities that people who oppose development in this city have to block every single thing that happens. And I’m just going to go on the road and say over and over again: I’m not doing this to limit citizen voice. In a way, I’m doing it to raise citizen voice, because I care more about the voices of the people who are not complaining on the mic every two months. I care about those voices more than I care about the people who happen to have time to go up in front of the microphone.

That’s a hard thing to say, and I cannot guarantee that it’s politically popular enough to win election after election. But I do think that fundamentally what you’re asking for is not just a procedural, not just a sort of a governance, organizational change. It’s a matter of personality. It’s a matter of courage as well.

Klein: I think that’s right. I really want to pick up on that idea that it’s a matter of personality. One of the core theses of the book—I’m not sure how explicitly we say it outside of the Mancur Olson section—is that modern liberalism is overly process focused, that it has repeatedly substituted process for outcome. And that takes different shapes in different places.

So when you’re dealing with things that require local approval, like housing, you often have that as the problem of decentralization, right? The power is split, fractured—these meetings that have very, very unrepresentative samples of the population showing up. But when you’re dealing with other areas, right? Like, I spent a bunch of time on the CHIPS and Science Act in the book, and the Notice of Funding Opportunity and all of the everything-bagel provisions and added standards and goals that got put into there.

And that wasn’t localism. That wasn’t even decentralization. That was done centrally at the Commerce Department. And I report on that, and I know a bunch of the people involved. That was just coming out of a culture in liberalism, of personalities, as Derek put it a second ago, that just kind of doesn’t want to say no to anybody, that wants everybody in the coalition to be as happy as possible.

So I think that the view that I at least came to, ultimately—I don’t want to speak for Derek here—is that this is all manifestations of something similar that we don’t have, like, a really good way to talk about. But it’s closer to the temperament of a coalition. If the temperament of the MAGA coalition right now is autocratic, the temperament of the liberal coalition is bureaucratic. And in becoming bureaucratic, it shapes itself differently at different levels of government. But sort of at all of them, somebody needs to be in the meeting who can say, Enough. Thank you, everybody, for your opinions. We are going to do this. Sometimes that is a question of power. Sometimes that is a question of leadership. Sometimes you don’t have the ability to do that, and we need to restructure the way, in theory, at least, that the overlapping, jurisdictional issues are handled.

That’s very, very hard to do, and I think you should be very pessimistic about good outcomes if that’s your only approach that will work. And sometimes it’s that somebody needs to just say it and, like, be willing to take the political pain for saying it. I sort of think this is somehow connected to educational polarization in the parties—this is not in the book, because I can’t prove it—

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s what podcasts are for.

Klein: Right? I think this is connected in a way that educational polarization in the parties, in the way that the Democratic Party has aligned to become the prosystem party, and the Republican Party is aligned more to become the antisystem party. And you just have a relationship to systems and processes and bureaucracies that are different on the two sides.

And there are huge pathologies in the Republican approach to this. It is not good that nobody can tell Donald Trump no. It is not good that they don’t listen to anybody else, that they don’t give a shit what any of the Republicans in Congress think. It is not good that if you tell Elon Musk he’s believing conspiracy theories, he will tell you to fuck off, and fire you from his company or throw you out of the meeting, right?

I actually have this whole view—and, again, not in the book, but we’re in Podcast Land here—that the temperaments of the two coalitions have polarized into very unhealthy personality types. Basically, the coalitions need an ecosystem of different personalities in them: some who are more authoritarian, like, a little bit, right? Some who are much more process oriented. It was good for the Democratic coalition that it had its antisystem hippies inside of it. Now that, you know, as Matt Yglesias puts it, the crank realignment has put RFK Jr. and all those people in the Republican Party, they’re too crankish. And, in a way, the Democratic Party is insufficiently skeptical of big corporations and big systems.

So there’s something here that I think is really important. It’s very hard to prove, but I do think it’s temperamental. And it sometimes comes out, as you were saying, in too much localism, but not only in that. If it were only in that, then we would just have a big chapter on how localism is a problem. But because we see it rhyming across so many places often where localism has nothing to do with it, I think it’s something broader.

Demsas: One of the things that I love about your book is how much you focus on abundance as, like, a vibe shift and not just a laundry list of policy changes, but that there needs to be a serious reorientation in how people think about themselves, their roles, what liberalism is for. I mean, you analogize it to how environmentalism was this lens that gave everyone a different way of viewing government and industry and the goals of liberalism. And, you know, abundance is hopefully another lens that people can use and apply.

But both of you have brought up Trump and Musk a bunch of times in this conversation, and I imagine someone coming to this conversation fresh—coming to your book fresh, and hasn’t been deeply involved in the debates that we all have been for the past several years in the abundance space—might be confused as to why this book is coming out now, hitting liberals for undermining government. And, of course, publishing timelines are what they are.

But Ben Wallace-Wells wrote a review of your book, and books of friends of the show Yoni Appelbaum and Marc Dunkelman, for The New Yorker. And he made the following comment that I hope you guys can respond to: “The abundance advocates emphasize the problem of ideology, because of who usually wrote the rules, but what’s happening is also, more simply, about wealth and power. When it comes to the expense of New York’s subways, the latest studies identify some specific culprits: the city builds many more mezzanine levels in its stations than is the case in stations overseas, and it hires more consultants. How much of that is really about liberalism?”

He goes on to say that it is “flatly ahistorical” to blame liberals for lack of progress on climate change. So I guess the question that has been posed to me multiple times as well is: Are we all just engaged in a long line of liberal self-flagellation and are ignoring the elephant in the room that is the Republican and Trump-Musk administration? Or is Ben wrong?

Klein: I think Ben is wrong. (Laughs.)

Look: I wrote a whole book about how much you can’t get done at the national level because of Republicans. So I sort of take a back seat to nobody on that, and that’s a huge amount of my coverage. But does Ben think California is well governed? Does Ben think New York is well governed? Does Ben think Illinois is well governed? Does Ben think these places where Republicans hold zero power are losing people by coincidence?

At some point, you have to be able to say, It’s not the only thing happening in the world that the other side is bad. Now, it’s awkward to bring out this book—I mean, in some ways, it’s helpful; in some ways, it’s awkward—to bring it, you know, during the Elon Musk–Donald Trump–DOGE era. Although, I do think that it gives us a kind of way to talk about: If you don’t make government work—really make it work—if you do not actually truly care that people can feel it in their lives, that you don’t have these debacles, like $42 billion for broadband that doesn’t give anybody broadband access, then you’re going to open the door for right-wing populists to come in and burn it down.

But I think that there is—sometimes I’m reading reviews. I’m actually pretty comfortable with bad reviews. I’ve been in this game for a very long time. And—

Demsas: I don’t think it’s even a bad review.

Klein: Ben’s wasn’t a bad review. That’s not what I’m saying. Ben’s was actually a very good piece.

But the thing I was going to say is that sometimes in reviews, you can tell when you have tripped people’s preference for affect, right? They just, like, want more Republican bashing in the thing, right? They want what Tyler Cowen would call more “mood affiliation.” And I just think we actually need less of it. And I think one way you develop credibility as a political tendency is you admit where you’ve gone wrong.

Yes, it is the case that it is substantially due to Republican opposition at the national level that we have not been able to pass more on climate. On the other hand, it is not the case that Republican opposition is why, after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Democrats never did permitting reform to make sure that the money it is spending could build enough of the green infrastructure it intends to build at the speed that we need to build it.

Republicans actually were willing to work with Democrats on that. It was Democrats who did not want to go forward there. Now, the Biden administration sort of hid behind Joe Manchin and supported Joe Manchin’s permitting bills, but liberals hated Manchin. And by the way, Joe Manchin’s permitting reform is not what I would’ve done.

So I think you just gotta be really careful. There are, I think, very good critiques of this. But why, you know, we have to spend more time blaming Republicans for our own failures I actually just don’t think is one of them, and I think it’s a kind of intellectual-failure mode in politics.

I think we’ve got to spend a lot of time blaming Republicans for Republican failures, and they’re currently attempting an autocratic breakthrough at the top of the U.S. government. And, like, obviously, I cover that day in and day out, but I think liberals don’t take their own failures nearly seriously enough. And the real problem with that, in addition to that then we can’t fix them, is also: Voters notice. And voters don’t trust you.

Gavin Newsom wants to run for president with the burning desire of a thousand suns. Right? He wants it so bad. And Gavin Newsom has every right to run for president. The guy’s governor of California. He’s going to have a huge problem running for president, because people don’t think California’s well governed. And it’s not even that he hasn’t been trying to change a bunch of that. I think a lot of what Gavin Newsom has been trying to do is good, but the fact of the matter is: Housing is a disaster. Homelessness is a disaster. They haven’t built high-speed rail. And none of it has been solved.

So that’s another issue. You begin destroying total generations, really, of political talent because they’re coming out of a place where they can’t defend what they’ve done. Like, does anybody want Kathy Hochul to run for president? When people don’t think the places you run are working, it doesn’t then work to say, Trust us.

And so I just don’t think you can—like, it is true that part of why various decarbonization actions have not worked is due to Republican opposition and obstruction. And again, that’s all mentioned in the book. But it’s just also true that we haven’t done a good enough job. And that’s part of the reason Texas and Georgia and a bunch of red places are building more out of the IRA than liberal states. The places where liberal states are getting more IRA money is in the credits to buy things that are built elsewhere.

Thompson: Yeah. To the extent that Ezra and I disagree about anything, certainly no disagreements have been revealed in the last 55 minutes. Because I want to echo and amen with hands over my head everything that he just said, and also, ladle some extra defensiveness on top of it.

You know, to the extent that Ben thinks it is flatly historical that liberals are the principal enemies of climate change, I just want to be very clear: All four of us—me, Ezra, Jerusalem, Ben—all know that this is in the book and that we all agree about this. I mean, we say in the first chapter that it’s no point talking to Republicans about climate-change goals if so many Republicans don’t even believe in or prioritize climate change.

And then as we talk about in the penultimate chapter, the U.S.—I don’t think this is well understood—in the 1970s was, in many ways, the world leader on solar energy. And we basically gutted our energy R&D and our solar industry because Ronald Reagan comes into office and puts a dentist in as the head of the Department of Energy and takes the solar panels off the roof of the White House. And basically, we decide for the next 30 years that we’re not going to do anything about the development of solar energy.

So that is in the book, and it is absolutely the case that if both parties agreed with the fervor of the Democrats that climate change was a problem, we’d be in a very different state in terms of the amount of zero-carbon energy that we produce in this country. That’s No. 1.

No. 2: I think the most important part of Ezra’s message right there is that liberalism should be an advertisement for liberalism. And if it isn’t, then we’ll lose. One of the best lines in the book, and this was Ezra’s addition, is that Democrats should be able to say, Vote for us, and we’ll make America like California. And instead, Republicans can say, Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California. They’ll turn America into Portland; they’ll turn America into Oregon.

We don’t want to give them this ammunition, because it’s incredibly effective to say that the places that liberals run are, unfortunately, not run well. And finally, on the issue of, say, the Second Avenue subway, you know, I was talking to Sam Bowman for an article in The Atlantic about the degree to which the U.K. could use an abundance agenda. And he made a really interesting point, because if there’s any country that has a worse problem of building than America, it’s clearly the U.K., which has basically been on a downward slope since, you know, something like the Victorian era when it came to building things in that country.

And I said, you know, Why does Spain and Portugal—why do these countries, which don’t rival Britain in terms of wealth—seem to do so much better on building things? And he said, In Spain in particular, you’ve had coalitions in government that run on their ability to build quickly and effectively. And I was like, Jesus Christ. What a concept. I mean, imagine a mayor of New York running on New York accelerating the degree to which it’s building the Second Avenue subway at a cost that isn’t $2 billion per square mile. Imagine someone being able to run for governor of New York for, say, another term by saying, Look at our progress in high-speed rail, and look at our progress with homelessness.

This idea of people running for government by pointing to their achievements at making government work, that’s unbelievable to me. And that’s what we should aim for. We should aim for liberals being able to run by saying, Look at how I made liberalism work where liberalism had power. And right now, I don’t think that there are enough places that can do that. And as a result, I think it’s hard for liberalism to build power without those advertisements.

Demsas: You guys are making a couple of electoral arguments, both in the book and implicitly in what you’ve been saying here. One is that, you know, the specific messaging-argument problem, which is just, like, If you can’t point to the thing that you’ve done and say it’s good, then why would people vote for you? But then you also are kind of drawing out some math problems for Democrats when it comes to population loss in blue states making it harder for Democrats to win the electoral college, reducing congressional representation in the House.

But I think the thing that struck me as the most important are the arguments you make about how scarcity fuels illiberalism. Can you draw out those arguments for me?

Klein: I love it. Well, we do quote you in those arguments. Do you want to draw those arguments? (Laughs.)

Demsas: That’s why they’re so good. (Laughs.)

Thompson: What’s your favorite passage of a Jerusalem Demsas article? And just read it slowly and mellifluously.

Demsas: Sure. Let’s do that.

Klein: Yeah, there’s a lot of Jerusalem Demsas in the book. I think you had the best piece on this, so I’m going to do the weird podcaster thing and be like, How do you think scarcity draws out of liberalism?

Demsas: Well, first of all, you guys are very generous citers. Anyone who is interested in reading more, it’s very easy. There’s, like, a hundred pages of notes and acknowledgements in here. But I think on this question of illiberalism, this is something that got into my head, particularly, when it came to Trump and Vance’s campaigning against immigration. And of course, I’m not making the claim that there are no legitimate concerns about immigration. We’ll park that for a second.

What we saw was clearly a weaponization of scarcity, and the problem of scarcity incites one of two possible responses, right? Either it’s: There’s not enough. I have to defend my own. I have to, you know, eventually make sure that other people can’t take housing that could go to my child, or this really good job might go to an immigrant or to a person of color, or to a woman and not to me or my family member or friend. And that’s, like, one very natural response to scarcity.

And the other is liberalism. It’s the promise that you can make more, that there can be enough housing for everyone who needs it, that there can be, you know, enough good-quality jobs that new people coming into your community isn’t a threat to your way of life. It’s actually making your life better. But the problem is that that has to actually be true, right? And as you talk about in these blue states, I mean, there is a problem where they have made housing scarce That has created a serious problem. And, I mean, we saw that in Springfield, Ohio, as a very effective cudgel for Trump and Vance to wield.

And so to me, abundance is a necessary prerequisite for liberalism at large. If you want people to feel open to expanding rights to people who are different from them, to be open to new things happening, to change immigration, whatever it is, they have to feel like there’s an abundance of opportunity. You’re never going to look at a choice between an immigrant and your child in the housing market and decide to go with the immigrant, you know what I mean?

So the thing I want to get from you two is, like: I worry that many people are taking a policy critique, something about the goals that we might have with decarbonization, with abundant housing, with a bunch of other things and trying to make it into an electoral argument. Because right now, in particular, the Democratic Party is searching for a way towards relevancy, and there’s room to make an argument to that set of policy makers.

So do you think that we are—and I mean me, in particular, that I’m—overstating the importance of abundance from an electoral standpoint? Like, how much of it is important, given that we’re in this populist moment, you know, that’s very anticentralization, very opposed to government, lots of people excited by the so-called DOGE efficiency move? So how much of this is just wish casting that we’re doing? And is it really relevant to Democrats’ electoral outcomes that they’re focused on abundance?

Klein: Well, let me say a few things. One is that we’re definitely not in a moment that is anticentralization, because we’ve never seen a presidency working as hard to centralize power. Not never, but in the modern era, we haven’t seen a presidency working as hard to centralize power and actively centralizing power as Donald Trump. And certainly his, you know, quote-unquote populist right is loving that, which, to be fair, is how the populous right usually is. It’s a highly centralized, you know, The people will have their voice through the leader who authentically represents the will of the people and wields power without check, balance, or oversight.

So it’s always kind of a contradictory mess. But that’s, I think, the moment we’re in. And I do think it does exist a little bit as a response to highly bureaucratized liberalism, although that’s not the only thing, obviously, it’s responding to.

One of the things I was thinking about when you were saying that, Jerusalem, was Elon Musk and the way in which, I mean, it’s like we’re in Dark Elon Musk territory, very much so. Because you can imagine this other Elon Musk, right? Elon Musk as a political figure, you know, from 2012, 2014 who is proabundance, because Elon Musk’s career is, like, an amazing set of proof points for at least part of what, you know, Derek and I want to see in the world.

Here you have an immigrant who came to America. He then set up, first, a series of businesses in the lightly regulated digital sector. But then he began moving into the highly regulated automobile and go-to-space sectors, and solar, for that matter. And then he built these companies on the back of government subsidies, government loan guarantees, and government contracts, becoming the single-best example—living example—for what public-private partnerships can accomplish.

Like, you can really imagine Elon Musk as this unbelievable messenger of abundance and trying to make possible more of the kind of thing he did for more companies, more people. Instead, he’s trying to pull up the ladders behind him and get more contracts and, you know. And I think a lot of what he’s doing is ideologically motivated as he’s fallen down darker and darker right-wing rabbit holes on the platform he bought to derange himself.

But there’s something else there that could have happened. And it points to—and this is the thing I say that I do think is an addition to some of the stuff you’ve written in that New York Times essay—where the core of the populous right’s politics has to be scarcity. It just has to be. Because its first commitment is fewer immigrants. Its first commitment is that trade is a zero-sum game where there’s always a winner or a loser. Abundance is fundamentally positive sum, and the populist right is fundamentally negative sum, or at least zero-sum. There is nothing more fundamental to the way Donald Trump views the world than the things that are zero-sum negotiations. All of them. There’s always a winner and loser.

And it’s just not how we see it. So he has to choose the pathway he’s choosing, because that is the dark engine of his politics, both here and in other countries. He didn’t invent this. This is something we’ve seen in many places, at many times. So electorally, then, I think you get into a couple questions. And look—there are a lot of electoral pathways that might work. And I don’t run in elections and win a lot of elections, but I’ve covered politics for a long time.

One thing that I do believe is just true is that you tend to win when you represent the future and not the past. And I think a really dangerous thing electorally for Democrats is that Donald Trump’s meaning has fundamentally changed since 2016. In 2016, he represented a kind of past against Hillary Clinton representing a different kind of past. And now he represents a future because Musk and RFK Jr. and Vance and Marc Andreessen—all of them together, the sort of flooding in of Rogan World—it has changed the meaning of Donald Trump from a defense of what there was to an idea about what’s coming.

And I think they’re going to fuck that up, because they’re breaking things they don’t understand. You know, and if we don’t fall into autocracy, I think the backlash to the tariffs and everything else is going to be really profound. I could be wrong, obviously. But I think it is fundamental that Democrats are going to need to, if they’re going to be a successful political party, recapture a vision of the future.

I mean, it’s a reason why in our book we put invention so at the core of things, right? We start with that slightly sci-fi vignette because we are trying to get people to imagine a future. This is about what world you are trying to build. And I think that is potent in American politics. I think that in politics, you need to have—to be as successful as you often want to be—a new vision.

I think that you need to reorient politics around a divide that is healthier for you. Polarization is—the next question should always be, Well, what are we polarized over? Right? And is the nature of that cleavage good for us or bad for us? And I think one of the real cleavages right now is abundance and scarcity. And I think people have, like, underplayed this. They’ve wanted to say it’s sort of a moral regressiveness or an anti-institutionalism, right? Like, those are the things Donald Trump represents to liberals. He’s like a racist who hates the fundamental institutions of modern life. And that’s true in many ways. But it’s clearly not enough.

And I think as Democrats begin to lose the future and lose the sense that they have a vision of what should be coming, that has become a really profound weakness. So what I’m looking for is, like, not just candidates who can sort of manage the politics-of-evasion problem and accept where Democrats get out of step with people, but candidates who can see some other way of organizing American politics, some other set of conflicts that are better for them and more constructive for the country than what we’ve had. And I think that, like, at a vibes level is what we are trying to offer. Like, a different way of cutting what this is all really about.

Thompson: Yeah. One way we sometimes talked about it is that American politics tends to be built on axes: Are you liberal or are you conservative? Are you proimmigrant or are you anti? Are you pro-DEI or are you anti? And we’re trying to introduce a new binary, a new axis here, which is abundance versus scarcity. And the reason why we’re trying to introduce this axis is not just because we think that axis is important, and it’s not just because we think that axis is illuminating to understand American policy and American economics. It’s also an axis on which liberals can win.

We’ve seen, I think, in the last few months that scarcity doesn’t just empower illiberal movements, as Jerusalem, that was the basis of your question. It’s also the case that scarcity empowers illiberal movements to pursue scarcity. I mean, look at what the Trump administration has done in the first few weeks. By saying, America can’t afford our debt—scarcity—we therefore cannot afford healthcare for the poor. More scarcity. Because America doesn’t have a healthy economy—scarcity—we have to accept American hardship—more deprivation. Because we don’t have enough manufacturing, we have to suffer the consequences of tariffs—scarcity for scarcity. Because we don’t have enough housing, we therefore need fewer immigrants. Oh, we don’t have enough of this, therefore we need less of that which we need. I mean, this is an argument of scarcity requiring scarcity, and it is an argument that we should be, as liberals, excited to take on, right?

Every administration invariably creates the conditions for its own opposition. Every single administration does this. That is the basis of thermostatic politics in America, and it’s the basis of thermostatic politics around the world. I think that liberals need both a negative identity and a positive identity. And this is my gloss, my wrapping paper on what Ezra just said: You need a negative identity, which is what you’re against, and you need a positive identity, which is what you’re for.

It’s obvious what the Democratic Party is against. Open any newspaper any day of the week: That’s what we’re against, right? Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to politics. Elon Musk is tweeting nonsense after nonsense on social media, while, at the same time, pretending he understands things that he’s absolutely demolishing. That, I think, goes catastrophically against American interests. The negative identity of the Democratic Party is incredibly clear. That is the unfortunate toxic gift of Donald Trump in power.

But what’s the positive identity? What are we actually for, beyond just being against Donald Trump? That’s where I think we need to offer a positive-sum vision, right? And that vision is what we call abundance. And it’s why, again, I think it’s really cool to have a book that is predominantly, in so many ways, a self-critique of the body of liberalism in America. But it begins with a sci-fi positive vision. Here’s what we’re aiming for. Here is our north star. This is what we want to build. Let’s see if we can get out of our way and build it.

And of course, that requires winning elections against a movement that right now is dominated by Donald Trump. But I don’t think we need further clarification on how to be anti-Trump. I think we need further clarification on how to stand for something bigger than being anti-Trump.

Demsas: So one thing I wanted to ask about—and I mean this: A big part of your book is about invention and about scientific innovation. We haven’t talked a lot about that. But one thing I think I wanted to ask about it is that it feels, in many ways, that the barriers hampering housing, transit, energy are different than the ones standing in the way of scientific innovation.

I mean, in housing, we know how to build a house. Transit: We see high-speed rail. We see energy. We know how to build solar panels. These are things that other countries are building. Of course, there’s innovation that can happen in all of these spaces, and I appreciate all of the focus on productivity that you have in the book. But are the problems preventing scientific innovation—are those really in the same wheelhouse as these other baskets that you guys are focusing on?

Thompson: Some of them absolutely are, and some of them absolutely are not. You know, in one way, you can think about abundance as being a kind of three-part process. Part one is: You decide what the good is that you’re aiming for. What’s the positive vision?

Part two is: You have to actually understand the market, the industry that is responsible for producing that vision. You have to understand local housing markets to figure out what’s wrong with housing. You have to understand clean-energy technology and siting rules in order to figure out how to build more clean energy. And in science and technology, you have to understand science markets and how scientific funding works and how the discovery process works.

And then part three is: You remove the bottlenecks that are in the way. And sometimes that means taking things away, and sometimes it means adding things. So in the world of science, right, what we want are more lifesaving medical breakthroughs that add the most important thing in the world, which is more healthy years of life. And the difficult thing about science is that you don’t exactly know what you are aiming for specifically, because unlike building a house or unlike siting a solar farm, discoveries are, by their very nature, unknown before you discover them.

So what I did for this piece is try to figure out, Okay, what are the inputs to scientific breakthroughs? It’s smart people, it’s time, and it’s money. The problem that we identified with the National Institutes of Health is that we have created, over the last 60 years, a set of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork requirements. This created a situation where the typical scientist now spends his or her time filling out paperwork or filing grants and not doing actual science.

I consider that to be an absolute catastrophe, and so do many scientists. And you can reframe the catastrophe this way: Imagine if we discovered one day in the near future that typical American scientists suffered from a virus that created a chronic-fatigue disorder that knocked out 40 percent of their working years, such that they had to sleep, say, between January and late May of every single year. We’d say, Well, obviously, this is an enormous crisis for American science. But in many cases, this is not an exogenous bacteria or virus. These are requirements in paperwork laws that we have created for ourselves and for our scientists.

So first, I want to find ways of experimenting with funding that reduces the paperwork requirements in ways that I see very similar as the benefits of reducing bureaucratic and paperwork requirements in, say, affordable-housing construction or broadband-internet construction with the Infrastructure Act under President Biden.

So there are some things that I think we want to take away and reform and streamline in ways that are totally similar to many earlier parts of the book. But also, I’m not a pure libertarian on this standpoint. I don’t think that the road to scientific abundance flows purely through just taking things away.

I also think we need to create new programs and recognize, for example, the absolute wonder that Operation Warp Speed did. I mean, Operation Warp Speed truly is one of the most remarkable programs in modern American history because it was fantastically successful at producing a life-saving medical therapy, and also, in a weird way, has been abandoned by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Democrats don’t talk about it, because it’s a Trump initiative, and Republicans, I think, don’t talk about it because, in many cases, they’re an anti-vax movement. And so it’s been orphaned, but the lessons of Operation Warp Speed—the way it created incentives for scientists, the way it removes roadblocks for actually building therapies that you invent—I think are incredibly important if we want to create science that saves people’s lives and build that science into products that extends people’s lives.

So the way I see it, the message in science intervention is absolutely in keeping with the thrust of abundance. It depends on a positive vision. It depends on a very keen understanding of the market that’s relevant to making that vision a reality. And then it looks very clearly at: What are the bottlenecks to take away and what are the policies to add?

Demsas: This talking about innovation and the failures inherent in the scientific process feels like a great time to ask our last and final question. Derek, let’s start with you. What is something that you originally thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Thompson: When Laura and I had our first kid, we were getting a lot of advice from people about the need to put the baby first and the fact that, of course, when you have a baby, the baby is what suddenly must come first. And that sounded fantastic. It’s certainly something close to the cliché of what new parents are told, that something has been introduced to their life around which they have to reorient their life. And that’s absolutely true in so many ways.

But the truth is, the best advice that I got about being a parent was the exact opposite. I was talking to a friend, Brian, who said, I think my favorite parenting advice is, No. 1: Look out for yourself. No. 2: Look out for the relationship with your partner. And then No. 3: Look out for your child. If you’re not your best self, he won’t be the best possible partner. And if you’re not the best possible partnership, you won’t be good parents.

So in a weird way, the child comes last. And there’s something beautifully counterintuitive and lovely about that, about the need for and the benefit of a kind of wise selfishness in parenting. And I love that that goes slightly against the good-on-paper advice of when you have a baby, that new baby needs to be the pure and unassailable sun around which your solar system must orbit.

Demsas: We get a lot of parenting responses in Good on Paper. Ezra, what’s yours?

Klein: Ooh, I mean, I think before Derek gave that answer, I was going to give a very book-related answer about something about regulations or—not all regulations, but, you know, there’s certain categories of regulations and comment structures that I took just as generally good before that I don’t now.

But I’ll give a more personal one, so I don’t seem like a robot: Getting less sleep. For a lot of my life and definitely a lot of my career, my 20s as a journalist and early 30s maybe, probably particularly before I had kids, I was a very much, like, a sleep-is-a-cousin-of-death kind of person. And I would try to set the alarm earlier and earlier, and would just push through, and sort of felt that every hour I was spending asleep was an hour I wasn’t spending alive.

And I really just now understand that to be the opposite. I had this one moment at some point where I thought I had been just kind of anxious for years, and maybe I was just tired. Like, maybe I just mixed up the two feelings, or the two feelings were just feeding into each other, certainly. And so now, I do not always succeed, because I have kids and a job and all the rest of it, but I really would like to get as much sleep as I possibly can as opposed to as little sleep as I can possibly get away with. And that has been a pretty big conceptual change.

[Music]

Thompson: I would warn listeners: Don’t take these pieces of advice in the opposite order. Don’t try to sleepmax and then have a baby. That will lead to a little bit of priority confusion. Nonetheless, I do think that when you do have a kid, being protective of sleep is unbelievably important for all of the obvious reasons.

Demsas: Well, thank you both for coming on the show. I’m so excited that this book is in the world. I’m so excited to continue this conversation with the both of you.

Klein: Thank you, and for all your work here, which is hugely informative to what we ended up doing. Really, really appreciate it.

Thompson: Yeah. Thanks for being an inspiration.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.