Ezra Klein, welcome back to the show.
Great to be here.
How are you doing?
Tired. Getting tired of the sound of my own voice. But otherwise, I’m good.
We’re here in New York City around the book, which I think is situated, culturally and politically, in a really interesting place. In recent years, there has been a glut of apocalyptic TV shows that are set in the near, sometimes distant future: The Last of Us, Station Eleven, Black Mirror. But come 2025, these programs have stopped trading in political metaphors and have quite literally set their stories in the Oval Office. I’m thinking about Zero Day on Netflix, Paradise on Hulu, both of which are set in an America in decline.
Your book, however, is diametrically opposed to those stories. What you and your co-author Derek Thompson envision is a future of abundance. So to begin, what is abundance? And then secondly, how did you come to the conclusion that abundance is the answer to this moment?
Abundance is a politics that takes as its core tenet that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. It’s really that easy. And it seems like it should be too easy, I say in the beginning of the book that that seems like too simple a thesis for a book. But then you look around, and you’re like—Do we have enough housing? No. Do we have enough clean energy? No. Are we building enough public infrastructure? Building it well? Are we ambitious with it? We’re not. Are we inventing enough of the things we want? No. We’ve actually been having a scientific slowdown for some time. It may be ending, but that’s a thing we could talk about.
So, this is an effort to focus people on the supply side of the economy. I think that we got very used to thinking about demand–labor market demand, wage demand–around the financial crisis, but over a long period of time, we’ve been having a sort of slow growing affordability crisis, and now it is pretty central to our politics. Also central to people’s lives, you know? How many families do I know that have had to move out of a place like New York City or San Francisco because they couldn’t afford to raise children there? So, that is the motivating inquiry of the book.
And then you ask this other question, like, why do you think it’s possible? Well, of course it’s fucking possible. Like, we don’t know how to build apartment buildings. China could build 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the time California has not built 500 miles. These are not technological problems. If we’ve made the process of politics impossible, then that’s on us. But this declinism, this feeling that we can’t do anything—that’s a luxury belief. That’s a thing that is the product of not looking closely at why we don’t solve problems that we know how to solve. The idea that San Francisco or New York City hasn’t built enough housing, it’s like, go to Tokyo and ask them how they do it, right? It’s not rocket science, and I think our vision of what is possible has become very sadly constrained.
In 2023, 70,000 housing permits were issued in Metro Houston and just 40,000 in metro New York, which has three times as many people. When you hear a stat like that, where do you see the pivot, or how do you get to a pivot? Because that sounds pretty intractable.
There’s nothing intractable about it. I mean, even the measure you’re using, right? Housing permits issued. Well, there’s no physical limit on housing permits we can issue. Whether you can build it, whether you can source the lumber you need and the sinks and everything else you put in a home. But, we have chosen this, and nothing about that feels intractable to me. I mean, even using Houston as the counter example. Houston has not chosen this, so clearly it’s not intractable.
You’re taking a very upbeat, positive approach to start.
I think there’s something genuinely optimistic about recognizing the problems are not unsolvable, they’re chosen. The thing you don’t want is a problem you can’t solve. There are plenty of those in life, but these are not them. The second dimension is I think people and liberals in particular have to get a bit of fucking confidence back. We’ve become defeatist and declinist. We excuse away failures. We tell ourselves apocalyptic narratives of the future. Like people have lived in much harder times than we do even now.
Funny enough, that’s where we ended our first conversation. And in the last act of the episode we talked about how everyone always asks you, should I have children in this day and age? And you say, if you are emailing me asking to have kids, it is very likely that your kids will be amongst the most privileged children in the history of this planet.
I mean, that’s a fact.
It’s funny that in many ways what was just a thought experiment on the podcast has been born out in this book– that hopefulness, that optimism.
I mean, I am interested and delighted that people are absorbing such a vibe of hopefulness and optimism from a book that is a recitation at a deep, textured, specific level of government failure.
So we need more confidence. You came in here, nice blazer. You look ready to go on CBS Sunday morning. But that’s what we’re missing, confidence?
No. What we’re missing is good policy. What we’re missing is good process. We’re not, but confidence is part of it. Governance is a temperament, governance is a culture. But no, don’t take from what I’m saying that all we need is confidence. We need to make it possible to build housing by right in California, that is something etched into statute. It’s not just about how big of a man Gavin Newsom feels like this morning.
So do you think the abundance agenda is a response to the hollowing out of the middle class? You write in the book that “an uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure middle class lifestyle receded for many, but the material trappings of middle class success became affordable to most.” Unpack that for us.
I do think it is a response to it in part. You could think about the hollowing out of the middle class from two directions. One direction is how much money people make are their wages keeping up with inflation, and then there’s the cost of living. But this is, among other things, a response to what is a crisis in affordability of the things people need.
What I’m saying in that part of the book is we do have an abundance of some things, but there are consumer products. It’s easy now to have a flat screen television on your wall and almost impossible to go to public college debt-free. Forty years ago, it was the opposite. You couldn’t have a flat screen television, but you totally could go to public college, debt-free.
This is a point my wife, Annie Lowrey, popularized back in 2020 in The Atlantic. A set of things that are the building blocks of a decent life, middle class or otherwise: Childcare, healthcare, housing, elder care, education, and to that I would add energy. They have gotten, over time, more and more expensive, particularly those first five.
We are trying to refocus Democrats on this question of the cost of living, and the supply of the things people need. Because I just ran through a list of things that we subsidize. We subsidize housing all over the place, right? From the mortgage interest deduction to rental vouchers. We subsidize education, right? We give you Pell grants. We have public education of all different kinds. We subsidize childcare. So why is it all getting so much more expensive? Well, one answer is that in many of these cases, we’ve constricted supply of the thing we’re subsidizing.
At the same time we passed the Affordable Care Act. We created Obamacare. We have nevertheless been constricting the supply of doctors by choking off the number of residency slots. And of course, we don’t make it very easy to immigrate here and become a doctor. We could make that cheaper if we wanted to.
Again, we subsidize people to buy homes in places where we’ve not made it possible to build enough new homes for the people who want them. What happens when you subsidize something where supply is constrained? You get a price increase. It’s completely basic supply and demand. One of the things liberalism has to get better at is looking at problems in society and saying, where can we solve this? Not through giving people more money to buy it, but through making more of the thing itself.
If it’s so basic, why do we continue making these mistakes?
Part of it is a version of liberalism that arose in response to the New Deal era. The New Deal liberals, they build a lot. It’s a period of really torrid growth in American life. I just read this stat the other day but between 1950-1961 America increased its total housing stock by 26%. One decade increased by 26%, but a lot of growth was reckless. A lot of it was thoughtless about the environment. Things like Robert Moses cutting highways through black communities. There was not a lot of space for input. A lot of things that were built, people felt were ugly, were soulless.
The term ticky-tacky comes from a song about Daly City, just south of San Francisco. And so a sort of new liberalism arose, and the new left was very much about stopping government, stopping building, blocking things from happening, be they projects that could be environmentally problematic or for that matter, housing, and changing the character of a city, of a county, of an area. That was reasonable in its time. I mean, we did have to clean up the environment, which was choked with smog and where we had pollutants, coloring the streams fluorescent.
But now we live in this other era where the problem is we are not building the things we need fast enough. I mean, the environment is a great inversion here because we went from the problem being that we were building too much too fast to the problem.
Now in this era where the only way to decarbonize is to build enough green energy so that we can move an advanced economy onto green energy and continue to power it, we’re not building nearly fast enough. All these statutes, these movements, these ideas, these court cases, these ways of looking at the world informed by the very potent environmentalism of the ‘70s and ‘80s, it’s not the right fit for our current problems.It’s very hard for society when the problem inverts itself on you.
If the policies of the ‘70s and ‘80s were an appropriate response to what was happening at the time, it took until 2016 for them to present themselves as a problem in an election. You can trace a clean line between what you’ve just said and the emergence of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in 2016. By then voters (from both sides) had doubts about attaining that “middle-class lifestyle.” And come 2024, that belief in the American dream had completely eroded. Eroded not just in red states but blue states and cities: New York County, Manhattan shifted nine points right. Cook County Chicago shifted eight points right. California nearly every county moved towards Trump. Los Angeles 11 points toward the GOP. There are many reasons for this shift, but one is how Trump/Vance ran on a politics of scarcity. They framed illegal immigrants as competing with Americans for ever dwindling jobs and homes. They’re here to take what you have.
Do you think that this was effective because scarcity is an easier sell than abundance? In some primal way, is the fear of scarcity more powerful and galvanizing than the promise of abundance?
I would add a little bit to that story. We had a huge generational financial crisis. It was in the same period that I think the reality of global warming became truly undeniable. And so you actually had the problems beginning to change. The old order became discredited on multiple levels.
On one level, the idea that these masters of the universe knew how to run the economy, it got shattered. The idea that if you just left it to them, we would have enough of the things we need, gone. And the idea that the economy was allocating resources and building things that made sense for the future also gone. So this sort of deep faith we had that you could leave it up to the markets and they would solve it for you– I think that is the first thing that shattered.
The housing crisis got a lot worse after the financial crisis because one of the takeaways of that was don’t build so much fucking housing. And it turned out the problem was not actually that we were building too much housing, certainly not in the places people wanted it. There were a lot of financial problems and what we were doing with those mortgages, but going into a recession in home building, which is what we did for a long time, was not the right answer. So the housing crisis actually did get sharply worse in the aftermath of that because we destroyed the home building industry for a period of time. And it’s here, I think, that we begin to have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump emerging. Because in the previous era, it felt settled who knew what they were doing, and all of a sudden it didn’t. And so new ideas, new arguments began to get entertained.
To your question of whether or not scarcity is a more compelling argument, I don’t think so. I mean, even Donald Trump, who I do think is a scarcity candidate, his answer to everything is less of something else, right? We don’t make enough in this country? Let’s have less trade. We don’t have enough homes? Less immigration. We’re spending too much? Destroy the government. He’s fundamentally about the suspicion of the other and then using it to sort of cut into even what we have. But he does promise to his people an abundance. He does promise if you’re inside his world, if you’re inside his movement, by taking away from everybody else, you’re gonna get more of it.
And that was enough to swing not that much of the vote. What was the swing of the vote, 4.5 points? It’s not like the entire country upended itself here. Now Trump is in office and he is using tariffs to wreck the global economy. So I don’t think people got what they were hoping for.
The other thing obviously is politics isn’t just about delivery. It’s also about your sense of who is on your side, your sense of the culture. I mean, Trump’s appeal to his voters, just like Obama’s appeal to his voters or Bernie Sanders appeal to his voters, is not purely material and nor is it purely transactional. It’s emotional. It’s about a story of America. It is about a feeling of respect and all those things are our ingredients in our politics too.
That trajectory you were describing before the 2008 financial crisis– that things mostly worked. That government would do its job. Sure, there were missteps, but in the end, on average, we were moving in the right direction. But come the end of 2024 you said quote, “the thing I’ve changed my mind the most on in politics in recent years is how destructive bad regulations can be and how seriously I take it now when I hear that regulations or rules are ill constructed. I think I found myself more frustrated and then ultimately quite angry at the way the Democratic party became just the defenders of institutions and not the reformers of them.”
That shift that happened in you, when and why did that occur?
So I was born an hour south of Los Angeles in Orange County, and I lived in California until I moved to DC when I was 21. Then I was in DC for 13 years and I moved back to California in 2018 and when I came back to California, one of the things that was sobering about it was that it was clear it was not doing well. I mean, the housing crisis, the homelessness crisis. I always think it’s an amazing statistic, but at least in 2022, California had 12% of the population, 30% of the nation’s homeless population, and 50% of its unsheltered homeless population.
There was clearly a crisis of disorder in California. Look, West Virginia is poorer than California. It has higher unemployment than California. It has more drug addiction than California, and it has a much lower homelessness rate than California because it has enough houses for people.
That’s striking.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Think of it like musical chairs. If you’ve got 10 people in a game of musical chairs and there are 10 chairs, then even if somebody has a broken leg, everybody’s gonna get a chair. But if you’ve got nine chairs, then the person with a broken leg is not gonna get a chair.
Right.
So these individual characteristics that we blame homelessness on–people having mental illness or a drug addiction, or losing their job–they do matter, but they primarily matter in a context where there isn’t enough housing.
So I go back to California, here’s a state. It is rich. It is highly populated. Every statewide official is a Democrat, and the outcomes are not what you would hope. It’s a very dynamic state. It’s the home of the technology and culture industries. It is inventing the frontier of AI, but it is not affordable. It is one of the worst affordability crises in the country. The worst housing crisis in the country. It is not building fast enough to meet its own clean energy goals. Why?
I mean, there was a version of this book that I thought about called, what’s the Matter with California? You know, it’s kind of building on What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which was a kind of famous political book a couple decades ago. And so that sense that you had to kind of ask–not just what was the problem over there– but what was this call coming from inside the house? That’s what happened to me.
So I wanna narrow the focus a bit. Right now Trump, by way of DOGE, is taking a cleaver to the federal government in an attempt to make it “more efficient and functiona”. But it’s not just Republicans frustrated with the inefficiency and stagnation of government. Democrats like John Podesta (who oversaw the Inflation Reduction Act for Joe Biden) has said “delays are pervasive at every level of government, federal, state, and local. We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”
Why and how did Democrats (and liberalism at large) begin leaning into impeding innovation rather than cultivating it?
I think a lot of it comes down to the rise of the new left that happened in America in the seventies, and it was a two-sided thing. You have Ronald Reagan beginning to attack the government, right? The sort of conservative movement. But in terms of the story I am telling is the role of the left in this. Ralph Nader is the leader of a movement to sue the government. That is what the institutions and statutes that Nader is part of do. They make it possible to sue the government for this or that infraction. And then you have these nonprofits staffed with tons of lawyers who spend all their time suing the government.
Ralph Nader, when he is running for president in 2000 was asked, ‘what makes him qualified?’ And he says, ‘nobody sued the government more than me’. We built things often for very good reasons–statutes for good reasons that made it possible for individuals or institutions to try to jump in front of government action and say, stop. But we just let it go too far.
Although they make up 1% of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one third of the House of Representatives and more than half of the Senate. You write, “when you make legal training, the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking. The default thinking in politics and legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.”
I’m picking up there on some work from Nick Bagley, who is a professor of administrative law at the University of Michigan. He was a former lead counsel for Gretchen Whitmer and he has this law review paper called The Procedural Fetish.
His point there as somebody who trains these lawyers and is one of these lawyers, is that the way lawyers think about what makes government legitimate is whether or not government is following the procedures and the process laid out in statute regulation and legal interpretations of those statutes and regulations.
But the way people think about what makes government legitimate is outcomes. Is it making their lives work? Does it work responsibly, to them? Does it do the things it says it does? The Biden administration got $42 billion for rural broadband and by the end of the administration it had functionally signed no people up for rural broadband.
And if you dig into this, there was this complicated 13 or 14 step process that states had to go through. Notice of funding opportunities and letters of intent and this and that and the other thing. And in theory, every one of those steps is there for legitimacy, right? To make sure like there’s no graft and no corruption and nobody’s getting picked for cronyistic reasons. And we’re making sure to keep equity in mind when we put out the contracts and in the end, nobody’s getting fucking broadband.
And so, from some legal perspective, this was all very legitimate. Like we laid out this approach and we balanced a lot of interests and put all these different things into the project. But from a voter perspective, you failed. You failed and you’re wasting my time and my money.
High speed rail, they are following the law beautifully in California. They’ve spent more than 12 years environmentally clearing the track. More than 12 years doing that. But nobody’s riding high speeded rail when they were told they would be doing so by 2020. It’s not that you should have no process, not that you should have no legalism, but you can turn the dial too far. Look, I’m not a fan of Doge. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk and they’re acting in a way that is fundamentally lawless–
Someone could super cut what you just said and some of what JD Vance has said and you’d see a lot in the middle of that Venn diagram.
Wonderful. I wish they would do the thing I’m saying. I wish Doge would try to make the government more effective, more efficient. I wish it would increase its capacity. I wish it would make it easier to hire good people. I would love to have a genuine department of government efficiency, not a department of burn the fucking thing down and profit from the ashes. That’s where they’ve ended up. But if the personality type of the right is autocratic, the personality type of the left is bureaucratic and both have real problems.
And you are where?
I am in the make shit work camp.
That’s gonna be your slogan when you run for office.
God forbid.
People want it.
I have seen this meme going around. I’m staying far away from that.
You have a new beard that’s looking good.
It changed my image. It’s like you grow a beard and everybody’s like, are you running? It’s like, no, I just grew a beard.
One listener asked if you were trying to appear more dignified?
Do you think my beard makes me seem more dignified?
Not at all.
I feel like I’ve lived a lot of years. I wanted to put the wisdom on my face.
Now you mentioned high-speed rail and you write in the book that “liberals should be able to say, vote for us and we will govern the country the way we govern California. Instead, conservatives are able to say, vote for them and they will govern the country the way they govern California. Back in 2008, California voted for Prop 1A, which set 10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect LA to San Francisco. The ride would take a little under three hours. The estimated cost was 33 billion with a completion date sometime in 2020.
Through your reporting in the book and for The New York Times, how do you begin to understand and explain what happens next here?
High-speed rail choked to death on process. They’re building it, but they have lowered their ambitions to Merced to Bakersfield. And if you know anything about California, connecting Merced to Bakersfield with high-speed rail would be nobody’s idea of what you should do with high-speed rail. Even if you finish that, it’s actually gonna be a disaster because it’s gonna have nowhere near the ridership you need to support this unfathomably expensive rail project you’ve spent 30 years doing.
What happens throughout this is death by a thousand cuts of process. They don’t have the power to just put the route in the direction they want to. They don’t have the eminent domain powers, they don’t have the environmental review powers. They don’t exempt high-speed rail, even though it is an incredibly pro-environmental project.
When they’re trying to get the money from the federal government, they apply through an Obama era stimulus program that gives preference for infrastructure projects that clean up air pollution in disadvantaged communities, which is one reason they start in central California because you have poor communities with worse air pollution.
Fresno is very troubled.
Right, and so now you’re building in an area that, on the one hand, it’s great to have high-speed trail going to Fresno, but if you build it there, it doesn’t begin with the backers and the political capital to keep it going effectively.
For color and context, I went to high school in Fresno. And back then, in 2011, it was something that felt imminent. Everyone was excited about it.
Yeah, and I found it really sad, honestly, doing this reporting, because these are good people. They’re working really hard under an impossible set of rules. Building high-speed rail is a solved technological problem. You go to Europe and board high-speed rail. You can go to Japan and board high-speed rail. You can go to China and board high-speed rail. We know how to do this. The issue is that we cannot do it under these processes.
I was standing on one patch of freeway that they had had to move by a hundred feet, and I guess there’d been a mini storage facility and the legal wrangling over just that had been like two and a half years. You have to let the government act if it’s gonna do big complex public infrastructure projects. We’d be in these areas and they would say, ‘oh, you know, as part of the negotiations we’re building a park, we’re building this and that’. They’re building all these things because it was part of getting the approvals and the city council to be on board and they were proud of it. But they shouldn’t have been proud of it because the point was to build high speed rail and they weren’t getting that done.
And now this project is caught in California in this crazy position. They don’t have enough money to even finish the Merced to Bakersfield line. And everybody on it told me forthrightly that if you can’t make it from LA to SF there’s not really a reason to do this. To now make it LA to SF they have something like $11 billion line of sight. They have already spent a line of sight on something like $11 billion. They probably need a little bit less than 40 billion to do Merced to Bakersfield. To do the whole thing, if it all went well from here, 110 billion. The whole thing was said initially that it would cost 33 billion and be done by 2020. Now we’re talking 110 billion done by God knows when and they’re just building in the hopes that it’s gonna somehow create politics where people are gonna keep throwing money at it because they’ll eventually wanna finish this. In addition to the failure of the actual project, the thing that upsets me most is that nothing has really changed.
What do you mean?
Look, you’re California. You have, as the most significant infrastructure project you’ve done in the last however many decades, one of the single failures– like a byword for failed public infrastructure. You’d think you would really root and branch remake the way the government there builds. One, maybe, so you could actually finish high-speed rail but two, so nothing like it ever happened again. And they just didn’t.
This is what I mean when I say, ‘liberals excuse away failure’. They explain it. They perseverate or move on from it or assume it’s an exception to the rule, but they don’t fix it.
And what do Republicans do with failure?
I mean, not much. They’re not trying to build high-speed rail at all. But the Republican Party, at least at the national level, has transformed into something different after failure. George W. Bush basically discredited the Republican party up until that point, and it took some time for this to work its way through the system. Donald Trump takes over the Republican party by running first and foremost against George W. Bush, against the Iraq war, against the financial crisis, against the feeling that free trade and immigration were ripping us off.
And what he does is he takes over the party from the bushes. What that party’s turned into, I think, is ugly and a problem, but it is different. One difficulty in California is that it’s now a one party state, and a lot of states are one party states. Texas is a one party state. I don’t think one party states learn that well. Because they don’t have enough competition to force them to learn.
Do you think Democrats need a candidate to do a hostile takeover of the party?
I think they need to change, and I think they need to do things that are coalitionally and conceptually uncomfortable for them. They need to take apart pieces of legislation they consider crown jewels. They need to make government work in different ways than they’re comfortable doing. They need to tell people in their coalition no. When things move from, we passed a bill to we’re writing the implementations and regulations stage, they need to start saying no when somebody’s like, ‘if we’re building all these semiconductor factories maybe we should tell all of the companies applying for these grants to tell us how they’ll diversify their subcontractor chains and put on onsite childcare. Maybe if you’re doing something as hard as trying to reshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing, just try to do that.
If you wanna pass universal childcare, I also wanna pass universal childcare. Let’s do it. But don’t put it into the semiconductor project. I call it everything bagel liberalism where they’re just piling more and more and more on the bagel. You know, an everything bagel just enough is a very good bagel. With too much, as in everything everywhere all at once, it becomes like a black hole from which nothing can escape.
I’m an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese.
Yeah, that’s a popular one in my house.
In advance of this episode, I spoke to Dan Richard, the former chairman of high-speed rail from 2012 to 2019. He often absorbed a lot of the criticism the project faced. But he offered four reasons as to why the project went off the rails. (No pun intended.)
– Judicial rulings that were crippling, creating excess cost and time delays passed by Judge Michael Kenny, who was believed to have a bias against the project.
– The myopia of the environmental movement. He received zero support as CEQA had become like the 2nd amendment to them.
– Jealousy on the part of train operators who felt high-speed rail was its own, separate project unrelated to their work. Everyone fighting for scarce resources– there’s never enough cable scraps, for example.
– And then finally, when the project expanded to the central valley, he said that politicians from San Francisco and Los Angeles became less interested in a rail that went to the Central Valley.
Those are messy, human issues: a judicial bias, a myopia of a movement, jealousy between contemporaries, and an elitist value assessment. Do you think high-speed rail is uniquely unlucky when we talk about these big projects, or just profoundly, painfully human?
I like that you called him. One and two there track with what I heard. Number three, I haven’t heard that much about, although there I did hear a lot about the issues with freight rail because you often needed to build along freight rail tracks, and it would close in the holiday season. In any kind of advanced complex society, you just have a lot of interests you’re balancing against each other.
I spent a lot of that chapter talking about the broad based slowdown in construction productivity in the United States. There’s a long time when construction grew at the rate of manufacturing productivity. We got better and better and better at construction, and in recent decades we’ve either flatlined or got worse. And that’s true in high speed rail. We built the Empire State Building in a year. Does anybody think we could build it in a year now? But our machinery is better now; our ability to do 3D drafting is better now. Why couldn’t we build it faster? We opened the first 28 subway stations in New York City in four years. Could we do that now?
Not every project is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy said about the family, but there is rhyming across them, right? And that’s what that chapter about building is really about. There are highly advanced societies, societies of negotiations, and everything is too highly negotiated to work.
One of the papers I found really interesting that I read during the writing of the book was about how small the firms that build housing are, because it’s just so difficult to work across county or city lines. Everything is about your ability to navigate the local politics and the local city council and the neighbors. Manufacturing has very high productivity because we’ve learned how to do it in big factories and offsite. We could do modular home construction, but we make that politically very difficult.
You can dig into it and find a reason and this thing on the project but the actual thing is that nobody had the power to decide. We are so caught up in negotiation and process and protecting different players and interests from harm that we make it too hard to act in a consequential fashion and make things actually happen.
But a mix of those human setbacks do add up to how many years of this not happening with high-speed rail?
You keep saying human setbacks, and I see what you’re saying there, but these don’t strike me as fundamentally, ‘Oh, the tragedy of the human condition’. Because China’s full of humans too, and they build high-speed rail…
But China doesn’t treat its citizens like human beings.
Well, France builds high-speed rail. Do you think the French aren’t treated like human beings?
We have a lot of lovely listeners in France, I can’t answer that.
But you don’t believe that–
You write in the book, “China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.
But don’t use China. Use France. France builds high speed rail.
It does seem France is less litigious.
Right. We have built a lot of American government by, we do it through adversarial legalism, we do it through lawsuit. And this gets to this point about people. People have all these flaws. We have these complexities, we get our backs up, we get jealous of people on other projects. It’s all true. But the default structures under which we work drive our behavior. So in Houston, where they don’t have a zoning code, it’s not that people love the idea that an apartment building will go up down the block.
They can complain about it, but they can’t stop it. In San Francisco you can stop it. But the question of like, at what level of government are decisions being made and in what way are they being made in your vision of democracy- like everybody who voted for the governor or everybody who showed up at the planning meeting, right?
These don’t have answers. Their value judgments, their matters of tradition, and the way systems evolve and process. But I don’t think what doomed high-speed rail in California was the frailty of the human temperament.
I don’t think that’s the only reason. I think it is part of the equation, though. Is your ‘vision of democracy’ better represented in Houston than San Francisco?
I mean it depends on what, but on housing sure. One of the things that we’ve laid down in a lot of different jurisdictions over time are parking minimums.
What is that?
So if you are building a residential structure (it works differently in different places) but per the number of people you expect to be living in it or the square footage, it has to have a certain number of parking spaces per whatever your number is. And that adds a lot to the cost of the project. If you’re doing things that are big multi-units you often then need to tunnel underground, which really adds to the cost of the project.
Which sounds on the surface well intentioned, but had the result of being pretty exclusionary, right?
Very exclusionary, because you’re making everything much more expensive and then only richer people can afford it. I know liberals who often say to me like, ‘oh, what we need is affordable housing. Not all this developer luxury stuff.’ But it’s like you layered on so many regulations that the only projects that pencil out for the developers are luxury condominiums. And then you’re complaining that all you get are luxury condominiums. Make it easier to build more kinds of things and they’ll build more kinds of things.
What do they say when you say that to them?
Everybody’s like, ‘oh wow. What a great point.’ No.
Is that what it’s like when they come on The Ezra Klein Show?
Yeah, everybody just thinks I’m right about everything. It’s wonderful.
Do you feel responsible for Tim Walz getting the nomination and then us losing the election?
(laughs) Yeah, I definitely hold that one on my back. I wish they had used Tim Walz differently. I don’t think Vice presidents win campaigns–
And they don’t lose them.
But here you have this guy who, the way he got onto your list and the way he got onto your ticket is by being good in freewheeling media environments. And then you wrap him in bubble wrap and you don’t let him go out and you just have him doing these canned speeches. That campaign was way too careful. They had a hard job, because what they were really dealing with was the cost of living and the Biden administration being unpopular. But there were some respects in which they absorbed too much caution from the culture of the candidate and the administration.
But to what you were saying earlier about how these conversations go, my friends who are, I think in some ways to my left, think that we need more affordable housing or maybe we need more public housing. And I don’t disagree with that. But the thing is, if you want that, you need to deregulate the way the government itself builds housing.
It’s funny that you’re describing them as to your left.
Well, they would describe themselves as to my left. I often say that I think I’m to the left of the people who are not allowing the government to work, but in terms of the way people understand the political spectrum, they would probably say I’m right of them.
The point I’m making is that public housing is great. You can build a lot of it in places like Singapore, but if you do what we do here you make it more costly, more procedurally complex. If you layer standards and goals that the private builders don’t even have in order for the public to build anything, then you’re not gonna be able to build very much of it. And what you can build will be unaffordable. It’ll be slow. In many cases, it won’t be built at all. And so you cannot build public housing at scale under those conditions. If you wanna build public housing at scale… we think about deregulation as something we do for the private sector. In some cases that is necessary. But in this case, a lot of what we’re talking about is deregulation of the public sector. So the public sector can exercise power more effectively.
I wanna understand this idea a little bit more. You write in the book “that the world we live in, where manufacturing productivity rises and rises, even as construction productivity falls, is a new phenomenon, not a historical inevitability.”
How do you think AI plays a role in the way we may avoid that historical inevitability? Because it does feel fairly inevitable.
It doesn’t seem inevitable to me. Like if the rule is we’re gonna make it extremely difficult to build in the real world and we’re gonna outlaw things like modular construction and affordable housing, AI doesn’t have a solve for that. AI can’t act in the real world very well at all. What AI could probably do is lower the cost of drafting and make it easier to generate this or that design or come up with possible answers to an engineering problem you’re facing. But we have made advances like that already. We have made 3D drafting easier. You can do things like computers you couldn’t do 30 or 40 years ago. And building has gotten much more expensive. So if we don’t make it easier to build in the real world, there’s nothing AI can do about that for us.
Do you think AI will accelerate construction productivity by, in part, reducing human’s role in it?
Not unless we choose to reduce our role. These are regulatory decisions.
Sure. I bring that up because in a recent episode (on your show) you talked about using this new open AI product called Deep Research. And you asked it to do this report on the tensions between the Madisonian Constitutional system and the highly polarized nationalized politics we now have. How did that go?
That’s where I think you have a very different situation than construction productivity. Because within four or five or six or seven minutes, it generated a 10ish page document that… look I hire and have for years researchers to work with me on the show. They’re incredibly brilliant people. It was better than anything any of them could have done in less than five or six days.
And that’s right now.
And that’s the worst it’ll ever be. I had another one recently where, you know, I’ve been following Donald Trump’s trade wars and his tariff reports and I had it prepare this report around this dense 41 page paper by Trump advisor, Stephen Miran about trade.
I had read the paper, but I was moving fast and I wanted to see some critiques of it. Some of these I’m doing prep with my human researchers and myself. But I’m doing these a little bit to try to understand what the capabilities of the systems are.
And it was astonishingly good. It was better than anything we had come up with. But what it has there is the ability to work in a sandbox of information available on the internet. And once you get into things you have to build in the real world, then you get into choke points of AI can’t solve.
Let’s go back to the sandbox, because a lot of people work in sandboxes. Have jobs with healthcare that support their families with work in sandboxes, people in marketing, plenty of journalists. How did you hold that when you discovered that this system– that is the worst it will ever be right now– did something that would take your very talented colleagues five to six days to do in less than seven minutes?
I’ve been covering this now since Vox, so to be blunt I wasn’t surprised by it. I have been living in this state of future shock for a long time now. If you go back to this piece I did a couple years ago called “This Changes Everything” it’s an effort to say that exact thing. And I think that everybody who really covers or really works with AI goes through, every so often, these moments of like, ‘oh my fucking God.’ But there is a kind of shock as you recognize the scope of what is coming and how culturally unprepared we are for it.
I’ve been trying to think about how to do this as a piece of journalism, but I have a three and a six year old. I don’t know how they should be educated. This is a place where my uncertainty is sitting right now, and this is the size of my uncertainty because I genuinely don’t feel like I know what it is the economy or society will want value or reward in 20 years. Now, I’m not saying, I don’t know anything. I’m pretty sure that other human beings will want us to be kind and hardworking, but in the way that a parent might’ve said 10 years ago, ‘well, as long as you’re a lawyer or you get a college degree you’ll be fine’.
I’m not sure that’s right. Is it safer to raise somebody right now to be a lawyer or to be a plumber? Not obvious to me. I feel like this is like a little bit of an event horizon now. It’s not that I think every job will go, I don’t, and economies do adapt, but they don’t adapt that fast and they don’t always adapt easily for the same people.
The fact that the headline numbers of unemployment don’t change that much doesn’t mean you didn’t have a lot of churn in who was employed and where and how. And so I am very concerned that we have hundreds of years under our belt of training ourselves to value people for their product and training people to value themselves for their product. Work is an ideology. Work is, in many ways I think capitalism is, at least in this country, the last dominant system of worth. We’re not that religious anymore. We’ve created this technology that is aimed at getting in front of that and being able to do that kind of work– knowledge work specifically. Yes, most creative people, it’s not replacing them, but a lot of work we are asking people to be machines and now we have actual machines. I don’t know how we will handle that as a policy matter, and I don’t know how we will absorb that into our thinking about each other. And the fact that it won’t happen is one big bang (where most of the pandemic happened all at once). We didn’t blame people for that, but it’ll happen fast, but slow, if that makes sense. You know, 8% unemployment in this area that used to have 2% unemployment or new graduates won’t be able to get a job. And we’re so used to being individualistic about this, and it’s been so adaptive for our economy to tell people to blame themselves, that we will blame them, we will harm their dignity, their self worth.
I think we’re entering into something that could be very cruel in some ways. You know, amazing things could come of it if we get it right… but terrible forms of upheaval could come from it, too.
You said recently we’re about to get “hit by a truck with AI”. In the immediate, who are the casualties?
I think it is coming for what we call knowledge work first.
Your researchers?
Probably not mine.
But only by dint of your goodness or your interest in working with people?
No, I mean, I have a bunch of things I need people to do, but I wouldn’t expand my research team right now. I don’t think that would make sense. And this is something I’ve heard from a lot of people in a lot of industries, that it’s not that it makes them wanna let anybody go, but in terms of would they hire more? No, because it’s very clear that the productivity of individual hires should be about to go way, way up. So you don’t want more people.
You want to figure out how to rebuild your systems so the people you do have can take advantage of these AI products that are coming out that most people still don’t know how to use. And very companies have deeply integrated into their functioning.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’ll be as Dario Amodei says, and we’ll have these machines of loving grace and we will have cures for autoimmune diseases that baffle us and cures for cancers that are incurable, and maybe it will help us make breakthroughs in energy and energy become cleaner and more reliable. When I say I see this as like an event horizon, what I mean is that I really don’t know what’s on the other side of it. It might be better. Maybe this period in human history, when we valued people for what they can make, what they could produce, when we asked them to act like machines, maybe this was a couple hundred years and it was never what we were supposed to be. Maybe we’ll find ways to value the human experience much more fundamentally.
It used to be that the rich didn’t work. The point of being rich was to not work. The point of being rich was to follow your interests and play croquet and like bullshit with people at the Naturalist Society. Now the point of being rich is to work and show how hard you work and all the podcasts you consume and all the books you read and, and, and…
We have this culture where productivity has become the dominant ethos. Maybe the culture to come will be more human. Maybe we found a machine that can act like a machine, so we can be us. I don’t know. I’m not purely pessimistic. My view isn’t stop it and, you know, I could see ways in which maybe it creates a huge number of jobs in other areas.
Where do you see your role in this? Like, how are you thinking about the work you wanna do and the role you wanna play? Especially, particularly when it comes to this abundance agenda.
I wear some different hats. I mean abundance. I am trying to persuade people of the worth of these ideas. I’m trying to persuade on one level liberals and on another level conservatives. There are ways in which red states have been able to implement pro housing policy more effectively than blue ones because they’re not working off of as bad of a baseline, you know?
And then I have my podcast and I try to explore a world that at different times I find wondrous and frightening and there’s, you know, very intense news that needs to be covered. Then also, as you know, novelists who you want to interview and beauty to try to explore.
I try to make sense of things for myself first, and then for an audience. For me that’s not changing. The AI has not replaced me yet, but give it a couple years.
Do you believe that?
I’m not sure it won’t replace me. I think it is something we all should be thinking about, which is why I spent so much time on my show trying to get people to think about it. But I don’t think we have answers because I don’t think we really fundamentally have information. And look, you can talk to people, right? Talk to Gary Marcus who thinks I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and it’s not gonna get there. I think in many ways it kind of almost is there now, but there are people who are skeptical of this vision of the world or who believe it will top out right around where we are now.
But nothing about the science and the data and people’s experience as you just described on the show, tells you that it’s topped out.
I think the question of replacement is actually a kind of interesting question. There are ways in which I think you could have a world where AI could replace a lot of us and doesn’t because we actually just don’t want it.
An example is maybe you could have told an AI to write a book like Abundance. I mean, a lot of this information is public. But I just don’t think if I told people that this book was written by chat GPT they would want it. Even if it were exactly as good. And I think a lot of things might be like that.
The idea that AI could generate based on inhaling the entire corpus of podcasting that has ever existed… it could generate fake podcasts that are actually better and more listenable than anything we’re really doing. Will people want it? Maybe, but also maybe not. I mean, right now computers are better than human beings at chess. They just are. But more people are watching chess played than ever, right? The sport is in a renaissance. People just wanna watch people play chess. Some of the things in the economy, some of the ways things work, we just prefer it. We just want a human being there. Maybe AI tutors for kids are better but we’re just not gonna want it. It’s too creepy.
Let’s bring the abundance agenda back to this current moment. Your colleague at the Times and a frequent guest of this show, Astead Herndon, wrote on Twitter:
“I find it so telling that Democrats don’t have a project 2025 of their own, what is the liberal thesis for why the government isn’t working?How would they fix things like education, homelessness, or crime? How would they go beyond the mantra of protecting institutions and actually improve them?”
And so do you see this new book as a kind of project? 2025 for Democrats. Are you, are you giving this, it’s a vision. Are you gifting this text to the Democratic party in the hopes they adopt it?
Project 2025 was a huge coalitional document organized by more than a hundred groups on the right. So what that was doing was trying to create something like a policy menu that represented a broad enough swath to be, I don’t wanna call it consensus because people have different views of things, but, but something.
That was Project 2025. This is a vision. Hopefully people take it and build policy menus off of it. Hopefully people take it and use it in ways we can’t predict or we can’t imagine. This is somewhere in between an analysis and a manifesto. There’s a lot of original reporting. Hopefully this book has the texture of government as it is lived and as it is practiced. But this is not a think-tank report. This is, for me and Derek, our best effort to answer some fundamental questions about what has gone wrong and to build a set of conceptual policy tools and intellectual tools for how to ask the right questions to get good answers about how to fix it.
I feel like we’ve explained some or most of the questions, what are some of the answers to make this go right?
I mean, I think the answers are in different places: reducing costs by increasing supply. It sounds easy, but we don’t do it. So that means you have to look for what is the supply choke point. It’s gonna be different in clean energy than in housing. Different in high speed rail than in clean energy. Different in higher education or parts of healthcare. Things rhyme culturally here, bureaucratically, but they’re not the same. These issues are not symmetrical.
I want universal healthcare. I mean, we’re not that far from it after the Affordable Care Act, but we’re further than I would like us to be. But also, if we were ever to have anything like Bernie Sanders version of single-payer, we would need a massive expansion in healthcare supply. We would need more doctors. We would need more nurses. We would need more hospitals. We would need more centers, right? And then we also need the capacity to do the surgeries and so on. So maybe we shouldn’t be choking off the number of doctors by limiting residency spots.
But you’re not gonna turn to the final chapter here and find 77 bullet points of solutions. That requires a level of expertise in every domain we’re talking about that we would not pretend to have.
And, you know you read this book and you found it hopeful. I think it is a hopeful book.
I also found it frustrating.
That’s fair. It is frustrating, but it is not a policy laundry list. Not because we’re not trying to influence policy. We are. But we’re trying to generate a lot of other people to influence policy, right? The hope of this book is that it’s generative. Look, local government has tremendous power, specifically over housing. It has a lot of authority on education and state governments too.
We’re much too nationalized. I mean, one of the concluding points of my first book Why We’re Polarized is that as local media has weakened, as media has nationalized as people who once would’ve read like a local paper and now subscribed to the New York Times, and people who once would’ve listened to talk radio, listened to Pod Save America, or Talk Easy, or the Ezra Klein Show, our attachments become national.
And that focuses us on a politics that is hardest for us to affect. We might really be listened to locally, whereas like Donald Trump, or for that matter, Joe Biden, are not gonna listen to us. One of the things that I find really exciting is that there are local abundance chapters now. That’s wonderful. YIMBY– the yes in my Backyard movement–has been incredibly effective at this. So local chapters of NB all across the country.
One of the things you and Derek do propose is that we do need a new, updated and contemporary set of laws to build. And I think the quick reconstruction of the I 95 bridge in Pennsylvania back in 2023 is a good example of a democratically run state doing something quickly and well. Talk to us about that.
What happens there is you have a truck sort of flip over and set on fire and a portion of the I95 outside Philadelphia collapses. And this is a huge artery for all commerce on the northeast quarter of the US.
Josh Shapiro is the governor and he says at the beginning, this could take a year to rebuild. This is a very, very hard problem. But he uses an emergency declaration to functionally swoop away almost all of the rules. He decides to use union labor. But aside from that, functionally everything the state of Pennsylvania has in its laws about how you do a rebuild is gone.
I talked to the Department of the Secretary of Transportation there, and he walked me through it in the book, and it’s like instead of putting out a structure for contractors to bid, there are two contractors working nearby on different parts of the bridge for other reasons. He basically pulls in both of them and he’s like, you’re on this now. They’re basically on the job by that day. Otherwise it would’ve taken like 12 or 24 months normally to do the full processes that they would’ve normally followed. Everything is thrown out the window.
They rebuild the thing in 12 days, you know, provisionally at least. So it’s working again. And it’s the beginning of Josh Shapiro becoming a national figure. You shouldn’t be using emergency declarations for everything, but if everybody agreed–including Joe Biden who said, “Shapiro’s doing a hell of a job”– like if everybody agreed that was better, that was government working… And by the way, they did it with union labor. It’s not like they didn’t do anything aside from rebuild the bridge. They did hold to things that were important to them. But then what does it say about our normal process?
And it’s not that you can’t work backwards and understand why the normal process is there. If the Secretary of Transportation can just grab some nearby contractors then that also opens the door for a lot of corruption. But in trying to close the door to corruption, we’ve also closed the door to the government working swiftly and effectively. Have we made the right choice? I don’t think we have. We’ve certainly turned the dial too far. You could allow things to happen quickly. We could hire inspector generals who are able to look at how contracts were awarded after, right? There’s a lot you could do to try to balance things better than we did, but Shapiro and them, they rebuilt fast and I think there’s a lot to learn from it.
Do you think Democrats, maybe more so than Republicans, need a crisis to act?
I think government, to change, often demands crises to act.
Like an Operation Warp Speed.
Yeah, Operation Warp Speed. Republicans right now under Trump are sort of creating crises, but I’m not sure that they’re more willing to act. I mean, Democrats want to act. Both parties don’t wanna act in ways they don’t like acting. Republicans would need a real crisis to raise taxes. They’re not gonna raise taxes just because the deficit is high. Something would have to force them to do that.
And Democrats, to break bureaucracy, to say the government is not working, I think they need something real. How do you make parties and coalitions go against their instincts and some of their core ideological approaches?
Democrats believe they’re working and acting in the name of working families. Is that true?
I mean, sometimes, but the big places they govern like New York City or New York state, if you are governing in a way that has made the place you govern unaffordable for working families and you’re losing them by the hundreds of thousands, then no, you are not governing on behalf of working families.
And that exodus continues across many cities, Democrats, can they fairly say that they’re actually in any way at this point working on behalf of working families?
Yes, they could say, in some ways, they are. They do things like pass paid leave and free school lunch. There are a lot of things Democrats do that are good, but in a world where they are losing both the support and the residency of working families, I think they have some real soul searching to do.
In dialogue with them, whether it’s on the show, off the air, or at the DNC– do they hear that critique? Do they feel it fundamentally?
I think a bunch of them do. This stuff is easier to nod your head along to. The conversation is always easy. People hold multitudes inside of them. They believe the critique and they believe the opposite of the critique. Particularly depending on how it’s framed. The question’s gonna be when the chips are down and they are governing again, do they do things they have been unwilling and resistant to do? Do they have the power? Sometimes they want to. You have a governor or a mayor or legislators who want to, but they can’t get the votes on the board of supervisors or in the legislature or whatever it might be.
So often you have overlapping powers that make this very, very difficult. I’m complicating this because sometimes they want to and they can’t. Sometimes they think they want to and they don’t wanna go through what it would take to do it. The Democratic Party treated Donald Trump’s first administration as an aberration. It didn’t think it needed to change that much. I think now it does. So we’re gonna see what emerges on the other side of that.
When did you get angry at the Democratic party? Something shifted.
I mean seeing government fail made me angry.
Was being castigated for saying Biden shouldn’t run contributed to this?
Oh no.
That didn’t bother you?
This book was written largely before that. So to the extent you’re picking up off of what’s in the book, I did not get angry about housing supply in mid 2023. The piece that leads to this book, “The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting”, is from 2021. I find what the party did around Biden impressive. I’m not angry about that. The party eventually did mobilize to do something never done before in the modern era, and got him to not run again. It was too late, and I think a lot of people deserve blame on this. But no, the idea that I’m harboring anger for that– like that made me respect the Democratic party a lot more. It actually did something hard at a time when Republicans are bowing the knee to Donald Trump. I don’t have that view on the Democratic party.
But you harbor anger where then?
California shouldn’t be unaffordable. It shouldn’t be. New York shouldn’t be unaffordable. These are choices. We shouldn’t be making them.
You write that “either we build faster or accept catastrophe. There is no third option in the coming years.” How do we go about doing the former and do you worry that we are moving towards the latter?
I mean, I definitely think we’re moving towards the latter. That quote you just used that’s from the section on decarbonization. If we don’t build enough clean energy, we will have unchecked climate change. And where are we? Donald Trump got elected. He pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accords and he’s trying to throw the solar and wind industries into chaos while accelerating the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure.
We were not moving fast enough, even when we were moving in the right direction, and now the government of the United States is doing everything they can to move us in the wrong direction. I think if you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. Elections have consequences and this one’s had more severe consequences than most. I wish… I’m not gonna end this one on a note of optimism on that particular question and policy area. I’m feeling somewhat heartbroken.
How do you hold that like day to day in your life as someone who’s like given as much as you have to?
Politics is a fight. I have the blessing of being able to feel some agency in it, right? I actually find it much harder when I can’t write about things and report on them. The feeling of powerlessness is the hardest thing. The point is not that politics is not giving to me what I’ve given it, but you know, I’m in this because I want the world to go well for people when I think it’s on the wrong track, and I think the consequences are gonna be dire.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that you are a realist. And so much of this book, especially the prologue, reads incredibly utopian. And so I do feel like it is worth holding at least some of what you believe–even if it’s not all of what you believe–together.
Sure.
Why don’t you set it up for us?
So, the book opens with a sort of short vignette that is trying to imagine the world in 2050, a good world in 2050. People keep calling it a utopia, but I actually don’t really think of it that way. It’s just a world where technology’s kept going. We’ve solved some of the problems that face us today. And so we write:
You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blink in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources—towering wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south. Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with joules dredged out of coal mines and oil pits. They mined rocks and burned them, coating their lungs in the byproducts. They encased their world—your world—in a chemical heat trap. Today, that seems barbaric. You live in a cocoon of energy, so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.
The year is 2050.
You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Water from the ocean pours out of the faucet. It’s fresh and clear, piped from a desalination plant. These facilities use microbial membranes to squeeze out the ocean salt. Today they provide more than half of the country’s fresh used water. Previously overtaxed rivers, such as the Colorado, have surged back now that we don’t have to rely on them to irrigate our farms and fill our coffee mugs. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, previously parched cities are erupting in green foliage.
I’ll end it on green foliage because one thing I like about the vignette, and also something we’re trying to do in the book, is that in the seventies, I do think one of the fundamental ruptures that happened in liberalism was between growth and the environment.
The idea was that to grow more was to despoil the environment. Small is beautiful, the population bomb. Now the situation, we think, is the opposite. I mean, you could see it if you look at the cover. But, I actually think there is a synthesis to be had. The only synthesis to be had. The narrow path to the good future is you’re finding technological ways to make modernity environmentally sustainable because the option is not what I think some of the degrowth people think it is—that we give up on much of modernity. The option is just that we burn the planet to a crisp. The option is we do it unsustainably. And so when we talk about the possibility of desalination to let overtax rivers recover, when we talk about the possibility of lab grown meat to allow huge amounts of Earth’s land to be wild, the question is whether or not we will embed any of this in wise and just policies. I like to think that we will. We can, but you know, what you were saying earlier, politics is a fight. It doesn’t yield without a fight. You win, you lose. But things take a course eventually. And we’re in a pretty bad moment, I think, but I hope that we’re in a moment that has a kind of thesis, antithesis, synthesis dynamic to it where the depredations of what Trump is mixed with a kind of aggressive constitutionalism of Biden will create something in between—what I described elsewhere as a party that doesn’t make government work and a party that wants to make government fail. Maybe we do get the party that wants to make government work.
In 2025, when people ask you, ‘Ezra, should I have kids?’ What do you say?
Yes. People should have kids.
Just as you said in 2022.
The human experience is a beautiful thing. It’s not really just about your experience, it’s about theirs. And the idea that we’re living in the terminal point of human history is wild. I am grateful my kids get to experience this world. I think it’s a beautiful thing to continue. I think human experience is precious, not just mine, theirs, right?
It’s not about how good my weekend is. Though often my weekend is very good with them. It’s about their weekend. If you ask me like, do I want to double my lifespan, of course I would. Of course I wanna experience what’s coming next. But they’ll get to. That’s a comfort, too.
Well, I know I’m not alone in saying this, but it is a great comfort to be passing through in this moment at the same time that you are. As always, thanks again for coming on and for all the time.
Thank you very much. Really appreciate your time as well.
Ezra Klein, take care.