Lawfare Daily: Derek Thompson on Abundance and a New Political Order

[Intro]

Derek Thompson: I would love to see more experiments being done, especially in the realm of science and technology, because that's, I think, how we're going to answer the biggest question here, which is how do we accelerate the science of science itself? How do we take the best ideas that live in the 2050s and 2060s and use the cleverest models to pull them closer into the 2020s?

Kevin Frazier: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the UT Austin School of Law and a contributing editor at Lawfare, joined by my Lawfare colleague, Renee DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown, and our guest, Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic and co-author with Ezra Klein of “Abundance.”

Derek Thompson: Ultimately, I see abundance as being about freedom. It's about the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to have the life that you want to have. And I think liberals need to recognize that in many cases, the rules that emerge from progressivism. that exist in states like California are keeping these places from having true liberal outcomes.

Kevin Frazier: Today we're talking about this exciting new book and the broader significance of the abundance movement at a time when the nation's security and economic wellbeing hinge on removing bottlenecks to technological diffusion and infrastructure development.

[Main podcast]

Alright, the end of one political order tends to create a vacuum, teeing up a contest of new agendas, leaders, and theories. In their new book, “Abundance” Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein offer one such theory by the same name. If successful, Thompson and Klein paint a fairly utopian picture of American life: rapid technological advances, energy security, housing affordability, and public health improvements.

Standing in the way of that future, however, is a political culture and a set of institutions that have become, arguably, quite calcified. Bottlenecks prevent addressing the scarcity that defines so much of modern life. Removing those barriers has substantial implications on the durability of our Democratic order, our geopolitical standing, and our national and economic security. So the stakes are quite high.

Derek, what the heck is abundance? Why are you writing about it? And why should we care?

Derek Thompson: Well, look, from a book summary standpoint, that's pretty damn good what you just did.

So rather than define or redefine “Abundance” as a book, let me talk about how I think it fits into this political moment that we find ourselves. We have a country right now, a right-wing movement that's trying to destroy government —and not just destroy it—destroy government for the purpose of taking over government, destroy government in order to turn a public state into something that can be co-opted by private ends.

That's how you get a world where you have Trump suggesting a cryptocurrency regime that just happens to include a bunch of coins owned by David Sacks, his head tech advisor. It's how you get a telecom policy that just happens to depend on Elon Musk technology like Starlink. You have right now in Washington, a group of people that are trying to demolish what government stands for.

I think America needs a counterparty, an opposition that is popular and strong and capable. And I think that instead right now we have an opposition that is unpopular, and weak, and often in the places where it governs not competent.

It is meaningful, very meaningful that in the cities and states governed by the Democrats, governed by liberals, you often have outcomes that progressives would say do not meet their priorities. It is five states governed by Democrats that have the highest rates of homelessness. The state that leads the country in renewable energy construction is not California, but rather Texas.

And so I want a liberal movement that uses the places that it governs as an advertisement for what it can do for the country. And right now, I think, unfortunately, you have a lot of places that are governed by liberals that strike the country as an example of what they don't want America to be.

So, I think that a vision of abundance, which is about defining progressive ends —abundant housing, clean energy, scientific breakthroughs that extend our lives, technology that improves our lives—I think that these ends, which are progressive ends, need to be matched with processes that actually show government working.

And so that's what our book is trying to do. It's trying to not only paint, as you gestured at, a utopian vision of what America can be, but also to very clinically and often in painstaking detail, point to all the ways that government gets in its own way and becomes an advertisement against itself in a way that opens the door to illiberalism and authoritarianism.

Renee DiResta: Where do we start? No, no, no. Okay, let's, let's take—I lived in California for 10 years. I don't know where, where do you live?

Derek Thompson: Where do we start? Honestly, that's, that should be the name of this podcast, right? I mean, where, where do we start? Is it, is it, is a great, is a great first question for, for any particular vision.

I was born in the Washington D.C. area, went to school in Chicago and now live briefly in North Carolina before moving back to Washington D.C.

Renee DiResta: I live in D.C. now. I, I spent, so I grew up in New York, I spent 10 years in California, and then I, and I was horrified by it, frankly, and I, and I moved for a reason, large, and we can—you know, we're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about your book—but, but as somebody who got very involved in local politics while I lived in California because I felt that it was a, an extraordinary dynamic of a state with a Democratic supermajority where so much more should have been possible because of what you're describing.

The YIMBY movement grew in large part because of that mass frustration, the complete inability to accomplish anything in my feeling. And I'm outing myself maybe as like a sort of a centrist Dem here or centrist Republican, depending on like, well, you know, where San Francisco orients itself.

But the thing that I, when I, when I ask, where do we start? I actually mean that quite literally, how do you get it out of the realm of meme and into the realm of like reality, how do you take something like California and lay out a playbook for people who have the capacity to pass something and don't seem to have a roadmap for how to do it?

Derek Thompson: I think you start with housing. Our book starts with housing, so I think we should start with housing. Housing is very important. It's not just important at the level of meme, something that people talk about, right?

Americans spend money every year, and if there is one segment of their spending that is larger than every other segment, it is where they live. And so if you are interested in solving what I think America faces today, which is what Ezra Klein and his partner Annie Lowry call an affordability crisis, you have to start with the biggest part of spending, which is housing.

I think that we have built a set of processes in this country that exist at the state and local level—and that is worse often in places with more progressives—a set of processes that make it very, very difficult to allow housing markets to respond to demand with supply.

That's a little bit of an over technical way of putting it, but that's the way I like to see it because I did not consider myself like some Milton Friedman, Hayek style, markets in everything, markets know all kind of person. In fact, the second chapter of this book, which is about clean energy, is all about what government needs to do to help markets see what they cannot see. Markets can't see pollution, government can. And that's why clean energy is important as a government initiative.

But let's, let's hold on housing here. I think that starting in the 1960s and 1970s, a certain kind of liberalism began to take hold in this country that was very different than the liberalism that existed between the 1930s and 1960s. If you look at how much was built in America in the New Deal and through Dwight Eisenhower in the interstate highway system, we built houses. We built roads. We built bridges. We built rural electricity. We totally remade the physical environment.

But we also went too far. The construction of highways in many cities demolished low income areas. The construction of all of these things in the physical world often despoiled the environment.

And so you had in the 1960s and 1970s, a kind of regime change in the character and identity of liberalism, which went from let's use a muscular government to build things that help people to let's use individuals to sue to stop the state and sue to stop businesses from changing our physical world.

And this movement accomplished some very important things. The Clean Air and Water Act actually did literally clean the air and the water. And every time that someone who's critical of environmentalism inhales before making their criticism, they breathe air that is cleaner because of the very people they sometimes criticize.

But one aspect of this identity shift from the 1960s to 1970s is that we went from a politics of building to a politics of blocking. And this happened at a legislative level, in terms of passing bills like NEPA and CEQA. It also happened at a litigation level, at a level of law and custom. We made it easier for individuals to sue the government and to sue companies to stop them from doing things in the physical world.

And as a result, you now have a world where, as Yoni Appelbaum, my colleague at the Atlantic reported, every time you have a city that gains 10 percent of progressive vote share, the number of permits in that city go up by 30 percent.

So this is a national problem that I'm describing, that it's a national problem that is especially bad, unfortunately, on the left, in part, I think, because this new identity for liberalism that came about in the 1960s and 1970s associated doing good in the world with stopping people from changing the physical world.

Right now, we have a different problem to solve for than just stopping environmental degradation. We have a housing shortage. We have a shortage of clean energy. We have a shortage of working infrastructure in many places. And solving those problems requires actually building. And so we need a liberalism, we need a politics that is good at achieving outcomes without becoming subordinate to processes.

To get ahead of maybe where your next question is going to be, which is, okay, Derek, that's all well and good, but that was very, very high level. How do we actually do this if you were a mayor or a city council? I have a very basic answer to that question, which I assume might've been on the tip of your tongue, but might not have been. My answer is courage.

Renee DiResta: Okay.

Derek Thompson: I think that there are many mayors and people in city councils that when they're hearing a new case for a development to be built in their city, there are, let's say, 50, 60 people that come to that city council meeting to make a statement.

And because of who tends to have time and awareness and care to make these comments. It's often people who are richer, who are whiter and who own houses. And they'll say, you can't build this for one reason or another. You can't build it because of construction. You can't build it because yada yada parking. There was a Durham council meeting where one woman said, you can't build this development because I have, and I don't mean to laugh at horses, but I have a diabetic or pre-diabetic horse and it's possible that someone might feed an apple to the horse and kill it. If we have housing near my horse. So we can't ever have housing near my horse. This actually happened.

And I think that what happens at these meetings that people become overly deferential to the voices they can hear and under deferential to the voices they can't hear. Because for every one person at that meeting that might raise a lonely hand and say, I know everyone here is against development, but I'm actually for it, there's a thousand people outside of that room that voted you into office because they want housing to be built. And there are ten thousand people throughout that state that would benefit from more housing being built in this area.

And it requires political courage, I think, to orient your politics to the outcomes you think you were voted in the office to do, rather than to make your politics subordinate to the processes of listening to all of the skeptics and the doubters, the NIMBYs that say you cannot build because a change to the physical environment might incur some costs.

Kevin Frazier: And on this idea of a politics of blocking as a lawyer, I have to admit we love procedure. We love process. It's our bread and butter. Tell me about the APA. If you want to nerd out about the N.E.P.A, NEPA, let’s nerd out about all that process. Let's learn about it. Let's teach that the answer is more laws. That tends to be the approach in a lot of law schools, is the solution is just additional procedure or additional participation, for example.

But one of the most important case studies you all point out of abundance in practice is arguably Operation Warp Speed. And I think it'd be really telling for listeners to hear you walk through how Operation Warp Speed really shows the signs of what's possible when, as you detail, the nation, the federal government, state government, private entities, decide to choose to prioritize something, and how that politics then of building can really become possible on some of the most important national security and economic security issues.

Derek Thompson: I'm so glad that you asked about Operation Warp Speed because I think Operation Warp Speed might be the most interesting—I think it might be the most fascinating law of the last 40 years.

Because here you have a law that by some accounts is responsible for saving 10 million lives, and nobody talks about it. Republicans don't talk about it because much of this party is staffed by people that are de facto antivax, so they're not proud of its accomplishments. And a lot of people on the left don't talk about it because of its an achievement of the Trump administration. I don't think it's an achievement of Donald Trump himself, but it was an achievement of a Trump administration, and they're loathe to give credit to anything that bears the name of Donald Trump.

But here you have an unbelievably original and creative law that accelerated the path toward developing mRNA vaccines that got us outta the pandemic and saved millions of lives around the world. How did we do it? I think we did it by not demolishing what government does—which is what Elon Musk is doing now—but by re-imagining what government can do.

And in a way, I think Operation Warp speed was a very—this is going to sound weird—progressive law in the old school style of New Deal liberalism. John Maynard Keynes, we quote in, I believe this chapter on Warp Speed as at one point saying, government should not do what the private sector does, but a little bit better.

Government shouldn't say, you know, Chipotle is good, but I'm pretty sure we can make a better fast, casual Mexican restaurant chain. And so we're, we're going to spend billions of dollars building that. No, it's Chipotle, love it or hate it. It's fine. Let the private sector do that. Government should do what the private sector cannot do. And the private sector cannot on its own orchestrate the accelerated development of a new vaccine therapy for a novel virus faster than any vaccine development in human history.

In Operation Warp Speed, it's not just one thing or another that government did that succeeded. It's many things in order, in sequence. Government invested in a bunch of different vaccine technology platforms not knowing what was going to work. It didn't bet on so many technology platforms that it couldn't follow all of them at once. It seeded many different companies with money to help them accelerate clinical trials so that they could figure out whether the therapies they were cooking up actually worked in the world.

And then when it turned out that Moderna and Pfizer working with BioNtech, which is a German company had, in fact, recipes for a vaccine that could dramatically reduce severe illness, especially for middle aged and older people who get the get the virus of COVID, realized, wait, we need to accelerate the pipeline by which we turn this little tiny dial, this little tiny dose of medicine into something that can serve billions of people, not only in the U.S., but around the world.

It contracted with even glass manufacturers like Corning, where it said, look, we know that in order to ship these vaccines across the country, we're going to need a special kind of glass that won't shatter at a very low temperature that is necessary to preserve the ingredients of this vaccine. So we need to develop a new type of glass that will hold the vaccine and will orchestrate its development with the private sector so that we can ship these vaccines all across the country, and they'll be waiting for people in CVS;s to be shot in their arms.

And then finally, it has to be said, the government could have sold—because the government bought out these vaccines, it could have sold them at any price, and it chose the very important price of zero dollars and zero cents.

And so I think what's so interesting about this policy is that it, it illuminates the possibility of government assuming a kind of new role in the private sector, which I call a bottleneck detective. Once you've decided what your north star is, what your goals are, your priorities are, here's a great example of government sort of surveying the entire potential obstacle course of vaccines development, removing the blockades that exist, and then adding policies to help people get over the hurdles that exist.

And as a result, we took the record time for vaccine development, which used to be eight, nine years, into a new record time of just 10 months. It was in so many ways, an extraordinary and lifesaving accomplishment. And the fact that no one talks about it, I think is utterly fascinating.

Renee DiResta: Do you see parallels to things like you know, what DARPA does with grand challenges and defense and that, and that model of facilitating, either funding or, you know, sort of challenge model I think is very appealing to me. I don't know if you see that as, as a parallel or as something that might be driven.

I'm curious if you think the federal government is a better place for this type of momentum to occur or if you see it happening more, it's at the state level, because we were talking about sort of blue state, blue city governance at the start of the chat.

Derek Thompson: Oh, no, I love that we're talking so much about innovation policy. I think, unfortunately, it's, it's not something that people sometimes want to talk about because we're so, we're so interested in the problems that exist at the level of Tuesday's headline, Wednesday's headline, Thursday's headline, that we forget that the pacemaker of progress is science and technology.

If the reason that people live longer in the 2020s and the 1920s, isn't because of our psychology or biology changing, it's because technology changed and science and tech might be the most important story in the world because of this.

This is a great question, right? I'm going to interpret your question as how do we achieve the most important scientific breakthroughs faster. And the answer to that question is we have no fucking idea. We don't know.

Renee DiResta: I feel like DARPA has an interesting model.

Derek Thompson: Oh, oh, oh, oh, I'm going to get to DARPA in just a second.

Renee DiResta: Okay.

Derek Thompson: We don't know. And this is actually the baseline case in science. What, what is the job of a scientist? It's to reach into the darkness of the unknown and to pull out a little bit of light.

I think the problem with our scientific institutions today—the ones that, by the way, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are destroying in ways that I find utterly horrendous—but I think one problem with our scientific institutions today, like the NIH and the NSF, maybe even to a certain extent DARPA, is that we're not running enough experiments. We're not doing what I suppose you could call enough of the science of science.

We've been funding university research with R1 grants for the same way for decades. How do we know this is the best way to evaluate proposals and send out money to Harvard and Carnegie Mellon and UCLA? We don't know. It's just the way that we've done it. How do we know that the DARPA model, which is very different from the extramural model of peer review to send money out to colleges?

DARPA is more like—just to give people a quick sense of DARPA and how the program manager job works here is sort of like Renee, I say, you know, you're, I'm really interested in carbon capture, right? In order to save the world from climate change, we're going to need big facilities to slurp up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but we don't quite know how to do it. Renee, can you run a team that will solve this problem?

And you reach out to one friend at UCLA and you reach out to another friend at the University of Washington and you reach out to another scientist that works for some company in Texas and someone else who works in, I don't know, Ontario, Canada. And you create a kind of Avengers squad, a dream team of scientists and technologists and researchers to work together to solve this problem. In a way, it's the exact opposite of the NIH. Rather than an individual researcher begging the government for money, we are empowering one agent within the government to create a dream team around them to solve a problem.

And you mentioned the, the Grand Challenges. If you have ever driven, if you listeners have ever driven in a self driving car, what kicked off the modern self driving car revolution was a DARPA Grand Challenge in the early 2000s that Sebastian Thrun won and then used his winnings to start Waymo at Google within Google X inside of Alphabet.

I think this is a brilliant way to think about adding a new theory of technological invention to our portfolio. But what I want us to do a much better job of is running the experiment. Let's try more experiments at NIH. Let's try giving away money by lottery at the NIH and see if that's better. Let's try giving the youngest scientists 10, 15 years of an institutional block grant. Here's a gazillion dollars, do whatever you want with it. And then yes, run alongside that, the things that we're doing at NIH like R1 grants.

Let's do all of that at once, and then study what works best. That's how science works. You run experiments and you study the outcomes. And right now I think—and this is a theme that winds its way throughout the book, far beyond science and technology—I don't think that we have a culture of institutional renewal, of institutional experimentation, but this is how progress works in many cases. It's certainly how it works off in the private sector.

I would love to see more experiments being done, especially in the realm of science and technology, because that's, I think how we're going to answer the biggest question here, which is how do we accelerate the science of science itself? How do we take the best ideas that live in the 2050s and 2060s and use the cleverest models to pull them closer into the 2020s?

Kevin Frazier: Maybe, though, just to get to the real politics of every, this moment we're in. As you pointed out, I don't envy the task that you and Ezra had, writing a book amid DOGE disrupting everything and amid headline news breaking every 20 seconds. Sounds like an impossible task. You all did an admirable job of updating, I'm guessing, at the last second, the book as much as you could.  

But given what the world looks like for the next three years, minimally at the federal government and given Renee's point about, well, there are quite a degree of barriers existing in blue states right now to just updating institutions, changing the perspective of investing in innovation, for example. To play devil's advocate here, hey, things are going pretty well in Utah right now. If you listen to Governor Spencer Cox and any of his speeches, he's mentioning building in Utah. He's mentioning investing in infrastructure. He's championing the Utah university system. Governor Abbott in Texas, investing in Texas A&M creating public private partnerships.

So to play devil's advocate here, Derek, we've got a short run horizon to address a lot of these issues. Red states appear to be taking this a little bit more seriously. Why don't we just focus on their efforts and really championing their approaches?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, why am I not just a Republican, right? Why are Ezra and I not just conservative libertarians? It's a totally fair question. Certainly one answer to the question is that the difference between us and libertarians is that we have explicit goals.

Our book begins with a three page sci-fi vignette of what the world could look like in 2050 if we get everything right. It's a world of clean energy. It's a world of abundant housing. It's a world of zero poverty. It's a world where we've used technology to develop, you know, supersonic jet lines. It's a world with goals.

We're, we don't believe in just letting the market do what the market does. We believe that government has a hugely important role in public health and public education and public infrastructure. And there's so much that we need the world to do that only government can do. So that's why we're not libertarians.

But there's a bigger question here, which is why are we not Republicans? Look at Donald Trump. This is someone who won in 2024 because, according to exit polls, voters were angry about unaffordability. They were angry about prices. And the biggest ticket item of anybody's annual spending is housing. Donald Trump could have run on the message, and governed on the message, of let's turn America in, into the Houston housing market. Let's take a page from Spencer Cox's housing abundant policies and build as many houses as possible.

Instead, one of the first things that he did is to raise tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which on top of a thousand things that doesn't make sense, on the tippy top of that pile of a thousand things is one little thing pointed out by the National Association of Home Builders in a memo that they published right after the tariffs were announced, which is that two of the biggest material inputs to housing turn out to be lumber from Canada and drywall material from Mexico.

So the first thing that Donald Trump, the unaffordability president did is to pass a tariff law that immediately makes housing more unaffordable. That's why we're not Republicans. This is not a national party that takes a page from what is working in America. This is a national party that seeks to demolish and destroy the public state and government.

Now, to make the job a little bit harder for me, there's a question embedded in your, in your question, which is why aren't you merely praiseworthy of the states of Utah and Texas? And the answer is, we are kind of praiseworthy. There's no debating outcomes. Texas is building housing. Texas is building solar. Texas is building wind. And ironically, Texas is building a bunch of clean energy, despite the fact that most of the legislators in Texas do not begin their day thinking about how worried they are about the future of climate change.

So what's going on here? I think what's going on here is that states like Texas and Utah allow the markets—the markets for housing and the markets for clean energy siting—to work just a little bit better in a way that ironically or ultimately meets progressive ends. And that's why even though, as I said at the top, I don't consider myself a libertarian and I don't consider myself a Milton Friedman conservative, I do consider myself a liberal who seeks to understand where we should allow a little bit more market power to thrive in order to meet liberal ends.

And that means taking a place like San Francisco or Los Angeles or Boston or Washington D.C. and taking away just enough rules that allow the market for supply to, to meet the demand to live there. That's what's necessary to drive down rents. That's what's necessary to cap housing evaluation. And that's what I think is necessary to allow people to live where they want to live.

You know, ultimately we can talk about libertarians and taxes and regulations, ultimately, I see abundance as being about freedom. It's about the freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to have the life that you want to have. And I think liberals need to recognize that in many cases, the rules that emerge from progressivism that exist in states like California are keeping these places from having true liberal outcomes.

Renee DiResta: I think one of the, one of the things we're getting at is this question of messaging, right? And this is where this, yeah, I was kind of jokingly alluding to it in the beginning when I said in California, it's very difficult to know where you are on the political spectrum because in San Francisco in particular, progressive means something very different than it does elsewhere in the country.

This question though, talking about Trump and why he got elected, I think Ezra wrote this op-ed a day or two ago in the Times where he notes that scarcity driven politics of the populist right really thrive on fear and resentment, right? And while, and what you're alluding to is that while people may have noted concern about the economy and exit polls, that's not really what the campaign was run on, right? It was run on a, with a very different tone. It was not a focus on like, let's build housing. That was not, if you were to ask, yeah, like somebody what is what was the main thing that Donald Trump talked about? It was not let's, let's build housing.

 So how do you think about framing and narratives when so many voters, I would, I would say even on the left are thinking more about cultural identity and political identity rather than the economic realities. What is the way in which you envision bridging these things?

Derek Thompson: There's something you said that I agree with and there's something you said that I disagree with. What you said that I agree with is that Donald Trump did not run on housing. He ran on cultural issues.

Renee DiResta: Yeah.

Derek Thompson: And that is true. What I disagree with is the sense that that means his victory was the result of cultural issues among voters.

I think if you ask voters, why did they move away from Joe Biden? What they tend to say most often is we moved away from Joe Biden because the cost of living was too damn high. That's not post material. And to a certain extent, to a certain extent, I think that this is, this is tricky to articulate, but let me do my best, there's a way in which. The cultural advantage that Donald Trump used in 2024 was accentuated by the economic and material pain that Democrats felt.

I don't want to get over my skis here because I'm not really a first order political commentator—ironically, because I just co-wrote a political book—and I'm definitely not a cultural analyst. But I think that debates about trans people in sports is often given unusual weight when people feel like the party in power is focused on other people's pain. I wonder if that issue of trans people in sports, an issue that I never read about, would have been so strong if inflation had been 2%, or if real wage growth had been 3%, or if housing affordability in California hadn't totally hit the shitter in the last decade, but instead California had the housing markets of say Utah or Texas.

I think in many ways people allow themselves or are motivated by cultural resentment when they feel like materially they aren't getting what they deserve. And so in a way you can almost end run the cultural debate by doing better on the economics by focusing harder on helping people afford the life that they want to live, on making the good life possible for them.

So I again, I think that—you know, Kevin, you started this interview by talking about political orders, and this is an idea of the University of Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle talks about this idea that American history, especially last 100 years, is defined by these eras when both parties tacitly agree on a set of messages.

So it's notable, he said, that Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican who acquiesced to the New Deal order by being an advocate for social welfare and by continuing to build in the physical world. And Bill Clinton, he said, belonged to the neoliberal order that was inaugurated by Ronald Reagan because he deregulated and actually cut the size of government.

So I think that we need a new political order that redefines freedom for our age. This gets to, Renee, your question about rhetoric and communication. I think every political order thrives by redefining freedom. Franklin D. Roosevelt defined freedom as four freedoms: freedom of speech and of belief and from want and from fear. And then Ronald Reagan in the 1980s very cleverly redefined freedom as a negative freedom, a freedom from government.

And we're trying to redefine freedom in our own way. We're saying that abundance is about freedom to live where you want to live. It's about the freedom to have a good life provided for you by affordable housing and clean energy and excellent transit. And government is absolutely necessary for these things because government is often either a handmaiden in or a barrier to housing, clean energy and infrastructure.

So I think the rhetoric here should be allowed to return to the economic sphere. I don't think the Democrats need to walk out and think that just because Donald Trump seemed to win on a cultural argument, Democrats therefore need an equal, but opposite cultural argument. I think maybe Democrats just need to solve effing problems in the world, and the problems that exist, I see are material problems. And this is a book about material problems and how to solve them.

Kevin Frazier: To put a little pressure on you all because I think you did a nice job from the outset of the book of saying, there's a temptation to call this the Abundance Agenda. And if you had called it the Abundance Agenda, then everyone would have flipped to the last page, looked for your 15 policy recommendations, said, I agree on one, four and seven, but I hate everything else and then moved on. So I think that was a savvy tactic.

And I want to know what's on your Abundance Agenda, because we have, for example, your co-author, Ezra writing about artificial general intelligence arriving perhaps as soon as next year and writing that we're just not ready for it at all. We have certain foreign policy issues that we know need prioritization over others. And so I'm just wondering when you talk about, yes, we need to leave certain cultural issues perhaps off the table for a second, we need to really focus on key priorities.

I'll give you an out here. You can either address, like you, to either address what's on your agenda or what is this actual process going to look like for saying we the Democrats are going to acknowledge that we have embraced everything bagel liberalism previously, and now we're just, we're going to take a cheese pizza approach, right? Like we are just going for the simple priorities and that's it. What does it look like to reach that point? Can we reach that?

Derek Thompson: Yeah, this is a great question. Derek, what do you actually plan on doing? That's a, that's an entirely fair question.

To recircle the way that you framed it, I think, I think this is important. This book is not called “The Abundance Agenda” because we did not want to end with a simple laundry list of the 10,000 things that 10,000 different localities and states needed to do to make housing more abundant where they are, or to make clean energy more abundant where they are. We wanted people to see our framework as a lens, to look through it and see solutions that fit the problems that they care about.

That said, let's be very explicit about two things that we want to do one is housing by right in various states. Housing by right means that the ability to build a house is granted. When the development proposal conforms to the building codes that exist, if it conforms to the building codes that exist, you don't allow an endless process of review and permitting and citizen voice to block up the process of actually building this new development. If it's legal to build, then it should be very quickly allowed. That's number one.

We need to make it much easier to build housing in this country. And I, I do think that this is where a little bit of libertarianism enters the picture that means really massively deregulating housing markets for the purpose of creating housing abundance. That's number one.

Number two, I really, I like thinking about these problems at the federal level because there are so many different problems, state and local, but federal government, there's only one of them. One of the big problems that I think we have is implementing national legislation, progressive legislation. You look at what happened under Joe Biden and the infrastructure bill.

Joe Biden passes an infrastructure bill that he and Pete Buttigieg praise as the most important infrastructure bill in modern American history. But what does it build? What does it build? According to the economist Jason Furman, real highway spending actually declined throughout the Biden administration.

We had $13 billion allocated to building EV charging stations, which infamously simply were not built. We had $42 billion authorized to extend the broadband across the country, and we built a pittance of broadband. Why? How did we authorize all of this money? And it wasn't spent even in states that were run by the same Democratic Party that passed the bill.

I talked to someone in the South; it's an off the record conversation, so I'm going to be a little bit vague about it. But I talked to someone who works very deeply in Department of Transportation Policy in a southern state, and he said, when we applied to use the broadband money, it was tied up in all this paperwork and all these regulations. And all of these things that we had to sign and cross this T and dot this I, and make sure that we had this workforce development thing over here and this other progressive priority over here.

And we filled out our paperwork and we sent it back to Commerce and they sent it back and they said that this isn't good enough. You have to change the way that you promise to price the broadband that's actually built with this policy. They sent it back to Commerce. Then it was sent back with further revisions and three years later no broadband internet was built.

This is a problem that, as recalls everything bagel liberalism, exists when the outcomes that are desired by liberals become subordinate to an infinite process of making sure that you fit every single progressive priority into every single spending item such that ultimately the money isn't even spent because it's too difficult for anybody to comply.

And what he said was, when I talked to him, he said, when I read the everything bagel liberalism column in the New York Times, it was like having a psychological issue that a therapist defines for you for the first time, and suddenly the scales fall from your eyes and you see exactly what has been ailing you, right?

This is a problem of implementation, and it requires not just a different legal approach, it requires, I think, a new philosophy of how to use government money. Do we want to take every single piece of legislation and lard it up with so many riders that it makes it impossible for the legislation to achieve its ends? Or do we want to make it as easy as possible for each piece of legislation to make a difference in the world? That's a change that can absolutely happen in a new Democratic administration if we change the mindsets of people in Departments of Commerce to make a difference.

Renee DiResta: What kind of receptions are you getting from lawmakers and policymakers in the blue cities that you were talking about? How are they thinking about ways to incorporate abundance and that framing into their messaging to constituents and resolving some of the tensions that have blocked adoption of, you know, housing bills and creating momentum in those cities?

Derek Thompson: This is totally self-serving and it's utterly self-selecting because for maybe a variety of interpersonal reasons, people tend not to reach out to me in government to say how stupid they think I am. It's, it's, it's other people outside of government that, that very often write to me to tell me how stupid they think I am. But within government for whatever reason, it's a little bit more self-selecting.

Look, I, I think the response has been fairly ecstatic from a lot of the local and state leaders that we've been talking to. They recognize the problems that we're identifying are problems that plague them, that they don't know how to solve for themselves, that in part, because of your earlier comment, Renee, they don't have a language to explain to themselves, and to other people in the city council, and other people in the state legislature. You know, one thing that we're trying to offer here is what we call a lens, a framework, a way to talk about problems that have existed, but people haven't known how to talk about them.

Renee DiResta: Well, can I, can I, can I push back on that just for one second? Like, because the YIMBY movement emerged in San Francisco, do you remember I feel like you probably read this too, like Kim-Mai Cutler's essay on the vomiting owls, right in 2014. You know, we started thinking about this in San Francisco, right in 2014, because there was like the protests of like the tech buses, the question of who is the housing for when we build the housing, how much of it is luxury? How do we think about affordable housing? How do we think about zoning? Why can't we build anything over three stories?

You know, the, the intransigence of what happened in San Francisco, the fact that every goddamn bill got killed, you know, in, in one place or another, the, it wasn't that the YIMBY movement grew there because the demand is there, the people want it and then somehow it always seems to die.

So I guess I see YIMBYism for, for example, like that movement as becoming a beacon, as becoming almost like the meme, right? Giving it a name, giving it something to orient around. And what I want to know is why abundance isn't a renaming of that desire. More broad, obviously it's far beyond, you know— your, your work on energy, the other examples in the book are fantastic and I think you do give it this overarching narrative.

But I'm, I'm really looking for like hope maybe for how the messaging translates into a successful execution, particularly in California, how does, how does giving them the language translate into overcoming the barriers in ways that your articulation of the YIMBY movement perhaps didn't or couldn't for whatever reason.

Derek Thompson: Let me offer credit, and then let me try to offer hope first. I'm really glad that you framed it that way. I think Kim Mai's essay and Matt Yglesias’s work and the work of the California YIMBYs and YIMBY networks across the country were incredibly important and utterly formative for this book. We stand on the shoulders of many, many giants here.

Hope. You know, Plonk once said, the scientist, that—and I'm paraphrasing here —new ideas succeed in the world, not just because you succeed in persuading people, but also sometimes progress moves forward, what he said, one funeral at a time. Progress happens because of demographic change. It happens because one generation grows up with a set of ideas that replaces the previous generation.

Now, I don't want this argument to be taken as a kind of ageism, and I certainly don't want to be taken as any kind of, you know, tacit argument for death panels. I do think that one thing you see within the progressive movement is a very important generational split.

If you look at the progressivism that came up in the 1960s and 1970s, it's a constrictive form of liberalism. It's a NIMBY form of liberalism. It's a form of liberalism that sees itself as doing good in the world by stopping development. And in response to that, especially in places in California like San Francisco, you've seen a new generation of liberalism define itself in the opposite way. That actually making progress in the world is about what you build in the world and not about what you block from being built.

And so what gives me cause for optimism is that time is continuing to move at the same pace that it has always moved, one second at a time. And young people with every passing year are getting more political power. And they're using their political power, I think, in many places to make new arguments about YIMBYism and what we call a kind of, you know, penumbral YIMBYism that exists across housing and energy and science and technology and even in the category of good governance. And that's what we call Abundance.

And our hope is that yes, I would love it if people in their sixties and seventies and eighties totally change their mind about the political good and their political priorities. I would love the opportunity to try to win that fight and change those minds. But I'm a realist. I understand that a lot of people in their fifties, sixties and above somewhat understand what they understand. And that our real challenge here is how do we persuade the next generations that are coming up, that are changing their mind, that are choosing their politics, that are building power, how do we change minds here? How do we set minds here for the next generation?

And I think that's what, what abundance can do, is it can give people this new outlook on defining liberalism for our own age as not a liberalism of process, but a liberalism of outcomes. Not a liberalism of blocking, but a liberalism of building. And I think that when you reorient your sense of the good in this way, I do think it changes what you fight for and what you represent.

And hopefully there is a world in which a few years from now, you still have city council meetings where there's a new development coming up and 60 out of the 80 people in that room are saying no development, no development, no development. And the mayor and the city council have the courage to say, we were elected, not only by the 60 people we respect in this room that are against this development, but by the thousands of people who are not in this room who would benefit from it. And I'm voting yay on this bill. Not because I disrespect the 60 no's in the room, but because I so deeply respect the tens of thousands of yeses that didn't have the opportunity to be here.

I think that hopefully the book can give people that political courage.

Kevin Frazier: And I think what's fantastic also is that you all not only embrace what's needed right now, but you also remind us of the fact that looking at the federal government previously, we've achieved some pretty incredible things. You and I will have to nerd out later about the Northwest Ordinance, about the Rural Electrification Administration, about all of these instances of fostering Abundance through federal intervention, through collaboration.

And so it's just a really powerful narrative that everyone needs to check out. The book is “Abundance.” The authors are Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. And Derek, unfortunately, we're going to have to let you go think about that government burrito a little bit more.

Derek Thompson: Thank you both so much. Thanks for the hard questions. This was really fun.

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