Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to accept a period of economic hardship. They say America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, so we have to accept less trade. They say America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. America needs the opposite of this scarcity mindset to grow and thrive. We need an abundance agenda. But what does that mean? The answer to that question is in my new book, which I cowrote with the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. He is also today’s guest. We talk about ‘Abundance’ the book, and why it exists. And we talk about abundance the idea, and why it matters. (You can buy the book here!) If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ezra Klein Producer: Devon Baroldi P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Donald Trump's scarcity agenda?
In his recent address to Congress, Donald Trump promised a golden age of America. But when you take a closer look at his policies, when you squint through the blur of tariffs added and removed and re-added and re-removed, I think the picture that moves into focus is something very different than an expansive vision of the future. It's something more like a pinched vision of the present.
Again and again, the Trump White House has pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. They say America cannot afford our debt, and therefore, we can't afford healthcare for the poor. They say America doesn't have enough manufacturing, and so we must accept less trade. They say America doesn't have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. Less for less.
This looks to me like a regime of scarcity. Now, of course, Republicans will disagree. They'll argue that in the long run, their politics is designed to solve America's problems. We can already see many ways in which the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place are being exacerbated by his first policies. Take, for example, affordability and housing.
Housing costs are too high in this country, obviously. And home construction has lagged for decades. The problem is particularly bad for young people who shifted significantly toward the Republican side in 2024. The median age of first-time homebuyers in America recently surged to an all-time high. And delays in homebuying are having a ripple effect.
Chapter 2: How does scarcity impact housing and trade?
They're playing a part in the decline of dating and marrying and starting a family. What do Trump's tariffs do to help this situation? Well, don't ask me. Ask the National Association of Home Builders.
Because in a March 7 memo, they pointed out that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada threatened to drive up the cost of two of the most important materials for building a house, soft lumber, which we import from Canada, and drywall materials, which we source from Mexico. An America that has to source all of its own wood and drywall is not a richer country than the one we have today.
It's a poorer country where American homebuyers have to pay the price for pointless protectionism. Now, here is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the politics of scarcity. But they don't. In many places run by Democrats, what they're offering instead is just another kind of scarcity.
Many cities run by Democratic leaders are laden with rules and litigation norms that block new housing, new transit, new energy. As my Atlantic colleague Yoni Applebaum told us on a recent show, in California cities where the share of progressive votes goes up by 10 points, the share of housing permits issued declines by 30%. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar.
And where the availability of homes is constricted, homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They're all run by Democrats. If Trump's opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to build a new kind of political movement.
one that aims for what my co-author Ezra Klein and I call abundance. Ezra and I are liberals. There's no getting away from that. We believe in taxing and spending, on healthcare and social security and welfare and schools and science. But we also believe in a liberalism that is different in character from the one that's emerged in the last few decades.
In the last half century, we write, folks on the left became so fixated on spending money that they lost sight of what spending actually does in the world. This emphasis on process over outcomes, dollars over deployment, is evident everywhere you look.
In 2008, California approved more than $30 billion for a high-speed rail system that has lingered in construction purgatory for more than a decade. In San Francisco, procedural kludge famously drove up the cost of a public toilet to $1.7 million. Yes, for one toilet. Chicago's mayor recently bragged that his city invested $11 billion to build 10,000 affordable housing units.
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Chapter 3: What is the abundance agenda?
That's $1.1 million per affordable housing unit. This is a shameful record of ineffectiveness. It's pathetic. The places where Democrats hold power shouldn't be advertisements for how bad they are at wielding it. If Democrats want to be the party that believes in government, they have to show that government can actually build what it intends to build.
What Ezra and I propose in our book is a political movement that does just that, a liberalism that works, a liberalism that builds. Today's guest is the New York Times' Ezra Klein. We talk about abundance, the book, and why it exists, and we talk about abundance, the idea. and why we think it matters. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Ezra Klein, hello and welcome.
I am thrilled to be on Plain English. What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting. We're gonna answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of what can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won't even think to ask us.
And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress in America.
I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because, as it turns out, writing a book is, among other things, a total pain in the ass. But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation. Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to change the world. Ideas are cheap, building is hard.
And I'm rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in the New York Times that's called, quote, the economic mistake the left is finally confronting. And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply-side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you read it?
Ah, 2021. You know, even when I go back to that essay, you can... You have moments as a writer, I know you do, and where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time cohere into one thing. You realize you've been thinking about one thing and not many. And so there are a couple things floating in my head over the 30 years before that.
One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology. And this had happened, in my view, after the 2016 election, when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won.
But also, and I don't actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were in. becoming filled with toxicity.
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Chapter 4: How did Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson develop the book 'Abundance'?
That's a sweet thing of you to say.
I absolutely was. I was inspired by the substance of it, this fusion of liberalism and technology, which I found important but didn't quite find an interesting way to articulate in an important way. But I'm also inspired by a semantic move that you make. You take this concept of, this ideology of progressivism, which in recent years has been judged and defined on the demand side.
Progressives ask, in many cases, to be judged on how much they spend to make the world a better place. And you do this really clever maneuver where you flip the yardstick. You say, what if we judged liberalism not by what it spent, but rather by what it built? That's what Yimbyism does. It says, how much housing have you built? Not how much have you spent on housing.
That's what Yimbyism for clean energy would be for. Not just how much have you authorized to spend on solar, how much solar have you deployed? And I'm thinking about it as it meets my own project about this distinction between invention and implementation. And maybe similar to you, there's a bunch of ideas that are swirling around in my head waiting to be conjoined into one idea.
And it's January 2022, and I'm standing in line in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C., waiting for some rationed COVID test because Omicron is circulating. And it's cold, and I don't do well in the cold, and I'm just angry. It's been two years since the pandemic started. There aren't enough tests. And before that, there weren't enough vaccines. And before that, there wasn't enough PPE.
And as I'm getting angrier and angrier, I'm thinking if you zoom out, there's been a supply chain crisis in the pandemic, in the post-pandemic era. And if you zoom out again and look at the entire century, it's been defined by a housing crisis and a clean energy scarcity and even a shortage of doctors.
And I write this sort of controlled screed that says this is a century that has been pockmarked by scarcity. And what if we could fix that with an abundance agenda?
I'd write this piece, the Abundance Agenda piece, and I have a sense now of where the story goes in my head, but what do you recall is the bridge that takes us from this moment to us getting together and deciding faithfully to work on a book together?
Well, a few things. So one, I also was, I was inspired and slightly dispirited by your piece because I read it and immediately was like, oh shit, he cracked it. Like he cracked the right way to think about this. which was this had to be a positive vision. My nature, but definitely my piece and my approach was critique. We are doing this thing wrong.
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Chapter 5: What are the key influences on the abundance agenda?
Well, as long as we're just doing intellectual history, I want to just call out... it's nice to be able to do this because I hope we are very generous with credit in the book. Like, this is not just our idea somehow by any means. And so, you know, in that, a couple of other people I just think were really, really important in this.
There was the whole progress studies world, which was sort of started by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. Jason Crawford has been, you know, a big driver of, I think that was very, very influential in the book you were writing sort of before it morphed into our collaboration.
The Niskanen Institute had an awesome paper that was very influential and was an essential part of my sort of first piece on this, that economic mistake piece called – I don't remember what the paper was called, but its idea was cost-push socialism, which was this idea that it wasn't just accidental that you often had –
very, very high prices for things that liberals wanted to subsidize, that it was the obvious outcome of subsidizing a good that you were at the same time choking off the supply of.
Just to jump in, yes, the paper is called Cost Disease Socialism by Stephen Tellis, Sam Hammond, and Daniel Takash.
Yeah, and Steve Tellis, I think, is a big influence here. Really, really thoughtful, smart guy, political scientist who I've known a very, very long time. And then at that same, also at Niskanen, they've had a great state capacity project under Brink Lindsey, who wrote a book that was in part about, that was very much about abundance.
Jen Polka, whose book on Recoding America, that came out after and during the period we were working on this, but she's sort of affiliated with them now. So Niskanen has, I think, really been a very important intellectual hub of this kind of work. You know, and then there are a bunch of writers. It wasn't just the Yimby movement.
There are a bunch of writers who are doing just extraordinarily great work on housing in particular, but in ways it generalized. So I think Matt Iglesias just is a genuinely unsung hero of just like forcing progressives to take this seriously for a decade, right? He had a Kindle single back when people used to do that called The Rent is Too Damn High.
And I mean, I don't remember what year that came out, but it was some time ago now. And he was just really, really pushed that. Jerusalem Dempsis, who is at Vox and is now at The Atlantic. And my partner, Annie Lowry, is also at The Atlantic. She has done – I mean, Covered Housing Forever, we are always talking about these things.
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Chapter 6: How did the abundance book evolve from the original essay?
But Mark Dunkelman, who just has a new book out, it's very along the lines of ours called Why Nothing Works, and it's great. He had written this piece years ago about why it was so difficult to rebuild Penn Station, which sucks, right?
And I think that if I'm remembering it correctly, I think that piece turned me on to Paul Sabin's work in the book Public Citizen or Public Citizens, which was very much about the rise of Naderite progressivism, the rise of Rachel Carson, the rise in the back half of the 20th century of a progressivism that was actually about or liberalism actually about checking what the government could do.
So there's New Deal liberalism that's about expanding what government can do. And then you have these people like Nader who emerge and say, no, no, no, no. Government is devastating us right now. It's not doing enough. What it's doing is bad for the environment. It's building heedlessly. It's captured by corporations. And a lot of those points were correct.
But they build this architecture of legislation and process and regulations and a huge nonprofit movement that exists to sue government and exists to slow government down and exists to force more veto points into government.
And in doing that, in following that line of historical work, I think I began to understand something I had not understood about progressivism, which is how unbelievably insufficient progress The idea that the cleavage in this country is liberals think government is good and conservatives think government is bad really is. Like, that's just not how it works.
Conservatives often do think government is bad, except if it's national security government or the police state, in which case they think it's great. And, like, you can just pick up anybody you want and now, I guess on the date we're talking, throw them, have ICE throw them into a jail in Louisiana because you don't like the things they've said.
Concerns are very comfortable with a government, I think, of terrifying levels of surveillance and police state power. But liberals are very divided in their soul on government.
There's a liberalism that wants big government and a liberalism that is terrified of government running over marginalized communities, doing the bidding of corporations, not being good enough to liberal constituencies like unions. And so trying to unearth
what was happening that we had chosen to hobble government in these ways, what had happened that this was so true in California, which was a state where you couldn't blame everything on Republicans.
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Chapter 7: Why is housing central to the abundance agenda?
To dive into the book itself, there's any number of ways that a book about liberalism and the future of politics could begin. You could start with culture. You could start with taxes and redistributive welfare policies. We start with housing.
Our first big chapter is about housing, the problem of rising housing prices, and the problem of constraints on housing construction in many of the places where people most want to live, like San Francisco. Why is housing so foundational to your sense of this project?
I wonder how much we're just going to bore everybody with this, but we eventually had a theory of the book and how to write it. That each chapter should be doing three things simultaneously. It should be really good at walking you through a fundamental problem of supply that has been caused or could be fixed by policy. So chapter one is housing supply.
Chapter 2 is really built around high-speed rail and decarbonization. Chapter 3 is state capacity. Chapter 4 is about invention. And Chapter 5 is about implementation. So it should be doing something on that level. And you should really, you know, I hope if you read this book, you'll learn a lot about housing. You'll learn a lot about decarbonization.
You'll learn a lot about how we build things in America and its legal system. You'll learn a lot about how China captured solar technology and the production of it from us and sort of took that over. You'll learn a lot in a great chapter Derek did about penicillin. Then it should be giving you a piece of the history here.
And then it should be giving you a sense of like one of the fundamental ways we have thought about doing things that doesn't work. And so chapter one is about housing. One, because I do sort of buy into the housing theory of everything, as it gets called, that housing is just fundamental.
People need a place to live, but more than they need a place to live, or maybe not more, but alongside needing a place to live. if we are going to have a strong economy, we need to let people live in the economic engines of the economy. One of the things I was most proud of, I think on a book, like the joys of it, given that most of writing a book is absolutely miserable.
One of the joys of it is when you come to a really new economic idea. I'm sorry, a new idea, a new epiphany. And I was really struggling with this question of, well, why should we, why do we care so much how many units we build in San Francisco? I mean, you can live in other places. Montana's not full of people.
And the sort of theory that I eventually, I think, cracked was that the big megacities are increasingly the engines of the American economy. And they are the frontiers, that the frontier of the, you know, we used to worry about the closing of the frontier because we thought it was like this expansive land America had that was the guarantor of our prosperity. But it was never the land.
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