Housing is the single biggest issue facing California. What will the state’s next governor do about it? On Friday, May 8, Ezra Klein will moderate a forum with top Democratic candidates for governor, giving them a chance to explain how they would actually solve, or at least make progress on, the issue.

Tune into our YouTube livestream on Friday, May 8, at 4:15 p.m. P.T. / 7:15 p.m. E.T.

For the record, Ezra Klein is not involved in this. He founded Vox.com in 2014, which is different to the parent company, Vox Media, which existed beforehand. Klein left the company in 2020.

Certainly seems relevant though, not just for his project ending up part of this but for the broader implications around journalism which Klein covers.

Ezra lamented on the latest Abundance episode that we had all but abandoned climate goals as part of the Democratic platform. Meanwhile, Amsterdam has just passed this fascinating act of public policy: banning ads for fossil fuels and meat.

Given Ezra frequently touches on both climate topics and veganism, and given his conversations recently about how liberalism has eschewed attempts to impose any moral authority beyond the logic of the free market, I thought this article was relevant. It's a provocative and bold example of how an active government can advance pro-social policy goals while also taking a clear moral stance that shapes local commerce and consumption.

"a Dutch travel trade association and several travel agencies sued, arguing that the ban was an overreach that violated freedom of expression rules and European Union consumer law. But the judge sided with the city, ruling that the health of its citizens and the climate was more important than commercial interests."

What would it take to build political momentum for something like this in the US? Can we think about this more broadly, beyond climate, and ban gambling ads I see everywhere?

Both men will often encourage Democrats to moderate their social views and be open to more conversations and candidates with heterodox beliefs that aren't strictly in line with party orthodoxy. They're not shy about it either, they're willing to stand on these convictions and ruffle some feathers with such controversial pieces as "Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way" or "Bigots in the Tent". They'll plea with donors to be more sensible about their contributions and prioritize electable pragmatism over special interest maximalism. I'm not here to critique the merit of these ideas. It's sound strategy as far as I'm concerned.

But I can't help but notice that neither expresses the same urgency or appetite for drastic measures when it comes to reevaluating the party's media strategy. I won't bury the lede any further; my opinion is that if you bribed key influencers to trash Republicans, exploited far right conspiracies against the party mainstream, and used bot accounts to signal-boost anti-Republican sentiments it would probably work. You could leverage LLMs to rapidly gauge response sentiment and A/B test new messaging. Just totally flood the conservative media ecosystem with bad faith concern trolling about Republicans and Republican policies. It would be ugly and degrade the political discourse even further, but it would work.

Now if Ezra and Matt tackled this head on by plainly stating "No, we will not stoop to propaganda and subterfuge. The principle of honest and fair conversation is the cornerstone of our political culture," that would be more than suitable, it would be admirable. But instead what they've consistently and explicitly reiterated is that threat posed by Trump and MAGA is so terrible, we cannot allow our principles to hinder our response to this crisis. But then they just never engage with the idea that media manipulation can be a political asset. Even more bizarrely, Ezra will go out of his way to defend the honor of political commentators like Charlie Kirk and Hasan Piker seemingly oblivious to the fact that they engage in these sorts of underhanded tactics all the damn time.

And this is what gives me pause whenever Ezra and Matt urge everyone else to slaughter their sacred cows. I'm not impressed when they advertise their willingness to compromise on their stated policy preferences. I know how professional opinion-havers (especially liberal opinion-havers) think, and there's nothing they love more than to signal how pragmatic and open-minded they are by humoring an opposing viewpoint. That's not a real sacrifice. If they truly think defeating Trump/MAGA is a goal worth sacrificing personal principles, are they willing to compromise on something personally meaningful to them? Would they be willing to trade respectable journalism for crass conspiratorial bullshit if it meant Dems winning 60 Senate seats?

This recent NYT article focuses mainly on Sen. Chris Van Hollen's proposal exempt many working-class folks from income taxes, coupled with a plan to raise taxes on wealthier Americans. This policy appears born of some earnest thought, and I am generally a fan of Van Hollen as a senator.

Other tax cutting proposals from Democratic senators and members of Congress range from the ill-advised to the downright farcical. They include:

• Sen. Cory Booker also wants a working class income tax carve-out, in his case for people making up to $75k/year.
• Katie Porter, running for CA governor, has proposed no state income tax for Californian families making up to $100k/year.
• Keisha Lance Bottoms, running for GA governor, wants to eliminate state income tax for teachers
• Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (who can count EK himself among her fans) has proposed tax relief on the first $100k of federal income tax for law enforcement.

This may sound unkind, but proposals like this are what you get when you asked the dumbest guy you know what to do about tax policy. Standing around at a summer barbecue, and these are the sorts of ideas that the dimmest guy in the group thinks are good ideas. And while we're at it, why stop at the working class, teachers, or law enforcement? What about nurses? Government employees? Dog walkers? Podcasters? Substackers? Does every niche employment category or job classification get their own unique tax break? Because that's where this thinking leads us.

Countering right-wing populism does not require going bar-for-bar with their stupid and nonsensical ideas. I understand the temptation, but Democrats have to resist running on a platform of promising low-hanging treats to people. No, your particular interest group does not get its own special treat because you're a special little star, more worthy than your fellow citizens.

Instead, any Democratic tax policy proposals should start from perspective of a broad civic renewal in American life. A message that we are all citizens who contribute to their society and have obligations to each other and the most vulnerable among us. You won't get a special treat, but you will live in a society where everyone pays their fair share in accordance with ability and need, and all of us share in the collective belief that the government we are funding will deliver results that will improve society in the long run.

Highest taxes on the wealthy and the billionaire class - or policy changes that actually ensure that tax liability actually applies to those folks - seem like worthy policy aims. But promising treats to various groups in desperate, flailing attempts to counter right-wing populism? Not serious, dumb policy, and failing to meet the moment.

In this post, Derek Thompson attempts to answer what is the cause of American misery since 2020. Why are Americans so down in the dumps about the economy, and just society in general?

He further argues that we should not dismiss this, despite it not fitting general macro trends, because this is a fact and this has political consequences, namely that anti incumbency has become a big deal now.

Ezra and Tom Friedman discussing China's approach to dominating the EV industry and EV battery innovation got me thinking about how massively behind we are in industries that we should be succeeding in. Putting all of our resources into a service economy with AI seems like a recipe for disaster, and we can't even do that right (Deepseek sunk our prized Nvidia Stock last year)

I wonder if we can truly compete without sacrificing aspects of our democratic process to even have a chance against Chinese pragmatism. One of the more unnerving, unspoken aspects of China's success is how it disproves our political narrative that one must be democratic, free, and open to be very successful in the 21st century.

Just listened to this podcast with Monica Hakimi, former State Dept lawyer and Columbia prof, and Janina Dill, Prof at Oxford. They are rock stars in the small world of public international law but not exactly household names, even in media that caters to the highly educated. But this was a riveting discussion.

I wouldn’t call it a debate exactly, but it’s two extremely intelligent women offering slightly different perspectives on international law and the “rules based” international system.

It is very similar, but I think far superior to, the conversations Ezra has tried to have on the role of international law in our discourse and politics.

I am really encouraged that Ezra has tried to explore the role of international law in the morality of decisions on war and peace, but I have generally been underwhelmed by his interviewees.

This discussion skips the “tell our listeners what international law is” bit. But I don’t think it’s hard to get in to. The issues addressed are heady but not overly technical.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jib-jab-podcast/id1523370063?i=1000763276029

Seeing UBI reduced to its one-dimensional rightwing caricature of crumbs thrown to the jobless peasants, as Ezra and Bores basically both describe it, is eye-blinking. And Ezra's wife wrote a book on it FFS.

For those who missed the memo, the goal of UBI is all of:

• a means to reliably transmit the needs of lower income deciles to the market, i.e., have a market that can continuously hear the signal of people's true bulk physical needs

• an automatic, always-on strike fund that enhances the bargaining position of labor

• a one-size-fits-all "universal insurance program" for that day your car to crap out or etc

• a better-than-nothing recognition of the family- or neighbor-based care economy (or non-economy, as it stands now, since no one currently gets payed for that), including the task of raising children

• an job mobility measure, encouraging people to experiment with different careers more easily, not just sucks-to-be-you unemployment benefits

• an anti-corruption measure that makes it less desirable/necessitous for public officials to scrape that little bit of icing off the top of the cake

• an anti-lobbying measure and more generally anti state-sectorial-capture measure, as people in certain "dead" or "zombie" industries that depend on a parasite/host regulatory- or subsidy-based relationship with the state to keep afloat can now more easily leave these industries instead of lobbying to the death for fear of economic annihilation

• a rewriting of the social contract that entrusts each individual with some portion of public resource-allocation unconditionally as opposed to filtering all public resource allocation via the paternalistic opinions of the collective

• a means to boost micro-economies and entrepreneurship in rural areas by virtue of creating neighbors that have time to explore where they live as opposed to being so burnt out that they order everything from Amazon and only find time to shop at Walmart (on top of just being stressed for cash)

• a means of strengthening and encouraging civic participation, again, mainly, by giving time back to people

OK.

I have to say I'm particularly dismayed at the reductive framing of UBI given that today's economy is so obviously gunked up by too few people owning too much of the monopoly board.

Lack of UBI has become an efficiency problem for our economy—the missing means to keep the supply of money circulating up and down at a healthy clip—long before automation precipitated this discussion.

This article was an interesting look at a regional election in South Texas. This is one of the latino majority districts that has flipped from blue to red in recent elections.

This is a good example where localism is very relevant. In a region where many people work in the oil industry and people have a preference for diesel trucks, conventional democratic climate change policy is unsuitable.

MattY takes on an issue that I think is gaining ground.

Dogs being everywhere and accommodation. Dogs being granted anti-breed discrimination protections, dogs having specific infrastructure built for them.

I think this is interesting because personally. Where I live I have seen my parks district spend a lot of money on dog parks and increasing the physical footprint of them while other public facilities like community centers, bathrooms, sports fields, etc languish.

He also goes on about specific laws being enacted that prevent local municipalities to enact breed specific legislation as well.

Mentioned articles in the article:

https://www.curbed.com/article/dogs-public-places-new-york-city.html

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/hasan-piker-is-bad-for-the-democrats

And yet Democrats and progressives are starting to treat this radio shock jock as an important voice in their party. Here’s what Ezra Klein had to say in his NYT post:

[P]ick over Piker’s years of streaming, and you can find offensive things he’s said.“…Streamer has said offensive things” isn’t really a news story…The impulse to cut off those with whom we disagree reaches far beyond Piker…It sits at the heart of cancellation as a political tactic. It relies on a belief in the power of gatekeepers that might have been true in an earlier age but no longer reflects the way attention is earned and held. Tucker Carlson was ejected from Fox News and grew stronger on X and YouTube. Nick Fuentes was banned from major social media platforms and gathered strength in the shadows. Trump went from being banned by every major social media platform to retaking the presidency.

According to Ezra’s line of thought here, the Republican Party and mainstream conservative institutions like Fox News would be smart to embrace Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — and therefore the Democrats and mainstream liberals would be smart to embrace Hasan Piker.

Let’s think through the implications of that line of reasoning. If the mainstream should always include extremists in the conversation — if gatekeeping is useless and counterproductive — then all you have to do in order to force extremist ideas into mainstream discourse is to grab some attention. If you get a Twitch stream or a podcast and you start screaming that the Holocaust was fake, or that the USSR was good, etc., and you manage to get a decently big audience by doing this, you should now have a say in how the country is run.

Noah had another article posted here recently. So I think this one responding to Ezra should be relevant enough.

I disagreed with the other Noah article posted here about how the US was right in it's conflict with Anthropic. But I like this article.

Paul Krugman ponders why consumer sentiment is so low despite the economy being pretty good. For my two cents I think the data hides that for many people the economy genuinely isn't good and CPI with it periodic reweighing hides this. Basically I disagree with Paul that there's a mystery here; people feel bad about the economy because it's bad. As for what *exactly* is bad about it I have ideas.

The housing theory of everything. Prices of housing have consistently outstripped inflation and earnings and this single major issue just matters more for how people feel about the overall economy. It doesn't matter how cheap my smartphone and TV is if housing continues to eat up so much of an individuals budget.

Somewhat related to the housing theory of everything is the geographic concentration of jobs. This is more vibes based but it feels like the job market grows more and more concentrated over time. People have to move to where the jobs are, which can partially explain higher housing prices, and also people become more lonely and isolated from relocating away from from friends and family which drives down sentiment.

Other important players are childcare, healthcare and education which I don't think CPI appropriately weighs on their index.

Outside of prices there's also the fact that the economy increasingly caters to the top 10%-20% of the market so it subjectively *feels* like the median income has a lot less purchasing power than it did in the past.

This is all sorta off the cuff but I thought the article was interesting. I just fundamentally disagree with Krugman that there's some sort of mystery here; people are dour because the economy isn't working for them.

I'm interested to hear y'all's thoughts.

Ezra’s most recent article about Hasan Piker has resulted in a large number of responses. In the last few posts people have complained about fatigue from the topic. Going forward all responses (direct and indirect) to the article are only allowed to be posted here.

Every time there's an show like the Mar 27 "Will Iran Break Trumpism" episode with Christopher Caldwell or Ben Shapiro as a guest, a large part of the discussion here revolves around whether or not right-wing intellectuals who appear on the podcast actually provide any insight into MAGA and Trumpism. Most of the criticism seems to take 2 avenues. The first is that the guest is simply lying to provide cover for what the MAGA movement believes (Shapiro). The second is that the guest is an out of touch, ivory tower type running everything through the beltway intellectual filter. They're usually accused of giving Trump and MAGA credit for a much deeper ideological framework than they deserve, or for wildly misunderstanding their appeal to the average American (Caldwell).

Do you think that more of these types of episodes would be interesting and informative, or have we had enough of them? Additionally, have you ever heard the equivalent of this type of analysis on the right? I listen to a decent amount of conservative media, and I'd be fascinated to hear the right wing equivalent of Ezra Klein interviewing someone from the left and seriously exploring the appeal of Zorhan Mamdami, for example.

Klein wrote a piece last September after Charlie Kirk's death called "Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way." The piece was a bit scandalous since it ignored a lot of Kirk's worst views. Regardless, Klein wrote:

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion...A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.

In Klein's recent piece on Hasan Piker, he says:

But it’s not just that cancellation has failed to silence those it targeted; it also weakened those who used it. The Democratic Party — and the progressive movement — was ill served by the belief that it could decide the boundaries of acceptable debate. In narrowing who it could talk to, it limited what it could hear and whom it could be heard by....

...This was not only bad politics but also bad democratic practice. These shows had come from nowhere and had gained millions of loyal listeners. They had earned their viewerships by voicing something that made millions of Americans feel seen, heard or at least interested. In avoiding those spaces, Democrats avoided contact with the kinds of voters they otherwise claimed to represent. This is the mistake Democrats often make when they talk about what they did wrong in 2024. They realize, now, that they should try to talk to the people who listen to these shows; they are less likely to realize that they should listen to the people who talk on these shows.

Beneath this is an important principle: Conversation is not a reward to be bestowed on those with whom we agree; it’s a necessary habit in a democracy. The point is not to find agreement so much as to deepen understanding. To talk with others is to believe in the possibility of change — theirs and your own. Whether you like everything that someone has said should be severed from the question of whether that person is worth talking to.

Both pieces essentially express the same point: open dialogue is essential in a democracy.

Democrats should talk to Hasan Piker (to find common ground) and talk to people like Charlie Kirk (to debate conflicting ideas). Republicans should do the same, too, but Ezra's pieces focus on Democratic strategy, which maybe is a blind spot in his thinking.

Yet, the piece on Kirk drew a lot more criticism than the piece on Piker. Obviously, at the center of that distinction are the ideologies behind each subject. Does the piece on Piker's give a different context to the Kirk one? Or is the former still worthy of criticism?

In Ezra's latest show, The Moral Cost of Trump's War, Fareed mentioned this. While I know there was a lot of criticism of him, I think this line was really insightful, and put words to a thought that's been circling in my mind for a while. I come from an immigrant family that lived in a rural village, and I've always been fascinated about the intangible things that change from that lifestyle to a modern urban one.

There were many old-fashioned scripts that liberal progressives have successfully de-prioritized in the 20th century. About how a man needs to be a provider, physically strong, a churchgoer, married to a woman, compete with the other men. And women need to keep to the home, to bake treats for the upcoming events, raise the children, be easygoing and not confrontational, etc... These scripts led to toxic masculinity, power dynamics, lack of individuality, and everything that liberal progressives identified.

But to straw man their existence, those scripts also gave a strong fabric of life. When you're from an old fashioned script-based mindset like that, when the fishery or the meat packing plant goes out of business and you lose your job, there's a lot less shame that is associated with you. You're still a good man, you worked when you were supposed to, you go to church, you helped your neighbor fix something last month. There's no personal identity crisis that comes along with things like that.

In a modern day setting with liberal capitalism, the assumption is that we as individuals are in total control over our conditions. We are supposed to do the market research and decide how to spend 4+ years training for a job. We are supposed to develop interviewing skills and marketable job skills and network to find opportunities. We are supposed to assess the risk to decide whether buying a house is the right time now, and can we afford our kids, and which consumer choices we make. And if anything happens like a job loss, there's a crushing blow to your identity. You're not still a strong man, a father, a churchgoer. You're just a guy who was bringing in $7k a month and able to pay their bills, and now you're a guy who's not bringing in $7k a month anymore and cannot pay their bills. It's a much lonelier, psychologically turbulent, and alienating way to live.

With those scripts, you know that if you followed it, you'd be safe within the tribe. People that venture out from pre-described lifestyles are not safe within the culture of the tribe. But all day, we are bombarded with images of people who eschew any script. There's the tech bros who spend their 20s working 80 hours a week typing on a computer for that 1% chance of building their startup. And they succeed! Everyone sees the fruits of people like that. There's people who don't think about marriage until way later in life. People who don't sleep at normal hours, people who choose to be digital nomads, people who change their genders or marry people of their same gender, it can be dizzying and disassociating to honestly pose the question to yourself - "What exactly should I be doing today", if you don't have a script to fall back on.

There are some portion of people, I'll guess maybe 20-30% of people who do quite well in a modern liberal capitalist, transient, individualized, urban lifestyle. I can generalize and say many of the people reading the NYT and listening to EK and are on this subreddit probably fit in that category. We can analyze the market and make informed decisions about what good paying jobs meet in the middle of the Venn diagram of things we feel a natural aptitude for. We can move to a new city without roots and figure out life. We can navigate daily life and find fun things to do without much trouble. In the absence of a "strong man provider" or "submissive caring woman" script to follow, we can do things that fulfill us - advancing in our career, training for a marathon, going to open mic classes, researching health tips, etc...

However, we have to acknowledge that there's a significant group of people, maybe 20-30%, I don't know, I'm just guessing, who don't thrive without a script to follow. If the steel mill their dad and grandfather worked at is shut down, they're shell shocked. They work at the nearest grocery store near them, watch TV and scroll feeds when they get home, eat the cheapest processed food, get fat, and live marginal lives in society. These people can feel that something is wrong, that the basic deal from society that their parents and grandparents got is not still active. But for whatever reason, they don't have whatever it is that allows others to adapt to this freedom, with no script. I think this undirected resentment is a part of the MAGA mindset that can't be ignored.

I also think it's worth mentioning that this frustration can metastasize in some pretty ugly ways. I have a lot of conservative family and friends, and I often try to talk to them and get to the core of why they feel a certain way. There's a noticeable chunk of them who I think are uncomfortable with the lack of scripts in society. They're not content with "Ok, everyone can do what they want in this world, and I just choose to live like my grandfather, marrying a woman, having a nuclear family in a suburban house with a white picket fence". They want people who do not fit into the script they imagine to suffer. They like seeing examples of people who didn't follow the script getting into trouble. It's a constant affirmation that they made the right choice. These are the people who like Trump's cruelty. Renee Good died, but she was a married to a woman, so we can immediately dismiss her for not following the script, etc...

I think these dark and ugly spasms are a reaction to liberalism pretty successfully eliminating the scripts that most of the world used to abide by. And I think the way that the JD Vance New Right, incels, and all their associated podcasts, talk is indicative of that. They're all circling this idea, this fundamental frustration of having a script-less world. I think liberals need to directly confront it, to have a meaning in life, to espouse a purpose, rather than "Oh, I don't know, we got rid of all the historical obstacles in your way, now you can make whatever money you want and do whatever you want with it, just don't bother anyone else". This is the level that I think a lot of our future politics will be fought at.

For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023.

Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’s been a record pace of settlement construction in the West Bank. Israel now occupies more than half the territory of Gaza. And Israel’s push into Lebanon has displaced more than a million people.

So what does it mean to reckon with Israel’s one-state reality — to see the facts on the ground rather than the frames of the past?

Shibley Telhami is the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Marc Lynch is the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. Lynch is the author, most recently, of “America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.”

Mentioned:

“Israel’s One-State Reality” by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami

The One State Reality by Michael Barnett, Nathan J. Brown, Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami

Israel’s Religiously Divided Society, Pew Research Center

Summary of a Year of Terror, Expulsion, and Annexation — 2025 in the Settlements, Peace Now

Book Recommendations:

Justice for Some by Noura Erakat

Wars of Ambition by Afshon Ostovar

The Second Emancipation by Howard W. French

Mayors in the Middle by Diana B. Greenwald

Israel by Omer Bartov

Tomorrow Is Yesterday by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

https://youtu.be/5plXNN3HhaU

The trailer for this podcast was posted here a week ago. Now it is out.

Matty has a new recurring gig at The Argument. Hopefully the show channels some old Weeds synergy.

I’m surprised Matt is doing this in addition to his other commitments. I was a fan of his short-lived Bad Takes podcast a few years ago, but I do not like Politix very much.

Relevancy: Ezra has done multiple podcasts on Trump’s reasoning and goals for the war in Iran. This article discusses the motivations and background in detail

In this post, Derek Thompson takes aim at the gambling problem in America, and the kind of moral degeneration it has created. Sports betting and bankruptcy are on the rise, the worship of money, and the fact that people are betting on families. And how is this fitting for our low trust world.

We all know Ezra is a wonk. The way he thinks, on any topic he covers, he helplessly intellectualizes it to a point of making philosophical arguments around it. He tries to bring guests who he thinks have thought "deeply" about things they write about. Add to that the layer of the guest coming to the NYT studio, feeling all serious and hoity-toity. The guests also "suggest" three books in the end - well, because they are all "serious readers". The result is us expecting a very serious, deep, thoughtful, almost philosophical conversation around every topic... including a few episodes on this era of Trump.

There have been a number of occasions where I have felt that a much "simpler" explanation was staring us in the face and why are we not talking about it? Guests who I wouldn't spend two minutes giving any respect to. Arguments that nicely wrapped in vocabulary but just pure amorphous feelings at the core. The reality is often way simpler and dirtier than what our stretched brains often hope to find in a seemingly serious intellectual conversation.

We often mean the term "grifter" to be associated with an internet/YouTube personality captured by an audience and cynically riding them for $ and fame. But in the traditional media, commentary and journalism space as well - there are enough people who have found a lucrative lane. They have an audience and opportunity to grow financially and attend "intellectual" conferences and sound all serious. We don't have to search a lot to find so called respectable contrarian takes that could potentially be guests on Ezra's show, and many have already been guests.

I think Ezra's show is unique in that way - the seriousness is never let go off. His tone, demeanour, patient way of talking, introducing the guest, all of that has already done half the work of bringing some credibility to the guest in a favourable way. And during the discussion, even in moments of incredulity when guests are basically saying indefensible things - I so wish Ezra would literally say "Are you serious?" or "Come ON!, you know that isn't the case". Maybe the fact that the guest is in the same studio space does not allow for that level of candor, while Jon Stewart can laugh out loud from his home.

Sigh. Ezra - sometimes nice vocabulary is quite successful in hiding bad faith arguments.

If stories like this don't at least make you sympathetic to the ideas of Abundance, I don't know what will. If we can't put in bike lanes on a half-mile long road in deep blue Brookline, Massachusetts, something is seriously wrong with American municipal planning.

Another all-time quote:

“Folks in the bike and pedestrian community were very excited about the proposed changes out there, because Chestnut Hill Avenue is a pretty important link between South Brookline, Beacon Street and the heart of Brookline,” said Transportation Board Chair Brian Kane said in an interview. “But there wasn’t really consensus from the neighborhood. We need to do our homework a little more.”

Debate around the project last year was heated. 

Opposition to bicycle lanes on Chestnut Hill Avenue revolved around removing curbside parking. Other opponents complained about the safety implications of adding bikes to a busy road and worried that bike lanes would reduce their property values."

(For the mods—this is relevant to EK because Ross and Ezra often collaborate)

Did anyone watch this Jeremy Carl interview on Ross’s podcast? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Dude is nuts.

Naomi Klein on the Ezra Klein Show talking about her book Doppelganger and related topics.

Relevance: David French has been a multiple time guest and fill-in cohost for the Ezra Klein Show. I think this wide ranging interview of General McChrystal is an interesting compliment to Ezra's coverage of the Iran War.

McChrystal talks about how the relative success of the special operation raid in Venezuela may have given the Trump administration a false confidence in their capability and fall into buying into the "myth of surgical warfare" by special operations raids and air superiority. He talks about differences in the motivation of potential combatants in Iran from Venezuela, and the challenges of actually holding territory and effecting lasting change rather than bombing things and even overthrowing capitols.

Most interesting and potentially concerning is their description of the warrior class/caste that has crystalized as military service has become most strongly predicted by other family members serving. They talk about potential implications of that including the valorization and desire for combat and violence, as well as the possibility of the political polarization of our armed forces. These do seem like reasonably possible and alarming outcomes, and I've talked elsewhere here about the concerning consolidation on the capacity for violence by the right (and the abdication of the responsibility of violence and effecting physical change in the world by the left) happening concurrently with a growing glamorization and valorization of violence by the right.

McChrystal's proposed solution in mandatory national service to depoliticize service and create a universal buy in and prevent the development of a warrior mindset and warrior caste. His conception of this seemed to also include public works projects. As someone that has not served, I do think there is a part this idea is compelling.

Description:

If you’re a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today, “largely optional.” Countries around the world struggle to get billionaires to pay a higher tax rate than middle-income families.

Gabriel Zucman is one of the world’s leading experts on tax inequality, the economist who first rigorously measured what U.S. billionaires actually pay—and he found that it’s less, as a share of income, than what a middle-class American pays. He’s advised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on wealth tax proposals and recently published sweeping new research showing that the problem is global. Today, we get into the mechanics of billionaire tax avoidance, the history of failed wealth taxes, and whether the AI era is about to make all of this dramatically worse.

Nice article on Zoning in American and how it destroys so much value.

EK has some nice episodes on this too, like: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-brian-schatz.html

After rejecting the ROAD to housing act, the 21st century housing act has been passed instead. It mostly arrives at the same ideas, but took away some of the democrats subsidies and government direct actions while keeping most of the deregulation principles. It appears that in exchange for the loss of some direct subsidy programs, they got a restriction limiting how many homes an investment firm can buy (If you are over 350, you can't buy more). Theoretically, there's nothing stopping one person from owning more than one company and through that owning 350 homes in each. But the deregulation on housing in itself has some popularity on the left now due to Abundance, and the limiting of private investment in single family homes got a verbal endorsement from Trump. So overall, its a centrist compromise bill of the parts that everyone had some agreement on.

New pre-print article from UC Berkeley, UToronto, Georgia Tech, and UCLA attempts to take down the abundance agenda with respect to housing.

The paper specifically calls out Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson as being "among the most influential shapers of public opinion and policy" on this topic, and then says they're wrong.

Abstract:

A popular view holds that declining housing affordability stems from regulations that restrict new supply, and that deregulation will spur sufficient market-rate construction to meaningfully improve affordability. We argue that this ‘deregulationist’ view rests upon flawed assumptions. Through empirical simulation, we show that even a dramatic, deregulation-driven supply expansion would take decades to generate widespread affordability in high-cost U.S. markets. We advance an alternative explanation of declining affordability grounded in demand structure and geography: uneven demand growth – driven by rising interpersonal and interregional inequality – is the primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades. For cost-burdened households, trickle-down benefits from deregulation will be insufficient and too slow.

Sharing to discuss, not because I agree with the study (obviously)