Now before anyone calls me NYMB is disguise, I will say that I am a staunch YIMBY; I want to get get rid of zoning regulations, build more housings, I am willing to support cuts to certain regulations (not on safety stuff though), and the person I want to win the 2028 race is Beshear. I am absolute pro affordability and want things to be as cheap as possible while also paying workers good wages and having clean air.

That being said, I have notice that quiet a few people tend to forget that lowering cost is only a part of what America needs, not the sole factor in policy making, and that sometimes actions that lower prices have drawbacks that make them poor policy overall.

The two main forms I see this impulse take are 1: Some activists utter hostility to Private Sector Unions, and 2: A dislike for regulating or curtailing the power of big corporations I see sometimes expressed.

Yes, Unions tend to raise the price of goods, that is a well-known fact. But the Price of Goods rises because it allows for the American worker to be paid more and for there to be more job security. I am not saying Unions are always right, they can overreach at times, especially the bloated public sector unions, but private sector Unions are the reason we have half the safety and good living conditions American workers enjoy now. Treating them as enemies to be opposed just seems to very out of touch given the current climate.

The 2nd is an aversion to curtailing the power of bigger business, other through regulations or trust busting. Yes, I agree that massive megacorporations tend to have better benefits and tend to produce stuff at a much cheaper rate. That being said, it's also not very good to have individuals who often are fundamentally opposed to American democracy in the case of those that support the "Dark Enlightenment", wielding so much power in American life. I would say it's a good tradeoff to kneecap that power to preempt them trying to make America into an oligarchy like Russia or Hungry during Orbans, or just refusing to work with them after they showed overt support to authoritarian ideologies.

Yes, we should deregulate housing specifically (aside from safety regulations), get rid of zoning, have more free trade, and we should work with corporations that aren't led by crazy people to help develop certain infrastructures.

Again, this is not me saying Abundance is bad, I am a diehard YIMBY and 100 percent a supporter of abundance, this is just a criticism of how sometimes it's misused and misapplied to complex situations where the cost of goods and infrastructure isn't the only factor at play.

Submission Statement: Matt Yglesias argues that now is exactly the time Democrats and policymakers should take the national debt more seriously: not because austerity is always good, but because Keynesian logic cuts both ways. If deficit spending is appropriate during a slump, then deficit reduction is more defensible during a period of full employment, strong growth, and persistent concern about inflation.

I thought this was relevant to the Ezra Klein community because it connects to a lot of recurring themes here: abundance, state capacity, interest rates, the politics of scarcity, and whether Democrats need a more credible governing story around tradeoffs. Yglesias’s point is not “cut everything,” but that a party that wants to make ambitious public investments should also care about fiscal capacity and avoid treating every tax cut or spending program as free.

Curious how people here think about this. Is deficit reduction a necessary part of a serious abundance agenda, or is this just a return to premature austerity politics under a new label?

This article explains the Neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement and how Barry C. Lynn propelled it into the Democratic mainstream, becoming very influential during the Biden administration. Chait argues that antimonopoly changed from preventing large companies from exploiting their size to distort markets, to a totalizing ideology that believes corporate consolidation is the root of all issues in the US. He argues this totalization leads neo-brandeisians to misdiagnose what is actually causing many of the problems the US faces and causes them to reject actual solutions to those problems. Chait specifically brings us the anti-monopoly reaction to abundance where they accused Ezra and Derek of corporate stooges. I think this article would be a good point of discussion for what parts modern anti-monopoly movement should be incorporated into democratic / liberal /abundance policy

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete.

What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play in shaping the arc of history, driving humans to cooperate on a grand scale to achieve great things, or divide violently against one another.

So I wanted to ask him about the stories that the U.S. and Israel, in particular, seem to have embraced right now. What does history tell us about the power of this story? And why does the liberal story seem so weak right now?

Mentioned:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Unstoppable Us, Volume 3 by Yuval Noah Harari

“Understanding AI” by Timothy B. Lee

Book Recommendations:

The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

One thing I keep thinking about from the post-2024 Ezra Klein podcast run is how politicians like Jake Auchincloss and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez were presented as examples of a possible Democratic “way forward.” Klein had both on pretty soon after the election.

I understand what made them stand out a bit. They are younger Democrats, rhetorically against activist language, willing to critique parts of the party, etc. But since those interviews, I honestly think both have been major disappointments and recent electoral evidence might suggest that the “moderate heterodox Democrat” lane is a bit overrated.

MGP in particular keeps ending up in the small bloc of Democrats helping Republicans pass awful legislation, including the recent anti-trans school bill. And now Auchincloss is publicly attacking Graham Platner in Maine in a way that, at minimum, feels more helpful to Susan Collins than to Democrats trying to win the seat. He is saying Platner was “personally disqualifying” and that he hoped Maine voters agreed with him. Which I understand those who are still iffy about the tattoo, but to me the time to air that was during the primary. Now his only opponent is Collins and no Democrat in good standing should be assisting a Republican majority in the Senate.

What makes this interesting to me specifically in the context of Ezra Klein is that both politicians were elevated as people Democrats should learn from after 2024. But as we get further from 2024, are they the types of Dems actually building a durable coalition? Or are they mostly just popular with elite media/podcast audiences who want Democrats to sound culturally moderate while still being economically center-left?

I’m curious whether other people here have reconsidered those episodes or the broader “future Democrat” conversation since then.

I notice lots of artwork related to Abundance looks similar to solarpunk, and movements related to Abundance like New Urbanism, walkable 15-minute cities, mixed-use development, Green Georgism, and Universal Basic Income also are influenced by solarpunk aesthetics. However, it seems like the solarpunk movement itself is fundamentally anti-capitalist

This was generated from the YouTube recording of Klein's recent conversation with Chris Hayes using an automated transcription tool then edited by me for clarity:

> Hayes: I want to ask this question because we have a question from the audience and I think it sort of brings us to the data center fight because that's where like the rubber hits the road on all this like at some level I'm extremely sympathetic to people fighting the data centers. At another level, there's part of me that's like, well, this is just the NIMBY gun pointed at another target. Usually, I don't like the target they're pointing it at, but maybe this target's fine.  This question from the audience is, how would a system of government  in the abundance model balance ensuring public sector decisions are both effective and  democratic? We're seeing these fights over data centers. How would it resist capture  by big corporations?

> Klein: It's a big question. I'll keep it on the data center point. The thing I have heard talking to a lot of governors, mayors, representatives involved in the data center fights because to be blunt about this question, the way the American political system tries to balance this is that we elect people and they're supposed to be able to balance the various incentives and  interests of society in a way that makes sense.

> And the thing that I think the people who are  more forward-looking on this are saying is look, if you want all these data centers, what you have to do is not just pay for the electricity they're going to use. That's table stakes. This is a  tremendous amount of investment, a railroad’s level of investment that is going to genuinely be either a huge strain [on] or an opportunity for transformation of a lot of our infrastructure, particularly our  energy infrastructure. And so the the data center buildout has to be harnessed, in their view, to some public vision about how it is actually benefiting the communities it is part of. In this way, data  centers are not like homes. When we argue that it should be easier to build homes, the reason it  should be easier to build homes is [that] it is good for people to live in communities. Like the idea is not omni-building, right? I don't want you to be able to build  more coal power plants because those are bad for communities. And the question of whether  a data center is good for the community it is in. There's questions about the broader state, about the broader country, right? There's questions about the AI race with China. But the question of whether it's good for a community it’s in, that is something we actually know how to at least  try to think about balancing. Now you could at the state level create framework legislation about what kinds of investments in the grid, what kinds of investments in water, what kinds of  investments in creating modernization that is desperately needed in order to do big buildouts you want to force. And then if you create a clear set of rules of the road, then there's certainty on how to invest and what you can get done. But what all the people actually dealing with this at town hall meetings tell me, and I think they're right about, is that unless you can tell a town what is in it for them, they don't want it. And they're  right. Nothing is in it for them except a bit of tax revenue. But that's not  impossible if there's all this money behind it. Money is fungible. Money can do a lot of things,  and particularly as an opportunity to modernize our energy grid. 

Ezra’s discussions with Lee Drutman got me thinking about this video by the urbanist YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity. In the video they discuss the Montreal’s unique system of having local political parties, which only run on Montreal-specific issues. The result has been having the city be more proactive and innovative than most other North American cities.

Chris Hayes interviewed Ezra about AI and how the political system should interact with AI companies. Interestingly, Ezra was pretty dismissive of claims that superintelligence is near, and that instead we should focus on AI as it current exists. He said we should view it as something the government should have a say in, and that we need to focus on regulating its harms and ensuring it’s used to benefit society instead of just wealthy Silicon Valley investors.

Not EK, himself but this is covering one of the signature bits from abundance, how high speed rail failed in California, one of the most left leaning states in America.

I find Wendover is pretty neutral and unbiased. He is left leaning in that "reality has a liberal bias" way but he's rarely explicitly political, so I am looking forward to this one!

Submission statement: a top economics working paper (Best student paper at the 2025 European UEA meeting) adds some nuance to our discussion of zoning changes. From the abstract: "While zoning strongly constrains city growth, the effects of relaxing regulation take decades to materialize and are limited in inexpensive or densely built areas. This is due to the large fixed costs of redevelopment, which rise sharply with the size of existing buildings."

Some key findings:

1. In the data: "96% of demolished buildings are replaced with larger ones, with new structures on average 3.4 times larger than the ones they replace"

2. In the data: "While upzoning does increase construction, its effects materialize slowly over time: ten years after the policy change, only 9% of the newly allowed floorspace has been built"

3. Model prediction: "an ambitious but realistic upzoning of NYC could increase the city’s floorspace supply by 15 pp over 40 years. However, the take-up of upzoning remains limited in the medium run: at a 40-year horizon, only 18% of the newly allowed floorspace is built"

4. Model prediction: "Fully removing zoning regulations yields larger increases in floorspace (+58 pp), but even in this extreme scenario, residential rents in NYC decrease only moderately (-17 pp)...removing zoning would still yield sizable welfare gains for New Yorkers (+13 pp by 2060), with lower-income workers benefiting the most"

All credit of summary to u/MarkRobinsonsBurner

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps.

Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for whatever party is in power. And competitive districts in this country – already an endangered species – now teeter on extinction.

That is, unless something dramatic changes.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He’s one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates of selecting House members through proportional representation – a system used in many other countries that would make gerrymandering much more difficult. He’s the author of the 2020 book “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and writes the newsletter Undercurrent Events.

Doesn't this kinda go against the spirit and text of Rule 5?

Doesn't this also go against the spirit and text of Rule 5?

Bafflingly, these also seem to be created by the Mod. Doesn't this also go against the spirit and text of Rule 5?