What does “abundance” actually mean—and who is it really for? In this episode, Goldy and Paul welcome back economic policy expert Mike Konczal to unpack the big new idea dominating political discourse: abundance. They dive into the buzz around Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book “Abundance,” and Konczal’s sharp critique of its deregulatory leanings, missed opportunities, and neoliberal undertones. From housing policy to green energy to the myth that deregulation alone can fix America’s problems, this episode challenges the idea that more is always better, and asks what it would really take to build a future that’s abundant for everyone—not just the rich.
Mike Konczal is the Senior Director of Policy and Research at the Economic Security Project, where he oversees policy development, research, and strategic analysis to advance its ideas. Previously, he served as a Special Assistant to President Biden for Economic Policy and Chief Economist for the National Economic Council.
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Further reading:
Democracy Journal – The Abundance Doctrine
Abundance By Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back By Marc Dunkelman
NBER Working Paper – Supply constraints do not explain house price and quantity growth across U.S. cities
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Paul:
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.
Paul:
That’s right.
Speaker 2:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
In recent episodes of Pitchfork Economics, we’re getting an abundance of Paul Constance.
Paul:
Oh, man.
Goldy:
What? No? You don’t like that intro?
Paul:
Yeah, it’s great to be here, Goldy. You just make it so fun all the time. Yeah, I am here in my official role as apologizing for not being Nick Hanauer, and I’m glad to be here.
Goldy:
Not just that, though it’s good that you issued that apology, and also as our resident book reviewer.
Paul:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Which you’ve done for a long time. When I first met you at The Stranger, you were the books editor there. You have a column in The Seattle Times. Unlike me, you actually read books, as opposed to listening them while walking your dog.
Paul:
Oh. Listening to books counts, Goldy. It counts.
Goldy:
I agree. As you know, I’m writing a book as an audiobook right now. That is my approach, because that’s how I consume books, and it’s good to have you here because you actually read the book that we’re talking about today, which is Everybody’s Talking About Abundance.
Paul:
That’s right. It’s written by Ezra Klein from the New York Times and Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. It’s largely based on their previous reporting, and it is pretty much inescapable. If you listen to podcasts, you’ve probably heard at least seven or eight conversations with or about those authors, and here’s another one.
Goldy:
Right, but we don’t have the authors on. Instead, and this is in line with your history as a book reviewer, we’re going to have somebody who reviewed the book, a previous guest of the podcast, Mike Konczal. He is now the senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project. Ran into him in DC at that middle out conference recently. Always a fun person to talk to, and he reviewed the book, along with Why Nothing Works, which we talked to the author on our previous episode. He reviewed both books for Democracy Journal recently, so we’re going to hand the explanation of the thesis off to Mike.
Mike Konczal:
My name’s Mike Konczal. I’m director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project. We’re an organization that’s focused on making sure that people can thrive in today’s economy while also market crafting and ensuring that markets are competitive and structured well to provide for a better economy. Before that, I was in the Biden administration working at the National Economic Council, and before that I was with the Roosevelt Institute, and just recently I wrote a review of two books about the Abundance Movement for Democracy Journal.
Goldy:
Everybody’s talking about abundance these days. You read the books, you wrote the reviews. What’s the general thesis here?
Mike Konczal:
Yeah. I would say I was actually hoping we could take a break from it, and the break we got was a global financial crisis, induced by Liberation day, so maybe we should just talk about abundance instead for a while. Abundance is a little complicated because it’s often referring to a bunch of different things, and if you are engaged in the online discourse around this or the democratic politics around this, it can mean a couple of different things to different people. Most immediately, it’s a series of books that have just come out, most notably Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at the New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, a book they wrote a book called Abundance, which is a book summarizing many of the arguments they have been making for several years, along with some additional research and in one concise package, arguing that the Democratic Party and progressive liberal politics, more generally, need to emphasize how things are actually built in the world, how things are actually innovated, and the so-called supply side of the economy.
Mike Konczal:
And notably, trying to find bottlenecks or ways of outdated regulations that pull back or make it harder for things to get built, and thus making us less productive, less efficient, and having less abundance and less things and material goods in people’s lives. You can also refer to the Yimby movement and other efforts, particularly around land use to try to get more housing in very restrictive areas, particularly high cost, blue areas. And there’s also this kind of abundance coalition, which is an amorphous set of think tanks, institutions around Washington, DC, designed to try to pull the Democratic Party a little bit more to the center. Those things interact, and people are often referring to each of the different things, but the things that has catalyzed right now is the two writers with very large media footprints, advocating these ideas at a moment where the Democratic Party is having a generational identity crisis.
Paul:
You make a point of distinguishing your vision of abundance from the ones that you were just talking about, and I’m curious if you could talk about maybe the danger behind some of the abundance conversation that’s going on right now in terms of how people are using it to forward their agendas. Are there any hidden trap doors in this abundance conversation that you’re seeing right now?
Mike Konczal:
Yeah, so I think one thing it does is that it folds a lot of different problems and challenges that the American economy in general and the Democratic Party in particular face, and so I think it’s on really solid footing when talking about zoning restrictions in expensive places in particular, and the way a lot of land use policy in the United States just in general is dysfunctional, so whether or not it’s trying to build more housing in wealthy suburbs, wealthy color suburbs, or wealthy cities, to getting transmission lights lines across states to help with public energy grid or with the energy grid to deal with rolling out clean energy. There, I think there are really difficult restrictions, and there’s a lot of laws and regulations that individually are helpful.
Mike Konczal:
They can become quite difficult. They make it quite difficult to build things in a fast enough timeline to address the problems that we have. A lot of that same criticism is deployed more broadly in places like administrative law or recent efforts by the Biden administration, and I don’t think that really syncs up quite well. I don’t think those are necessarily the same problems. So, I think there’s a little bit of collapsing a lot of different problems under one umbrella. That definitely happens. The way they talk about supply tends to have a deregulatory emphasis. It’s interesting that the theory is as deployed doesn’t quite address both some of the high level things we could do to increase abundance for people and also practical things that we have done.
Mike Konczal:
For instance, one thing I think a lot about is healthcare, and there they focus a lot about doctors and the restrictive ways in which Dr. Cartels can restrict the supply of medical professionals, but they don’t talk about the Affordable Care Act, which got 50 million people healthcare and bent the cost curve down while making sure people got more healthcare, or the ways in which Medicare for All, public options, Medicare buy-in, or any things that expand the public footprint could get people more things concretely in their lives at cheaper costs, which is the definition of abundance. Supply is always read through the firms in which they produce things they take inputs and make outputs. The way that they don’t talk about that, a lot of the public options or a lot of the more affirmative things the state can do is an interesting choice and it’s a weird choice and I understand why they’re focusing on things that come from the heart of housing policy essentially, but I don’t think that always intersects with everything quite so concretely.
Goldy:
We talked to Dunkelman just the other day, earlier this week about his book Why Nothing Works, and it was a great conversation. I have to say that, in reading the book, I found it really irritating at times that it’s all about what progressives do wrong, and I understand that it’s because progressives are the only ones that actually want to do anything with government, and the other side is all about not doing things with government, but at least from Dunkelman’s conversation, from his approach in the book, he’s really arguing for return to government doing big things.
Goldy:
A lot of the great successes of the progressive movement of the New Deal, whatever you want to call it, American liberalism, all these terms are imprecise and, I think, confusing, is we built big things. We did big things, and you bring up healthcare, the big thing we could do would be Medicare for all. Medicare was a big thing, and it worked. It provides healthcare to seniors affordably in a way that the market never could because there’s just no way to provide affordable health insurance to people in their 80s. There’s no money to be made off of that, because they’re going to get sick and use healthcare. I haven’t read Ezra’s book yet. I haven’t read Abundance, but from what I’ve read, what you’ve written about it, it doesn’t seem to be that’s where he’s going at all. It seems, dare I say, a very neoliberal approach to the problem.
Mike Konczal:
Yeah. It’s interesting how the different writers are all taking different tack, so in my Democracy Journal piece, I include Dunkelman’s book, which I think is quite remarkable. I think it’s an interesting book, and if listeners and others are interested in this topic, I highly recommend adding that too, because I think it gives a very different lens. It’s also a more historical book, and it’s also written over a longer period of time and kind of a little divorced from the specific fights about the Biden administration that kind of animate, I think, some of the Klein and Thompson’s specific arguments. For Dunkelman, it’s really much about restoring a kind of new deal focus, tempered by the things and the excesses that it got wrong in the sixties and seventies, but really animating that spirit of being able to build big things, like dams, TVA, and those are the things he’s really focused on.
Mike Konczal:
The Klein-Thompson book, on one hand it really does come out of state and local level land use policy, so there’s so much focus on housing, on California’s failure to build high-speed rail, and the restrictions that hold that back. There’s other stuff about innovation, tech policy, and science investment policy, but the real animating spirit to me in that book is around these land use policies, which have an important role to play, and I think people need to take that stuff very seriously. I think it is good that the MB movement has been making progress in many states and municipalities, but the more bigger animating force is often a little bit lacking, which is why I think why nothing works is a good, additive thing to this debate, because it identifies much more concretely with the New Deal tradition in a way that, I think, is more muscular and assertive of what needs to be done.
Paul:
I haven’t read the Dunkelman book yet, so one of my big criticisms of Ezra Klein traditionally, not so much Thompson, but I think I see that in abundance as well, is very little conversation in the book about abundance for whom, as in I think that you could easily see abundance for corporations in terms of opportunities, and not so much abundance for you and I, the way that the economy has been sort of rigged over the last 40 years to benefit the super rich, as opposed to working people. Do you think that there is a way to, and does Dunkelman discuss a way to make sure the abundance agenda is working for people and not CEOs, not that CEOs aren’t people, but you get the gist?
Mike Konczal:
Of course.
Goldy:
So, you’re talking about distribution here?
Paul:
Yeah, the distribution of abundance, basically. Yeah.
Goldy:
Yes.
Mike Konczal:
Corporations are made of people, so what I think the authors would say, and it’s not directly addressed in the book, or at least not in a way that’s very obvious to a reader, is they’d say that particularly for the things they’re concerned about, supply is so desperately needed, whether it’s housing or decarbonized, green energy, or innovative new drugs, that being able to increase the supply of them will obviously help people, even if there’s a little bit of trickle down to it, a little bit of asterisks next to it, that they don’t address it a little bit more forward, I think, is notably lacking in the book, and I think it’s something that people who are engaged in this should try to address a little bit more specifically. One thing that really stands out to me in the read of it is how much it’s meant to be a focus within liberals. So it’s kind of castigating liberals, which is what liberals love to do, and they’re too process-focused, and they love to check boxes, and they add way too many requirements on everything, and it lards it all up.
Mike Konczal:
But it’s really notable how the Reagan administration is not and either of these books. Both books, their histories essentially end in 1980 or essentially under the Carter administration, which itself was a big deregulatory, proto neoliberal administration in the way we’d mean the sense in a rigorous way. They’re focused on the echo of what would become under Reagan in the sixties and seventies through the new left and the Watergate baby Democrats, but the ways in which this can go very poorly, we can see it under President Reagan and many of the things that came after that. We did try to deregulate finance to create abundance of housing, and it was a disaster. It led to the housing bubble. We did many of the procedures, impairments put in place like OIRA under President Reagan, weren’t there because liberals love process and love putting out requirements. They were there purposefully to slow down action. When I’m worried about the administrative state, I’m not necessarily worried about there’s too much process focus, and more that the right wing courts have basically dismantled it.
Mike Konczal:
The reason all these reports last for hundreds of pages on the stuff I know, which is like financial reform, is because they’re all going to get sued by business industry. I think there’s a way in which it doesn’t really grapple with how much of this stuff has been created purposefully to harm government by actors who are hostile to government, as opposed to well-meaning liberals who’ve have done too much, and as a result often can kind of miss a little bit of the ways that this can go sideways. I think on many of the stuff that they care about, like building out green energy and building housing, the first order things are so important that we just have to start getting that moving, and I agree with that. It’s when that becomes a theory of the case of what Democrats should do and liberalism should be about writ large, that I think we really need to kick tires a bit harder and think critically about some of these extra things.
Goldy:
I want to get into housing a little bit, because that’s clearly one of the areas that they focus on in the book Abundance, and in the same issue that you review these books of Democracy Journal, I have a long piece on housing, and I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time, and I am with the urbanist crowd, the land use people, that we need to have land use reform, eliminate single family zoning in most areas. We need to make it much easier to use your land to build multi-family, etc, more density, all that. But when I look into it, and in fact, there was a recent working paper release that shows the empirical evidence, that does not reduce the cost of housing, that it’s not sufficient on its own to make it easier for the market to build, that in fact, the single greatest correlation with housing prices is local incomes.
Goldy:
And so, what I really chafe at in a lot of this Abundance arguments is, if we just free up the market to do its magic, somehow these things will be fixed, when in fact, one of the big changes that happened in the Reagan administration was that the federal government stopped building housing. They used to build housing. Yes, a lot of it was bad for a lot of reasons, but we shifted to vouchers, and the only money we put in are tax credits, but the bulk of the federal spending on housing is actually in the home mortgage interest deduction. That’s what we subsidize. Is there any recognition at all in the Abundance book, that in fact, if we want abundance, the federal government needs federal and local governments need to take a more active role in building it, or is this all completely supply side market solutions?
Mike Konczal:
The book answers it two ways, and I think it’s in the book, but certainly in the broader argument. One is that if you wanted to build more public housing and social housing, have a federal agency or a state or local agency that’s purposefully like, “We need to build X number of 4 million new homes across the country,” they’re still going to run up against the same problems, indeed maybe even more, because it’s a public entity, so there’s a big-
Goldy:
And that’s completely true, by the way, it is harder for public entities to build because they have to adhere to things that private builders don’t do. We, for one, pay union wages, pay a prevailing wage. There’s all types of various regulations. So yes, public agencies, public authorities are hampered
Mike Konczal:
In the book. There’s an example. I think it’s also drawn from Ezra Klein’s own reporting, about a mixed use social housing kind of project in San Francisco, and the absolute insane cartwheels they have to do to try to get it off the board, basically because, among other things, local homeowners have a veto on what gets built and homes that are meant to be more accessible to poor, middle income people. Richer people are not going to want that, and so there are some examples about how even if you wanted a big public push, you would still need the reforms they have. This is something that I think can sometimes be frustrating with this, is on one hand it’s a bunch of small, I don’t want to say small, but local and narrow and targeted interventions in dysfunctional markets that make total sense, or at least you can argue the pros and cons and trade-offs of them, but they make sense on their own terms.
Mike Konczal:
Then, abundance looks like that, which is like NIMBYism in California kind of stuff. Then, on the other hand, abundance is meant to be a master metaphor for our overall political dysfunction and a kind of rallying cry for Democrats, and that might be a good vision, right? Democrats need a vision of the future. I do think it’s important that the left can say we’re the ones who can actually provide material abundance. The right wants a small. They want to crash the economy and rule it like local tinpot dictators. There’s a sort of politics there that I think has gotten mismatched in recent years, and the Biden administration, I think, really did try to focus on this. The messaging wasn’t there, and it’s obviously a complicated time, but I think there’s a turn that you can make there. The question is whether or not the specific things that they’re pointing out are sufficient to match the big picture thing, and I don’t know if that actually maps one for one.
Goldy:
You live in the DC policy think tank crowd. That’s the world you live and work in. We’re out here in the other Washington.
Mike Konczal:
Thank you. I do. I know you’re trying to say that as it’s an insult, but I love it.
Goldy:
No, I’m not. I’m not. I’m asking you a question that I don’t have access to, because A, we’re out here in the other Washington, and B, they pretty much just lock me up in this room in my house, and they make me come in once a week to talk to people, but nobody really likes that. I don’t have those types of interactions. How is this playing, especially in democratic circles, because my suspicion is that it’s meant as an effort, whether they think of it or not, to kind of re-establish a kind of neoliberal hold on economic thinking, and it is designed to pull Democrats towards the center and away from the more Bernie Sanders, AOC crowd, and when I say crowd, I mean the huge crowds they’re actually getting on tour right now. Obviously, there’s a lot of chatter about it. Is it making the impact that the authors seem to intend?
Mike Konczal:
We should break that down a couple of different things. One is it’s definitely a big subject of conversation in DC circles, in funding circles, in think tank circles, and politics circles. We see the minority leader Jeffries for the Democrats in the house using abundance a lot, working it in the conversations. Other people are talking about a lot. Why is that? Well, there’s a couple different things. One is that there’s just this generational identity crisis for the Democrats. They kind of don’t know where they stand. It’s very hard for them to communicate very well about what their ambitions are and what they’re offering to voters. No matter what you think of politics and what the Democratic Party’s brand, strength, or how it should be building a political coalition, I think it all kind of took a hit in 2024.
Mike Konczal:
Any theory of the case took something on the jaw, so with that kind of loss, even though it was a small loss in terms of electoral votes among elections in the past several decades, that it was to President Trump on the second term after everything that had happened, and that it was broader than what I think people anticipated, I think, has left people very searching for new things, is one. Two, and I think this is important is that it does address a lot of things that the Democrats are feeling. A lot of democratic leaders, I saw this in Biden White House, housing’s a real problem for young people, and Democrats are losing young people, and it’s not easy, because it is often a local and state problem. It’s like it’s very hard for the federal government to get the right traction on it sometimes.
Mike Konczal:
And so, the idea that Dems can’t build anything or that a lot of democratic cities are in disarray, whether or not that’s true and how that’s true is a whole other conversation, but certainly people are feeling that. The sense that the Biden administration’s investments, this was a problem with the book is I think it actually didn’t report it out very well, but a lot of those investments are going very well and the problems they’re facing are just great problems you can address, but I think the sense that that didn’t connect with voters is also important, and maybe abundance is a way through it. I think in addition, it is business friendly in that way. It’s complicated, because on housing, it’s actually the big real estate investors, and Wall Street will say new housing is going to hurt their bottom line.
Mike Konczal:
They say it very clearly to when they’re talking to their investors, but on other things, it’s obviously not antagonistic to business, and for people who are wondering how to think about that, that’s a thing. I will say it’s a way to no longer talk affirmatively about equity, which I think a lot of Democrats are feeling that they got burnt on and they’re trying to find an off-ramp. I think that’s not great, and I think it’s something that the authors may want to address a little bit more forwardly, that doing abundance actually can help people who are left behind, and that politics is obviously a little bit notable too when for Democrats where they’re thinking, but I would say that the identity crisis is the biggest driver of why it’s happening.
Goldy:
It’s a great word, abundance, very positive. Who doesn’t want abundance? I think this is the most abundant time in human history and we just distribute it really poorly here. That’s part of the problem that they don’t seem to address. I’m reminded in this whole conversation, I’m constantly reminded of the John Maynard Keynes quote, “Anything we can do, we can afford,” and we’re just not doing these things. We can afford them. We can build housing. We can provide healthcare. We can build transmission lines and transition to green energy. It costs money, but we can do these things. I know, and I’ve mentioned this in other conversations. I’ve been a little MMT-pilled recently, but there’s a lot to that paradigm that should form the debate, that doesn’t seem to be informing the abundance argument, which is basically just, I think people are going to interpret it very simplistically as, “Deregulate, and the market will fix things.”
Mike Konczal:
Yeah, and what I’d say is on the Keynes quote, anything we can do, we can afford. The question is like, “Can we do it right?” We can afford high-speed rail. The question is, can we actually do it? And I think that’s how they’d push back. I think there’s a valid point there. I think a little bit about the big picture politics is that, for some of the stuff, it’s not really a rallying cry, and for some of the stuff, it’s not necessarily a big headline bill you’d run for office on, but instead something maybe you would kind of do at a state senate level or a little bit secret senate, like backdoor stuff, like we’re going to make it easier to build interstate transmission for clean energy, but we’re also going to give something to dirty energy and it’s done, because we think clean energy is going to win in the long run and we can subsidize it more later.
Mike Konczal:
Those kinds of deals are not what you run on. The Paperwork Reduction Act, which we don’t even need to talk about it. It already sounds kind of boring. That’s a big thing in that world, right? It’s like we got to reform the Paperwork Reduction Act. Bernie Sanders is not getting 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people in a crowd say, “We’re going to expedite the hiring process at agencies.” They’re talking about how an authoritarian menace is running our government, who’s going to take away people’s healthcare and their income security to give tax cuts to billionaires. The politics is super weird. Bernie Sanders in 2020 ran on, essentially, on the Yimby platform.
Mike Konczal:
He called for federal preemption on local zoning laws, building a lot of housing, including public housing. Also, rent control, which they don’t like, but if that was part of a big package, maybe they’d be on board, and I know some of the local Yimby groups are more in favor of that, because they deal with the local politics of it. And so, the way it’s coded essentially, I think, is actually super weird. This is why the Dunkelman book, I think, is a really important additive to it, is that IT involves a much more aggressive administrative state, a much more strong ability to achieve concrete outcomes in the world. And there’s a version of that, that can be coded as centrist, but it’s the weakest version, AND I certainly hope it’s not the one that wins.
Paul:
So, you’ve been on the podcast before, and so you’ve already had the benevolent dictator question, but I want to ask, if you were in charge, what are some ideas from both of these books that you would want to bring to your benevolent dictatorship across the land? What are some good ideas?
Mike Konczal:
So yeah, so the things that I’m quirky about and would emphasize, versus the things that we really need, that’s a good trade-off I’ll try to find in the middle. So I’m really interested, and so it’s funny because we’re talking about, how would we make the administrative agencies more effective, but it’s like, will they even exist in a year? I don’t actually know.
Paul:
Right, yeah.
Goldy:
They’ll exist. They’ll just exist within the confines of a Salvadoran prison.
Mike Konczal:
Right, right. Or they might just report to the president, and the whole idea of the last century of independent agencies, which helped make our economy one of the best in history might just be thrown away, but okay, so what do we do after that? That’s a great question. There is the, “You can just do stuff” way of Silicon Valley, like the way Doge is doing things. You can imagine that put towards progressive ends, and so what that all looks like in a year or two, I think we don’t know, and it depends on so many things, but the stuff around administrative reform, the idea of having more democratic process upfront in exchange for less lawsuits after the fact, because right now, basically, the government or actors working in tandem with the government, they put out a plan to do something, and it’s just all pretext for lawsuits, and people with various interests try to shut it down, and that delay is what I think is most poisonous.
Mike Konczal:
So, getting some more democratic process upfront in exchange for, once the plan is made, then it’s executed outside of very extreme cases, knowing that the democratic process itself and elections are what should be giving the feedback mechanism, not random judges and well-funded pockets of loss. The democratic processes is what should be giving that feedback, not the random courts and well-funded efforts to try to slow down or shut down things. I think that’s really important. I think on housing and land use, generally, you need more preemption, and whether that’s HUD or the federal government, depending on how the laws work and how the politics work, we’re going to create what President Obama did with race to the top in education. We’re going to create a piggy bank, and once you make sure you can have density around certain areas, like transit hubs, you’ll get a pocket of this money.
Mike Konczal:
Governors probably want to do this, or many governors want to do this, and money helps lubricate, make that thing happen much quicker, I think, efforts along those lines, which noteworthy, this is also where I think it’s very different than libertarians, conservatives, and even neoliberals in the accurate sense of that word, who generally don’t want preemption up to the federal power to help overcome local coordination problems. Going back to reconstruction, probably, the center part of the conservative reactionary impulse in the United States has been to preserve local hierarchies, and so I think that has very important progressive ends to it and also, I think, would also help solve many of the major challenges we have.
Goldy:
So, we do the final question, which obviously you’ve had before, but you get to rethink it in light of what’s happened since. Why do you do this work?
Mike Konczal:
I do this work because I think, so I’m at the economic security project, specifically in the work I’ve been doing broadly. I think these things matter. I think a mixed market economy, a capitalist mixed economy, can produce great wealth, but also great inequality, can produce abundance or it can produce hierarchy and squalor. “Private opulence and public squalor,” as John Kenneth Galbraith said, and trying to fight for a world in which the outcomes are both more abundant and more equitable, that more people get a chance to build wealth and create the lives that they want while we also harness the best parts of the markets and best parts of government to produce the future that we want, I think, is really important.
Goldy:
Great. Well, thank you.
Paul:
Thank you so much. So Goldy, based on that conversation, are you now more or less likely to read abundance, do you think?
Goldy:
Well, here’s the thing, and this is a personality quirk. I already paid for the book. I used one of my audible credits. I just haven’t gotten around to listening to it yet. It is next on my list. I first listened to Why Nothing Works, because we were going to have the actual author on, and I wanted to pretend like I actually understood what he was talking about, so I will listen to the book. I think it’s important, largely because so many people think it’s important, and you know me, if I’m going to go and critique something and make of it, and knowing that Ezra Klein is one of the authors, I almost certainly will. I need to inform myself so I can arm myself as well as possible.
Paul:
And I think this is definitely one of those situations where you’re not just reading the book, you are participating in the conversation that’s happening. It’s the atmosphere around which we live. I recommend it. I think that, I mean, got my copy from the Seattle Public Library. They have a great, little operation called Peaks Picks where you can just walk in and scoop up popular books that are on the front of the store with no waiting list. Plug, plug.
Goldy:
As if we’re still going to have libraries in four years.
Paul:
Well, yeah. I mean, in Seattle, we do. I recommend it. I am kind of glad I didn’t pay for it, but one thing that I really did enjoy about this book is it opens with a five-page hypothetical scenario of what an abundant future might look like. Really, it’s all of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s specific axes that they’re grinding a little bit, like because Ezra Klein very famously does not eat meat, there’s a long passage about how all the meat in the future is lab grown, and there’s clean energy and so on and so forth.
Goldy:
In the future, Paul, does everybody speak very slowly, using long words?
Paul:
That is a cheap shot, and I think that those who live in glass houses, Goldy, should not throw stones.
Goldy:
I use big words, but I do not speak slowly. I try to pack as many in as possible.
Paul:
Or quietly. So anyway, I thought that the book, I really enjoyed that first bit, where it was almost like a science fiction imagining of what their policies would look like, and I hope that that is something that people take from this book, is having a vision. I think that’s something that progressives have sort of failed at in recent years, is focusing so much on policy, that you don’t actually communicate the end results of that policy, and in conjunction with the policy framework you have, it was just nice to read something so optimistic, aspirational, and idealistic. I think those are all qualities that we need in this conversation, and so that’s something that I really enjoyed of the book, so listen to the first five pages, and you’re all set.
Goldy:
We are writing a book. Nick and I are writing a book, and I was working on the concluding chapter, which doesn’t mean I’m done, it just means I wrote the conclusion first, and it’s very aspirational, and it uses the word abundance, and it really kills me that I feel like they’ve spoiled the word for me, because we’re not talking about the same kind of abundance necessarily that they’re talking about. Part of the argument is that we live in a world of abundance, that this is not the world that market capitalism started in. This is not a world of scarcity. That’s not what markets do. We don’t allocate scarcity.
Goldy:
We live in an abundant world, and the problem is that we have allocated the abundance very poorly, and that many of the things that the authors pine for are things that we could have now and should have now if we actually invested in these things, and it’s not simply a lack of deregulation. It’s not simply too much paperwork or process that is denying us these things. What we lack is the will and the moral argument to distribute things more fairly and to make the investments we need, and that is my fear with this conversation, is that it basically frees us from doing the really difficult work and the difficult thinking of how do we distribute abundance, not how do we build it.
Paul:
Yeah. The distribution is always the tricky part, right?
Goldy:
Right.
Paul:
As we’re learned with supply chain troubles over the last five years, and as we’re learning with tariffs and all that, it’s how you get something from one place to another that really defines who you are as a society.
Goldy:
The other thing is there’s a lack of empiricism in their argument. It’s a lot of critique, but a lack of empiricism and a lot of assumptions based on what they are advocating, what it will do. I want to make a point about Seattle, where we live in, which is an abundant city with terrible problems, and that is, for all of the land use restrictions that we have, which again, we should reform that, we should make it easier to build, we are building faster than any big city outside of the Sun Belt. We are building over 10,000 units a year, not in the Seattle metro area, right here in Seattle City limits.
Goldy:
We’ve been doing that for about a decade, and over that decade, our housing has gotten more and more expensive every year. It’s not addressing the problem. We are becoming a less affordable city, and we are having more homelessness the faster we built. So the idea that building in the private market is going to fix this problem just isn’t supported by the facts, and again, this seems like a lazy alternative that progressives can just fix ourselves, and everything will be better if we just get out of the way of progress. I know I haven’t read the book. I can’t say that’s exactly what they’re arguing, but that’s the take I’m seeing in public discourse, and it upsets me, Paul.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. There are two people on this podcast at the moment. One of them has read the book, and the other one has talked much more about the book.
Goldy:
I’ve read the other book. I’d love to talk the author. I would love an opportunity to talk to the authors of this book. Maybe we’ll get them on someday, and I will read the book for that. I’ll read the book. I’ll have that book read within a couple of weeks. I got some long dog walks ahead of me.
Paul:
Great. An abundance of dog walks.
Goldy:
An abundance of dog walks. Anyway, if you want to read more, you can read the book yourself, right, Paul? You can download that book. You can buy it, get it from the library, get it from your local, independent bookstore.
Paul:
That’s right.
Goldy:
That big, online monopolist, what do you recommend? You always recommend a place online, right?
Paul:
Yeah. Bookshop.org is a good place. They now sell E-books too, which is handy, so you don’t even need to be locked into the Kindle ecosystem anymore. You can buy them from independent booksellers.
Goldy:
Yeah. I’m still working through all those audible credits since I froze my account. If you want to read more from Mike, there is a link in the show notes to his review of these books in Democracy Journal. His review was titled The Abundance Doctrine Doctrine.
Goldy:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well at Nick Hanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack, and for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website PitchForkEconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.