“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I could have imagined. And it’s generated a lot of interesting critiques, too, especially from the left. So I wanted to dedicate an episode to talking through some of them.My guests today are both on the left but have very different perspectives. Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the most prominent voices in the antimonopoly movement. Saikat Chakrabarti is the president and co-founder of New Consensus, a think tank that has been trying to think through what it would take to build at Green New Deal scale and pace. And he is currently running to unseat Nancy Pelosi in Congress.I found this conversation wonderfully clarifying — both in the places it revealed agreement, and perhaps even more in the places it revealed difference.Mentioned:“How the Gentry Won: Property Law’s Embrace of Stasis” by David Schleicher and Roderick M. Hills, Jr.“The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California” by Jason M. Ward and Luke SchlakeZephyr’s Book Recommendations:The Promise of Politics by Hannah ArendtThe Populist Moment by Lawrence GoodwynListen, Liberal by Thomas FrankSaikat’s Book Recommendations:Destructive Creation by Mark R. WilsonBad Samaritans by Ha-Joon ChangThe Defining Moment by Jonathan AlterThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the book 'Abundance' about and why discuss it now?
It is a wild thing to release a book into the world. Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, has been out for a month and a half. It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week, which thank you to all of you out there who have read it or listened to it. No way that would have happened without you.
And it's doing things out there that I never really expected it to do, creating arguments that I didn't see coming, which is amazing. And so I wanted to have on today two people from the left, which is where much more of the pushback than I necessarily saw coming has come from.
One from the anti-monopoly left, which I think sees abundance in ways I didn't initially foresee as a threat, as a challenge. And I also wanted to have somebody on from the part of the left that has become obsessed with building.
Chapter 2: Who are Zephyr Teachout and Saikat Chakrabarti, and what perspectives do they bring?
the Green New Deal left, the industrial policy left, the left that thinks we have lost the ability to accomplish the missions the left has set for America through the government. So my guests today are Shrikant Chakraborty, who is running for Congress in San Francisco against Nancy Pelosi. He's the president and co-founder of the New Consensus think tank, and he was AOC's first chief of staff.
He helped recruit her for Congress and run her campaign. And Zephyr Teachout, who is a law professor at Fordham University, a key figure in anti-monopoly thinking. She has mounted runs for governor, for a state attorney general, for Congress, has authored a number of books.
I found this conversation both great about abundance, but also about some of the broader goals, questions, animating impulses and theories of the left as it tries to define itself for this next era. Shotka Chakrabarty, Zephyr Teachout, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having us on.
Chapter 3: What are the key disagreements and agreements on abundance from the left?
Yeah, thanks for having us. So my simplest summary of abundance is it's an effort to focus people on the question of what do we need more of and what is stopping us from getting it. So I'd like to hear from both of you about what you think of the book's arguments, where you agree and where you disagree. And Zephyr, why don't we start with you?
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate how you led off because I do actually think there's a deep disagreement. I'll start with the deep disagreement and then there's some areas of genuine agreement and we should talk about those as well. But I gather you're having us on to really fight out the... I want the deep disagreement, yeah.
There's an area of deep disagreement and there's areas of specific disagreement. So the deepest disagreement is actually what you started with, which is the question of focus.
And I think that we should be focusing democratic politics and politics in general on the problem of concentrated power and the way in which concentrated power is making it impossible to do things and also really crushing our democracy. That we really do have an oligarchy problem and that the anti-monopoly toolkit is then a response to that. So, like, with that focus, I would say...
OK, something good the Biden administration did, getting over-the-counter hearing aids, like a life changer for millions of Americans. Who blocked that? Well, it's an oligarchy in the hearing aid market. There's basically five companies that control the hearing aids, and they did everything they could to slow down the procedure that
The best friend of the Chamber of Commerce is a long notice and comment period that slows down government from doing something really good and meaningful. So I use that as a micro example, but the macro critique and disagreement is around focus.
So, Kat? Well, I actually agree with a lot of the goal of abundance. And I think everyone here agrees that America is really stuck. And the specific reasons why we're stuck, I think, might be where there's some disagreement or this broader than a thing than just process.
But the thing I really want to add to the discussion and the question we've been studying at New Consensus has been, how do countries get unstuck? Because if you look at the history of the 20th century,
Every modern developed nation, most of them liberal democracies, they went through these phases of rapidly transforming their economies and creating absurd levels of prosperity for pretty much everyone in their society. And, you know, they often did it after these periods of being really stuck.
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Chapter 4: Why is housing so expensive in California compared to Texas?
And so that's the big piece that's missing for how do you actually get past all these obstacles that we're talking about.
Oh, this piece is super hard.
Yeah, sorry, Zephyr, you want to jump in?
I just want to make sure that we keep something I think that is really important, really central, which is democracy. And so when I'm thinking about examples, and you've done a lot more research in other countries, but in the United States, obviously we're going to look at FDR, and we aren't going to spend all our time on the New Deal.
But we see that for FDR in the first term, it was more of a top-down vision, right? Let's just get things done. And he found it didn't work. And the buy-in for that, he needed to bring an anti-monopoly agenda.
And when you and I worked together, I think, eight years ago on visions of the Green New Deal, I think an underappreciated aspect of the Green New Deal is it's not just a technocratic top-down vision. It is very much about a vision of power.
I think one of the places where I differ, maybe with your school, is I tend to work backwards from a policy outcome I want to what I think are the obstacles that are getting away. Those obstacles are almost always in some way related to some kind of power wielded by someone, some group, but it can change pretty dramatically in different places. So I want to ground this.
The single biggest item in virtually every household's budget is the home they live in. It's the rent. It's the mortgage. So there's a new RAND report. It came out after my book was written. It found it costs four times as much, more than four times actually, per square foot to produce publicly subsidized affordable housing.
So the public affordable housing that I think the left supports in California as it costs to produce a square foot of market rate housing in Texas. This is to both of you. Maybe I'll start with you, Shai Khad, because you're in California. Why do you think that is?
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Chapter 5: How do democratic processes and concentrated power affect infrastructure and housing policy?
It's about 20 percent more expensive, 10 to 20 percent more expensive in upstate New York to build than in Texas. And some part of that is labor. And I think that's good. Like, I think it's good. We have a more unionized labor force now. in New York than we do in Texas. So can I come back to you with another example, which is, I think, an area where... Well, I want to stay on housing.
We can talk about another example. Because what you just said about the cost of construction is important. I want to throw this to you. Because this, I think, is where it gets even harder. Zephyr just said, look, one of the reasons you're going to have a higher cost of housing construction in upstate New York than Texas is...
We use union labor laws or we use prevailing wage laws, depending on what you're looking at. And the more I've dug into this, the more I have come to see that in blue states or under democratic governments, we have made the cost of public construction very high. The reason I started with an example about why is it more to make publicly subsidized affordable housing?
Why does that cost more than market rate housing per square foot in California? Why is it much more than it costs in Texas? All these rules, the government has placed upon itself. They add delay and they add cost, which if it all then got done would be fine. But sometimes like in high speed rail in California, it doesn't.
How do you think about the cost of construction in a place like San Francisco?
First off, you know, just in the San Francisco versus Texas example that we're talking about, I just want to make like one sort of point there. Because Austin, which is a city that people refer to a lot where they did a lot of streamlined permitting. Construction went up, rents went down, really good. But it wasn't actually enough. The 50% of Austin's population is still cost burdened by rent.
And now construction slowed down because part of the reason costs went down was a lot of people left Austin at that time. It started having net migration out of Austin. And so now what happens, right? I think there's another example of just doing the permitting streamlining isn't going to be a silver bullet. But when you're talking about costs, there's not one simple answer.
I think the optimism here that I have is you look at Europe, you know, Europe can build stuff way faster and way cheaper than us. They have a way more unionized labor force. And I think what I wish we had in America was, I wish we had large, you know, union bargaining deals in a sectoral way, the way many European countries do, and do this at a society way.
I wish we didn't have to jam all these requirements into legislation because we had actual societal solutions for it. But I think it's possible, you know, and the other thing Europe does is on a lot of these process questions, they empower their agencies to have more power to actually make decisions, right?
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Chapter 6: What lessons can America learn from Europe about government-led development?
You are inconveniencing all kinds of not just big businesses, but small ones. And that matters, right? I mean, I was covering this part of High Speed Rail. They spent years in litigation with a small mini storage facility that just didn't want to be moved. It's totally reasonable that that storage facility didn't want to be moved. In Europe, they move the storage facility, right?
They just have different laws around that kind of thing. But one thing that I have been fascinated by and that sort of led to some of the inquiry for me Was that innovation you're talking about? Yes. How many politicians I talked to, and they would not all describe it to me as about corporate power, but they do describe it as there's a thing they want to do.
And all they can do is tell me all the reasons they can't do it. The real estate board, the planning board, the fractured zones of authority between different councils in LA and the way that the LA municipal structure actually works. I'd
talk during the fight for congestion pricing in New York City, the head of the MTA, and he was so frustrated by how much time he was spending working on environmental assessment with the Biden administration at that point, right?
It's always a different story, but what you often see is we just don't give the people we've imbued with democratic authority, a mayor, a governor, honestly, even a president, as much power as you sort of think from the outside. It's to the public, Obama promised a public option. Why couldn't he deliver it? Joe Biden said, I'd get this. Why didn't I get it?
And does it lead you, Zephyr, towards, because I think there's a tension here that I find difficult to resolve between wanting things to be like very small-D democratic and then also recognizing that small-D democratic processes can get very captured, thinking that maybe we need more executive power, but also recognizing that then you can get a bad executive like we have nationally at the moment, then you have a different problem.
How do you think about the level at which power should be exercised and the ability of some central voice to say, thank you for your concerns. We're doing it this way.
Yeah. So I love the question. And I think it is sort of just telling the truth about the nature of how power is organized in society today. And I don't think it's just a few instances. I mean, this may be an area of difference. I think that the major enervating power is actually... centralized corporate power. And I think you'll find it in area after area after area.
So let's talk about green energy. You're probably familiar with the New York Sabin School, and they come out with this report fairly regularly on where are there checks on local rules against green energy building. And so I took a look at it the other day and it's majority red districts in New York.
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Chapter 7: How does money in politics and corporate power influence policy making and infrastructure projects?
And there's also no doubt that what you would assume from that politics is a much more rapid build-out of green energy infrastructure in blue states than red. And that is not what we see. I say this in the introduction of the book. This book is not aimed at the right because they don't share my goal on decarbonization. But then trying to understand...
Why Texas and Georgia have been such incredible success stories from the perspective of the IRA and a bunch of the states that are much more aligned with its politics have been much more difficult. That then requires some untangling. And Shrikant, you focus very much on this. I'm curious how you think about that.
Well, first of all, I mean, I do agree that, you know, money in politics is this hugely enervating force, right? But even if we got rid of money in politics and all the other forces that kind of get in the way, I don't think our politicians on their own would do things at the scale. You know, even looking at Texas versus California, yeah, people are billing in Texas because...
In a completely, you know, nothing else going on sort of scenario, there's fewer rules in Texas, it's cheaper to build in Texas, so you build in Texas. But that's not going to build out enough clean energy to make any sort of dent, actually, you know, in the global problem of tackling climate change. I think the money in politics and all that just supports the general focus
feeling that our politicians have and this trend that they've had of trying to do less and less. I think one of the really bad parts of money in politics is that politicians spend all their time calling big donors for money, and they think that's their job. And they're really confused by the job of actually trying to build stuff, you know, or make things happen. Like, there was an interview with
Hassan Khan, who I worked on the CHIPS Act on Oddbots yesterday, and he was talking about the stuff that actually got in the way of the CHIPS Act, right? And a big part of it was trying to negotiate with all the different special interests and groups that had stuff to say. And he said, that's fine. That's an important part of the process. And again, you know, Europe does this as well.
But there's no real... And they've lost semiconductor manufacturing. Yeah, that's fair. But, you know, but there's no real focus from the up top. There's no political leadership that was saying, we got to get this fab built, right? I was saying that's actually an overwhelming priority here.
And what happens when you create a political moment that's bigger than any of these forces, you can actually blow past it. And we're kind of seeing that with Trump and tariffs right now. Dark abundance. Yeah, dark abundance. Because, you know... I'm sure all the businesses are calling up Trump right now and being like, what the hell are you doing with these tariffs?
And they're calling all their congresspeople and senators. But Trump's created such a political moment and reality within the Republican Party where you've just got to go along with the tariffs. The Republican congresspeople can say, sorry, this is just too popular in the party. My hands are tied. I've got to go with the president.
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Chapter 8: Why is green energy development more successful in some states than others?
They do come to you. But in the training, it was like, you know, if you're writing a bill, here are the people you can contact to get expertise, right? Similar to what you encounter in the Dean campaign. And, you know, I think it's just this complete abdication responsibility of your role to actually put out solutions that'll solve real problems.
Like the culture is more, we'll figure out ideas from everybody that's around us and kind of cobble it together into this Frankenstein monster. We got in trouble with the Green New Deal. Like when we put the Green New Deal out, The week before we announced it, I think it was like 70 environmental groups wrote a letter saying they're going to denounce it because we were pushing something new.
Because at that time, the environmental groups were really focused on just keep it in the ground stuff.
Was their disagreement substantive or was it we were not consulted?
They would probably say it was substantive. I don't think I'm going to say it wasn't, but it was more the latter, right? Like it was more that we weren't operating in the idea space that everyone else was operating in. But I'd say, you know, in general, like the pipeline example you brought up is a really interesting one, right?
Because I think when you abdicate responsibility from actually pushing for new ideas and solutions, what you're saying is the interest groups, which I think often, as you're pointing out, Zephyr, are the big corporate interests, they're going to fight it out. So in the case of the pipelines you're talking about, I'm sure there's interest groups on both sides.
So 20 years later, we'll come to some resolution. But in the case of natural gas pipelines, we streamlined all that, right? We put permitting under FERC. We made it happen super fast. We have 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines in this country right now. We built it super fast because there wasn't really a big enough opposing interest group.
And so that's sort of what I see happening in the Democratic Party is there's a real resistance to putting out actual solutions and putting out real ways to solve these problems and just deciding that we're going to take ideas from everyone. And I agree with Zephyr that that tends to be the corporate powers that have more influence there.
There's a part of the book that is in there, but I think has gotten less attention. But we have over time, in my view, denuded the state of expertise. Members of Congress have, I think it's shocking how small the staff of a House member who represents like a highly populous district and maybe runs an important committee really is. And I'm not saying that's the only reason.
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