Think Twice: About Abundance with Derek Thompson

Nayeema Raza
This is Open to Debate. I’m Nayeema Raza. We’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in American politics, and I’m about to interview the co-author of a book that some are saying will be to the Democratic Party what Project 2025 was to Donald Trump’s re-rise. That is a formative agenda setting roadmap to the next four years. In that case, I guess the analogy is better called a Potential Project 2029 for the Democratic Party. Now, the book, Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein is about a political project, a liberal agenda, and Open to Debate is squarely not about that. This show is a non-partisan platform committed to the exchange of ideas.

But we wanted to speak to Derek to understand how those ideas and that debate will play out in the coming years within the Democratic Party and between Democrats and Republicans. And we wanted to know what self-critique, rethinking, and disagreement Derek and Ezra had while writing this. The conversation is part of our Think Twice book series, and my guest, Derek Thompson, is a staff writer at The Atlantic, the host of the podcast, Plain English, and the co-author of the book Abundance. Derek, welcome.

Derek Thompson
It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Nayeema Raza
Thank you for being here. So congratulations on the book. It’s-

Derek Thompson
Thank you so much.

Nayeema Raza
It’s got quite a reception.

Derek Thompson
Yeah, it’s been fun. You know, I was talking to Ezra about this the other day. When you’re a writer, it is very difficult to know what kind of reception your articles or your essays your books are going to have. Like, you’re always just dropping a rock of unknown weight into a pond, and sometimes the rock turns out to be a pebble and there’s no ripples. And sometimes the rock turns out to be something larger and the ripples are large. So, um-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
You know, it’s, it’s been a, it’s been a fun moment and the reception to it has been-

Nayeema Raza
Great.

Derek Thompson
Has been really lovely to see.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah. This one is rippling. We’re gonna talk about where and, and how as well. Uh, but the book was really birthed out of two essays that you and Ezra wrote independently. Um, your 2022 piece on an abundance agenda and Ezra’s 2021 piece, I believe, on supply side progressivism, or as he called it, the economic mistake that liberal, that the left is finally confronting. Um, talk about the marriage between those ideas, uh, yourselves and how it morphed into this baby, without making the analogy too weird.

Derek Thompson
No, I mean, I honestly, the, the analogy isn’t inappropriate. I think co-writing a book is, is a little bit like a common law marriage at times. Like you gotta be really inside your, each of each other’s heads. Uh, look, I, both of us have always been fond of binaries, um, and thinking about the world in smarter binaries, and by, and Ezra identified a really intelligent binary in 2021, where he observed that liberalism over the last few decades, the Democratic Party the last few decades had really done a wonderful job focusing on what he called the demand side of the ledger, spending and taxing. But at some point along the way, liberals got worse at actually building things. And the problem is, if you don’t add to the supply of something, say housing in a city and you add more housing vouchers and you create more demand, prices have nowhere to go but up. That’s just economics 101, rising demand and flat lining supply means rising prices.

And so he urged liberals in housing and clean energy and other fields to focus more on the supply side, not just the demand side of their progressivism. And then I was very jealous of that piece, and it was sort of rumbling around in my head. And I wrote this other article about what I called an abundance agenda, and that flowed from my own personal experience. I was right here in DC where I am right now, waiting in line for a COVID test, which they were rationing at the time. It was about 19 degrees outside and I was extremely frustrated that we were still two years into this pandemic rationing tests. And as I thought about the pandemic itself, it just seemed to me to be this cavalcade of scarcity. Shortage of tests, shortage of vaccines, shortage of masks, and PPE.

And as I scoped out, I thought, really, this is the story of the American century, manufactured scarcity in housing in America’s most productive cities, scarcity in many different kinds of clean energy, whether it’s solar or wind, which we just haven’t built fast enough. And so I wrote that in order to solve those scarcities and that century of scarcity that we’ve been experiencing, we needed an abundance agenda. So we sort of took the, the chocolate of Ezra’s supply side progressivism, and we mixed it with the peanut butter of my abundance agenda. And then out came this, uh, uh, I, I mean, I guess it’s, it’s a, it’s a dessert metaphor, so out came this dessert book.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah, it’s a 30-second for Baskin-Robbins or something.

Derek Thompson
(laughs)

Nayeema Raza
Um, the, you, you have described this book as a self-critique, by that I think you mean not a critique of yourself, but of the liberal ideology and the party you subscribed to, correct?

Derek Thompson
Yeah. Ezra and I are both liberals in the American tradition. We both vote for Democrats. Uh, we both consider ourselves progressives, liberals and describe ourselves like that-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
… whether we’re talking to people on our own side or people from the other side of the aisle. And right now, the Democratic Party is unbelievably unpopular, polling at 29% nationally. That’s the worst in the history of the poll, and quite ineffective in many of the places they hold the most power. Uh-

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
It’s astonishing.

Nayeema Raza
In fact, actually, I, I believe they’re even, uh, less popular than Donald Trump at this point.

Derek Thompson
They’re considerably-

Nayeema Raza
According to some, according to polls.

Derek Thompson
… less popular. Donald Trump looks like-

Nayeema Raza
Yes.

Derek Thompson
… Taylor Swift next to the brand of the Democratic Party right now. And if you look at the places where liberals and Democrats have the most power, in cities like San Francisco, states like California, they aren’t doing a very good job running these places. And that was a huge motivation for making much of this book a critique of our own side.

Nayeema Raza
Right. And, um, one particular ana- example that kind of struck me in the book was this, was, um, an example that’s kind of contemporary right now. It was around kind of diversity in the procurement process leading to the inability to hire contractors that could do things at scale. So all of a sudden, affordable housing contracts were being given to smaller, you know, suppliers that were not able to make, or were making affordable housing less affordable because they just at a smaller scale. And that’s one of the examples that kind of struck me in the book. Um, I’m curious, what is one concrete example that, that strikes you as the most salient?

Derek Thompson
This is a really, really fascinating story where Biden passed or created a $42 billion initiative to build rural broadband in America. But what ended up happening is that through the way that it was administered to the Commerce Department, there was a 14-step process that people had to go through in order to get access to all of this money. When I say people here, I mean 56 different states and localities, and the measures were so onerous and so difficult to fill out. There was so much paperwork and so much backlog that now today, four calendar years after the bipartisan infrastructure law was signed, only three out of those 56 states and localities have actually received all of the money.

Nayeema Raza
In some ways, are you and Ezra DOGE sympathizers? Not in the current current Elon Musk incarnation, but in this idea of a more efficient government?

Derek Thompson
We are absolutely fans of government efficiency, GE. We are not fans of DOGE as is being run out of the White House.

Nayeema Raza
GE, that E I think can stand for, for lots of things, and is tur-… And it’s kind of a Rorschach test. Do you think the E stands for government efficiency or do you think it stands for government, uh, extinction? Do you think the E stands for government excess or expansion or effectiveness? What E would you say you are trending towards and what E do you think the, Elon Musk is trending towards?

Derek Thompson
I think he’s trending toward extinction and we’re trending toward efficiency. We believe very strongly in the power-

Nayeema Raza
Not expansion?

Derek Thompson
… of effective government. Elon Musk? Well, he’s, he’s expanding government to the extent that-

Nayeema Raza
No, you. You. You. Your argument.

Derek Thompson
Oh, there are absolutely places where we want to expand government. Sure. I mean, there’s, in the second half of the book, for example, we ironically look at the, at Operation Warp Speed, which was a Trump initiative, and look at how successfully it did in terms of not only setting a really, really concrete goal and saying within 10 months we want to build vaccines at scale that are distributed to the entire population at a cost of $0 and 0 cents, but also took away bottlenecks and blockages in the way. So in, in some ways, you know, Operation Warp Speed was a vision of expansive government. It was, it cost tens of billions of dollars. It was government helping the private sector accomplish that, which the private sector could not accomplish alone.

So we do believe to a certain extent in expansive government, but for a purpose, we’re interested in helping government build more of what it already in many cases wants to build. Like the reason why, to me, the rural broadband example is so winning, so it’s, of-

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
Winning, when I, I mean, so perfectly encapsulating of this message is that here’s the government saying, “We’re desperate to build rural broadband, and yet we can’t get out of our own way to do it.” That speaks to a mismatch between process and outcomes I think among liberals.

Nayeema Raza
You, you talk a lot about the, in the book about the importance of innovation. That’s a key chapter and pillar for you. And at this moment where we have an administration that, on one hand is slashing research budgets, um, closing down facilities, uh, and on the other hand, elevating innovators, albeit techno optimists, um, you know, people like Elon Musk. So what is your assessment for how this nets out for innovation? Because on the one hand, it’s like you’re putting innovators in charge, on the other hand you are, you’re, you know, pulling away some funding, um, and cutting dry a lot of how innovation has happened in this country.

Derek Thompson
Yeah, I’m not enthusiastic or optimistic about it at all. Um, you know, to make a brief historical reference, uh, in the gilded age between the 1870s and the 1890s, there was a relationship between big business and government that was highly corrupt, was highly kleptocratic. You had situations where, for example, JP Morgan would do a favor for the president, and the president would give him access to treasury notes. What I see right now is there’s a very, very intimate relationship between tech and government in ways that make me feel very uncomfortable. That said, I’m also pro technology and pro-science.

I want that science and technology, however, to be, I, I, I, I want the focus on our science and technology policy to begin with an attitude towards science that says, let’s find a policy for high risk, high reward research and reform, not destroy, but reform the national institutes of health to make it more likely that we come up with lifesaving break breakthroughs in, in medicines and drugs. So I am very pro-science and very pro-technology. I’m not pro smashing government and then recreating its services by handing them over to people who are designated as friends of the administration. That’s closer to the gilded aids than the future I want to build.

Nayeema Raza
if you look at this evolution you’re talking about where you have business and politics so intertwined and the, you know, you talk about the gilded age, you talk about that historical, you know, fabric of business and politics in America, that is a political economy that has existed under the surface of America for a long, long time. I mean, Lawrence Lessig writes about this in Republic Lost, others. You know, how our regulations are largely drawn from corporations, how our, our elected officials rely on donations. Um, this is not a partisan issue. It’s across government, right? This critique. And in some cases, special interest groups have played that role, right, in the, in liberal politics, right? Having to win over unions or having to win over other constituencies. Do you, did you kind of see that critique as you were developing this book? Or do you see that critique? How do you see that critique relative to the critique you’ve just made of, you know, the Republican Party?

Derek Thompson
Yeah, I take an expansive view of the concept of special interests. When you look at why it’s so hard for a place like San Francisco or New York City or Los Angeles or Portland, or even in some cases a Seattle or, or Washington DC. When you look at why it’s so hard to add housing in these places, it’s often because rich homeowners are using their political power to stop new development. Now, we don’t often think-

Nayeema Raza
This is like NIMBY.

Derek Thompson
Yes. We don’t often think of these people as special interests the way we would say, think of the lobbying department for Amazon, um, and Northrop Grumman, right? Like we, we think of the latter as clearly being special interests, and the former are just neighbors, right?

Nayeema Raza
Mm-hmm.

Derek Thompson
But in many cases, they can act in the exact same way as a special minoritarian interest that’s holding back progress for the majority. And one thing we’re trying to do with the paradigm shift in this book, you know, if we’re, if we’re so lucky, is to get people to think of NIMBYs as a special interest. And so if you are against special interest, if you’re against minoritarian groups holding back progress for the majority, you should be just as vexed about NIMBY-ism as you are about corporate lobbying.

Nayeema Raza
So a book published in 2025 means a book locked in 2024 probably. Is that correct?

Derek Thompson
We locked the book in November. Uh, we basically had it finished in September, and then we had a, we talked to our editor about the possibility of being able-

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
… to do a really quick write through after we understood the winner of the 2024 election. And so Trump won, and we moved a couple things around and we added some footnotes, and we added some paragraphs. But, you know, 95% of this book was done by the fall of 2024.

Nayeema Raza
Wow. Okay. So marginal edits at that point. Um, fast-forward, you know, almost six months now, I guess, or, or four months now. Would you like to add a post log right now?

Derek Thompson
That’s, that’s great. You know, it’s funny, I, I, I had Ezra on my podcast, Plain English, and, um-

Nayeema Raza
Mm-hmm.

Derek Thompson
I asked him, we had asked him a lot of questions about the history of writing this book so that people could understand how we worked in this project together. And we walked through the big ideas from the book. And then the last question that I cut and didn’t have a chance to ask him, but we were talking about at the airport the other day, was, if this book was one chapter longer, what would that chapter be about?

Nayeema Raza
Okay.

Derek Thompson
And I’m interested, there’s sort of two chapters that are bouncing around in my head, or two, this might not be a full chapter, but sections that I think it would be interesting to address. You know, one is that a lot of people are interested in asking the question, how does a movement like this build power? Right? Who are you intending to or aware of the inevitability of making angry? How do you make the right people angry and make the right people happy in order to turn what is essentially a kind of, uh, you know, high level manifesto into a political track to actually gain in a mass power? I think that’s an, that’s an interesting reaction that we’ve got to in this book.

One piece that I wrote and then deleted, and now I, I think I might just publish it as an, as an essay, is we both, Ezra and I, thought it was a possibility people would read this book and think, “You guys want markets to play a larger role in housing. You want to deregulate aspects of energy. You’re interested in science and technology. Are you guys just techno optimist libertarians? Are you just the same as the Republicans that are advising Donald Trump?”

And so I wrote a relatively long section, several thousand words, pointing out all the ways that were different from the techno optimist like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. And I think that-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
You know, that, that distinction, while I don’t think is too blurry right now, because the difference between what DOGE is doing and what we’re insisting on is very, very different, I do think that distinction could be interesting to draw.

Nayeema Raza
Uh, yeah. Have you engaged with, uh, some of these techno optimists, um, that you wanna distinguish yourself from in the, uh, in the additional chapter of the book? Have you actually engaged with them and debated with them and, and heard from them in this process?

Derek Thompson
Sure. Yeah. I, I, I know many, many people from Andrew [inaudible

:48]-

Nayeema Raza
Is Peter Thiel calling you?

Derek Thompson
Peter Thiel is not calling me. Um (laughs), but-

Nayeema Raza
David Sacks? Yeah.

Derek Thompson
Uh, no. Neither is Sacks. Uh, but-

Nayeema Raza
Okay.

Derek Thompson
But I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley.

Nayeema Raza
Mm-hmm.

Derek Thompson
A lot of people. Yeah. I, there’s a lot that these guys talk about and a lot that they want, that I want too. Right? I’m interested in AI, I’m interested in building a kind of cosmic brain that can find connections between biology and life science and genomics and proteomics that can extend and save our lives. If a machine, you know, built out of large language models can do that, then I say that would be absolutely fantastic. I’m not nearly as optimistic about them, about the fate of unregulated AI. And I also, and this is, I think really just important to say, I’m a liberal. I have liberal goals. I like Medicare, Medicaid, and social security. I don’t wanna cut them. I believe in climate change. But just believing those things, I think is a very important distinction from many of the techno optimist advisors to this White House.

Nayeema Raza
So this is a kind of unique moment where Democrats are confronting their failure in 2024. Gavin Newsom is on a listening tour, on a, or a podcasting tour, as it, as it may be. Steve Bannon is a stop on that tour. Others are kind of retreating, rethinking. There are 3,416 daily think pieces about what Amer- what Democrats got wrong in 2024. I’m making up that number, but how do you think Abundance fits into this context? Like, what’s the headline of your goal here?

Derek Thompson
Donald Trump won an affordability election, and Abundance is about making the most important material elements of people’s lives, housing and energy more affordable. That’s why this book belongs in this moment.

Nayeema Raza
So Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Congressman, seemed to offer your book up as the Democrat’s kind of Project 2025, comparing it to the Heritage Foundation backed transition agenda for Donald Trump. Is Abundance the Project 2025 of the Democratic Party, or the Project 2029 of the Democratic Party, you think?

Derek Thompson
No, it’s not. It’s absolutely not. We say very explicitly, this book is not about writing a point, a list, 10,000-part agenda for what Democrats should do in the White House, in the administrative state, in Congress, and in all the various localities, cities, and states that have their own housing issues or energy issues. We don’t have that list. And we’re not interested in offering a list. We’re interested in offering something more like a lens, a new way of seeing America’s problems, so that when various people look through that lens, they can solve their own problems in a new way, right? Maybe someone in San Francisco will look through the lens and see a new set of laws they wanna pass to make housing more abundant in that city. It’s the lens that we’re trying to produce here, not the list.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah. So that lens feels like people are picking it up and, and seeing through it. I, I heard Chris Murphy on the Daily Show talking about permitting reform, which is a, which is part of your, uh, part of your book. Um, you, we noted Ritchie Torres, of course. Benjamin Wallace Wells and The New Yorker noted that, uh, Gavin Newsom and John Podesta, uh, both have made remarks about how we don’t build enough in the country. So the, the Abundance agenda seems to have gotten, gotten hold. And, you know, to the extent that there were ideas percolating around this already, it seems to be a kind of vernacular, like gives people a language to hold onto. Does that mean that your strategy is working, your strategy of inspiration and motivation is working?

Derek Thompson
I’m gonna give you an answer that might be too honest for my own good. Um, I have no idea.

Nayeema Raza
Please. Yeah.

Derek Thompson
It’s possible that people are being inspired by this book in the right way, and they’re passing laws that produce exactly the outcomes that we want. It’s also possible that as sometimes happens, an idea catches on and it experiences what’s sometimes called, you know, semantic drift, right? People just use the word abundance to justify what they were going to do anyway-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
… because they think it’s sort of a trendy wrapping paper to put on the politics that they already decided they were going to pursue. In that event, Abundance isn’t influential at all. I mean, the book itself isn’t influential at all, except as providing a wrapping paper. Way over my skis to predict what exactly what’s going to happen, but there are little seedlets of optimism that I see. I would not say this book is the Project 2025 of the Democratic Party. I would hope that some very enterprising smart people might read this book and write a Project 2029 for the Democratic Party. But this is not a book that’s just a list of agenda items.

Nayeema Raza
Does that make you and Ezra still kind of like the Paul Dans and Kevin Roberts of, of, you know, the Project 2029?

Derek Thompson
We, we, we, we don’t control what people are going to take out of this book. You know, the book is out there. It’s not for me to tell people how to interpret it. The words are there, people gonna interpret it however they will. Um, but we, yeah, we, we wanted, we wanted to inspire people, and we wanted to shift the way they think about politics. I think that in the last few decades, liberals just have thought about politics through this really closed process-oriented mindset. And we’re trying to get them to think of outcomes first. Housing, energy, science, technology. If you put the outcomes first and you reason back, what new ideas unlock.

Nayeema Raza
If this were to become, to evolve into a Project 2029 through somebody else’s work, who would be the Donald Trump character? Who was the Democrat, best positioned single person? Gotta gimme one name. Who’s best positioned to take this forward?

Derek Thompson
No, I can’t do it.

Nayeema Raza
Really?

Derek Thompson
I can’t do it. I don’t know. I, I don’t know. I mean, who, um, you know, when, um-

Nayeema Raza
Gimme a few.

Derek Thompson
When John Maynard Keynes was writing about, you know, his macroeconomic theories, maybe he couldn’t have named FDR. When Milton Friedman was writing about economics, he couldn’t have named maybe, you know, Ronald Reagan. Um, I think it’s very, very difficult to predict ahead of time who the-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
… champion of a particular set of ideas are. But here’s what, here’s what I do believe very, very strongly, and why I think a project like this is really, really important. Um, we’re, the world’s gonna have challenges in the next few years. Some of them are obvious. You can see them in every newspaper headline every single day, and some of them are not obvious. They’re, you can’t see around that corner. What we want to give people, Ezra and I, is a set of good ideas to resolve those problems so that when the crisis hits, people can like, reach onto the shelf for the available ideas to solve those problems. In a way, what Ezra and I are trying to do is like, stock the shelf, right? That’s like, that’s what writers are trying to do. We’re we’re trying to stock the shelf for someone else to grab.

Nayeema Raza
I wonder who the book is not talking to. And I ask that, um, because of a review I read in the New Statesman. It called it a necessary book. The, the reviewers seemed to really agree with the ideas of this book, but also noted that it was quote, “Grating and academic.” I, I-

Derek Thompson
(laughs)

Nayeema Raza
I, is this, I’m not here, I’m not here to read you your bad reviews, but is this a book for elite Democrats? Is it-

Derek Thompson
No, that’s fine. We can, we can make the rest of the show-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
… just like the, a pure vocalization of my dark subconscious where its-

Nayeema Raza
(laughs) No, no.

Derek Thompson
It’s just all of my worst thoughts coming to confront me.

Nayeema Raza
No, but, but this is a serious question, right? Because we, you and I, we’re in the business of making things, we’re journalists, we put stuff out. And, and do you feel like this is a book for elite Democrats, for America, for both? What is your goal here and what is the reality of what a book like this, who a book like this will reach?

Derek Thompson
We want as many people to read this book as possible. There is no number that is too large for me and Ezra. Of course, you want as many people reading this book as possible, but I’m also realistic. You know, I’m an Atlantic writer. Ezra is a New York Times staff writer. We have a certain audience, and that certain audience is going to be the sort of inner ring that’s most likely to read this book. And there are all sorts of populations that we care about that might not read this book. And I’m open to the idea that maybe it wasn’t written specifically to reach them, but it was written specifically to help them. I mean, I think many of the problems of liberalism today is that, you know, I’ve used this term minoritarian, which is probably a little bit too academic, which goes right back to the New Statesman’s critique (laughs).

Nayeema Raza
(laughs)

Derek Thompson
Um, I think there’s all sorts of rules and norms in places that liberals govern today that are really bad for the working class.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
When it’s easy for the, say, landed gentry, for the homeowner set of Los Angeles and San Francisco to consistently sue to stop new housing developments, that’s not a good outcome for the working class at all. And you don’t need to just see that I’m right by like listening to the sentence and saying it feels right. You look at the census demographics, and you look at the census migration numbers. People are leaving, the working class is leaving California and New York and Illinois and Minnesota, they’re leaving blue states.

Nayeema Raza
People are voting with their feet.

Derek Thompson
They’re voting, that’s a very expensive way to vote. And so we are trying to resolve issues that we absolutely see as being core to not only working class prosperity, but also the Democratic Party’s ability to hold onto the working class, which it’s really struggling to do right now. So maybe they won’t read it at the same level that say, you know, someone at the board of supervisors in San Francisco is likely to read it, but it is meant for them in a way deeper than like just reading the book itself. The ideas really are meant for them.

Nayeema Raza
Do you ever kind of wonder about, and we live in a world of so many different content forms, et cetera, about how do you reach people you’re not reaching? Or do you feel like this is the best venue for you to do your thing?

Derek Thompson
It’s a great question. I do think about this a lot. Um, you know, I wonder sometimes whether I need to be more on TikTok, which I hate, or more on Instagram, which I hate.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
Or more on YouTube, which I’m just not, because that’s where young people in particular are getting their news from.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
And so if I really want to be read by or be influential among that demographic, then shouldn’t I meet that demographic where they live and breathe? Um, I don’t do the best job of that. And maybe it’s my own fault. Or maybe it’s just me being realistic that, you know, a person can only, a person’s only good at so many things, and I think I’m a good writer. I don’t think I’m a very good straight to camera TikTok performer, and so I don’t do that.

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
But to your point, there is a, there’s a vision of my job that you could articulate in the next 30 seconds that totally-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
… explodes and blows up my sense of my, of my, of my professional writer identity.

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
Because you’re like, “Derek, if you’re trying to be this like, public intellectual guy, don’t write essays. Make TikToks. That’s where the people are.”

Nayeema Raza
Yeah, make TikToks. By the way-

Derek Thompson
I’m open to it.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah. Derek, I think you have the hair for it. You have this YouTuber hair.

Derek Thompson
(laughs) Yeah, right.

Nayeema Raza
It’s like, it’s like up and to the right. We have people listening and can’t see it, it’s up to the right. But, you know, I’ve just recently done that. I, I went and left kind of my New York Magazine, Vox, Semafor life behind, and I’m doing this independent show called Smart Girl, Dumb Questions, which is, I think about being accessible, but also being a place where I can ask the questions I have all the time, or I don’t need to know everything. Um, this is a program that in, in, in some way embraces abundance in its most apolitical sense. You know, Open to Debate is about abundant dialogue, abundant debate, the idea that you don’t have to kind of put your head down in the sand and only listen to people who agree with you. Can you talk about scarcity as it relates to mindset or our, our kind of share of voice or share of, you know, mental space for other opinions these days?

Derek Thompson
Sure. Um, so my first book was called Hit Makers, and it was about the science of why people like what they like. And one of the themes of that book was that the most fundamental bias in all of human nature is a bias toward the familiar, that the bias towards familiarity must be so deeply inscribed into our DNA. So you should trust what you know. But I do think that this familiarity bias and this loss aversion that comes from familiarity bias does lead many people to having a kind of scarcity mindset. And look, for many centuries, a scarcity mindset made a lot of sense. Like-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
Scarcity mindset, I think must be a very, very ancient piece of, of our, our mental circuitry. But-

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
… the world changed in the 1700s. Like technology is a positive sum phenomenon. And I think a part of being a progressive optimist is seeing the ways that science and technology make positive sum outcomes real and possible. Like for example, if we hadn’t in invented solar power in the 1950s, if we hadn’t invented wind power in the 1880s, well then we would be totally stuck with climate change. It would be just burn more fuel or accept a worse life. But I think we have an option to have to expect a better life with clean energy technology. It’s technology itself that makes positive sum outcomes possible.

Nayeema Raza
Yeah. So to draw that, uh, analogy forward or metaphor forward into the world of ideas, it’s like engaging with an idea that may feel disconnected from yours could in fact strengthen your own idea, is something that you’re saying, I think. Am I hearing you right?

Derek Thompson
In a way, yeah. In a way, what you, it’s, it’s sort of like you think about ideas the way that some people think about trade, is that if I want a bottle of French wine and they wanna sell me a bottle of French wine, then I lose a hundred dollars and they lose their wine. But there’s actually no loss, because I wanted the wine more than my own $100, and they wanted the $100 more than their wine. And so the exchange was actually wildly positive sum. It was a good trade. And what you’re saying is that there’s lots of conversations too that can be good trades, that the exchange of ideas-

Nayeema Raza
Right.

Derek Thompson
… can lead to something that is bigger and better than the ecosystem that had pre-existed it.

Nayeema Raza
A win-win. Um, part of, on the same topic of debate, part of the liberal self-critique in this book is around this idea of Democrats and consensus building. And I’ve heard Ezra talk about this separately as well. How do you weigh the trade-offs between consensus, healthy debate, and clarity in a party or society?

Derek Thompson
Well, first you acknowledge the truth, which is that trade-offs exist and they’ll always exist. You know, I talked earlier about kind of a wonky policy in the bipartisan infrastructure law of building out rural broadband. So among the 14 steps that these states had to do in order to qualify for rural broadband spending were, one, the FCC had to draw a map of where American populations were being underserved by their rural, by their broadband internet, um, uh, providers. Then there was a challenge period where the states could say, “Uh, uh, uh, you got the map wrong,” then the states could apply for funding. And then the commerce department could say, “Oh no, you didn’t fulfill the diversity matrices over here, and your workforce development program isn’t up to snuff, and you also aren’t reaching out to enough, uh, female employees. And also there’s a possibility the way you’re gonna price it isn’t fair to the ultimate buyers.”

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
If you go through all those checkpoints-

Nayeema Raza
Yeah, all the red tape.

Derek Thompson
I would actually defy you, I would actually defy you to point out what was obviously wrong. Like, all those values are right. We should want a good map. We should wanna allow states to challenge it. We should care about diversity. We should want to elevate women in industries that are dominated by men. We should care about these things. But there comes a point where the trade off no longer makes sense, where you care about so many different things and you’re layering them all on top of each other that in fact, you never accomplish the very thing you set out to do, which was build some damn internet for people.

This is a concept that Ezra calls, calls everything bagel liberalism. This idea that if you pile everything, an everything bagel is delicious. It’s my favorite bagel and it’s his, but if you pile literally everything onto an everything bagel, it creates a black hole. And what’s happened, I think, in a lot of liberal spaces is that this instinct to show care for every different possible way you can get a program wrong or not listen to a group that, that, that demands to be listened to, you end up accomplishing close to nothing. And this reputation that liberals accomplish close to nothing when they have power is really kryptonite for the movement.

Nayeema Raza
My last question before we bring in some other voices, what did collaborating with Ezra bring to the table? What did you two disagree on, debate over while writing?

Derek Thompson
That’s a great question. I would say our conversations never felt so much like staunch disagreements as uncertainty is sort of like becoming certainties. So like, I initially, for example, thought that we might want a chapter that was, or not even a chapter, like a section that took on the kind of sociological depression that American voters feel right now. Like according to NBC surveys, Americans have never felt more depressed by the state of the country. And trust in institutions and establishments is at an all time low, practically no matter what survey or surveyor you’re, you’re, you’re looking at. And I thought about like, you know, do we, do we wanna forward this and say we’re trying to redefine liberalism for an age of anti-institutionalism?

And we talked about it and he looked at some of my work and I looked at some of his notes and I thought, no, actually it’s a, this is a distraction from the chapters that we have, which are so focused on material outcomes, housing, energy, science, tech. And so it wasn’t so much a disagreement as one person writes a thing, the other person reads a thing, they say, “Hey, maybe it fits in chapter three,” but maybe it doesn’t fit at all, and then maybe it doesn’t fit anywhere. So I would say there weren’t honestly any like, you know, knock and drag out fights, um, by the end of this writing process. There really was a, a mind meld in terms of what we wanted to say and, and also really how we wanted to say it.

Nayeema Raza
That’s so interesting, starting with two different essays. I guess it’s not like a marriage then, Derek, in, in every sense, huh? If you’re not having real focal disagreements (laughs).

Derek Thompson
No. More like, yeah. Unfortunately, I can’t think of the interpersonal metaphor here, but it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s more like, you know, two tributaries joining into a river, right? Like there’s-

Nayeema Raza
It does, Yeah (laughs). Two tributaries going into a river. That’s, that’s, that’s a good analogy. Do you, uh, do you think it would’ve been a different book if you disagreed more? I mean, would, do you feel like disagreement is good for your process?

Derek Thompson
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we, I think disagreement is great. And, and Ezra and I, um, you know, unfortunately for the purposes of answering this question an interesting way, um, don’t really have deeply strong disagreements. We of course have, we have different instincts, right?

Nayeema Raza
Yeah.

Derek Thompson
Here’s, here’s a disagreement. Um, this book was delayed. Ezra and I were waylaid on this book. I had a kid, he went back to work and was doing a bunch of stuff for Israel-Palestine, plus we’re just busy people with podcasts and columns. And so, um, our poor editor had to deal with the fact that this book was late, and there was a debate about whether we should rush to get it out in 2024 before the DNC or whether we should delay it until 2025. And I thought that we should rush to get it out in 2024.

Nayeema Raza
Ah.

Derek Thompson
‘Cause I thought this book was going to be an important agenda shaper for the Democratic National Convention. And I was worried that if Donald Trump won, he would bring the conversation to some completely insane place about who knows what, and this book wouldn’t find its moment. And Ezra said, you know, “I think maybe this book might be just as appropriate in a world where Donald Trump has won and Democrats are trying to redefine themselves.” And I would say objectively that I was wrong and he was right. So, um, maybe, maybe, maybe that’s, that’s a place where, um, where we disagreed. But again, the disagreement wasn’t exactly a, it wasn’t substantive, um, so much as sort of projecting.

Nayeema Raza
Um, that, that’s a, that is a great and gracious answer. Thank you so much, Derek. We’re, we’re now going to bring in some other voices to ask questions of our guest, people who have been listening to this conversation with Derek, uh, and, and have questions for him. First up, we have David Dayen. He’s the executive editor of The American Prospect and the author of Monopolized, Life in The Age of Corporate Power. Um, David, we’re intrigued to hear what question you were bringing in.

David Dayen
In 2006, over 2 million units of housing were built. And then right after that, we entered the biggest depression in modern home-building history. Single-family homes didn’t rebound in construction for more than a decade, even multifamily, which wasn’t really caught up in this, didn’t rebound for five years. I don’t think you believe zoning rules were non-existent until 2006 and then there was some swarm after that. What happened was we had a housing bubble collapse. It was brought on by Deregulating Housing Finance, and it was really spurred by an abundance agenda. It was known as, as George W. Bush’s ownership society. So how does that factor into your analysis? What lessons should we draw from what happened in the recent past when abundance was prioritized over regulatory slowness or, or regulatory safeguards, even ones that on the surface had little to do with building and the results were disastrous?

Derek Thompson
I think there’s a part of this question that’s incredibly fair and a part of this question that’s not fair. The part of the question that’s incredibly fair is that housing is a market, and markets are more complicated than the set of rules that allow a certain piece of housing to be built. Housing is about labor, housing is about financing, right? Housing is about many things that aren’t just the rules that exist at the local level. And so, if you’re trying to explain why we’re, why were a lot of houses being built in 2006 and very few houses being built in this depression era, as David said, between 2007, ’08, and 20, and 2015, although I think, you know, the, the recession in home construction I think has basically continued to this day, it’s true. You, you, you cannot blame zoning for that. You have to blame macroeconomic conditions.

Uh, the construction companies were absolutely gutted and they haven’t been able to build back What was lost. What I think is unfair is that we’re not calling for an abundance of lax lending standards to home buyers who can’t put down a single percentage point of a down payment on a house, right? That idea as closely as you x-ray this book does not exist in the book. We’re calling, however, for an abundance of some very specific things, of housing in America’s most productive places, in particular, of clean energy, of scientific discovery, and of specific kinds of technological development that we essentially think are public goods. And then because we think that all of this is, has a huge, is, is either already a government job or could use more government work, we believe that the bow that has to be tied around this is a new philosophy of effective governance that we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes.

So I, I, I think the question is in incredibly intelligent, in pointing out the fact that if, if what want to do as a smart consumer of housing news is understand why did we build so many more houses in 2006 than in 2010, you cannot blame zoning for that. You cannot blame a sudden explosion of zoning between 2006, 2010. The only thing that explains that crash is the Great Recession and the aftermath itself. I, I would not characterize the trigger of the Great Recession as an abundance agenda as we would define it. I would, I would characterize it as a particular attitude toward deregulating the finance industry and making it easier for individuals to buy homes they couldn’t afford, while at the same time, deregulating the ability, deregulating the banks themselves, allowing them to package those subprime mortgages in a way that ended up being catastrophic for them.

David Dayen
The ends, the ends were the same. I mean, the means might have been different, but the ends were absolutely the same. We want more people in more homes. We want the ability for more people to access housing. That was the ownership society, and the means in which they went about it was somewhat different. But I’m curious whether you think that, okay, if we lay out an ends of an agenda, what if, what if those means are distorted in different ways that are really troublesome?

Derek Thompson
That’s, look, that, that’s absolutely possible, right? Could we see deregulation in various markets leading to outcomes that are undesirable? Yes. But the equilibrium right now is what’s so terribly undesirable. The equilibrium right now is a world where housing is so unaffordable in the richest and most productive cities that the working class is leaving them in drone, in droves. So I, I absolutely recognize that there are more forces in the housing industry than just the set of zoning and historical preservation and permitting and environmental review processes that we focus on in chapter one of the book.

I don’t, however, think it’s entirely fair to suggest that our abundance agenda is in keeping with a homeownership society that didn’t operate along any of the levers that we’re operating on. There was nothing in Bush, in the Bush first and second term about zoning reform and per- and permitting reform and environmental review reform. That wasn’t a part of the ownership society, or a central part of it. So I don’t think that we should be afraid, afraid of allowing markets to flourish in many cities and states just because we had a great recession caused by an entirely separate set of factors 16, or what? 19 years ago.

Nayeema Raza
Alright. Thank you so much, Derek. Thank you, David. Appreciate you joining us. Um, next up we have Jordan Weissman, a reporter who covers federal agencies and consumer affairs for, yeah, for Yahoo Finance. And, and I understand as someone that, um, you know, you know, well, Derek. Hi, Jordan. How are you?

Jordan Weissman
Hey, good. Thanks for having me on. Uh, Derek, we’re gonna talk about more of your, uh, bad reviews. Um-

Derek Thompson
(laughs)

Nayeema Raza
Oh, God. Stop scooping me, Jordan.

Jordan Weissman
Yeah, so… Yeah. So, you know, some of your critics, and I don’t think totally gracely, have, you know, said, “Yes, zoning reform is important. Yes, we need to fix permitting so that we can hook more green energy to the grid.” However, you know, regulations aren’t the only problem that are keeping us from having these nice things. Corporations play a role too. Uh, there are a, you know, there are utility, there are utility companies out there that do not want to build out more green energy because of the financial incentives at play. One of the reasons we don’t have enough medical services is because of possible consolidations. And that the way you deal with these things is by having something like an aggressive antitrust agenda.

But really, what you need to do is take on corporations and be willing to take on corporate power, and they don’t see that necessarily in the book. They don’t see a lot of discussion of those things. And I’m curious, um, you know, how does something like antitrust or taking on, you know, corporate influence play into an abundance agenda? Is that part of it? Is it something that you can graft on? Is it something you haven’t necessarily thought about? It’s sort of adjunct to it? What’s, what’s your thought?

Derek Thompson
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts in antitrust. Um, you know, I think it’s, it’s, if you think about the economy of California as really having these two tent poles of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, you know, I think a fair history of antitrust in America suggests that it was actually antitrust remedies that blew open both of those industries. It was an antitrust remedy on the Edison Trust that move the Hollywood business, or that moved the movie business from New Jersey to Hollywood in the early 20th century. It was another, uh, consent decree, another antitrust remedy to a certain extent, um, that allowed or forced AT&T to license its patents, so that when they invented the transistor, they had to license it. And then later, another antitrust remedy really blew open the possibility of innovating in the software space far beyond what AT&T itself was going to do.

So I think there’s a huge role, if you look historically, at antitrust in improving consumer choice, improving growth, improving any kind of material progress. I do not have the attitude that antitrust is the most central component of our vision of abundance. I am less afraid of bigness when it comes to companies. I prefer to like, have ex- extremely explicit outcomes that I’m going for, and then think about using the right tools to achieve those outcomes. So you mentioned hospitals, for example. I think it’s very clear that if you look at the consolidation in hospitals and in particular within dialysis and dialysis companies in the South, there’s really, really good data coming out of Duke University suggesting that consolidation in dialysis drives up prices and lowers results for patients. And that’s a place where I would absolutely want to see an active antitrust, um, policy, an active antitrust, um, uh, agenda. Um, but I don’t see the project of associating bigness with badness across the economy as being central to the abundance agenda.

Nayeema Raza
Alright, thank you so much, Derek, for that. Thank you, Jordan. And finally, we’re joined by Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass at Conservative Think Tank that is working on charting the course for conservative economic policy. Abigail, what’s your question?

Abigail Ball
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Something I thought was really interesting was the lack of discussion of organized labor in the book and also in the broader discussion, um, of it kind of, you know, in, in all these reviews and conversations that I’ve seen and in the book, I, I noticed only I think two mentions. There’s one in the discussion of the I-95 rebuild that, noting that it was done with union labor, which it seemed was a positive thing, but there wasn’t sort of a broader discussion there. And then a note about the prevailing wage laws adding to, um, the cost of labor projects. And so coming from the right, I’m very used to talking about these conversations with like, you know, uh, organized labor adds to the cost of, of building things like the Second Avenue, Avenue subway, big dig, things like that. So I’m actually really curious, kind of both on, at a substantive level, kind of how does organized labor factor into your vision and agenda? And then more broadly, as a coalitional question, how do you see organized labor as part of the Democratic coalition moving forward?

Derek Thompson
Yeah, this is a fantastic question. So I belong to a union. Ezra belongs to a union. So this is a fully unionized book (laughs), from an author standpoint. Um, I think unions play an incredibly important role in American life and have for 150 years. Um, I think that unions are a tool of power. They’re a necessary tool of power to push back against employer abuses, but there’s no guarantee that any particular tool of power will only be used for good. Tools of power can be used for all sorts of purposes. And you mentioned a couple examples I think are really compelling, right? The Second Avenue subway is famously built with unionized MTA labor. There are infamous labor laws in New York that, for example, I believe it’s called the Sandhogs Union, require that a certain number of employees be around a digging machine in far excess of the number of people that are required to actually work the digging machine, which essentially means you’re turning a construction project into a jobs program, even though those jobs are not necessary.

Well, that can only do one thing to the outcome of the project. It can only drive costs up. It can’t make the project more efficient at all. And so what ends up happening is that the east side of the New York subway famously has the most expensive mile of subway on the planet, $2 billion per mile extended. Here’s a case where if the outcome that you want, and so much of this book, again, is about shifting people’s attitudes about politics being process-oriented versus politics being outcomes-oriented. If the outcome that you want is for American cities to be able to build infrastructure efficiently, then, well, in this case, it turns out that the laws on the books for public unions in New York City are getting in the way of the efficient construction of infrastructure for the entire city.

And this is another place where you could argue that those laws amount to a kind of special interest that are reserving for the, for a few benefits that should be reserved for the many, which is to say, an efficient construction of a subway project that lots of people are going to ride year after year. So I don’t come into this book or this attitude of abundance as being exclusively and universally pro or anti-union. I am as a general matter pro-union, but in recognizing, again, unions as being tools of power rather than being tools of perfection, there are just going to be sometimes that public sector unions are not working toward our vision of abundance.

Nayeema Raza
Thank you so much for the question, Abigail. Thank you, Derek. That’s it for our guest visitors. But I do have a last question for you, Derek, before I let you go. Uh, and, and on toward your TikTok career, which will no doubt spin out of this conversation.

Derek Thompson
(laughs)

Nayeema Raza
Um, it’s, you know, the book is a really rational exercise, and I think about the, um, the excellent guest who just joined us today to ask you questions. It strikes me that there will be a lot of critique of this book and the ideas in it from the right, from, but also from the left, from progressives, you know, because some of these will be clawing back regulations that will take back things like, you know, not the whole, not roll it all the way back, but there will be rollbacks on certain environmental procedures, certain DEI procedures, certain, um, you know, protections for unions. We’re talking about this, you know, observation of, of workers, et cetera. Do you worry ever that your book is gonna piss off conservatives, progressives, and leave you kind of as a moderate middle?

Derek Thompson
Um, I worry about it on a sort of personal disposition level because-

Nayeema Raza
Mm-hmm.

Derek Thompson
… um, I find criticism difficult to deal with emotionally (laughs). Um-

Nayeema Raza
Oh, no.

Derek Thompson
But at a, no, no, no, no. This is not a, this is not a pity me situation. The furthest thing. I mean, like-

Nayeema Raza
No, I know, but I feel bad now. I was reading you your bad reviews, but tell me. Tell me.

Derek Thompson
No, no, no, no. No.

Nayeema Raza
Yes. On a personal level. Yeah.

Derek Thompson
Trust me, trust me, I’ve already memorized all those bad reviews.

Nayeema Raza
(laughs)

Derek Thompson
You, you, you have not said a single word that has not been inscribed into a neuron. Um, the only point of writing a book like this is to draw new lines in politics and ask people to orient themselves around those new axes. That’s a messy business. You can’t expect to do that and make everybody happy. And certainly if you wanna make everybody happy, the last thing you should possibly do is write a politics book. Because with with negative polarization in this country, there is not, there’s not a single idea that makes everybody happy.

So, um, you know, personally, um, I, I think I could improve my relationship to criticism, but as a general matter, um, I, I went into this book-writing process with eyes wide open. Yes, it’s gonna make people mad. Yeah, there’s gonna be some really intelligent criticisms of this book, um, from people that I disagree with, from people that I agree with. You know, I’m going to learn from people the many ways that this book is wrong in fact. I mean, that’s just, that’s just the job of writing, and I can’t get everything right. Um, nothing’s written in stone. Um, not even a book.

Nayeema Raza
All right. Thank you so much, Derek, for joining me today and for writing this book, and, and really for opening yourself up to critique too, which is part of the mission here at Open to Debate, to engage in dialogue and self-critique and rethinking. So thank you for doing that.

Derek Thompson
Thank you so much for having me.

Nayeema Raza
Again, the book is Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. I’m so glad we could have the conversation today, and that David, Jordan, and Abigail could join us also. And thank you to you, our audience for tuning in to this episode of Open to Debate. As a nonprofit working to combat extreme polarization through civil debate, our work is made possible by listeners like you, the Rosenkranz Foundation and supporters of Open to Debate. Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Our CEO is Clea Connor. And Leah Matthau is our Chief Content Officer. Elizabeth Kitzenberg is our Chief Advancement Officer. Andrew Lipson is our head of production. Michelle Debreceni is our director of marketing. This episode was produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval, editorial and research by Gabriela Mayer, Max Fulton provided production support. And the Open to Debate team also includes Annalisa Cochrane, Gabrielle Iannucelli, Rachel Kemp, Erik Gross, Linda Lee, Mary Ragus, Tom Bunting, and Vlad Vertonin. Damon Whitmore mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Clement, and I’m your host, Nayeema Raza. We’ll see you next time on Open to Debate.