Can we build an economy that delivers abundance without abandoning democratic accountability and economic equity?
Recorded live at Democracy Journal’s “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” conference, this episode features a wide-ranging panel discussion on one of the most consequential debates shaping today’s political economy: whether abundance and social democracy are in tension—or whether they’re mutually reinforcing.
Moderated by Ed Luce of the Financial Times, the panel brings together Baillee Brown (Inclusive Abundance), Jerusalem Demsas (The Argument), Mike Konczal (Economic Security Project), and Sandeep Vaheesan (Open Markets Institute) to wrestle with what it actually takes to deliver housing, clean energy, and public goods at scale—without ceding power to concentrated markets or hollowing out democratic governance.
At a moment of deep political discontent and institutional distrust, this conversation helps clarify the real choices facing policymakers—and why getting this balance right is essential to rebuilding public faith in government.
Ed Luce (moderator) is the U.S. national editor and a columnist at the Financial Times, where he writes on American politics, democracy, and global political economy.
Baillee Brown (panelist) is a policy advocate and the founder of Inclusive Abundance, where she works with lawmakers to advance a pro-building, outcomes-focused approach to delivering housing, clean energy, and public goods.
Jerusalem Demsas (panelist) is founder and Editor in Chief of The Argument a publication and podcast covering housing, economic policy, and the politics of affordability.
Mike Konczal (panelist) is the Senior Director of Policy and Research at the Economic Security Project, where he focuses on inequality, housing, industrial policy, and the political economy of growth.
Sandeep Vaheesan (panelist) is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute and a leading voice on antitrust, corporate power, and the role of public authority in building a more equitable economy.
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
Hey, Pitchfork listeners, Goldy here. A couple weeks ago, Nick and I had the pleasure of attending a conference in the other Washington because you know, we here in Seattle, we live in the real one. Anyway, it was a conference in which our friends at Democracy Journal packed some of our nation’s leading progressive thinkers into a room to ask them the important question, “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, at least on that day we did. And one of the more interesting sessions was a panel titled Abundance and Social Democracy: Enemies are Allies, to which I ask, “Can it be both?” Anyway, we hope you enjoy.”
Ed Luce:
If everyone’s ready, welcome to the next panel on social democracy and abundance and whether they’re opposites or whether they can be combined. Very, very important question. I have to say, I’m extremely grateful to Mike Tomasky for asking me to moderate this because one of the effects of Trump is that he imposes an opportunity cost on what your mind focuses on. And as I was doing a bit more speed reading of this wonderful panel’s writings, this morning, Trump came up speaking in Davos and I decided not only have I, on principle, never been to Davos, but decided therefore to mute him and carry on reading. And I’m really grateful for the fact that I spent a morning reading intelligent, thoughtful policy disputes and debates, and hopefully this is what this panel will provide.
Now, in terms of the big question that they’re going to address, as a foreigner, I immediately put it in an international context, and it strikes me that if you want to include both, essentially we all want to be China in respect of project execution, getting things done, and we all want to be Denmark in terms of equity, inclusive prosperity, some redistribution.
And that if you were to combine this China-Denmark Minotaur, you’d probably get Singapore, which is pretty useless in an American context. Regardless of all the sort of democratic backsliding that has been happening in this country, America remains a complex multilayered federal democracy. And so therefore, maybe we go back to an example from home, and I think this is going to surface in the debate, which is the New Deal. You combine the Tennessee Valley Authority with Social Security. You’ve got China and Denmark right there. And so I guess the question we’re going to get to is what do these two approaches have in common? I don’t really want to set up a punch and duty show where it’s one or the other, but I think there are tensions there that would be good to explore. Can we have our bagel and eat it if you like?
So let me start. I mean, I want to ask each of you a question, the same question, and then we’ll get into some of the more specific questions like housing affordability, like mass transit, and of course, energy platforms and affordability. But before I do so, let’s just sort of start with a more 30,000 foot question and we might as well go in order. Baillee, I’ll start with you. And Baillee’s Inclusive Abundance, which is a very good name for this panel. And Baillee, why are we talking about abundance now? What prompted this book, this debate? What is it about this era, this time, that makes this such a pressing debate?
Baillee Brown:
Thank you so much, Ed, and thank you, Michael, for hosting this event. I think about abundance as a policy lens that any elected official can use and take forward and solve the problems that they want to solve. And I think the reason why it’s really caught on was the book written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson was obviously very well-timed after the Biden administration leaving office and Trump taking office. I think that we saw immediately when Trump came into office, and since then he just does things. And I think there’s almost an envy that Democrats feel now that they’ve been out of office, that it felt like there were a lot of policies that were attempted to be put into place or implementation was really slow and those dollars weren’t getting out to people. You have historic amounts of investment and those dollars really aren’t reaching on the ground. Projects are not getting built in the same quick manner.
And so a lot of the work that I do at Inclusive Abundance is working with members of Congress who are interested in using this policy lens to solve problems. And I think the reason why it has really caught the imagination is it’s a very optimistic policy frame. It’s trying to beg the question, how can we be more ambitious and say, “We really want to be relentlessly focused on outcomes” and not say “The reason why we’re doing these things is for a certain interest group,” or something like that. So I think it’s about deliverism and making government work better.
Ed Luce:
Just very quickly, in a nutshell, why were only 50 EV charging stations built after the Inflation Reduction Act? What in your view is the problem there?
Baillee Brown:
I think there’s a few different problems there. I think it was a $5 billion program where it was distributed between or amongst state and local governments. And there are a lot of different reasons for that, but there was some debate of where should we put these EV charging stations? Should they be at gas stations? Because if gas stations are not going to be relevant anymore if we convert from gas powered cars to electric vehicles, is that the most reasonable place for them to be or should they be elsewhere? There’s a lot of technical policy reasons why that needed to be evaluated to build those projects. But the biggest issue is that the environmental processes took too long. And I think the leadership in terms of saying, “We need to get this done,” and agencies relentlessly being focused on that, there wasn’t quite that focus.
Ed Luce:
So I think we’re going to be going pro-abundance to slightly less pro-abundance to move along, but Jerusalem, same question to you.
Jerusalem Damsas:
Yeah. So in 2020 when I was writing about housing for Vox, and I would talk to other housing reporters at the New York Times or Rachel Cohen’s Vox who’s in the audience today, we were just kind of shocked at how all of a sudden everyone … Our stories were just doing super well. And it wasn’t that we all just suddenly got a lot better at writing. Everyone started caring a lot more about housing in 2020 for obvious reasons. We saw interest rates bottom out. We saw millennials were aging into their prime home buying years. We saw particularly higher income Americans during that kind of K-shaped recovery were able to use a lot of their continuing high incomes in order to put down payments down. And so you saw the housing market just really take off in the United States and other parts of the world as well.
And so this became an issue in states that were not used to having extreme housing affordability problems. So I would talk to lawmakers in Idaho, in Montana, in Texas, in Tennessee, and these are places where they’d had kind of cities that were growing, like Nashville was a fast-growing city. Boise was a place that was taking on a lot of California refugees, if you will. But at the same time, they conceived of this issue as a coastal issue like, okay, yeah, there’s something wrong with the New Yorks of the world and the San Franciscos of the world, but it’s not really our problem. And then it became clear that no, given that we’d allow people to move freely in this country, if places are too expensive, people will move to less expensive areas in order to access either homeownership or just more affordable life generally.
And so a lot more people began questioning, “Why is it that housing is so expensive in my area? What are the tools available to me to actually engage with this problem for my constituents because it became a top tier issue?” And so YIMBYism, which had been a movement that had been around for 10, 15 years at this point in San Francisco, California, Boulder, the coast largely, really was there and available to provide answers to policymakers. And they were able to say like, “Listen, there are these constraints to building. It’s a time where builders are excited to build. They’re already really, really incentivized to build because of the financial environment. So don’t allow there to be a bunch of constraints to that growth.” And so YIMBYism really became a much bigger flashpoint. And also policymakers were looking for levers they could pull to increase housing affordability. In my work, I’ve really focused on the problems of localization and excessive procedure and the ways that community voice has been weaponized against broad economic good.
And it became clear that this is not just a housing problem. And we’re thinking about land use, right? Land use is… I mean, housing, I think, is the most important of these issues, but land use includes issues like energy, siting and permitting. It includes things like transit systems. Why is it that California High-Speed Rail couldn’t build? Why is it that a mile of rapid rail transit in even lower cost areas like Dallas is so much more expensive in the United States than it would be in places like Spain and Italy, places that are democracies, places that do have a community voice, places that do have environmental protections and historic preservation protections? Why is it that you’re still seeing these massive cost differences? Why is that we can’t deliver on these very clear public goods? And it became clear that these questions that YIMBYism was trying to answer were not just relevant in the housing context. They had applicability in places like energy, in places like transit.
And I do think that that is a big reason why this all became a big deal is because just housing became so quickly unaffordable in places that were used to having affordable housing.
Ed Luce:
So I want to get back, I mean, I want to drill down a little bit into housing later, but just to stick with the general question, Mike.
Mike Konczal:
Why abundance and why now? A couple reasons I think abundance has particularly taken a lot of interest in Washington, DC and among elite policymakers, one is that obviously the election of 2024, whatever your theory of the Democratic Party was, it took a hit on the chin and there’s obviously more narrow explanations for the loss related to immigration and inflation, but obviously a much broader identity crisis for Democrats. So abundance walks into a space in which people are kind of big picture rethinking the Democratic Party. There’s also very concrete material reasons for this. One is obviously the housing shortage that exists right now. I think Jerusalem just did a really good walkthrough on how big of an issue and crucially how broad of an issue it is. It’s not just a handful of spots anymore, particularly during the lockdowns and the reopenings. Housing prices are up quite a bit everywhere.
Everyone feels this and knows this, and it’s a real problem, especially as peak millennials age into their home buying years, we see an extra kind of political discontent. A couple other things that haven’t been mentioned yet. One is obviously trying to tackle climate change with the failure of cap and trade in 2010. And I also think some of the riots in France in 20 … What was the …
Ed Luce:
The [inaudible 00:11:41].
Mike Konczal:
Thank you. The idea that we would put a price on carbon to try to fight climate change fell out of favor, and instead there was a view that we need to build things to… We need to take leadership and building clean energy more affirmatively rather than just penalizing and taxing dirty energy. Once you try to do that, you hit a lot of the same kinds of roadblocks that you would hit while trying to build housing at the local level.
And so things like energy transmission, things like where we’re placing various kinds of solar energy and so forth, suddenly not just the blockage, but having to think conceptually about how are we going to do an industrial policy for clean energy? Those were just tools and mental muscles that just haven’t been used in a long time. And I think abundance offers a framework for starting to think through that as well. And that’s one reason I think a lot of the, before the book, it started to circulate more.
Another thing is China. The consolidation of power in China around 2017 to 2018, I think led policymakers to no longer associate trade liberalization with political liberalization. And so suddenly concerns about who is making semiconductors and where are many of the leading industries of the 21st century going to be placed became much more forefronted. And then you have things like the Bipartisan Chips Act and things like about how do we reshore kinds of high-end industries, both for technological and productivity reasons, but also national security reasons, and there again, you get this same kind of question about how do we build faster? How can we actually build a new industry in the United States that we bring back a new industry and make it at the frontier again, which involves a lot of industrial policy that we just haven’t done in a long time?
So there’s all these different little pieces that are … All these major pieces all come together. Abundance has a way of communicating to it that I think is appealing. It has strengths and has weaknesses in it, but it’s, I think, definitely something that addresses a lot of the concerns people have.
Ed Luce:
And partly, presumably, there is a demand out there amongst kinds of people who are in this room and across America for an optimistic case for liberalism, right, Sandeep?
Sandeep Vaheesan:
Yeah. Well, first, thanks so much for moderating this panel, Ed, and thanks Michael for inviting me. So in many ways, abundance was very timely in that multi-decade crises became acute, the housing crisis post-2020, the climate crisis. And abundance, I think, correctly recognizes we need more stuff, at least in certain sectors. We need more clean energy. We need more transmission lines/ we need more affordable, high quality housing. So I think it’s a credit to the movement and associated commentators for surfacing these questions again. And in some ways they were resurfacing questions. So I think we’re supposed to aspire for kumbaya of sorts today. So I will say, abundance played an important role in talking about exclusionary zoning. This has been an issue that’s been discussed for decades. There were the famous Mount Laurel cases in New Jersey, challenging exclusionary zoning. If you go back further, the Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive covenants in 1948, but they’ve sort of fallen off the radar.
The wonks were talking about it, but these issues largely didn’t have public salience and abundance brought them back to the fore again. Same thing with which level of government should be making decisions. I suspect we all agree it doesn’t make sense to have states, cities, and localities sign off on long distance transmission lines running from Nebraska to Chicago. The federal government should be responsible for citing interstate projects like that. That’s why we have the Commerce Clause and the Constitution. So there are discrete policies that I think have a lot to recommend themselves. And I think the disagreement is over the means. How do we get to abundant housing? How do we get to abundant clean energy? And a lot of the recommendations from abundance I think are necessary, but not sufficient. There are some bottlenecks that ought to be removed, but the second question is, once those bottlenecks are moved, will the private sector step up to deliver abundant housing, abundant, clean energy, or do we need significant public investment?
I’ll put it in slightly different terms. So we’re accustomed to a state, and we saw this most notably during the Biden years that steers. The Inflation Reduction Act dispersed hundreds of billions of dollars to spur investment in clean energy, but do we also need a state that rose? Does a state need to directly get into certain sectors to deliver abundance? And I think that’s the crux of the disagreement.
Ed Luce:
Okay. Just sticking for one last round to the more abstract level. Another way of describing this debate is over the power of the state. Is the state too strong? Are there too many multiple veto points at too many levels and a Lawyers Full Employment Act kind of situation? Or is the state too weak? Which this seems to me to be your implication that these are two very different perspectives. Is the state not doing enough to crowd in or regulate the private sector? And so I mean, I’ll just go in reverse order. I mean, the sort of philosophical role of the state here seems to be quite central to this debate. Sandeep?
Sandeep Vaheesan:
Yeah. So if you look historically, how did the United States achieve abundance? It was imperfect in some ways. It was not universal during the mid 20th century, and that was through the New Deal. The New Deal relied on a mix of significant public investment. You mentioned the Tennessee Valley Authority. The federal government entered the business of power generation and transmission on a very large scale. That model was replicated across much of the country, notably in the Pacific Northwest. That was paired with things like low cost credit for rural electrification. In 1935, only about one in 10 farms of the United States had electricity. Thanks to the provisioning of low cost credit by the federal government, that number went up to almost nine in 10 20 years later. So this was very much a public program to deliver electricity to the entire nation.
But of course, this was also paired with the capital discipline. Famously, the federal government broke up banks along commercial and investment lines in the Glass-Steagall Act, which had a little bit of a moment after the crisis in 2008. In the power sector, the government broke up the holding companies along more sensible lines. You had holding companies owning utilities in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, the Northeast. There was no real operational or engineering logic to some of the large companies that existed back then, but this was paired with the regulation, assorted rules to put companies on a more quasi-social footing, restricting speculative activity, prohibiting certain types of mergers and acquisitions, and spurring, in some ways forcing companies to do things like long-term investment and research and development. So from my view, that’s the model we should be trying to replicate, not copy and paste what was done in 1933 and ’34, but refine and improve it today.
Ed Luce:
Do you agree with that, Mike?
Mike Konczal:
I think so. So when we’re talking about this, it depends. One thing about abundance is that it kind of folds a lot of different things into one rubric, I think sometimes unproductively. So there are things particularly around local land use where I do think the abundance framework makes a ton of sense. There are things where on federal rulemaking, for instance, it strikes me that the business community is much more influential in slowing down or weakening regulations. And so that balance is often a tough thing for, I think, the abundance framework to often navigate. And it’s a little surprising sometimes it just doesn’t fold it into it. That federal rulemaking is often dominated by business in the same way a lot of local zoning is dominated by wealthy homeowners. I think you can have a state that is both too strong and too weak in different ways.
There’s very interesting arguments coming out of history and law right now that says we have a very specific view of neoliberalism, but basically the economic changes since the 1980s, and it views it as a very conservative and libertarian view, a very economistic view of how the government should work, which is very hands off, very step back. And I think there’s a lot of ways in which that happened. But there’s also a good governance movement from the ’60s and ’70s that did a parallel kind of action and slowing down government action. And Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens, I think, is very interesting book in this regard. I think sometimes this argument downplays how much the conservative movement actually is the driver here and actions like OIRA and other things to really slow down federal policymaking is much more important or is equally important. But I think that part is very interesting is that in some sense, we’ve made the government much more active in the 1980s.
The sociologist Loic Wacquant, talks about a centaur state, which is very affirmative and powerful in foreign policy and policing and we’re seeing right now with ICE detentions, but also very weak in its ability to administer and regulate and execute public investments. And right now there’s a hearing at Supreme Court about Lisa Cook. We’re going to get some other Supreme Court rulings very quickly in the next few months about what the administrative state looks like over the next few years, and I think it’s really up in the air. And so I think it’s good we’re thinking more critically and more openly about ways for the state to be more assertive because for better or worse, it may be the case that the executive branch has a lot more control over what things do, and we need to be in a position to execute on it.
Ed Luce:
Again, as a sort of foreigner looking at this, the incapacity of the American state, the sort of flailing state quality of it is something I don’t think is debated enough as rather than the size or the powers, it’s the ease of regulatory capture as it were. How relevant is that to this sort of broader debate, Jerusalem?
Jerusalem Damsas:
Yeah. Mike stole my citation, so I’ll repeat it though. So Paul Sabin’s book, Public Citizens, I think is really great because what it does is it asks this question of why is it that the government actually, despite growing in size, seems so ineffectual in specific areas? Why is it that … I don’t think it was the case that the Biden administration didn’t want there to be more clean energy built all over the country, but particularly in blue states. I don’t think when you talk to regulators in California that they’re happy about the fact that it’s easy to block utility scale solar or battery projects in their state. They’re not excited about these outcomes and they seem very actually intent on these outcomes changing. And so why is this happening? And what Paul Sabin really traces in his history of the late 20th century is that, of course, there’s the classic story of the Reaganites and the conservatives that most of us know attacking government and making it weaker.
But there is also a parallel story that happens within liberalism and within the left where people are upset, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, with actions that the government has taken. They’re upset about maybe large projects in their communities that they see as having negative impacts, some tangible health impacts. Some of them are less tangible aesthetic issues that they’re having. Much of the NIMBY backlash that we see is driven by homeowners who, like say the last good house that was built was their own, and after that, greenfield forever. But there were also people who were upset about the fact that there was unfair citing of negative uses in particularly minority communities and poorer communities. And so both of these impulses worked to try to make it more harder for government to make these decisions quickly. So if you want to make sure that a government never cites a negative land use in your community, you have to create a bunch of veto processes and points in the system to make it possible for you to block it whenever it comes up.
And so localities develop these tools for blocking it. Lawyers who are great innovators in this country are lawyers, figure out many, many ways to stop and block and delay, which is often a delay ends up killing projects even if eventually they could have won out in court, these kinds of projects. And so I think it’s actually not correct to say that the abundance movement wants a weaker state. Abundance I think is like a very broad coalition where there are folks who are more libertarian and view the state as something where it should be, leave it alone, let the private sector rip. And then there are a lot of people who like myself are on the liberal side of this question. And I view it as how do we empower particularly mayors, governors, state officials to be able to make decisions quickly?
Some projects shouldn’t be approved. That’s true, but that should happen fast. There should be clear standards for what projects are allowed or not. And instead, we’ve created these discretionary processes. And so I think that there’s like kind of a romantic view that we could have some sort of like mass democratic movement that would always push forward and say, “We want these homes built and therefore they will be built. And so it doesn’t matter what procedures exist.” But this is just not real. Most people do not want to go to their local government every single week to make sure that enough housing is built in their communities such that in 30 years from now, their kid can buy a house in the same neighborhood. And so you have to create systems and processes that work even when most people aren’t paying attention that are responsive to the broad economic desires and needs of the population, even if they’re not checked in on a Thursday at a community meeting.
And so to me, this question of like what the state should look like is the state should be able to make decisions quickly. Those decisions should be clear. They should be made obvious to developers, to the public, to affordable housing developers as well. And that is the question here is like, how do you get states to do this? Because I think that there’s this dichotomy that I think even you said up, Ed, around Denmark versus China. I use this example all the time of Denmark actually where they were building a rapid rail system in Copenhagen. And similarly, there were people who were homeowners who were upset about the noise and construction in their communities. NIMBYism is not just an American phenomenon. So what they do is they sue. They say, “We’re going to block this project because we’re upset at how much noise is being made that you guys are disrupting our routes to work and there’s like all this dust around,” and they’re very upset. And so a judge blocks the project.
Sounds very similar to what we would see in the United States. In six months, in a six-month period, you’re able to get basically every actor, like the local government official, the head of the environmental regulatory agency at the federal government level and the entity that is in charge of actually building the train system in a room together and they just get together and they decide, “Okay, these are the rules. This is when you’re allowed to do construction. This is when you’re not allowed to do construction. These are the fines you now have to pay local community members for having disrupted their areas. You have to compensate these people. We’re going to also make sure that if people want to leave for this period of time, we’re going to pay for that disruption to their cost, so pay for the rent or whatever they need to pay in order to move to a different neighborhood.”
And then you’re starting construction up again. So this is not a system that is authoritarian. This is not China. This is not a system where you didn’t have responsiveness to the local concerns and needs. What it was, was a government that was able to balance those concerns with the broader need to build a transit system that is now running, that is extremely effectual and much lower cost than what we would see in the United States. And so that’s not a weak government. That is not a government that is incapable of making decisions. No one believes that the private sector is going to build all the transit systems and all the energy systems that we need in order to electrify and to get people closer to where they need to go and their jobs and work and school. That has to be the state. That’s always going to be the state.
Ed Luce:
So I mean, that strikes me as a key distinction. They’re incorporating all the various local objections in Denmark, but somehow reaching decisions and execution way quicker than the United States or Britain for that matter. If the United States is more like not Denmark and China combined, but more like India and Italy combined, how do you address that? What’s the sort of core issue here that to get to where Jerusalem says we need to be?
Baillee Brown:
Yeah. I don’t know anything about India or Italy. I will not comment on that.
Ed Luce:
That was rhetorical, Baillee.
Baillee Brown:
But I think it’s important to just zoom out and say that all of these veto points have kind of come up and become calcified over many years. And this happens both at the local and state level and at the federal level. And I think what is so frustrating to people is really encapsulated by Marc Dunkelman’s book, Why Nothing Works, which is just this perceived sense that nothing works and people aren’t seeing results of new housing being built or really making housing more affordable because we know that lack of supply is the primary driver of why rents and mortgages are going up. The way that we, and I think abundance is prompting elected officials to think about this concept is really like, how do we rebalance back to a more reasonable system that Jerusalem described in Denmark where we can have remedies available for people who are upset about things that are happening?
So being able to invest and say, who is the decision maker for this project? Who do we trust to make this decision? Is it the elected official? Is it a bureaucrat in the city department? Is it the person at the agency? There needs to be someone who is responsible for executing and making that decision. And the kind of more cultural mindset shift of abundance that I hope people can adopt is you need to be able to pick a fight. There may be some people who don’t like it and you need to be able to have those disagreements and come to a resolution. You can’t just say like, “We don’t want this project to get built.” It’s like, okay, if you don’t think that we need to meet our climate goals, then fine, we won’t build that project. But in order to meet our climate goals, we need to be able to do that.
One example that I’d maybe cite that shows the government’s role in this is NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, is a law that basically says you need to write a book report looking at all of the different environmental impacts that this project will cause. And to trigger NEPA, there are a lot of different reasons why something can trigger NEPA, but the way that it’s described as a major federal action. So if you have a federal grant, then you need to go through a NEPA process, in theory, what that means is if you’re getting a grant from the federal government, then you have to go through this extra step and extra process that actually slows that process down. If you’re a company that’s just trying to build a project and you don’t have any sort of, you’re not building on federal land, you’re not getting a federal grant, you don’t need to go through that process.
So you are slowing down projects that the federal government has an active interest in actually getting done and it provides a way for people to be able to sue to say basically anything in the environmental assessment. If you don’t even cover it, you can sue and say, “We’re going to stop this project or delay and delay,” which makes it much more expensive. So I think coming back to the original question that you asked and the balance of government’s involvement, I think what abundance asks us is to say, how can we make the government most effective? And for the things that our government prioritizes, how do we make sure that that is effective as possible in making the best investments in our programs?
Ed Luce:
Please feel free to interrupt and make this more conversational. Let’s just get into the energy thing. Clearly energy is getting more expensive. It’s not because energy is less abundant, it’s getting more expensive, I guess, partly because of AI and partly because of private sector demand with this gold rush, AI gold rush. NEPA clearly makes it harder on the supply side, but there is a demand side to this. And I think that’s one of the criticisms of abundance is that it doesn’t address concentration in the private sector. Sandeep, is that a fair critique?
Sandeep Vaheesan:
Yeah. I would say the big missing pieces of abundance are profits and power. And Mike, a little bit to this at the federal rulemaking level, but I’ll just quickly respond to a point Baillee made about NEPA. So NEPA’s become a little bit of a punching bag. It’s the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. It stands for the proposition that the federal government, when acting directly or indirectly, should look before it leaps, before authorizing or funding, for example, a hydroelectric project. You should figure out, well, whose lands are going to be inundated? Are there ways to design this project to minimize adverse social and environmental impacts? If you look at NEPA, the proverbial multiyear environmental impact statement where the agency and outside contractors spend millions of dollars studying impacts are very much the exception. And the Biden administration took some important steps to streamlining NEPA so that more projects qualified for what’s called a categorical exclusion, whereby they don’t have to go through this whole process.
Certain projects in certain areas can get to skip environmental review. Other projects were entitled to more abbreviated environmental assessment. So the idea that every project is being bogged down by NEPA is not consistent with the facts. Second, so many delayed or cancel projects are blamed on NEPA. It’s sort of this simple monocausal story. Well, this project, let’s say a solar farm in California wasn’t built, or it must have been due to permitting and other environmental review, but there are many other factors at play. So the increase in interest rates starting in 2022 killed off a lot of previously viable projects. In some cases, developers were pursuing technologies that were still experimental. They went a certain way and realized, “Okay. This is not feasible. We won’t be able to make money building this.” And that’s the third piece. Companies build when the expected profits are sufficiently large and stable to justify investment.
And a geographer by the name of Brett Christophers who wrote a very good book a few years ago called The Price Is Wrong, where he said, “A lot of these projects are foundering because the profit loss logic no longer makes sense. They thought they would make a 10 or 12% rate of return. Economic conditions changed. They were not going to make that much. The funders walked away.” And I’ll wrap by emphasizing the PowerPoint here. So the Roosevelt Institute, where Mike used to work, put out a very interesting study on solar development in California in 2023 and looked at what were the bottlenecks? What were the constraints here? They found on average these projects were getting through the NEPA process in about four to six months, not a long weekend, but not an interminable length of time either. What was holding them up was they were not being connected to the grid.
And if you look at who’s in charge of the grid in the United States, it’s mostly private investor-owned utilities that have an interest in thwarting the integration of clean and underscore here, low cost, renewable energy that might eat into their profits. So this power and profits piece is largely absent from the abundance narrative on why we don’t have more clean energy, more affordable housing today. You agree with that, Jerusalem?
Jerusalem Damsas:
Yeah. So I think there’s a conceptual issue with always thinking about whether NEPA is blocking projects by just looking at the length of time that existing projects take to go through the system or to look at whether or not projects when they go through the court system end up actually winning because this ignores how many projects never, ever get proposed or even attempted to enter the NEPA process to begin with. But also broadly, we use the NEPA process and it’s probably a shorthand that people shouldn’t use so liberally, but we’re talking broadly about environmental regulations at the state, local, and federal government. And yes, maybe something can get through the NEPA process, but in order to get there, this has become a familiar punching bag now, but I was in California visiting the high speed rail sites and talking to the regulators and the builders and the unions who were involved in these projects.
And the way that this project gets cited is after the government, the federal government and the state government have already allocated billions of dollars and given their permit, each town, they have to go hand in hand and say, “Will you give us a permit to go through your town in order to build high speed rail?” And the towns, of course, rationally are like, “Well, what are you going to give us? What are you going to give us in order to get this?” So in order to make sure this project goes through this tiny town, they’re like, “Well, we want to station here too.” The purpose of high speed rail, of course, is to go quickly between two places, but you have these stops in the most random parts of California. I drove the six hours between Fresno and Los Angeles in order to visualize where these stops were going to be.
And what’s actually happening here is that many of these, these are obviously a public project, but also when I talk to affordable housing developers, when I talk to renewable energy developers, these are people who are constantly telling me that even proposing projects gets blocked at the time when they’re trying to get financing from banks because banks know what the permitting process looked like. So they’re like, “There’s no way. There’s no way that you’re going to be able to get this project through. We’re not going to risk it. We’re not giving you financing.” So it is very difficult to quantify this. I don’t think it’s the case that anyone who works on abundance issues believes that we are entering Utopia the second we end zoning regulations. No one thinks this, but this is true of all issue areas. You solve some problems and then other problems arise because we live in a fallen world where there will always be issues.
But I think the question is, are these problems worth solving and dedicating energy to? And when you talk to the people who are actually building, when you look at actually the history of where these regulations come from, these are intentionally put in place to block things. There’s a story that everyone likes to tell because no one wants to be … I guess this is all about getting long, so no one wants to be mean, but so they always say like, “Oh, it’s unintentional bad things that have happened that have led to the housing shortage.” No, there were people who explicitly wanted to exclude and block new housing from entering their communities, who wanted to exclude energy from existing in their communities because they didn’t like black people, they didn’t like Chinese people, they didn’t like energy projects near them, whatever it was. And they explicitly wrote, “We want to create these laws in order to block projects.” So it’s not confusing why this is happening.
These stories are well told by historians. There were people alive in that time today who talk to me all the time about why they wanted these regulations to exist. So I think it’s a little bit weird for us to pretend that all of these regulations are having no serious impact on the ability to build the things we say we want to build.
Ed Luce:
Okay. I’m getting more of a taste for Punch and Judy as this goes along, in fact. So I’d also like to explore a bit more of those tensions. But Mike, in terms of housing, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as you were implying, and zoning and building codes, et cetera, might be part of the good intentions there. So in my view, but you might disagree, you probably won’t, is rent freeze. If Zohran Mamdani was sitting here and we were just debating on this panel, what do we do about housing affordability in New York? What would your answer to that be?
Mike Konczal:
I’m going to back up just because I know many of the people he’s appointed to his housing commissions and they like-
Ed Luce:
I’m asking you.
Mike Konczal:
They seem like they know what they’re doing and I think they’re on the right path. I want to bridge that up a little bit and talk about the concept of rent freezes plus trying to build housing supply. One thing you hear, and this is brought up by progressives, and I do not think it is brought up disingenuously, is that abundance polls pretty poorly and that electeds have trouble running on it. And I know there’s a lot of focus groups and there’s obviously Inclusive Abundance that people are trying to figure that out in how to message it. I think it’s more of a conceptual problem. There’s always going to be a little bit of a blockage with popular acceptance of abundance.
One is obviously the preemption issue that people have brought up here, taking away power from local communities to democratically decide on what their housing and their energy and what other projects happen there is going to be unpopular. That’s why it needs to be preempted. I think people are trying to think more critically about where those actual instincts come from. Is it the aesthetics of new projects? Is it like school and construction and traffic and parking? But there’s always going to be an issue on that front, on the preemption front. I think there’s a bigger problem. I always think about like, okay, so if there’s a mother whose child can’t see a doctor, what does the abundance offer? And if one says, “You know what? We will remove certificate of needs to building new hospitals.” That’s a big thing. And I agree, trying to build hospitals better and faster without these kinds of weird, cludgy, industry-driven blockages is important, but that may build a hospital in four to eight years, and that hospital may have a doctor who expands supplies such that that person can then see a doctor.
The fact that it’s really hard for people to see the concrete immediate benefits, both abstractly because supply is often hard to imagine, but also concretely, even if you do this thing, will I even be a person who gets to benefit from it? I think that’s a real leap that’s hard to manage. And that’s why I think you’ve seen a lot of different electeds in a lot of different contexts end up in a policy position of saying, “We’re going to do stuff that may not pass the economic textbooks in the short term, whether it’s a price freeze, whether or not it’s a subsidy, while also using that as kind of a care and a stick to expand supply and do these other things.” Obviously, New York is going to be a test run on this on housing and everyone’s watching it very closely. Things that Virginia and New Jersey and other places are going to try to do on energy is another test run of this, but I think that’s fundamentally how we’re going to have to deal with the price crisis we have in some very key sectors of prices.
Ed Luce:
I mean, so I love your hospital and doctor example. And Baillee, let’s pose this one to you.
Mike Konczal:
And one more thing is, the book abundance says that the Affordable Care Act is not abundance. It’s not abundance coded, which is very … And it’s come up again on Nicholas Blakely’s Influentialist Space brings it up as well. It’s very weird because there are a lot of supply efforts in the Affordable Care Act to try to do better delivery systems and so forth. But to me, when I’m thinking about abundance, I’m thinking about prescription drug price controls. I’m thinking about a public option in healthcare. Public option healthcare will save hundreds of billions of dollars and get people more healthcare. That’s the very definition of productivity. It’s the very definition in my head of abundance, but we don’t tend to see it that way when I talk to people who are in it. In fact, I’ve talked to some people. It’s always tough to tell who speaks for abundance, but people are very cautious about prescription drug price controls. And it’s like, well, what is actually included when we’re talking about abundance on once we get further away from land use and some things where we know the proceduralness of it can slow it down?
Ed Luce:
Okay. I mean, again, the hospital thing, let’s imagine we’ve got a lot of the Vita points cleared and you build hospitals quicker and you can see doctors therefore more easily. But if you haven’t deconcentrated what is a very, very concentrated sector, hospitals, isn’t that going to offer the promise of abundance without really delivering it?
Baillee Brown:
So I’ll just say on the topic of concentrated markets and monopolies, I think this is a place where progressive left and abundance proponents really can agree, where there are points of artificial scarcity that we want to be able to dismantle. So earlier when I talked about how we can use abundance as a policy lens, I think the healthcare example that I like to use for this is really the doctor shortage, not in terms of building hospitals, but we have a doctor shortage today. And one of the reasons for that is because the cap that the American Medical Association gave to Congress and said, “We need this. We think that there will be too many doctors. We should have a cap on residency slots and in medical schools.” And that’s obviously a incumbent interest who is trying to put on artificial scarcity in order to protect themselves at the risk of hurting everybody else.
And so now there’s, how do we try to remove that barrier? How do we expand those caps? Another place where I think that abundance in the anti-monopoly left can agree are on banning non-compete agreements. I think this is something that Sandeep has been working on. Many companies would like to impose non-compete agreements on workers, which restricts worker mobility, depresses wages, and makes for an overall less dynamic economic environment. And I think the reason why abundance folks are interested in issues like that where it’s not really like the classic built environment space is saying, “How can we fix this market to make it work right?”
Ed Luce:
So I mean, you’re all making really … Well, Sandeep, you want to do it? Yeah.
Sandeep Vaheesan:
I just want to, on the concentration point, I agree with what Baillee said here. So antitrust is associated with an anti-concentration program right now, and there are real benefits. Businesses in a number of sectors, including in healthcare, have too much pricing power. If you look at markups, they’ve gone up. We could actually get more simply by deconcentrating certain sectors, but there’s also a dynamic benefit. If we make it harder for businesses to engage in mergers and acquisitions, they don’t just stagnate, throw up their hands and say, “Well, we can’t grow anymore.” What they often end up doing is they end up building new facilities, maybe a new clinic, hiring new doctors. And this is actually the political economic system we had in the 50s and 60s where it was actually quite hard for large corporations to buy out rivals. And what we saw was we saw a lot more investment in new capacity. We saw more research and development. And so I think the dynamic long-term benefit of, let’s say, strong merger policy shouldn’t be underappreciated. And it can actually help contribute to abundance, enhance our overall productive capacity as a nation.
Ed Luce:
One of the most interesting things about the contents of your very interesting and varied answers is it doesn’t feel like an either or proposition, the title to this panel from what you are saying. It feels like you can have Punch and Judy if you like. Is that wrong or are there actual trade-offs here between increasing abundance through regulatory and state reform, but also having a better competition policy?
Jerusalem Damsas:
What I’ll just say here is that this is when I was asked to do this panel and I saw that the tagline was social democracy, I guess, versus abundance or something like that. Can these two things coexist? Is 95% of the policy prescriptions about abundance have been endorsed by every single person on this stage, ending exclusionary zoning, making it easier to permit clean energy, making it easier for states to build transit and not get caught up in the procedural sludge, I guess is the term we’re using in order to do those things? That’s literally what the entire project is about. The project is about how do we build these things and get rid of the regulatory barriers to this. Nobody here has defended exclusionary zoning. Nobody here has said, “Because a single family home is here, we shouldn’t be allowed to build a duplex here or an apartment building here.” No one’s saying any of this.
And so to me, and this happens all the time with critiques of abundance, they’re just like, “Well, there are more things we should do.” And I just want to push on this a bit here because if we’re all agreeing that the current makeup of how our regulatory system works is incorrect and we’re quibbling over details, I’m not really, really sure what we’re arguing about.
Ed Luce:
So is that correct? I mean, we’re saying, “Yes, we need abundance, but that’s not enough. There are other things.” Is that correct summary?
Mike Konczal:
So there’s an organization called the Abundance Institute, and it’s spent this past 2025 arguing in favor of federal preemption of AI regulations at the state level. My organization, ESP, is opposed to that, I believe open markets is as well. And there was this weird online fight where a lot of people said, “That’s unfair. The Abundance Institute does not speak for abundance.” And it was weird because I think a lot of people who aren’t obsessively following this on Twitter and X couldn’t follow it. It was a weird dynamic. And the Abundance Institute people actually, which is a much more right-wing organization, I think is the correct way to describe it, said, “Actually, we existed years before the abundance movement or the abundance book in particular and the op-eds and podcasts that went into it. So we get to call ourselves abundance.” And one thing I notice a lot in DC is that when I’m talking to someone who’s coded abundance, half the time they’re like, “Yeah, I’m in favor of more housing. I think the Paperwork Reduction Act needs to be redone.”
Then halftime they’re EX, they’re like hardcore accelerationists on AI and the tech sector. And they’re like, “Basically, let’s just let it rip.” And those organizations also have abundance in the title and often they have the same funding streams behind them. And so much it’s Zymbism and good governance and making things get built better and faster than things Jerusalem said, “I’m 100% in favor of it and we should all do it.” And so much of it’s like, we need to have maximum deference to the tech sector and other business interests, I’m very skeptical of it and we should pause for it. And one thing about a movement that’s come out of magazine writers and a lot of publicly facing people is that it’s often kind of hard to say who actually speaks for it. Jerusalem is going to say like, “Well, I don’t think we should have a federal preemption of state AI until there’s a federal baseline in place, which I think she’s written.” Okay, but there’s a lot of organizations that wake up every day and say like, “No, we need that. And still actually.”
Jerusalem Damsas:
Still actually.
Mike Konczal:
If Jerusalem was in charge, I’d feel a lot better about everything. But that disconnect I think is a real growing thing. And I think there’s a way to read that very hostile and turn up the alarm on it. I think that was in Elizabeth Warren’s speech, Senator Warren’s speech a week ago or so. But I think as an everyday lived, who is speaking for abundance and what are they advocating? There’s different slices of it. Steve Teles, who I think is speaking later today, he describes it as a varieties of abundance, but I think that’s like in a political movement, that’s harder to achieve. And so that’s one thing that I think gives me, I think gives well-meaning people who agree with what Jerusalem just said a bit of pause on this topic.
Ed Luce:
Right. So to bring it back to the sort of New Deal language, there are some economic royalists around too. Sandeep, I know you wanted to say something.
Sandeep Vaheesan:
Yeah. So building on what Mike said, I think there’s a little bit of an overpromise problem. So if abundance simply said these are necessary, but by no means sufficient conditions for plentiful energy and housing, it’d be mostly on objectionable. I’d have some critiques. But if you read the book Abundance by Klein and Thompson, they present a utopian future of GLPs manufactured in space, drone deliveries of food. And so there’s a disconnect between the vision and the policy program. And so this comes up in housing. So a lot of cities have upzoned. If you time the upzone right with the building cycle, you might get a nice burst of housing construction. This is what happened in Austin. They had 20 years of rising rents and got a burst of construction in 2022, 2023.
Then rents started going down and developer said, “All right. We’re pumping the brakes. We only build into rising markets, not declining markets.” So if you look at the overall record on upzoning, there’s actually a paper that came out a few years ago that found that following an upzone, five to eight years after an upzone, you can expect to see 0.8% increase in the housing stock, which is not nothing, but it’s not transformative either, which sort of goes to Mike’s point about certificate of need laws. Yeah. There are barriers that should be removed, but let’s be realistic about how much they’re going to deliver.
Ed Luce:
Baillee.
Baillee Brown:
You just said though that the rent went down in Austin. So I think we know that lack of supply increases rents, and when we increase supply, rents go down. They may not always go down a ton, but I think that it’s important to, again, that it’s not solving the whole problem. We’re not saying that that’s going to make it much, much cheaper. It’s not going to cut your rent in half, but it’s going to make a dent in the problem itself. I think when Jerusalem said earlier, all of these people agree with all these things. I would say that’s not always been the case. Because of the YIMBY movement and because of the increased literacy around supply being a reason why housing has increased in costs, we’ve really seen a lot of momentum recently in Congress, Senator Warren and Senator Scott, Elizabeth Warren is not necessarily the biggest fan of abundance, yet she carries probably the most abundancy bill in Congress, and that’s a really supply side focused bill.
There’s a very similar bill in the House that Chairman French Hill and Ranking Member Maxine Waters have sponsored that also contains supply side provisions that also include some carve outs to make sure that you can streamline NEPA to build housing more. And those are bills that have passed on big bipartisan margins in both the House and Senate. So right now it’s kind of a House versus Senate competition versus do we disagree on the actual policy itself? But we haven’t had in Congress, there hasn’t been a housing bill in the past 30 years that it’s been at the federal level. And so I think we shouldn’t take for granted that we all agree that housing supply is an issue that we should address. And of course it’s not the only thing that we should do to tackle housing affordability.
Jerusalem Damsas:
I just want to make one quick point. So the idea that it is over promising to say that when you build a lot of housing, rents go down a little, is literally to say that that program is more successful than a rent-freeze would be. A rent-freeze would freeze rents. What Austin did was bring rents down. So if it’s radical to freeze rents, what is it to bring rents down? And so I think there’s like this, I don’t do messaging. I don’t really know how people want to message this. It’s not really my business. But I think there’s a level here where we are judging this policy proposal against some insane standard, especially when we say the existing studies that Sandeep is referencing are ones that look at very minor upzonings, that should shift building almost nothing. If you’re saying like, “Oh, minimum lot sizes were 2,500 square feet and now they’re allowed to be 2,000 square feet,” how much should you expect that to change how much is built in an area?
If you say an area that used to only allow single family homes, now can allow duplexes under certain conditions, should you expect a massive shift in how much housing construction occurs? Of course not. The fact that you can measure anything at all indicates that there’s huge latent desire to build an ability for these submarkets to change. The evidence for this is when we look at California. It takes 30 years of regulations to actually legalize ADUs. The first one was in 1980, the final one after legislators had to knock down local governments from saying, “Okay, fine. We’ll allow ADUs as long as you have four parking spaces or you can have an ADU as long as your home has at least 3,000 square feet.” So we’re getting rid of most affordable housing options in the entire city. They’re able to knock all this down by the time it’s like 2017, 2018.
And in 2022, one in five new homes in California was an ADU. 20% of housing that was built were homes that were illegal to have built previously. That is the massive shift that you’re seeing when you actually have investment in these kinds of policy shifts.
Ed Luce:
Okay. Sandeep, I think this can be carried on, but I’ve got my eye on the clock. I think in terms of audience questions, I over promised and I’m going to under deliver. I’m sorry, there’s only one minute left. And the debate between Sandeep and Jerusalem is a very, very important one that’s not going to be resolved in the next 60 seconds. So let me ask a rapid fire round final question. I’ve deliberately avoided politics here in messaging, but let’s sort of end with your quick suggestions as to how the broad left in America or the liberal spectrum sells the kinds of things we’ve been discussing to voters out there, low information or otherwise. What’s the 21st century equivalent of a chicken in every pot? Is it a charging station in every affordable home? What is it, Baillee?
Baillee Brown:
I love that. I want to teach.
Ed Luce:
Okay. You can go with my suggestion.
Jerusalem Damsas:
A nuclear plant in every backyard.
Baillee Brown:
Right. Exactly. We love that. Nuclear waste in every backyard, that’s where we need to go. I think affordability and abundance is the right frame where more affordable housing, more affordable childcare, et cetera.
Jerusalem Damsas:
Yeah. I mean, I think that Zohran Mamdani actually did this best recently in a speech where he ties affordability to people’s ability to live the lives they want. So affordability is about you getting to live in the community you want to live in, the ability to access the school you want to go to, send your kids to the park you want to send them to. You’re tying affordability to the choices people have that make their lives meaningful.
Ed Luce:
Mike.
Mike Konczal:
Affordability is something different. I think politicians should not say abundance because it does not work very well as a message, but try to implement them as part of their governing vision.
Ed Luce:
Got it.
Sandeep Vaheesan:
We need to expand political imagination beyond tax credits and permitting. The Republicans blew up the Inflation Reduction Act before it reached its third birthday. Compare that with what we did do in the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority is more than 90 years old now because it delivered clear material benefits and even has Republican buy-in. When the Obama administration tried to privatize it in 2013, Bob Corker stood up and said, “Hold on, we’re not doing that.”
Ed Luce:
Well, thank you so much for raising my IQ and stopping me from watching Trump this morning. I really enjoyed that. Please join me in thanking you a lot.
Freddy:
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