Plain English with Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein on the Essay That Inspired Their New Book, ‘Abundance’

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Derek Thompson

About the episode

Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to accept a period of economic hardship. They say America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, so we have to accept less trade. They say America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants.

America needs the opposite of this scarcity mindset to grow and thrive. We need an abundance agenda. But what does that mean? The answer to that question is in my new book, which I cowrote with the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. He is also today’s guest. We talk about Abundance the book, and why it exists. And we talk about abundance the idea, and why it matters. (You can buy the book here!)

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.

 

Summary

  • In the following excerpt, Derek and Ezra remember the essay that led them to write Abundance:

    Derek Thompson: What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about Abundance. This is exciting. We’re going to answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks, so I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of what can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won’t even think to ask us. And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress in America. I haven’t had a very easy time with book leave because as it turns out, writing a book is among other things, a total pain in the ass.

    But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation. Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it’s going to change the world. Ideas are cheap; building is hard. And I’m rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in The New York Times that’s called “The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting.” And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply-side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you write it?

    Ezra Klein: Even when I go back to that essay, you have moments as a writer, I know you do, where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time cohere into one thing. You realize you’ve been thinking about one thing and not many. And so there were a couple of things floating in my head over the sort of years before that. One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology. And this had happened in my view after the 2016 election when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won, but also, and I don’t actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were becoming filled with toxicity. And because the leaders of social media platforms represented tech, they had become synonymous with tech, and they were these mega and quite unaccountable billionaires. I felt that the left had, in its anger at these companies, begun sort of giving up on technology.

    But then at the same time, two other more positive things were happening. One was the YIMBY movement, which was the emergence of a strain of, at least at that time, I would call it progressivism, centered in California, where I was living, which was not just saying we should build more houses. I think this is actually a quite important distinction, and I would really recommend Conor Dougherty’s book Golden Gates, which is just a fantastic history of the YIMBYs. But it was not just saying we should build more homes. It wasn’t just like, here’s the supply-and-demand curve. It was saying it was illiberal that you were not a social-justice-focused progressive if you lived in a big, economically important city like San Francisco or Palo Alto, and you were fighting the building of these homes. It had to be part of the self-definition of progressivism, that we were making it possible for the working class to live in the cities, the engines of American opportunity.

    And I felt the YIMBYs were, and I am a YIMBY, the most exciting ideological faction to emerge in a very long time. And I was very involved in climate change policy reporting, and it had become very clear to me that there was only one pathway, a very narrow, narrow pathway—which I don’t actually think with Donald Trump we’re all that likely to be on in the way I’d hoped, but at that point, we were maybe on—by which if we were going to avoid the worst of climate change, it was going to be because we had technologically accelerated solar, wind, and battery technology to the point that we could mass-deploy it at a price point competitive with fossil fuels. And that might actually work, that a politics of sacrifice was going to fail. But a politics built on clean energy innovation and then rapid deployment might work. But we did not have, if you looked at how we built things in America, in blue states, the policies needed for rapid deployment. So we were going to need something like YIMBYness for clean energy.

    And then the final thing, and then I’ll shut up with this long thing, was I had moved back to California. I’m a Californian. I lived in California from when I was born to when I left college to go to D.C. I then lived in D.C. for 13, 14 years, 2005 roughly to 2018. And then I went back to California and the state in my view just was not doing well. And when I looked around at why it wasn’t doing well, why did it become so unaffordable, why it had such a bad homelessness problem, why people were so upset, why so many people were leaving. California was and is losing people. It was really just clear we hadn’t built enough. The things we had wanted to build, like high-speed rail, had not come to fruition. We did not have enough mass transit. There’s no functional … I shouldn’t say functional, there is no good subway system in Los Angeles. It would be such an amazing city if they’d had a good mass transit system. But we weren’t building enough homes, we weren’t building enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals.

    That California’s problem was not its commitment to justice, but its commitment to expanding supply. And that was the set of things like knocking around in my head that somehow cohered into that essay.

    This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

    Host: Derek Thompson
    Guest: Ezra Klein
    Producer: Devon Baroldi

    P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here!