In the face of what is inarguably bad governance and fake—but spectacular!—technocracy (the list goes on and on, but we’ll stop at AI-generated tariffs), we thought we’d take a moment to join the conversation about what good governance looks like. A couple of weeks ago, one of us reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, for the New York Times, and then the other one of us reviewed the review. So we figured: let’s work it out on the pod? No guests on this episode, just the two of us in a brass-tacks, brass-knuckles discussion of the abundance agenda and the goals of twenty-first century economic policy.
We dive right into what the abundance agenda is and who its enemies are: innovators and builders against NIMBYs and environmentalists on David’s account; techno-utopians who discount the environment and politics on Sam’s. We agree that housing policy, at least, has helped the better-off create a cycle of entrenching their position through stymieing construction and production. We find another point of agreement on how Klein and Thomson’s abundance agenda attempts to harness the power of the state to build, and that certain left-wing critiques are off base, but disagree about whether their proposal is a break from the neoliberal era of governance and what that even was. In some ways, we end up right where we started, disagreeing about whether the abundance agenda seeks to unleash a dammed-up tide that can lift all boats, or whether the abundance agenda leaves behind everyone but a vanguard of “innovators” in the technology and finance sectors. Let us know if you’ve got a convincing answer.
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back by Marc Dunkelman
Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy by Jerusalem Demsas
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
“Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy” by Steven Teles
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle
Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin
“The State Capacity Crisis” by Nicholas Bagley and David Schleicher
Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States by Matt Grossmann
The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles
“Why has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag
“Exclusionary Zoning’s Confused Defenders” by David Schleicher
“Cost Disease Socialism: How Subsidizing Costs While Restricting Supply Drives America’s Fiscal Imbalance” by Steven Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash
”On Productivism” by Dani Rodrik