Abundance

There is an open question about what happens in that world.

So, uh, I wrote Abundance, uh, last year with, uh, Derek Thompson-

I heard.

[laughs]

It's like fish wrap.

Yeah, and look, I don't know how many people actually read Abundance by Ezra Klein and- Good

example, good example.

The other guy.

This is actually, I hope, something that the left is kind of learning.

There was that popular book, Abundance, that came out a couple of years ago by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, who are guys I think who kind of lean left, and their book is not... totally brilliant but it's you know kind of 50 good

um which is better than you can germany expect i think what i took from that is that they're writing for you know an audience that is fundamentally on the left so if you're not in that audience it's going to leave you a little flat but i trying to move you know people within their own coalition so you know good good on them

Yeah, good luck to them.

Just to tell you a quick story, I testified in the Minnesota State House Ways and Means Committee earlier this year.

And I was talking about housing and exactly this issue.

And as soon as I mentioned the book Abundance, half the Democrats on the committee rolled their eyes and like, oh, God, here he comes with that neoliberal claptrap again.

um so yeah i mean there's a kind of civil war on the left um between you know old-fashioned let's just throw more money at things and a more sensible supply-side approach that book abundance should just have been a call it should just have been called you know left-wingers discover supply-side economics 50 years after

Yes.

New York Times op-ed columnist Ezra Klein, author of Abundance, Ezra Klein-

Yes

... is going out here and saying functionally the same thing that Hasan said.

One of the reasons that the project did start in the Central Valley is because the then Obama administration was dangling a whole bunch of federal money and said, "Hey, we want you to start in Fresno because there's too much asthma in Fresno." I'm not making it up.

That was in Ezra Klein's book Abundance.

But really the true high-speed rail that the voters voted for is LA to San Francisco.

Right.

This week you have me, Natalie, and Jenny 2.0. Jenny is doing the nonfiction, and what are you talking about? So I'm going to

talk about a book called Abundance, which is by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who are reporters.

I was going to say, I know the name Ezra Klein, but I couldn't tell you who it is.

And then I'm going to talk about remarkably bright creatures, and I didn't even look at the author.

I'll look that up by the time it gets to me.

So, okay, I'll just dive right in.

So I read Abundance.

Listen to it, actually.

So time for solutions.

Uh, where, where have we seen, uh, the best, uh, policy interventions? I know, you know, even, even before, uh, the, uh, the Derek Thompson book Abundance came out, Derek Thompson is Reclaim's book, um, people for the past, uh, several years, including at the Abundance Institute, have been talking about how we need a whole public policy plan for abundance of lots of things, housing probably number one that people cared about the most.

And so there have, uh, been lots of people working hard, uh, across this great land of ours, uh, trying to, uh, see, including, uh, yourself, of course, in, uh, the, uh, the Dominion, [lip smacks] uh, to, to put some changes through.

Um, for people who live and work in Washington, DC, this is a little different from most big public policy issues because, uh, the vast majority of the policy levers to be pulled here are at the state and lo- even local city county level, not one big federal reform, uh, 'cause it's states and localities that tend to control these things.

Mm-hmm.

So, it's interesting that on the one hand, we've got a big movement, but other than maybe a couple of big, uh, states, there aren't single huge standout kind of revolutionary changes to point to, but that just means that this is a problem that needs to be addressed kind of place by place, a little by little, kind of boring policy by boring policy, including a lot of ones that a lot of people probably weren't aware of were even a thing, right? A lot of people don't even realize there's such a thing as like, you know, required parking minimums on, uh, on development, on property developers.

Um, so I think to, you know, to me, this is a sort of, um, kind of, you know, th- you know, threat and opportunity, right? There's not like one master slogan that everyone can rally around and says, "Oh, we just need to pass the Housing Abundance Act through Congress, and everything will be fine."

Mm-hmm.