Why has America’s 20th century vision of innovation and opportunity transformed into a stagnant and stunted dystopian reality? Our guest this week claims that “the crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades” and it’s all because we haven’t been following building enough. Ezra Klein is host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, a columnist for New York Times Opinion and the author of “Abundance,” which he co-wrote with Derek Thompson. He joins WITHpod to discuss how liberals have failed on progress, how they can shift gears in MAGA America, and how we might reimagine abundance for everyone.
And an exciting announcement: “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast” is now on YouTube! Watch at msnbc.com/withpod.
Plus, we’re nominated for a Webby Award! Please vote for us and your other favorite MSNBC podcasts by April 17th:
- Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes in the Podcasts — Interview/Talk Show category
- Into America: Uncounted Millions in the Podcasts — News & Politics category
- Prosecuting Donald Trump in the Podcasts — Crime & Justice category
Voting closes April 17th.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey, “Why Is This Happening?” listeners, before we get into today’s episode, we’ve got some very exciting news, something we’ve been working on for a while. We are thrilled to share. Starting today, we’re launching full episodes of WITHpod on YouTube, meaning you can watch the full video of this episode by going to msnbc.com/withpod later today. You can watch it on any device you have YouTube. You could throw it up on your big flat screen TV if that’s the way you want to do it.
Apparently this is what people are doing now with podcasts. It’s msnbc.com/withpod. Be sure to let us know what you think by using the hashtag WITHpod or emailing us at withpodmail.com. Enjoy.
Ezra Klein: If you believe people would like the fruits of liberal governance, then you have to make liberal governance possible. If you think they won’t, well then, yeah, it makes sense to be completely defensive about this. But I am more worried about the inability of the people who believe what I believe to change the world in a way that makes people want that vision executed than I am about the others.
I think that is what marginalizes the power of the other side, that you are successful. And I think we’ve a little bit, we give lip service to that vision of politics. But if you look at how Democrats govern in states and nationally, they don’t actually believe it.
(Music)
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I spend basically most waking moments these days thinking about how to put the fire out that threatens to consume American democracy. But when I’m not doing that, occasionally Kate and I have been talking about this a lot, like at night when we’re both home trying to sort of sort through what’s happening.
I’m finding myself trying to think about like, well, the house is already so burned that even if we put the fire out, we’re going to have to rebuild it basically. Like the amount of damage that’s been done means that the sort of constitutional order, the way things are, the way things were, status quo, anti, there’s not going back to that. There’s something on the other side of this if we survive it.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about like, well, what do I want that to look like? What if you think about this moment of break, if we can survive it, if we can get through, if we can preserve American democracy on the other side as an opportunity to build something new? And I that is a more fun, both bewildering exercise and more enjoyable exercise than the constant thrum of emergency, even though the constant thrum of emergency is really important, because we can only get to the rebuilding phase if we don’t let them destroy this completely and then just like build their own, you know, dictatorial prison over what used to be the house.
And I was thinking about that as I was reading this great new book that you probably have heard of because it has been very essential to discourse. It’s called “Abundance.” It’s by my very good friend Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and they’ve been on book tour and talking about it a lot.
But what it is, the book is way more than I thought it would be and thought it would be great. But it is in some ways this kind of invitation to think generatively about what kind of world we want to build. And that’s an exercise we don’t think about a lot, and particularly in the defense of Crouch right now. But it seems to me more important than ever to think about it because hopefully we’re going to get to that point and then we’re going to have to be ready to do something else.
And so, it’s really great to be able to welcome the co-author of “Abundance,” Ezra Klein, to the podcast.
(Music)
Ezra Klein: I’m so glad to be here. An object of the discourse.
Chris Hayes: You are really an object of the discourse.
Ezra Klein: Why on the other side of the camera.
Chris Hayes: I spent a little time being the object of the discourse when Sirens Call came out. And I’ve been watching you and thinking about it is a strange experience. Well, let’s do something Meta to start. Let’s talk about book tour.
What’s strange about it is that what I found strange, particularly in the beginning part, is you write the book so that the book exists. Because what you do is you talk and write columns. You have a podcast, the Ezra Klein Show on New York Times. I do this podcast and TV show. But a book is its own thing. It’s a text. And when you’re doing the first part of the book tour, you’re just distilling it into sound bites. And there’s something a little frustrating because you’re like, you want people to read it because it took a lot of work to write.
Ezra Klein: Derek sometimes says that the product of the book is the conversation. That’s really what you’re creating. I’ll say I’m having a very different experience on this one than I had on my first book, “Why We’re Polarized.” Why we’re polarized, what I felt like happened is I wrote a book, I promoted the book a bit, and then the book went off and had its own life. Like I sent it to college and it had its own experiences.
And every once in a while I would check in and be like, how you doing? What are you learning? And this book, it has detonated into the discourse. People had very strong opinions of it before reading it.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: Which I want to say I’m not complaining about. I think that is part of how this goes, when it goes well.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Ezra Klein: And then there is this argument that it kind of helped create or helped concretize that then I am part of or a symbol in, or trying to help shape or trying to decide how to participate in. And that’s been very different. It’s been like the feeling when I used to surf a little bit and bodyboard a bit when I was younger, like the feeling when a wave catches you.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: And now you’re both, like, trying not to fall off.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ezra Klein: But you are taken by a power beyond your own.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ezra Klein: Whereas, like, the first book, I sort of like, I just like, watched the wave go.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yes. And there’s something enjoyable about that. There’s something enjoyable about that, right? I mean, we all want our ideas to get a hearing, and 99 times out of 100, they don’t get a ton of hearing, or they do. I mean, the way news cycle works is it moves so quickly that it’s just so rare that anything feels like it sticks.
Ezra Klein: I don’t know what I thought would happen, but for all the reasons you said in the introduction, in a moment of as almost unfathomable peril as this one, when the news is as overwhelmed as it is, my expectations for how much the idea of abundance could break through were smaller. And so, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on why has it broken through the way it has? Why has it set out this argument?
And one, I think there are a couple of reasons, but one of the big ones, maybe the biggest, is, I think, for Democrats or the non-Trump coalition or whatever you want to call it, I think the stakes, which have always been high, now have really clarified that if you don’t make liberal democracy work, you really might lose liberal democracy.
And I think this is a difference between Trump’s first term and his second, that in his first term, his impulses were dangerous, but his capacity to carry them out was clearly impeded, weak. He was distractible. He was surrounded by people who did not want him to destroy the foundations of American government. And so, until maybe January 20th for all that he did many things I find terrible in the first term. And he mismanaged the pandemic terribly. And all the things we know, he was quite overmatched by the system.
And in the second term he isn’t.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: In the second term, he is overmatching the system. And so, the threat that many of us felt he posed but didn’t quite come into view until the very end of the first term is now very real. And the sense that if you can’t make this government deliver, running it in, and I don’t mean here, liberal in the American tradition, but in the broader tradition as a liberal democracy, you might lose it to the strong men who come in and promise that they’re rich, they’re powerful, they’re connected, they’re not going to listen to anybody and they’re the ones who can make it deliver.
Chris Hayes: And that they can get things done. And this is a theme that runs throughout “Abundance” that has been really top of mind for me. And I think it’s a good place to start, which is process fetishism, procedural fetishism, liberalism as currently constituted, being very obsessed with process and Trump being the opposite of that. I mean, he’s the anti-process figure. Talk a little bit about the relationship that current version of liberalism has to process and what that means.
Ezra Klein: I’ve been trying to think about because it comes up a lot, the right way to describe this and the right way to describe what I hear from the people who are inside government trying to carry all this out. And I think it is fair to say, I believe it to be true at this point, that the output of the system is the process, not the outcome. The system is designed to follow the process, not achieve the objective. And that is why so often in different bills, the objective is ultimately not achieved.
I spend time in the book on California High-Speed Rail. We could talk about the dreams of the Second Avenue Subway or the Big Dig. We could talk about rural broadband under Joe Biden or the electric vehicle charging network. It is not that it doesn’t achieve anything.
Sometimes it achieves it slowly and over budget. And sometimes, particularly when it’s just moving money around, it actually is able to achieve it. When we expand the child tax credit, we actually do send people checks. But when the project is building real things in the real world, the way the system is now set up inside the system, the dangerous thing is not to fail to achieve your objective.
The dangerous thing is that you fail to follow the process. And an Inspector General or someone else is going to haul you in front of them or release a finding or you’ll be pulled in front of Congress and yet yelled at, and you can’t say, no, no, I was just following the rules. And then, yes, in some sick way, it’s like that system summoned its opposite.
And not just Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are happy to burn the entire process down, who are functionally lawless and are now creating a kind of government in which no rules need to be followed and the infractions have overwhelmed the system that polices them. Right. In a system where everybody is following the rules, to not follow the rules is quite dangerous because you might get caught, you might get yelled at.
In a system where nobody is following the rules, where the inspector generals have been fired, where the courts are overloaded, where nobody can enforce how many infractions are happening, then it becomes not dangerous really at all to be one of the people following the rules. I mean, it’s a difference between breaking into a shop, on the street on a calm day and participating in a riot.
Chris Hayes: Right. More of our conversation after this quick break.
(Break)
Chris Hayes: So there’s two ways that I’m processing this exact thing, and I think this is kind of the core right now, because in some ways, to take your first point, right, process as fairness as opposed to outcomes is the core of the rule of law, right?
What makes a fair trial isn’t whether the person is found guilty or found innocent. What makes a fair trial is the process under which that enterprise is conducted. Right? So there is something deep in a kind of legalistic sense of process as fairness independent of outcomes. But there’s also something perverse about it when you don’t, like, actually build the charging stations or you don’t build the subway.
Ezra Klein: Can we hold on the first one? Because that really was interesting for me because I think you’re right. Right. And this is a big point of Bagley’s paper, that within liberal legalism, and within legalism broadly, the way government legitimacy is achieved through following process.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Ezra Klein: But I want to hold on what you said, because imagine you did have a court system, and in many cases we have had this court system where it does follow the process. But then imagine it turned out that 50 percent of the people we could later find studies were done, information came to light, whatever, that they were wrongly convicted or wrongly exonerated. So at some point you have this reality.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: That on the one hand, the system is following the process. Right. The thing we said made it legitimate in any individual case because we know, tragically, the courts will sometimes get things wrong. The question of whether trial is fair is actually different than the question of whether the trial found the right outcome, the true outcome.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: But if you began to find that the error rate was huge, that it was missing the right outcome, the fair outcome, 40, 50, 60 percent of the time, well, then I think you would have to say, oh, no, we’ve made a mistake.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: That this process should not be deemed legitimating. This process is failing. And I think this is a very helpful analogy because it’s really the argument we’re making in the book. The argument we’re making in the book is the process has stopped achieving the outcomes we want.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: In fact, it is routinely impeding the outcomes of process was ultimately supposed to be a neutral arbiter of in the environmental arena, being able to lay down infrastructure that is good for the environment. In the housing arena, being able to make housing affordable in big cities.
I just spoke to somebody who is centrally, quite importantly, responsible for the Biden Rural Broadband Initiative, which has been a kind of example I’ve been using on the tour, which Elon Musk tweeted out the criticisms I was making of it when I talked to Jon Stewart and he was telling me that he would estimate that he spent 40 to 50 percent of his time doing internal government process.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: It wasn’t really about solving the very difficult problems of rural broadband. It was about just responding to the system’s demand for constant response, procedure, checking in meetings, interagency, that 40 to 50 percent of his time. Right. So at some point you have to say, okay, that is not the process succeeding.
Chris Hayes: No. And you have a line in the book, and I’m not going to pull up to quote it exactly, but basically you say something that really struck with me, which is the people closest to this are often the people who complain about it the most and see it most clearly. Like, we had Jeremy Konyndyk, who, you know, was at USAID, you know, very recently under Biden, and he’s like, look, you want to hear. You want to hear about the flaws, bureaucracy and problems and red tape of USAID, buddy, like, weak. I could do that all day. Okay.
One of the points he made, interestingly was, like, a lot of that came from congressional micromanagement, ironically enough. So, you know, added layers of process and accountability. But it really is the case. You talk to people in the VA, right? People in the VA who spend their lives trying to get veterans’ health care. And the VA is actually a quite a functional bureaucracy, I think as bureaucracies go, in many ways, they’ll tell you all the things that are, you know, are terrible about it or frustrating or all the red tape they have to do.
But the sort of twin, the twin instincts I have watching this happen with Trump and DOGE is A, a little bit of jealousy, which is like, God, it would be nice to have some fewer lawyers in the Obama administration. God bless the lawyers in the Obama administration, including my wife, who would have asked forgiveness instead of permission on stuff and just moved more quickly and not been so process possessed. So that’s one instinct I have. Right.
The other, though, is, oh, wow, all this stuff that feels like red tape and process is pretty GD important because this is what it looks like when you get rid of it. And I’m wondering, like, how you’re calibrating that exact sort of scale of reaction.
Ezra Klein: I love that you admitted both of those because I think it’s something that I’m hearing privately from a lot of Democrats, but they don’t want to say publicly that there is a kind of envy. You know, what if we could have just.
Chris Hayes: 100 percent.
Ezra Klein: And there will be something that needs to be learned here. I do think the really important word there, though, is calibration. I don’t think it ever gets to be as easy as government is good or government is bad or regulation is good or regulation is bad or process is good or process is bad.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: You have to be outcome focused. And in any individual case, you have to be smart about that. The problem is we’ve developed in liberal governance a culture that has become, as I said, process and not outcome focused. The other thing that you said, I think is really important. And I have heard from so many liberal, very liberal civil servants, right? The people we have charged with a difficult job —
Chris Hayes: Of doing the stuff.
Ezra Klein: — of achieving —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — the world that we have voted for.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ezra Klein: And what they say to me again and again is, I wish I could just act. And if I did something wrong and it turns out the way I did it wrong was not serving the people, that then you can hold me accountable, you can fire me, you can prosecute me if I broke the law. But this prudential —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Ezra Klein: — process that’s interesting, this extraordinary, as somebody put it, edifice of process to make sure nothing goes wrong in the first place. And on the back end, to make sure I’m endlessly audited and overseen and producing reports on how I’m spending every dollar.
I talked to a woman named Heidi Marston, who was the head of the sort of agency that works on homelessness in Los Angeles. And something she said to me. She had resigned and written a letter about basically the impossibility of the job. She said, look, I had about a billion dollars, and if you had let me spend it, I could have done a lot of good.
But in reality, that billion dollars had endless little earmarks in it. It had been micromanaged by various Congresses that had passed into tax credits, be at the federal level or the state level. It had audits, and then they work with nonprofits, and the nonprofits had to be audited. And it was all just spiraling. And so much of it was understandable if you pulled any one of them out.
Chris Hayes: This is the thing. Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Once in a while, you can pull one out and it looks stupid. You know, I can give you an example of demanding that the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation comes up with a workforce development plan to increase the percentage of women in the local construction force.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Even that’s a good idea. It’s probably not.
Chris Hayes: Why are we making them doing it? Yeah. Right.
Ezra Klein: Of the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. But a lot of them are fine. And you might say, oh, yeah, we want these audits. We don’t want taxpayer money spent badly and so on and so forth. But collectively, it is Derek Thompson, my colleague, has this good line on this in the scientific area. He says it is like we have given the entire bureaucracy chronic fatigue syndrome.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Right. We have taken 40 to 50 percent of their energy and wiped out its productive function.
Chris Hayes: And so part of this, I want to stay on this because I think about there’s a sort of interesting personality dispositional question, and then there’s these sort of systems questions of risk. This incident I think about a lot when I think about regulation, which was. I was working out in Prospect Park once with a TRX, which you like throw over a tree. And I was just trying to get reps in. And it was a beautiful spring day.
Ezra Klein: All right. My visual is increasingly vivid. I like this.
Chris Hayes: It was a very sturdy tree. I was not going to pull this tree down, and I wasn’t going to pull the branches down. I know, like, I could. And a Parks employee drove up in a car and was like, you can’t do that. That’s not allowed. And I had this feeling. My general feeling, like, at a very deep personal level is like, I hate rules. I hate meetings. I don’t love authority. I don’t like being told what to do. I do not have a very bureaucratic personality. I rather ask forgiveness than permission. That’s my general, like, drive dispositionally.
And I was like, annoyed. I was like, what the hell? And then I thought, you know, how many trees are there in the New York City park system? Hundreds of thousands. If you just let people hang stuff off trees, like they would bring down branches. Right? Like, I know in this individual case this risk is fine, but if you had to create a rule, should we let people hang things off branches for the entire park system? The rule would be no, because you can’t trust people’s individual judgment necessarily.
And so, the difference between individual judgments of risk and system wide risk ends up being this thing you run against time and time again. Yes, maybe one of the DOGE backpack boys is correct about what the downside risk is of ripping out some code. But over the entirety of the system, of the payment system or the, you know, defense software system, like, those individual judgments might be wrong a lot. And so what you get instead of individual judgment is process, basically.
Ezra Klein: I think that’s right. One way to say what we’ve done here is instead of giving discretion and freedom of action —
Chris Hayes: Exactly. That’s exactly it.
Ezra Klein: — to civil servants, bureaucrats, people with expertise, we’ve given it to Elon Musk and DOGE.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: And that isn’t what I wanted to do.
Chris Hayes: No. Right.
Ezra Klein: I say in the book, and what I believe now is I supported civil service reform six months ago and I support them now. What I want to do is I want to make it easier to hire, easier to fire, and easier for people in that organization to manage and act.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: And I want to do all of that not because I don’t trust the civil service, but precisely because I do. Look, I’ve had Jim Paul on my show talking about this, but I was just talking to somebody else about it again, who’s working on rural broadband. The way we hire in the federal government is absolutely insane.
Chris Hayes: It’s totally nuts.
Ezra Klein: Absolutely insane. People with domain expertise are reliant on the HR functionaries sending them these lists of who is like qualified based on self-assessment and keyword searches. And then the people will go back who actually know what they’re talking about, and they’ll go back and they’ll say, no, no, no. These people are unqualified. This person who applied is qualified. And they’ll be told no, like based on the criteria set out and the thing written that’s not correct.
And then you can fight and sometimes you can win the fight, but it takes a lot out of you. I want to say so clearly, because one interpretation I keep seeing of the book, which I think is really facile and wrong, is that this book is anti-government and pro deregulation.
Chris Hayes: No, it’s the opposite in some ways. I think it —
Ezra Klein: And the book in some ways is actually pro deregulation in certain areas —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — though others would need more regulation. But it’s largely saying we should deregulate the government.
Chris Hayes: Well, yes.
Ezra Klein: And because it’s pro government and we need to trust the government more —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — so it can act and then we can judge it more effectively as opposed to in wrapping it in prudential process as an alternative to trust, which then makes it very hard for outcomes to be achieved, which then makes it very hard for us to judge. Are the people there doing a good job or are they good people in a bad system?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And as an alternative to trust, I think is a key part of this, a key part of the story. And you guys quote, actually at length, I think. Is it Paul Sabin is the name.
Ezra Klein: Paul Sabin in his great book “Public Citizens.”
Chris Hayes: Yeah, his book “Public Citizens,” which is about basically the kind of Nader raiders, but it’s about the ideological tendency of sort of government skepticism from the left, litigation as means of restraint, and then this sort of prudential legal risk aversion as the kind of background context for all bureaucratic functioning that came out of that.
And how that, you know, what’s interesting there is what he does really well in that book, and you guys, you know, do a great job of framing this as well, is that it’s actually like it’s government skepticism. It’s government as the bad guy that is the kind of animating force behind so much of that movement and so much about what brings about the results of that litigation that ends up hamstringing government.
Ezra Klein: I have so many thoughts on this, and I’m so glad you brought this up. So, I think you could think of a lot of liberalism as a sort of contest internally between the New Deal liberals and the New Left liberals. And I think that’s kind of understood. The New Deal liberals were much more about building things really fast and spending government money and making a big government. And, you know, the Tennessee Valley Authority and they’re electrifying things and they’re going too far and it gets enwrapped with corporations and big unions.
And there’s a feeling that government is doing too much in ways that are harming the environment, which it is true.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: You have Robert Moses building highways. I mean, building a lot of things, but building highways through black communities. You have a lot of abuses in this era of very torrid growth. And so, you have this sort of new left emerge. And it has a lot of arguments, many of them very good.
But one of the things it is actually doing is restraining government. When Ralph Nader runs in 2000 and is asked what makes him qualified to be president, he says, I don’t think any human being alive has sued more government agencies than I have, which is interesting as a way of thinking about what he was really doing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s an interesting answer to that specific question.
Ezra Klein: Okay, that’s one way of saying it. Let me offer another, ‘cause I don’t offer this one in the book. So let’s go a bit beyond the book. I keep seeing my friends on the left say this has just warmed over neoliberalism. And I think it’s worth talking about neoliberalism for a second because basically everything that Derek and I are targeting here emerges in the era of politics we understand as neoliberalism.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Like 1970 to 2010, let’s call it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: And Francis Wickham is this great line where he says neoliberalism is not the veneration of the market, but the denigration of the state. The new left is neoliberal no less than Ronald Reagan is neoliberal. The point of a political order like that is that both sides accept fundamental premises. And what neoliberalism fundamentally is suspicious of the state and venerating, if it is of anybody, of the individual.
And so there’s a Republican version of it, which is, you know, outsource everything, contract everything —
Chris Hayes: Privatize.
Ezra Klein: — private markets, privatize.
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ezra Klein: And a liberal version of it, a Democratic version of it, which is more about individual participatory government, a deep skepticism of the state allowing individuals and groups in civil sector to sue the government left and right. All these things that get built up, that are suspicious of state power and not very suspicious of the motivations that individuals and nonprofit groups will have in challenging state power. And this is all neoliberalism.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Yeah, so I think this is very poorly understood by Democrats in the world because they don’t realize the contribution they made to this. They see what Ronald Reagan did, but not what they did.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And the key of this sort of skeptical posture towards government, right, is a kind of really important through line here. And one of the things that you see as a result of the sort of Nader’s Raiders public interest litigation, which you guys do a good job of saying is like they have enormous successes. Enormous amounts of air pollution.
I mean, shocking amounts of air pollution is in the air and it’s reduced by 80 percent. There is a ton of stuff that our cars get way safer because they get sued and because of all this stuff that there’s a cumulative effect which is both solving a problem and creating a new one.
And what I think the thing that’s important to kind of end up in here, which I would like to hear you talk about is, I think some people who are getting the book refracted through interviews can see it as an attack on bureaucracy as such, as opposed to the specific form of bureaucracy we in the U.S. have on the other side of the kinds of neoliberalism from the left and the right that made the government we have, which is actually a different kind of bureaucracy than other bureaucracies.
Bureaucracy is constant across the world. It exists in all kinds of governments. All kinds of governments have to do things like build subways or figure out how much housing to put in Tokyo or Los Angeles. But there are better and worse versions and better and worse orientations to bureaucracies.
And one of the critiques of the book, as I understand it, is that there are specific pathologies to our bureaucracies right now that are not inherent to bureaucracy writ large and can actually be changed to make better versions of bureaucracy.
Ezra Klein: Yes. I wish we had a word that wasn’t bureaucracy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, we do.
Ezra Klein: Because were so poisoned that way.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Ezra Klein: What I want is extremely high performing government institutions. I don’t like that either because it sounds like I just like fired up a McKinsey LLM.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: But we almost need a different term because so much of the language here has become poison, deregulation. I find the word deregulation makes the liberal mind shut down. We don’t deregulate. That’s what the Republicans do. Well, why?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Look like if you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a public housing bill compared to some other people. She wants to solve more of the housing crisis through public housing. And the only way to do that, because we’ve made it functionally illegal for the federal government to build public housing is to deregulate the federal government, to allow it to do these things. And when it doesn’t, it needs to, like, pay people and build in a way that is affordable and actually gets the job done.
Because if you pass a big public housing bill, but you don’t have rules or internal capacity thus for the effective construction of public housing affordably and on time, then your bill is going to be a big failure. Right. If you do the Green New Deal as Bernie Sanders wanted to do it, but you don’t have rules that allow you to build green infrastructure or lay down transmission lines to get the energy you’re generating from solar and wind power to the places people need it, then your bill is going to be a failure.
One thing I like about “Abundance” and the set of arguments we’re making here is I think they usefully scramble our political categories. I think they focus us on different questions. I always say that this whole book is really about this very simple line, which is what do we need more of and how do we get it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: And I am not that concerned with what the means are there. I am open to a very wide variety of means. I’m open to market actors and state actors. I’m open to regulation and deregulation. I’m open to spending money. I’m open to taxation. Right. Like, if you convince me that the way to get more clean energy or more affordable housing is one of these, if that’s what will open up the supply choke point, that’s important to me. But what I will say, there are five chapters in this book and the third is called Govern.
We have an entire chapter on state capacity, an entire chapter saying that in order to have the world we want, one of the things we need more of is effective government strong enough to achieve the outcomes it promises. And one way I think this scrambles people’s political intuitions is a lot of people who I think understand themselves as emotionally pro government actually are not. They are in practice extremely suspicious of the government.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: And they are much more trusting of interest groups and coalitions —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — and outside watchdogs than they are of the government itself. And many of these people believe they are to my left, but not that necessarily this matters, but I believe I am to their left.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Because what I want is a government strong enough to build high speed rail as it can in Europe or Japan or for that matter, China. What I want is a government capable of building public housing as it does in Singapore. But what that will mean doing is breaking arrangements that Democrats and, you know, state machines and liberal organizations have become very comfortable with and in fact quite rely on. And that’s a problem where you get more attached to the structure of your coalition and the politics that don’t create internal dissension —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: — than to the things you have promised the public.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and you see this. I mean, if you’ve ever covered a fight over building anything as a local reporter like, you see this, you know, and sometimes it has a left wing valence and sometimes it has a right wing balance, you know what I mean?
Ezra Klein: Yep.
Chris Hayes: So, like I’ve covered fights where like the lefties in the neighborhood didn’t want the Borders bookstore to come in because it was a chain bookstore. But it was also part of a development that would have had some affordable housing. But they were going to go after the Borders bookstore, but then that was going to take down the math of the whole project. So the whole thing never got built. And I’ve covered people who have rallied to make sure that a homeless shelter or an SRO for women didn’t get built in the neighborhood.
And sometimes the same people. But this sort of, when you’re in one of those meetings, there’s an interesting thing happening about like what the right and the left is in the room, which is almost meaningless. And you will get people who I think of themselves as very liberal saying insanely reactionary things without realizing they are saying insanely reactionary things.
Ezra Klein: It’s really tough. I mean, I’m in California right now. I’ve been here for about a week doing media hits and events. But also, much of this book is rooted in California.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, totally.
Ezra Klein: Californian. I wrote a lot of it living in Oakland and San Francisco, which are highly dysfunctional from the question of what do we have, what do we need and how do we get more of it? The week I’m here, there are really big reform bills of the California Environmental Quality Act that have been unveiled. And the California Environmental Quality Act is a sort of relative of the National Environmental Policy Act.
And the way these big bills work, and they’re very important bills, is that if you are building something, and in California, not just state, but anything that requires permitting, which is everything, you have to consider the environmental, and that is extraordinarily broadly defined consequences of that build.
And these used to be very short, and now they’re very long. The National Environmental Policy Act, it can take on average 3 and a half to 4 and a half years to complete an environmental review, right? It’s longer than it took to build the Empire State Building to just create the review. And I’m trying to think because it’s a big deal here. Well, how do I want to see this bill reformed. Right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Because in Berkeley, for instance, somebody used CEQA to sue against the expansion of dormitories at the University of Berkeley because the addition of students is bad for the environment. They create trash, they create noise, they create traffic. So when you’re there, you’re in a bad place. Right. I would say that person is very, you know, that’s a reactionary position in my view. Okay.
Here’s a thing that I think is very uncomfortable for liberals and it is uncomfortable for me. One of the big interest groups that fights reform of CEQA and CEQA has become a real problem for building housing for clean energy, high speed rail. They began doing the permitting, the environmental permitting in 2012. By the end of 2024, they were almost done more than 12 years. The unions defend CEQA here aggressively. And the reason they do it is that CEQA’s leverage.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: They are not trying to protect wetlands. What they are using this environmental bill to do is say, look, developer, if you don’t make this a union project, if you don’t make this pay prevailing wage, we are going to use our lawyers to tie you up in so many secret challenges. You will wish you had never started this development in the first place.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Now, I am broadly pro union. I don’t think that is a good way to do union power.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: I think we should have environmental bills that protect the environment and that have discernment in them. Right. That what they do is not just sort of process. And if you show you’ve done enough process, you don’t get sued. But actually what they do is orient our development in pro environmental directions. And I think we should have bills that empower unions in important ways.
But I don’t think the environmental bill should be procedural leverage on basically everything else. Right. And it’s not just unions. Rick Caruso, this big developer in L.A. who ran for mayor. So it’s everybody in —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — you know, he’s using it to stop somebody from building something near his mall. It’s just become leverage that everybody uses on everybody else. And my view is that’s bad.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: We have just created a procedural weapon that is not like my joke in all this is make environmental policy, protect the environment again.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: That’s what I want it to do. I don’t want it to do all these other things, even if sometimes it’s helping out a constituency that I’m broadly sympathetic to.
Chris Hayes: I mean, part of this, though this was the one thought I had through the book was like, I’ve read, there was a period of time where I was going to write a history of the New York City Subway System and I read a bunch of the —
Ezra Klein: Dude, I want you to write a history of the New York City Subway System.
Chris Hayes: It would be a fun book. So there are two things that happened when I read, you know, there’s maybe, there’s like six or seven broadly books in this genre. And I basically have read all of them, and two things came about. One was that, you know, one of the things that’s clear is at any time, under any set of rules, building something big is an enormously complicated bit of politics. So, like, you can’t remove coalitional politics, interest group politics. Like, this is difficult stuff.
There’s, you know, there’s some developer, he doesn’t want to sell, and then there’s some neighborhood that has some, you know, politically important group that are connected to the mayor. So you can’t. So all this stuff is just building like that doesn’t go away. And then the other thing that did strike me when I read these subway book is like, dozens of people died. I mean, it is shocking how many lives were martyred to build the subway.
And they built it fast, dude. Like, it was cut and cover. They went through stuff. I mean, but it was unbelievably dangerous. And like, that’s the other part of it is that, and you guys get to this a little bit, but how much of it is the specifics of some dysfunction of us or California and how much of it is just like and you wrestle with this a bit, but I’d like you to talk about it, the accumulated reality of essentially an affluent society.
Like, yeah, it’s harder to build the Second Avenue Subway in the 21st century than it was to do cut and cover on the streets in 19th century with Irish immigrants literally dying by the dozen. It’s like, yeah, guess what? It’s a lot harder. There’s a lot more stuff. We value life a lot more.
Ezra Klein: I think this is where having a lot of comparative examples —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, agree.
Ezra Klein: — in modernity helps ground your intuition somewhere sensible. Because look, I also don’t want dozens of lives martyred —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — to the second Avenue Subway.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: And so I’d ask everybody, is your impression of France or Spain —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — that they do not value human life?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Right. Is your impression of France or Spain, which are quite good at building subways and are better at doing it in places like Paris. And you can’t tell me that Paris doesn’t have a lot of old and important stuff in it than we are in building in New York City or across California. Like, have they gotten with their much cheaper, much more capable subway construction, have they gotten it wrong? And we who can no longer build subways have gotten it right. Because I think there’s sometimes this tendency to say, well, you have to throw everything overboard.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: But you don’t have to throw everything overboard.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: You have to choose what it is you’re saving —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — or you don’t get anything done.
Chris Hayes: Yes. But the only thing I would say to that, and I think you’re totally right, these comparisons are important. I’d say two things. One is the comparison of Spain and France is much better than comparison of China, which people love to do, because it’s just like China’s just in a different part of its development trajectory. It has a different political system. They’re not a democracy.
Like, I have sailed down the Three Gorges Dam and talked to my Chinese Communist Party minder about how many people lived in there. And he’s like, oh, we think about 100,000. And I was like, oh, really? What’d you do? It’s like, well, we just moved them all. I was like, okay, right. Yes, this is a different thing.
But the second thing I would say about that is that it really does come back to when you talk about Europe’s particularly. Tom Geoghegan, the great labor writer, once had this essay book that he wrote, and his insight, which totally tracks with stuff in “Abundance,” is that we replaced regulation with litigation. That, like, we have a litigation society where risk is managed by litigation.
And Europeans say this all the time. They come here and they’re like, the fact you have to sign something when you have to go in some kids amusement park they think is nuts. Like, they do not have the culture of litigation there. What they have is a culture of regulation and a kind of empowered civil service.
Our very American, and you guys say this in the book, we don’t trust government, so we sort of outsource this all to litigation. And that is a huge part of why when you look at these European countries, they’re able to do stuff we aren’t able to do.
Ezra Klein: And litigation is slow.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: This is such an important thing about it.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yes.
Ezra Klein: It doesn’t always get you the right answer, right?
Chris Hayes: No.
Ezra Klein: The idea that going and challenging quickly before a civil servants with expertise is less likely to give you a good answer or a good outcome than going and challenging slowly over years before a judge who knows nothing about this project at all is actually quite weird.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: But what the other thing does is it is more leverage for the challenger. Right. Because delay is very expensive, delay is very potent. And so the possibility of delay can be wielded much more effectively. I think the question you asked two questions ago is so important because I think we have to be very clear about the tradeoffs we’re making and have to make and the tradeoffs we don’t have to make.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s a good distinction. That’s a good distinction.
Ezra Klein: And I find there’s this kind of King’s cup that will happen.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: Right?
Chris Hayes: With both of them.
Ezra Klein: The things that are good stand in for the things that are bad. I keep having this come up on, you know, I’m in California, I’m doing these events and people keep saying, well, this is really a problem of human nature. How do we persuade people to support a multifamily affordable housing development down the block or a multifamily apartment complex down the block? And what I keep saying to them is, you don’t.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, just take away their ability to block it.
Ezra Klein: The reason Houston and Austin build —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — housing and L.A. and San Francisco and Boston don’t, isn’t that we got rid of selfishness in Texas.
Chris Hayes: Right, Right.
Ezra Klein: We did not change.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Reshape the quality of the human soul in Texas. But like that technology, that soul reshaping technology to make it to California, we changed the default. And it is your God given right to complain about an apartment complex going up down the block. And frankly, it should also be your democratically given right to like send a letter before it happens to your city council member —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — like making your concerns known. What it should not be is you’re procedurally granted right to delay or destroy it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: That should happen at a higher level with the people we’ve elected who can then be judged over time in a more coherent way by the whole community seeing the outcomes of different projects and having made all this litigation and procedure is the wrong balance. I’m sure you’ve run into this.
There’s an interesting thing happening right now where Democratic governors across the country get very excited about these rebuilds they’re doing under emergency declarations. So the I-95 bridge falls in Philadelphia. John Shapiro is able to rebuild it in 12 days. There’s a version of this with Wes Moore in Maryland, Gavin Newsom, when I went on his podcast, which was a fascinating experience, it’s like, you should have talked about the I-10 here. We did that in 10 days.
And it’s like if you’re all so proud and everybody else is actually excited too about what you’re being able to get done under these emergency rules that wipe away a lot of process. But by the way, the I-95 rebuild, that was still done with union labor, then what does it say about your normal rules and this goes to a really important insight of Bagley, where he says liberal legalism, which is at this point just liberalism, because between Walter Mondale and Tim Walls, every single person we name to a national ticket had gone to law school.
Liberalism has convinced itself that what legitimates government action is process. But for most people —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: — what legitimates government action is outcomes, and it is what it did in their lives. And I agree that you could have outcomes. You know, you can imagine the benevolent dictator gets you outcomes of that process, but usually that actually doesn’t happen. And we’re not. I mean, you know, I, for instance, I don’t think Elon Musk and Donald Trump are going to give you good outcomes doing what they’re doing. Right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: It’s bad process, bad outcome. But the actual, I think, provocation that Bagley, who is himself an administrative procedures lawyer, who is Gretchen Whitmer’s lead counsel —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — I’m not quoting, like, Milton Friedman’s disciple here.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: His insight is that government seems less and less legitimate to people because it works less and less well and achieves its outcomes for them less and less often. And that is actually reducing their support for even the kinds of procedures that we need to keep it legitimate. Right. Like we are just ended up —
Chris Hayes: This is it. Yes.
Ezra Klein: — in a dysfunctional cycle.
Chris Hayes: Right. And this is why. Right. So that the, oh, I love the emergency. If I can declare the state of emergency, then I can get things built, is precisely the kind of vicious cycle that gives you kind of Trump and Trumpism as reaction. Right. And this is why Mitch McConnell gave us Trump in many ways, I think, because to the extent you break the legislative body’s ability to produce outcomes, the extent you sort of mire down processes and they become ineffectual and people lose trust in them, they don’t like them, then it’s like, well, let’s, yeah, like, let’s do the emergency thing. Let’s do the strongman thing. Like, it just becomes more and more tempting.
And so what you end up is a polarized choice between the kind of morass of bureaucracy and like, here’s DOGE come, you know, riding in on its white horse. Although I will say the American people don’t seem to be buying that, thank goodness. Like, I actually think they’re like, wildly overplaying their hand politically.
But it is interesting to hear those governors sing the praises of the emergency declaration, because that is really how you get into the permanent state of emergency, which is like, really the problem and the place that we’re headed. We can’t get anything done in our sort of bogged down procedural liberalism. We need a permanent state of emergency where you rule by decree.
Ezra Klein: And this gets to something that is a genuine trade off and a very reasonable argument which is, well, look, aren’t you happy you have all these protections which aren’t working that well, but still now, right. Kyrsten Sinema going around, you know, retweeting everybody who wants to filibuster anything Donald Trump does. Well, aren’t you glad you kept the filibuster now? You know, aren’t you glad you have adversarial legalism now that you’re turning to the courts to stop Donald Trump? Aren’t you glad you had all these things now?
And one thing is they’re not working. It turns out a lot of things we treated as rules or laws were norms —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — and the administration get away with destroying them. And I would say the much more dangerous version of the Trump administration is the one that is procedurally arsonistic in the way it currently is but was macroeconomically competent. If they were not but using executive authority to lay down insane tariffs that was sending the stock market into turmoil, this would be much more dangerous.
But you can’t always assume —
Chris Hayes: No.
Ezra Klein: — that your strongmen are going to have an insane view of global trade. Right. Like that’s not, or even that they will maintain an insane view of global trade if the pain gets too big. So I do want to note that. But the other thing is that we are so afraid of harm that we have made it too hard for the government and institutions like Congress to create progress.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Ezra Klein: And the reason I think that’s meaningful and I’ve always had this argument with people about the filibuster, which I do not support. The reason I think that’s meaningful is that the healthiest way for politics to have a feedback loop is for the side with good ideas to be able to implement those ideas and then sell the American people on that theme and for the other side to be afraid of harming those good ideas and for them to back off of doing it. And when you break that ability to execute, then yeah, I guess it’s good that there’s some curbs in theory on the other side.
Chris Hayes: In theory, yeah. Right.
Ezra Klein: But you let the other side in, right? Like, we let Donald Trump back into power. And I’m not saying it’s all because we were not able to deliver the things people wanted. But it’s not completely unrelated to the fact that probably over a very long period of time in blue areas, we failed completely on cost of living. And I think you have to be a more self-confident movement than that.
If you believe people would like the fruits of liberal governance, then you have to make liberal governance possible. If you think they won’t, well then yeah, it makes sense to be completely defensive about this. But I am more worried about the inability of the people who believe what I believe to change the world in a way that makes people want that vision executed than I am about the others.
I think that is what marginalizes the power of the other side, that you are successful. And I think we’ve a little bit, we give lip service to that vision of politics. But if you look at how Democrats govern in states and nationally, they don’t actually believe it.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(Break)
Chris Hayes: I mean the thing that to me is just inarguable is that housing is too expensive in democratically controlled areas, full stop. And that the last 20 or 30 years approach of subsidizing the costs that are the central essentials of life is a failed policy mechanism. But then there’s like the hard stuff of innovation. You do this sort of thought experiment about closing your eyes in like 1890 and waking them in 1920. I forget what the 30-year span is, but it’s just insane the amount of physical transformation that happens in some of these periods.
And then 1919 to 2020, like the Internet and computers go bonkers. But you know, cars, planes, all that stuff is all basically physically the same. So there’s this real question about like the frontiers of physical innovation.
And right now there’s something happening with energy to me that’s sort of the most exciting story and is yet gets 1/100th I would say the attention of AI. And I’m curious why you think this is. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Why is it the fact that we are on a trajectory to maybe to get to like zero marginal cost energy pretty soon and people don’t talk about that and they all talk about when we’re going to get artificial generalized intelligence.
Ezra Klein: I think this is a great point. One is I don’t think people have caught up to how fast the technological innovation by the way induced by government.
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally, 100 percent.
Ezra Klein: Super important, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: We have made a better world possible because the government pumped, you know, here, in Germany, in China, elsewhere a huge amount of money into subsidizing solar, wind and battery technology and manufacturing. You’ve moved up the manufacturing curve and innovated on it and it’s remarkable and we’ve destroyed all expectations of what were possible here. But, okay, this advanced geothermal, now we’re exploring. Right. We can do a lot more than nuclear.
One reason I think there’s not excitement about it is I think we have yoked it to an unexciting goal. One move this book is trying to make is to say that the goal of our energy policy should not be decarbonization as hard as decarbonization is. The goal of energy policy is clean energy abundance.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: And so, I actually don’t think it’s that exciting of a goal to tell people, listen, if we work really hard, you can have what you have now. And these harms that are mostly abstract to you and described in the future, we believe are going to be largely mitigated. Right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: That’s good. Like, we should do it.
Chris Hayes: A little not as bad, basically. I mean, that’s the other thing that’s so hard about it because there’s so much that’s already in the pipeline of warming. So it’s also —
Ezra Klein: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s still going to go up, but it won’t be catastrophic. It’s tough.
Ezra Klein: And there’s a big look, like inside the broad left, the left broadly construed. I don’t mean the left of liberalism here. There’s a big degrowth, you know, conservationist dimension —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: — that is skeptical of that kind of world. But I think the goal is energy abundance. And we talk about why in the book, but I think the goal that liberalism should embrace is clean energy abundance. There’s a version here, by the way, where Donald Trump did something like this and did all of the above energy abundance, but he actually then didn’t. He is trying to unleash fossil fuel investment and construction and usage, but he’s also trying to destroy wind and solar industries in the same breath. Right.
So now you have actually two quite contrasting visions. Like a world built on more dirty fuels that encase us in a heat trap and coat our lungs with particulates. Or like this amazing world of like, solarpunk and wind and nuclear, and it’s really possible. But it is energy is a form of wealth, and we should treat it as such. We should want on the left, as liberals, I want people to be richer. I want them to have more things that are wonderful for them. I want them to have good lives. I want the world to have energetic wealth. So things become possible in the future that are not possible today. There are a lot of problems you can only solve that way.
And this is one of the, you know, the book is operating on a lot of levels. But one of the levels is kind of like ideological vibes, I would almost call it. But I think the relationship between, you know, liberals or Democrats or something and technology has become dysfunctional. And because of how dystopic, specifically social media became, even as it enriched, like six —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: — white guy billionaires, everybody kind of soured. The sort of relationship began to sour. And so then, even as this remarkable story was happening in energy, we weren’t really telling it.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Ezra Klein: Although were funding it. I mean, one of the tragedies, I think, of Joe Biden being Joe Biden’s age made his capacity to communicate and tell his own story much diminished —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Ezra Klein: — compared to what it would have been if the Joe Biden, you know, who we knew when he was 65, was a very different political figure.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Innovation was so central to this administration’s agenda. The Infrastructure bill, the CHIPS and Science bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, these were all part of the latter two at their core about technology.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: These were bills about green infrastructure, these are bills about advanced hydrogen, and you know, these are bills funding all kinds of things to create the energies of the future and the transmission networks necessary to get that energy everywhere. And Biden could kind of still make an argument about building, but he was just, I mean, there’s no other way to say this. He was much too diminished to make the argument that was actually true about his policies, which is that he was actually reorienting the Democratic Party’s agenda around innovation —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — and building the artifacts that innovation could create, the sort of embodied manifestations of that innovation. I think that’s a really important politics. I think when you lose the future, you begin to lose. I think Barack Obama represented the future and he won. I think Bill Clinton represented the future and he won. I think in a weird way, with Elon Musk on his side, Donald Trump began to represent the future and he won. I think you want to take back a vision of the future.
Look, I think AI is a really big deal. I covered a lot. I think it is in the near term going to people will feel it in their lives in a way they are not going to feel an energy transition. In the long term it’s actually not clear to me that AI, we’ll have to see what happens with whether or not the scaling laws top out, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — before we get to superintelligence or AGI. But I don’t know. I’m a person who believes AI is going to be truly transformational. And so I don’t want to pit them against each other, but I do want to say that in both these cases it should be at the center of politics how to both manage and shape these transitions. I’m always saying this to people. I would like to see the federal government shape the kinds of AI systems that are developed by shaping the incentives to develop them.
So having prizes for solving huge scientific and technological and biopharmaceutical problems. And then you get a billion dollars if you built an AI system like AlphaFold, which predicts the 3D folding of proteins —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — you get a billion or $5 billion if you solve a problem that is worth that much to us. And we get the answer.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Right. That that molecule is generic from the get go. Right. You know, there are different ways to do this in the ways we have done it. Instead we’re like, it’s like AI for national security, which maybe is necessary, but is dystopic in a million different ways. And then it’s AI yoked to subscription revenue and maybe advertising.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: Like that is as big as we can think. And then we’re trying to regulate some harms on the margin. Like that’s not good enough. Try to change the world. Like imagine a better world and using government’s unfathomable resources to get us there faster.
Chris Hayes: I’m so interested in this. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The sort of left’s relationship to technology, which I do think has. There is a very, and a totally, I want to be clear on this, a totally understandable, like strong kind of Neo-Luddite stream. There’s this book, “Blood in the Machine,” that’s sort of like a celebrating history of the actual Luddites by Brian Merchant, which is a really interesting book.
There’s this feeling that like the aesthetics of AI slop is fascist adjacent, which is not a crazy idea. Like, it really is right now being used to like literally generate fascist memes for the White House. There is this relationship that’s grown extremely skeptical. And I totally understand why. Like, there’s a lot of reasons for it at the same time, yeah, you got to own the future.
Like the carbon free, green, boundless energy transition that’s happening, which truly every char blows your mind more than the last chart. For me, as someone who covered this for 20 years and it was like, we’re screwed. There’s no way out. To see that there is a way out now. Like there’s a path out. There really, truly is a technological path to zero emissions. That wasn’t true 10 years ago and it wasn’t true 20 years ago. It wasn’t true 30 years ago.
And the fact that, like, Dave Roberts, great Substack and podcast, which covers it every week, is like the only place where this is, has any kind of cultural cachet. But AI is everywhere. Love it, hate it, whatever. It’s so fascinating to me almost at like an aesthetic level that, and partly it’s just like energy is weird, utilities are weird. All that stuff’s like a little remote and obscure. Whereas, like, ChatGPT is there and it’s talking to you and maybe flirting with you.
But there just is something dysfunctional right now in the general orientation of technology when it is the fact that, like, technology truly is our way out. Bill McKibben, who you quote, like the people who’ve been working on this the longest, the most diehard climate people will tell you this. Everyone to a person will tell you, like, that’s our way out right now, and we’ve got it. And the question of whether we deploy it at scale is the existential question of our time.
Ezra Klein: But I want to pull out of the passive voice here a little bit. Right. Because did Kamala Harris run this campaign?
Chris Hayes: No, she did not.
Ezra Klein: Or did she talk about how much they increase oil and gas production?
Chris Hayes: Correct. Yep.
Ezra Klein: Right.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Did Joe Biden run this campaign in 2020?
Chris Hayes: No.
Ezra Klein: Right. Did Hillary Clinton run this campaign in 2016 also no.
Chris Hayes: No. Yeah.
Ezra Klein: There is a reason.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, totally.
Ezra Klein: We’re not talking about this.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: I mean, I do think that the AI comparison is tough because you’re not going to get into a emotionally supportive relationship with an MRNA vaccine. You know, like there’s something weirder happening there —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: — that is so, you know, I mean, it’s more like the Internet. And we did talk about the Internet a lot because —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — things are just woven into the —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Ezra Klein: — moment to moment fabric of what we’re looking at. I mean, AI also, to the point of your great book, is an attentional technology in its current form.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right.,
Ezra Klein: Right. And it’s what’s hijacking our attention.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Yes.
Ezra Klein: I think there’s a lot to be said there.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Ezra Klein: But we get to choose what politics is about. And you certainly get to —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — at the top levels of politics, try to make it about some things and not others. And I want —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — to keep coming back to this because liberals have been, I think, somewhat divided on technology. And I don’t mean technology itself, I mean their affective relationship to it. I think it has become hard for them to sort of make the argument you’re making the biggest story in the world. The biggest story in politics should be the success of green energy, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: Or certainly one of the five.
Chris Hayes: One of the biggest stories. It’s one of the biggest stories of my lifetime.
Ezra Klein: It is really meaningful how fast that goes and how fast that goes. And I want to say this really clearly is in our power. But even Democrats are not doing the things they need to do to make it go fast enough. If you look at where the IRA’s money for installation and advanced green infrastructure and energy manufacturing is going, it is going to red states disproportionately because it is easier to build and lay cable and lie down solar panels, including in red states where the politics are against renewable energy. I think Texas increasingly is, whereas in a lot of blue states it’s just very hard to get anything done.
And while the Biden administration was very excited to spend a bunch of money on this, they got very nervous when it came to doing the permitting reform necessary to make it much easier and faster to build the things they were funding. And they kind of hid behind Joe Manchin’s legs on this one and let Joe Manchin be the guy carrying the permitting reform fight. And then the progressive left hates him for many quite understandable reasons —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ezra Klein: — and permitting reform died. But there was never the Biden administration permitting reform push, right? Where they were like, listen, we did this in order to make it successful, we need to do this other thing. They did do it, by the way, on some things on CHIPS and Science on the semiconductor side.
Chris Hayes: They did lean into it. A hundred percent. Yes.
Ezra Klein: They ended up passing a bill later on that was co-sponsored by Mark Kelly and Ted Cruz that was about exempting the CHIPS and Science, the semiconductor fabs from environmental review. And I should say Mark Kelly just brought out, I haven’t read it yet myself, but a new permitting reform package. I think really important that we’re serious about this because you can’t get to that world fast enough if you don’t make it easier to build things. You should not be able to challenge all these environmental projects using environmental review in the way you can.
Now there should be a speedway for clean energy, right.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: We should give it a lower level of scrutiny than building a fossil fuel plant. The fact that NEPA, National Environmental Policy Act, or for that matter the Endangered Species Act, the fact that they cannot distinguish —
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Ezra Klein: — between laying down solar panels to help save the climate we have and building an oil refinery to destroy it. That is a huge indictment of the bill’s applicability to the modern world. Not its applicability to 1970 when Richard Nixon passed it, or 1971 or whatever it was, but the applicability to the world we are in now. Like, it is our job to write legislation that reflects the environmental challenges we have.
It’s not Ralph Nader and Richard Nixon’s job to write legislation for the environmental problems we have. And I just think that I really feel this is important, that this is part of how you renew liberalism. Like, the Trump administration does not just have a shitty vision of process. It has a terrible vision of the future.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: It’s a bad future, even if they succeeded. Right. A future of less trade, a future of less immigration, a future of less government capacity, a future where tons of things.
Chris Hayes: Of McKinley. The McKinley administration.
Ezra Klein: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Clearly.
Ezra Klein: Literally a future where tons of things are devolved to Trump’s cronies and to Elon Musk. It is always such a tell to me, that the countries they lionize kind of suck. Right. Like, they all love Hungary. Hungary’s not great. If you were going to be a country in Europe, you wouldn’t choose Hungary. Right. You know, he’s impressed with what Vladimir Putin can do, impressed with what Xi can do.
Like, it is really telling about their cramped and narrow vision of the future, that the countries they seem to be excited about as potential models are not countries you would want to move to from here. That creates a big opportunity for liberalism in this period of reformatting and reformulation to say, no, no, we actually have a great vision of the future.
Not a vision of sacrifice and endless process and an interagency review stamping on a human face forever. We have a vision of more. And that is an old thread. I was saying I was bringing up the New Deal versus the New Left, but I mean, you go back into old Marxists, you know, the left is actually very much about material abundance.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: And then it has a sort of another left that emerged that is much more skeptical of it. But I don’t think we should have omnidirectional abundance. I’m not saying build more things that are terrible for the environment, so on, but there are a lot of problems you can only solve if you can solve them technologically and you can create, you know, say, clean energy abundance. We are not going to decarbonize if we can’t make clean cement.
And I will just tell you this as a vegetarian, who cares about animal suffering, like the least popular part of my politics. If you do not figure out a way to make lab grown meat, if we can’t make meat on a scaffold in a brewery, that seems possible, but is very difficult, we will never solve or get anywhere near solving biodiversity and deforestation, because that is actually not driven by climate.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: That is driven by cutting down trees and rainforest for livestock.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Ezra Klein: A huge amount, like an actually unfathomable amount of the land human beings use is not used for living in cities.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: We use like 2 percent of the land for cities. It is because we use most of the habitable land, or about half of it on Earth for agriculture, and we use most of that for cows, sheep and goats.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ezra Klein: And if you could replace that, which you will only do by giving people an alternative, you’re not going to convince them to move on to, like, legumes. If you could replace that then you could do something about that.
But if you can’t, and instead China is just going to want more and more meat, and Russia, if it gets richer again, is going to want more and more meat, and Bangladesh is going to want more and more meat, then on that set of interlinked environmental problems, we are screwed. So sometimes you really do need the moonshot technological approach. It’s not on everything. We know how to build apartment buildings.
But I would like to see a government that puts technological innovation to solve our hardest problems, much more at the center of the agenda and much more yoked to a vision of the way that both abundance in the things we need most, the essentials, but also the pulling forward of technologies from the future into the present as something like Operation Warp Speed did that. That should be central to progressivism because that is one way we make a world unimaginably better than the one we currently inhabit.
Chris Hayes: Ezra Klein is the host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. He’s a columnist for the New York Times Opinion section, and he’s author, along with Derek Thompson, of the new bestseller “Abundance.” That was awesome, Ezra. Thank you so much. I know you’ve been very busy. I appreciate you taking time.
Ezra Klein: Chris, I always love talking to you. It’s always so generative for me. So thank you.
Thanks so much for listening and remember to catch us on YouTube starting this week. And also some exciting news for us here at MSNBC. Three of our podcasts are nominated for Webby Awards. Why Is this Happening? What you’re listening to right now, Into America and prosecuting Donald Trump, now known as Main justice, are all up for awards. You can check out our show Notes to see how you can vote for each show and help MSNBC take home the award for all three shows. Why Is this Happening? Is presented by MSNBC and NBC News. Produced by Donny Holloway and Brendan O’Malia. Engineered by Bob Mallory. Featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of Ms. NBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mention here, by going to nbcnews.com why is this happening?