Pod Save America
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Sun, 30 Mar 2025
In their new book, Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that Trump's scarcity mindset is suffocating the country: America doesn’t do enough manufacturing? Better cut back on trade. Not enough jobs or housing? Get rid of immigrants.Klein and Thompson sit down with Jon to explain how faster (and better) infrastructure projects can re-engage Democrats’ base, why tolerating government failure has made liberals look bad, and whether the accusations of neoliberalism that have been levied at the book are a fair criticism of the "abundance agenda." For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.
What is the 'Abundance' discourse and why is it controversial?
The reason hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California and Illinois and New York every single year for Texas and Florida and Arizona, we survey them. It's cost of living. We've made the places we govern too expensive. And that's because we have not created enough of the things that we need.
And I think that requires not just a self-examination, but a message that says, we actually fucked up. Right. This didn't happen completely by accident, but we understand the way in which we fucked up and we have a plan to not do it again. And I don't think that what is energetic in that is like every individual housing idea.
I think it is the generalized notion that the people came before me, whoever this imaginary politician is. They made some mistakes. We're in a different era now. And what I have is not the continuation of the last 30 years of liberal policies that you're already not happy about.
What I have is something new that takes the best of that and then is alert to the things that you're upset about because in this last 30 years, things got worse for you in a bunch of real ways.
So you mentioned some of the critique from the left. I'm sure you've read all of it, read most of it. I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr Teachout review of Abundance. I wanted to get your reaction to one part of that because I think it summarizes a lot of the criticism on the left. I mean, you mentioned the Bernie side. There's also sort of like a Warren-esque critique as well.
And she writes, I still can't tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore incorrect—we need zoning reform— or non-trivial and deeply regressive, we need deregulation, or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential. Matt Brunig has a similar critique.
He says it would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction. Obviously. Now, in the book, it's not a book about monopolistic power practices and corporate concentration, so I get that.
I guess to the question that Teachout asked, is there room in abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power and anti-monopoly politics and all that?
Of course there is. It's been really interesting reading some of these reviews and discovering within the critical reviews a kind of memoir of the author's ideology. We read books not as they are but as we are. That is precisely what I meant to say but with shorter words. And so, of course, someone interested in antitrust is going to read our book about abundance, the future of America.
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