Noteworthy timing that Elon just changed it within a year of the book release. I wonder what Ezra thinks of it.

I read the book by Ezra Klein, and it keeps saying the US does not have X compared to Y European country. Do you think Abundance is mostly applicable to America only, or can it resolve issues in other countries too. For example I know Canada has a huge NIMBY problem, while Japan does not. How much could the Abundance agenda apply to Canada, Japan, Australia, and European countries?

Do the later chapters of abundance apply to other countries as well? Also, I have heard much less discussion of them in general. They are chapter 4 and 5 about scientific innovation and deployment of tech. He talks about push and pull funding - do you think these chapters are related to the general theme of cutting regulations, including regulations on funding, and procuring more government funding?

There’s also a book called Why nothing works by Mark J Dunkelman, I’m curious why there’s very little mention of it online even though it’s related to Abundance and published around the same time.

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

(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.

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)

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.