Ezra Klein

Many contend that American politics is in a transition time from an old paradigm into something new, but few can divine what the future might hold. One of the social tensions is rhetoric between scarcity and abundance, and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wholeheartedly want to focus on ways that America can lead to abundance. They lay out an agenda for the political left, their natural conversational home, to reform itself so that they can advocate for a better future.

The authors envision a show more future empowered by technology and science. In fact, they suggest reforms to government-empowered research which often leads to social advance. They want to address a sense that government isn't taking any big risks for big projects anymore. They want us to invent, build, and deploy in a way that might cut out some unnecessary regulations but raise our collective stature.

Of note, their approach to China, our biggest rival, isn't to engage in more petulant rhetoric but to beat them by innate American ingenuity. They fault America for not bringing big ideas to market but instead for inventing ideas for other countries to adopt. They blame shortsighted politics for overlooking advances like solar power that can provide us with energy independence and cheaper energy.

Many Americans express disgust about the direction the political right is leading us but simultaneously anguish about how the political left doesn't articulate a vision for the future. To remedy, these authors share one that I can wholeheartedly support. They don't want bigger government; they want better government, which is a lot more complex to implement than simple rhetoric can provide. They don't posit one-sized-fits-all solutions but suggest careful decisions based on individuals and data.

My biggest concern remains, though, is a simple question: Are the American people listening anymore, or are we too caught up in petty partisanship to rally behind a noble vision for the common good? show less

Summary: A vision of an American future where we invent and build what’s needed and for government that enables rather than hobbles growth.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson open this book with what seems an idyllic dream in the not too distant 2050’s. Abundant water floods the West because oceans provide desalinated water to our taps, allowing a resurgence of tapped out rivers and the greening of desert cities. Fresh food from local “skyscraper farms” and lab grown meat fill your show more refrigerator, allowing the re-wilding of land. Miracle drugs manufactured in space extend life. Electric transport has cleaned up the air. Work weeks have shrunk through the use of AI. Homelessness, health, and climate crises are a thing of the past.

I have to admit reading this sounded like an exercise of constructing castles in the air. The authors would disagree. They boil their contention down to this: “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. Our housing shortages, infrastructure woes, energy needs, and technological challenges are not insurmountable. And the answer for them is not “less is more.” Technology is an engine of incredible growth. The vision is one, not of a static, but expanding pie.

What is striking is that Klein and Thompson are two progressives, who write primarily to progressives. While critiquing conservative efforts to hobble government, their critique is far more focused on the ways progressives have hobbled growth and innovation through excessive and labyrinthine regulation. Much of it was well-intentioned to provide for safe housing, a cleaner environment, and more equitable contracting. Environmental litigation hamstrung housing growth in places like California, where it is most needed.

Perhaps the most telling example in the whole book is California’s efforts to build high speed rail, beginning in 1982. As of the writing, none of the 500 mile system is operational while costs balloon. Meanwhile, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high speed rail. The problem is not know how, with the U.S. long a leader in rail transport technology. Rather, the problem has been regulations and the protracted negotiations, environmental reviews, and lawsuits these entailed.

The issue is not that government can’t work. For example, Houston permitted more housing units than San Francisco, the Boston and New York Metro areas combined during a recent year. In Houston, the median home price was $300,000 versus $1.7 million in San Francisco. Houston has land use but no zoning rules whereas the others have layers of regulations and restrictions that make construction processes lengthier and far more expensive. Contractors build fewer housing units. And none of it is affordable.

America has led the world in innovation due to our commitments to basic research. Once again, in more recent years, research has been hamstrung by reporting requirements that stifle many of the most creative. They observed that we haven’t studied the creative process. Not only that, increasingly, we don’t build what we invent, but offshore it. The authors argue that the country that can both invent and build what it invents is destined to be an economic powerhouse.

Finally, they highlight the importance of strategic deployment, citing examples from Kennedy’s moonshot program to Trump’s operation Warp Speed, which produced a vaccine that might normally take ten years in ten months during a global health emergency. It means logical, streamlined processes and the ruthless removal of bottlenecks. They raise the question of AI development and the wisdom of allowing the innovation and implementation infrastructures to be located offshore. Is it such a good idea to contract this out to the Middle East, they ask?

On one hand, Klein and Thompson offer a trenchant critique of the failures of progressives, one of miring growth and innovation in regulative processes. Likewise, they offer a compelling vision of the possible. What I don’t find here are substantive proposals of how to go about removing the regulative barriers to growth apart from dismantling them, as the current administration seems to be doing. I also think they are optimistic about the ability of technology to save us. I find that technology is always doubled edged. The electric future they envision relies, at least in part, on battery and nuclear technology. Both of these carry significant downsides.

I also think the authors are caught in a binary of scarcity versus abundance. A third alternative that I don’t see here is one of “enough.” In a society with obscene extremes of wealth and poverty, it seems we lack a commitment that everyone would have enough–of housing, transport, health care, education, and economic opportunity. We have an abundance in our social, intellectual, and material capital for everyone to have a high standard of enough. The problem is not merely regulatory but structural and spiritual. I fear that without addressing these problems, the vision of these writers is indeed of “castles in the air.” show less

Some friends really recommended this book a few months ago, and I put the audio on hold. Klein is speaking to liberals about where they have gone wrong, which mainly seems to be related to over-regulations. He has some good points, but in general relies on over-simplification and anecdote.

Of course, in the current political climate (which was not the case when he was writing the book) it seems off-base. For example, he writes that science is underfunded in the US, and that science research show more should be more supportive of pure science. I think this is probably true, although Klein centers his argument around MRNA research and the COVID vaccine, which seems to refute his point that science in the US is too slow and not creative enough. However, it's hard to get wound up about his points; when the NIH, NOAA and the higher education system are being dismantled in front of our eyes show less

This is the first book I’ve read that specified, right at the beginning, that it was written for Democrats. And indeed it is. This manifesto addresses Democrats, myself included, with a wake-up call to action in an increasingly demoralized world. I learned quite a bit about why we have ended up in a polarized society whose government moves as slowly as molasses. And it’s not just the Republicans who are responsible. Democrats have participated in many missteps also. Although we all claim show more to want equal opportunity for all, we fight zoning laws that would allow more people of lower incomes into our neighborhoods. We are responsible for much of the red tape that clogs up innovation and development. The anti-government sentiment that began with Reagan was embraced by subsequent politicians of both stripes, contributing to our overall dissatisfaction with both local and country-wide government systems.

Many of these issues hit home for me. Right now the City of Ann Arbor, where I live, is engaged in a fight to either allow city-wide multi-family housing or restrict it. And believe me, it’s a complicated issue, with both sides having legitimate arguments. We also own a number of businesses in Detroit with dozens of employees. Recently my husband had to review a multi-100s page document from the government that detailed paid time off, and found the language completely unreadable. The problem is, he had to send this off to each and every employee with an explanation. He found the red tape surrounding this document unnecessary and frustrating. So I do understand where Klein and Thompson are coming from!

This is not necessarily a book about answers to these complex problems, but serves as a catalyst for future thinking and decision-making. This is the second book I’ve read in the past couple of months (the first being ‘Poverty, by America’ by Matthew Desmond) that has made me a bit uncomfortable, and is causing me to see the world through a wider lens. If the authors’ purpose was to send out a wake-up call, mission accomplished. show less