What Worries Me Most About ‘Abundance’

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s been a little over a year since Derek Thompson and I published the book “Abundance.” While the book didn’t begin what I consider the abundance movement, it did mark a kind of kickoff of the idea as both an object in the discourse — something people are fighting over and creating factional wars over — and something politicians are trying to turn into policy.

Being a part of this has been a bit of a wild ride on a bunch of levels. It has created fights — as well as opportunities — I didn’t expect. It can be a very weird experience.

But I’ve wanted to come back to “Abundance.” I’ve been a little distracted from it by the million things Donald Trump is doing, but if abundance is to become something more than a synonym for efficiency — if it were to become part of a vision for a better world — I think there’s some success to build on, but also a whole lot more that actually needs to be done.

So I wanted to have on some other folks from within this intellectual hothouse to talk through what has happened, what we’ve learned from the arguments, critiques and coalitions that are forming and fracturing, and what we think needs to happen next.

Derek Thompson is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He’s not only the co-author of “Abundance,” he’s also the author of a great newsletter under his name.

Marc Dunkelman is a resident scholar at the Searchlight Institute, a fellow at Brown University and the author of “Why Nothing Works,” which came out around the same time as “Abundance” and is about some very similar ideas, but with a much more historical perspective.

So I wanted to have them on together to talk through what we’ve seen and what we think is coming.

Ezra Klein: Marc Dunkelman, Derek Thompson, welcome to the show.

Derek Thompson: It’s good to be here.

Marc Dunkelman: Thrilled to be here. .

So our books came out a little more than a year ago. Congratulations, everybody!

But just at a high level, where’s your head at? What are you feeling good about? What are you feeling worried about a year on?

Derek, let’s start with you.

Thompson: One way to think about the reaction to the fallout of “Abundance” is to think about its impact at three different levels: the level of vibes, the level of legislation and the level of outcomes.

At the level of vibes, this is a 0.1 percentile outcome, given where I was March 1, 2025. The degree to which the concept of abundance has reached something like full penetration of the political discourse — certainly, the discourse of the Democratic Party.

You look at the fact that governors Kathy Hochul and JB Pritzker are talking about how their solutions to the energy crisis or the housing crisis must begin with a supply-side policy — that tells me that “abundance” is not just a word that’s being bandied about.

It’s a concept — look at problems, solve them on the supply side — that is being actively talked about at the level of governors, at the level of Congress, at the level of the Senate. Zohran Mamdani has called out the concept of abundance and has paired his policy of rent freezes with a policy of helping developers build in New York City.

So that’s the level of vibes. It has clearly entered this level of mimetic strength that is far beyond my wildest dreams 13 months ago.

At the level of legislation, I’d say it’s like a B or B-plus. One bill that Gavin Newsom signed is literally called the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. “Abundant” is right there, in the first word.

There’s legislation that has been passed around the country that has also tried, many times explicitly citing “Abundance,” to make it easier to build housing and easier to build clean energy.

But then, I think where the strongest criticism of our movement has to begin is at the level of outcomes.

California should be commended for the law that it has signed, and the work that folks like Scott Wiener and Buffy Wicks have done to advance the concept of abundance in that state. But if you have the misfortune of going to FRED, the St. Louis data website, and looking up housing starts in California between 2021 and 2026, you do not see the publication of the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in those statistics.

What’s even more worrisome to me is, if you look at 2015 to 2026, you don’t even see the YIMBY movement.

Thompson: That is exactly right, and that’s pretty concerning. We said in our book: Judge political movements by their outcomes.

The bright side is maybe you could say it’s too early to count our outcome successes, but the very fair criticism of our movement right now is: Where are the outcomes? Especially in states like California, where the volume of abundance has been the loudest.

Marc?

Dunkelman: I think I have a slightly more optimistic perspective.

More optimistic than that? [All laugh.] That’s pretty optimistic.

Dunkelman: My view is that your book and the associated effort to rethink progressive policy is a remarkable change in the sense that, from the beginning of the progressive movement in the late 1800s through the 1950s, the progressive answer to most public policy questions was: Put the government in charge, and it will make enormous strides. Centralize power, and we will bring power to the Tennessee Valley through the Tennessee Valley Authority. We will remake the banking system through the Federal Reserve.

We had a whole series of ideas that were grounded in this notion that we were going to have strong, centralized power do big things. Then, beginning in the late ’50s and into the ’60s, a different idea — which had been there at the beginning but had really been sequestered by this idea that big government could do big things — emerges.

There are books like C. Wright Mills’s “The Power Elite,” and then the Students for a Democratic Society puts out the Port Huron Statement, and the core notion that they are beginning to seed inside the progressive movement is actually that centralized power is bad and we need to take on the core elite who have been making all these decisions.

The progressive movement becomes about speaking truth to power in almost every form. You see that in the reaction to the civil rights movement — that’s speaking truth to the power of Jim Crow. You see it in second-wave feminism. You see it in the objection to urban renewal and the highway program, to “Silent Spring” and, ultimately, to “The Power Broker,” which my book is sort of in conversation with.

All of these are strikes against the old progressive way of governing. It is to push power down, to empower little people, who have been bulldozed, in the proverbial sense and in the literal sense, to be able to stand up against centralized power. By the mid-1970s, speaking truth to power is the central idea of the progressive movement.

I think what “Abundance” has done, for the first time really since then, is to open up a conversation about whether we need to rethink that core notion of what progressivism is about. In the old notion, the sense was that we needed to, in all cases, put more oversight on government rather than letting it cook.

Now many of us on the far left and in more moderate circles are beginning to say we need government to function, generally. I think that was not a conversation we were having 18 months ago in nearly the same way.

All right. Both of you are speaking more in the grand march to triumph register here. So I’m going to come in with things I’m more worried about.

I probably agree with a lot of what you said, Derek. But at the level of vibes, abundance has been more factionally controversial in the Democratic Party than I would have expected, and has cut into it in ways that I wouldn’t have expected.

It sort of set off a big, populist liberal fight, and whether or not that fight is constructive and whether or not the syntheses that come out of it are constructive is unknown as of yet.

My absolute biggest worry, though, is not the critiques of abundance outside the tent, but a small-ball-ness that I see emerging inside the tent. When I think about failure modes for what this could be and what it could be becoming, “abundance” ends up as a synonym for efficiency, that we’ve rebranded an agenda for state capacity.

I always hear people say: I don’t disagree with cutting red tape — as if all abundance is about is cutting red tape, as opposed to an actual, radical vision of plenitude.

Something that neither of our books ended up doing all that well was really describing what that vision of the future would look like. If you imagine a candidate running for the Democratic nomination in 2028 or running for the presidency in 2028, what are the ways that they might describe what this abundant future is to look like?

Is it that you’re promising to just build five million houses? Does that mean anything to anybody? How do you make clean energy abundance a concept that people can actually feel? How is that something people are excited about?

And then this goes to another thing that I think is going quite poorly, actually. The back half of “Abundance” is about trying to build a progressive politics of technology. I think that’s farther away than it felt in 2025, particularly given the way the A.I. conversation has gone. There’s an often quite merited anger that is building toward A.I. leaders and A.I. companies.

With all that on the table, our book begins with housing. I think housing is the place where you see the most legislative action, where you see the most governors and politicians talking about it.

A lot of the examples in “Abundance” are from California, where I’m from, where I was when we wrote much of the book. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has very much embraced the “Abundance” critique. So I want to play this clip of Gavin Newsom on Jimmy Kimmel.

Archival clip of Jimmy Kimmel: Is California overregulated?

Gavin Newsom: Yes.

Kimmel: Because it feels like there are a lot of well-meaning laws, rules, etc., that get in the way of building your house, of opening a restaurant. I’ve experienced this myself. What do we do about that?

Newsom: I mean, we need a liberalism that builds, and we have to own that. I’m very much part of this new nomenclature we call the abundance agenda. We have to reconcile that.

We have to be more focused on time to delivery. Not just rhetoric, not just what we’re for. We have to actually deliver and manifest it. That’s why this year we did the most significant housing reforms in our state’s history. We did something that hadn’t been done in decades — we tried to address land-use reforms, what we call secret reforms. We weren’t able to get it done.

We finally were able to get it done this year in a meaningful way. But this is a meaningful topic for Democrats to recognize we have to deliver on big and bold things. Trump breaks things. Democrats need to build things, but we have to actually deliver on that promise.

Derek, what do you think when you hear that?

Thompson: I definitely don’t want to give the same answer to every question, but I hear the governor of California describing a legislative victory in terms that literally quote our book: “a liberalism that builds” abundance. He’s being asked questions by a late-night host that are basically like large language model summaries of our book.

But then you look at the outcomes, and California still hasn’t actually increased housing starts in the six months since that bill was signed, nine months after the debate over that bill really began. That’s not the fault of that legislation, necessarily.

You could think of it in a couple of ways. You could think, one, that there’s a set of problems that have accumulated in California over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing, and this is one important step to ungunk that process. Maybe that’s an optimistic way to frame it.

Another way to frame it is that legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction. We’re in an environment with an elevated interest rate, where Trump is waging war against legal and undocumented immigration, which is complicating the fact that 40 percent of construction workers in California are foreign-born. So the labor supply of construction work in California is scarce, and therefore very expensive, also raising the cost of housing.

You look around the country, and there just aren’t a lot of housing construction triumphs at all — for a variety of macroeconomic reasons.

I care about outcomes; we care about outcomes.

If California, Illinois, New York are going to pass laws that hold up “Abundance” as the inspiration or motivation or philosophy of those laws, and then three months, six months, two years later, we still don’t have the fruits of abundance — whether it’s building more housing and building more clean energy — I am worried that speaks to a gap between what I call the legislation vibes and the outcomes.

There is another way of thinking about this that I’ve become more sensitive to in the year after publishing the book that I’d like to hear your thoughts on. Whether a housing project gets built can depend on a series of things, but I think you can often break it into three things when there is demand for it.

One is: Legally, can you get the damn thing built? Can you get the permits? Can you get the agreements? Can you get through, if it’s a big enough project, the City Council or the planning board or whatever?

We focus a lot on that. I would say that there’s been at least the intellectual victory, where there is something getting closer to a broad consensus that you should be able to build. Legally, that should be possible in places where we need housing.

But then there’s a question of: Can you finance the build? And then there’s a question of: How much does the build cost? What is the cost of construction in terms of materials — in terms of labor, in terms of how much you’re paying labor, in terms of what kind of thing you need to build?

I think a good critique of the book that I’ve heard is that we don’t talk very much about financing. One thing that has been hard is that even as a lot of yes-in-my-backyard bills are passing, as you mentioned quickly, the financing environment has gotten much worse, because interest rates went way up after the inflationary period.

And the second is that the cost of construction in a place like California is a very fraught topic because nobody wants to see wages go down. There’s a big deportation agenda happening under Donald Trump, which, as you mentioned, is making labor more expensive.

But even as there’s been a lot of victories on zoning and exempting things from environmental reviews, the financing side has gotten harder.

I’ve definitely talked to mayors and others who say: Look, I’ve got all these projects I want to see go forward, and we’ve made it possible for them to go forward. But the financing of the projects is not penciling out, and we don’t have an answer to it.

Thompson: Yes. The framework that I’ve developed for this, which I think is a critique of that first chapter, that housing chapter, is that to really understand housing in America, you need to understand a 50-year story, which is mostly about rules; a 20-year story, which is about business cycles; and a five-year story, which is about the incredibly weird business cycle that has followed the pandemic.

Chapter 1 of our book, the housing chapter, does a very good job explaining the 50-year story of how a set of zoning and permitting and environmental legislation and rules that accumulated around the 1960s and 1970s has slowed housing construction across the country, but in particular in blue cities and blue states, where there is very, very hot demand.

I think it did a good job of explaining that 50-year accumulation of rules.

But there’s also the 20-year story, which is that after the Great Recession, the construction industry in this country was decimated, and that led to the 2010s being the decade with the fewest houses built per capita of any decade on record.

That’s not just a rules story; that’s a story about macroeconomics. It’s a story about the fact that after the Great Recession, there just wasn’t demand or available labor or companies sufficient to build the kind of housing that we would need in the 2020s.

And then what happened in the 2020s was just one piece of mayhem after another. You had the pandemic, you had inflation. You now have a scarcity of construction labor, which makes it more expensive to build in many places.

So I do think that to really understand the problems that states, that governors and mayors face when it comes to housing, you do have to understand that there is this Russian nesting doll of problems.

Fifty years of rules, 20 years of macroeconomic crises, and then five years of macroeconomic and financing crises. That has really put us where we are.

And, like you, I’m picking up the criticisms that I heard about financing, about the fact that if you want to build this level of housing, you need to be obsessed with the question of: How do we actually finance that construction? How especially do we make loans to developers, at a time of high interest rates, possible for them to keep up with the level of housing construction that you want?

Those are really, really strong critiques. I think they click into the story that we were telling, the 50-year story. But I do think that it is fair to argue that our book missed that very important ingredient.

Marc, there’s also a question of power here that I know you’ve been very focused on. So I’m going to keep California in the front of my mind here, just because I know it very well.

Very recently, you’ve seen clashes between Governor Newsom and cities across California because all these big bills are passing at the state level — and then the cities are using all kinds of often fairly innovative approaches to making them not work, to dragging their feet.

This is a big conflict between Los Angeles and the state at the moment. But not only Los Angeles. This is hard, the question of: Who should have the right to say yes, and who should have the right to say no?

I think even within conversations among people on the left, there are a lot of contrasting intuitions here — for good reasons.

How do you think about this?

Dunkelman: Housing, to my mind, is an outlier within the abundance agenda because, unlike in linear infrastructure, transit lines, train lines, electrical transmission lines, the challenge here is to empower someone who owns a plot of land to build housing or more housing on it.

And I say that because, in this circumstance, in the world of housing, the challenge is that the state wants more housing and the person who has purchased a plot of land wants to build housing, but the neighborhood doesn’t.

It’s sort of a sandwich, and it’s the peanut butter and jelly that’s gumming up the works.

In the case of housing, what Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener have largely tried to do is to push power down to the homeowner — which feels good to us, as progressives who want to speak truth to power, right? We don’t like it when some oppressive force sitting above us tells us we can’t do the thing that is good.

So empowering someone who lives near a transit stop who has an underutilized piece of land that a city can build a bunch of housing on feels good to us.

That’s largely what has passed. It’s pushing power down to the landowners so that they can do more.

And then you reach into these challenges of financing and whatnot. I have to say, in the scheme of things — you guys are journalists, and I’ve spent a long time in politics — the idea that a year later you’d have a bunch more housing built because of a book seems a little far-fetched to me.

I agree with that.

Dunkelman: But I like the standard you’re holding yourself to.

I will add one thing on that, because I think the way to think about why you should worry about this is that it’s not like last year was the first time California or any of these states passed a bunch of new housing bills.

They were bigger, and they were cleaner. But there has been a decade of housing bills being passed in California. Dozens and dozens of bills, including many that were framed to me as transformative, just weren’t.

To what you’re saying, and as somebody who has worked in politics, you’ve seen this. As somebody who has covered legislation, I’ve seen it. I think there is a tendency to assume when a bill has passed, it’s done.

If you’ve been fighting for the bill and finally we have got the duplex bill or whatever it is, it has passed. Great news, everybody! We’re going to get our duplexes! But often it doesn’t work that way.

A lot of things don’t work in practice the way you think they would. That implies, to me, particularly on housing, that when you don’t have enough consensus on the ground for something, it can be very, very, very hard to implement it, because cities and neighborhoods and planning commissions and so on use a lot of different tools to block the projects in other ways.

Dunkelman: The core question you are asking here, and I think we’re all asking, is: Who should decide what housing is built, when and where? And how should that decision-making process work?

When I wrote “Why Nothing Works,” the big aha moment was when I realized that for a lot of progressivism’s history, our view was to centralize that power in the hands of one person who will decide what is built.

That’s how Levittowns were built. That’s how Robert Moses built housing all over New York City. That’s how the establishment built housing for a long time.

Then we switched horses. We decided we didn’t like that model because, in many cases, it was abusive to people who lived in communities that were bulldozed or they were discriminatory or they were not sensitive to what was happening in the environment.

So we created, over the course of 50 years, a whole series of laws that put new checks on those who would build housing. And we are now beginning to try to dial back the number of veto points in the process.

You’re right. It has been 10 years of small-bore changes, and now, I think, more substantial changes.

I’m from Rhode Island. We’ve got a bunch more housing starts than we had.

I understand that it’s not the immediate satisfaction of suddenly having five million more units across the country. But it’s a different discussion among progressives. That feels, to me, like a sea change.

In our housing chapter, I wrote about the anger in the ’60s and the ’70s that America was just getting uglier. The term “ticky-tacky” comes from the song about the housing in Daly City, not too far south from San Francisco. You had the accurate view that a lot of forests and rivers were being despoiled.

The growth machine, government construction — the public lost faith in it because instead of this building making their surroundings more livable and more beautiful, it just became this soulless, greige, mixed-use, anonymous construction.

So actually, one thing that has been very, very badly underplayed here is the centrality of aesthetics in whether or not people want to build.

Thompson: I don’t know that I buy this idea at all. At least, I think it’s incredibly underpowered as an explanation. The claim on the table seems to be that Americans in the 1950s and 1960s turned against the growth machine, as you described it, primarily out of an aversion to the ugliness of the world.

“Ugliness” is not the word that I would use. The words that I would use are “environmental degradation.” The environmentalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was about the fact that people were dying from the air and dying from the water. That’s not a question of aesthetics. That’s a question of health.

If you want to understand why it’s easy to build in Texas but difficult to build in California, and all you have is the beauty explanation, then you’re essentially saying that continued building in Texas is made possible because Houston is so damn beautiful. Houston is not so damn beautiful.

The reason that it’s easy to build in Houston, I think, has very little to do with the aesthetic perfection of downtown Houston and much more to do with the fact that there’s a system of customs and laws and a lack of zoning regulation that simply makes it easier to build up and to build out.

Same goes for Dallas, same goes for Austin, same goes for San Antonio.

I want us to build beautifully. I want to build things that people love, in part because I want the growth machine of the 21st century to have democratic approval, such that we build houses, people love them, they want us to build more houses. I think that’s a flywheel we should hope for.

But if you really want to understand why Petaluma, Calif., stopped building in the 1970s, why you can’t build in San Francisco, why it’s so much harder to build in blue cities and blue states than in Texas, I don’t think the beauty argument or the beauty paradigm gets you very far.

I think that is probably right. In some ways, I want to put beauty closer to the center of politics, or at least to say it is more important than we give it credit for in politics. And also I don’t think it explains why Austin builds homes and Los Angeles doesn’t.

But I actually want to hold on Austin for a second because one fight that still felt fairly live when we were writing the book is: Does building housing lower rents?

There was an argument that because demand is always so high, you can build homes, but it doesn’t do anything. It just allows more wealthy people to move into them.

Maybe it’s even like building freeways, where it increases so much demand that you don’t get any faster travel time.

You’ve done some reporting on Austin — that’s been a hell of a story over the past year or two. What have we seen there?

Thompson: What we’ve seen is that Austin built an enormous number of homes in the 2010s and early 2020s.

Average rents have gone down, down, down over the last 18 to 24 months. Austin is like the canonical story here.

But the story that I find more impressive, in a way, is Dallas, Texas. Dallas, between 2019 and the early 2020s, added a population equivalent to the size of urban Boston. Hundreds of thousands of people moved into the Dallas metro area.

If Dallas were like Los Angeles and San Francisco, the average price of a home in Dallas right now would be around $3 billion.

But that’s not what happened.

Three billion dollars?

Thompson: No, no, no, I’m joking. But it would be so absurdly high. You’d have to calculate it in Bitcoin.

But what happened instead is that housing prices in the metropolitan area have actually declined over the last three and a half years. Dallas built so much that construction increased per capita throughout this period. Dallas builds more housing today than any other metro in the country.

That is a triumph of allowing the housing market to work. And that’s because housing is not a special kind of good.

It’s a good that, like so many other goods, is responsive to supply and demand given a steady level of demand. If you restrict supply, prices go up; if you add supply, prices stabilize; and if you add enough supply, prices can actually go down.

It’s why you have, in so many places where people want to live, prices going through the roof. Because we’ve simply made it too hard to build. It is really, really important to me that whatever explanation people have for this phenomenon — some people say it’s about billionaires or corporate interests — I say: Look to Texas.

Texas has billionaires. Texas has corporate interests. But Texas also has an entirely different set of rules and customs and permitting regulations that simply makes it easier for supply to respond to demand. As a result, we have outcomes in Texas that are better than the rent freeze that Mamdani has promised New York and other left-wing politicians have promised their own cities and states.

We have something better than a rent freeze. We have rents going down because we’ve made it easier to build.

So you mentioned Mamdani and the rent freeze, and, of course, it’s another side to his agenda, which is to increase supply. Mamdani is attempting a synthesis you’re seeing much more often now on the Democratic side, which is price controls paired with supply increases.

You’ll sometimes even hear these argued as one creating the support for the other: price controls creating political momentum for supply increases.

I want to play a clip of Mamdani speaking in March.

Archival clip of Zohran Mamdani: We’re all here together today for an announcement where we launch the Neighborhood Builders Fast Track.

What this means is that we are creating a prequalified roster of developers, and in doing so we are going to cut down on predevelopment time for new projects from 18 months to 10 months.

Now when you couple that with the referendums that were passed just late last year, that means that we are cutting down on the time it takes to build affordable housing in this city by up to two and a half years.

And I say that to you in a city where we know that time is money, where we know that too many of these kinds of press conferences have then been followed by years of waiting — and New Yorkers cannot afford to wait any longer. So what this means in a tangible sense is the creation of 1,000 additional affordable housing units on city-owned land across our city.

Here’s what I like about that clip that I think reflects something bigger happening across Democratic policymaking, which is a recognition that speed matters. In a way that was not admitted, a lot of policymaking actually took the view that delay was good. The delay was good because policy is complicated, its effects are complicated, and we need a lot of process and time to surface information, to surface objections, surface concerns.

You can really see this in the way environmental reviews are conducted. You can see this in the way that housing is built. I don’t think we often said that delay is good, but in practice, we believed delay was good.

There you have a democratic socialist out there saying, as an applause line: “Time is money.” I think the sense that speed is progressive, it’s more affordable, but also it allows you to deliver at the time frame of elections and show government making a difference in people’s lives. That is a principle that I am seeing people take more seriously.

I’m not saying that’s just our fault or anything of that nature, but I think it’s actually really important. Recognizing that delay is corrosive to democracy because you can’t feel government in your life is a really, really, really important shift for Democratic-side policymaking to make.

Thompson: Marc, you’ve written about this explicitly. Among liberals, input was considered a costless virtue.

It was considered costless to have long periods of input, to prize input, to say that the ultimate expression of democracy is people standing up and telling their City Council: Don’t build this thing anywhere close to me.

That was seen as more democratic in some places than the actual vote for the mayor who promised to deliver housing to that city, and actually found that the people who showed up on Tuesday night at the City Council meeting were the veto point that prevented him from allowing housing.

Dunkelman: My general view here: People also use the term “procedure fetish,” as if progressives just sort of like procedure for procedure’s sake.

Nick Bagley’s term.

Dunkelman: We’re not looking for procedure just because we like it. We’re not looking for delay because we like delay. We have a fantasy, and we’ve had it now for several decades, that if you get everybody in the room early enough in a planning process, you can create a product or an outcome that has no trade-offs.

And the truth is that one of the major barriers to abundance is we’re facing real trade-offs here. I do want to point out that there has always been a housing crisis in New York City, and we put all sorts of restrictions on what government could do.

The abundance discourse has wanted, in many cases, to pit us or you guys against the left.

That’s not an accurate portrayal of what’s happening. You’re seeing Mamdani. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott are the authors of maybe the most pro-abundant housing bill introduced ever in the Senate and that has passed the Senate.

To the degree that there seems to be tension about this, here’s an idea where it seems to be that there’s a growing consensus.

Thompson: The polling outfit Blue Rose recently did this survey where they asked people whether they liked abundance messaging or populist messaging.

It turns out that the most popular messaging was a synthesis of abundance and populism. It was things like: “Working Americans can’t afford the basics — and it’s because we stopped building them: not enough housing, not enough energy, not enough child care, and what little gets built goes to the wealthy first.” Democrats will build an America that works for everyone, not just those at the top.

That was the message that polled the best. I don’t think that’s dispositive. I mean, testing messaging is not the be-all, end-all of politics.

Look, there are philosophical differences between liberals and populists that we shouldn’t run away from. They exist. But the fights often obscured the degree to which individuals could hold simultaneously both populist and abundance principles.

I’ve come to think of this somewhat cheesily as the abundance mullet, which is to say, economic populism in the front and abundance in the back. So who’s wearing the abundance mullet — as horrifying as that might be to imagine? Zohran Mamdani ran on freezing the rent, but here he is talking about making it easier and faster for developers to build in New York City.

Well, to be fair, he ran on both.

Thompson: He did, yes, you’re right. He ran on both. But I think if you polled people and asked them: What did you hear more about, freezing the rent or accelerating the time with which developers could start building in Manhattan and Brooklyn? — I think most people associate him with the mimetic “freeze the rent” rather than the less mimetic: shortening the permitting time from 18 months to 10 months.

So he’s one example.

Another example is Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, who ran on freezing utility increases, making it easier for people to afford electricity by talking about price caps. But her second executive order was all about supply-side renovations to encourage the construction of solar and storage, in particular, by making it easier to build energy in New Jersey.

There, again, you have the promise of freezing the utility increase in the front with the promise of expanding supply in the back.

I was going to do this later, but I’m going to do it now because I think one of the dangers of this conversation is that the three of us are largely pro-abundance.

I’ve done previous episodes where I’ve had critics sitting at, in fact, this very table. But I want to try to offer up the critique so it is represented in the strongest way I can.

Yes, of course, there can be a synthesis of populism and abundance, and you can see it in somebody like Mamdani. But in practice, abundance has two huge problems from the populist perspective.

One is that a lot of rich people and billionaires really like it and are funding things with “abundance” in the name — and are going to use abundance as a mask or a vehicle to push the Democratic Party back in their direction.

And the other, which is the big critique that certainly gets made of our book — I don’t know if it is as true in the critique that gets made of yours, Marc — is that “Abundance” just isn’t focused on the right enemies, that politics should be about a confrontation with corporate power.

And abundance is at least perceived as trying to make politics about a more positive sum — we can all build, we can all get along. It’s a more liberal approach to things.

That, I think, is the strongest version I can give up.

But you can hear Elizabeth Warren make a version of this argument in a speech she gave not too long ago:

Archival clip of Elizabeth Warren: So yes, we need more government efficiency, a lot more, but many in the abundance movement are doing little to call out corporate culpability and billionaire influence in creating and defending those very inefficiencies.

Instead, abundance has become a rallying cry, not just for a few policy nerds worried about zoning, but for wealthy donors and other corporate-aligned Democrats who are putting big-time muscle behind making Democrats more favorable to big businesses.

It looks like the corporate tycoons have found one more way to stop the Democratic Party from tackling a rigged system with too much energy.

She goes on to note that Reid Hoffman, who’s a tech billionaire and an influential tech figure, has been sending the book around to people he knows.

I want to ask this of both of you: What do you understand to be the relationship between abundance and corporations, and abundance and concentrations of wealth and income and power?

Marc?

Dunkelman: I think there are certain cases where concentrated corporate power is a problem. We’re coming off a week where there were a bunch of victories for the anti-monopolist movement — Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

I’m not sure that any of the three of us would voice any objection to taking a strong stance on abuses of corporate power in that realm.

As someone who goes to a lot of music shows, I really, really hate ticket fees. I really don’t like them.

Dunkelman: So there you go. But my concern about that critique is that if you look at the stories, at least in my book, and several of the stories in your book, the problem, in many cases, is not created by corporate power.

The last chapter of my book is about an effort to build a clean energy transmission line — really just a string through a bunch of forests — in Maine. It was proposed in 2016, and it’s constructed in 2026 — not because there was some corporate behemoth that was standing in the way.

The fight there was about whether it was worth it to imperil some portion of a pristine forest in Maine with a wire. And the way that people used the levers available within the government made it so that we could not replace something like 700,000 cars’ worth of carbon into the atmosphere through old fossil fuel generation with clean hydropower coming from Canada.

That’s not a problem about corporate power. That’s a problem about whether government can make an expeditious decision.

Thompson: I want to say something really clearly. I think the people who focus on corporate power being the most significant problem in America have some very good ideas.

I also think, frankly — we just heard from Elizabeth Warren — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in a way, is kind of a very abundance-like agency.

I mean, it has consolidated what used to be ——

She says earlier in that speech that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she helped found and ideate, is like an abundance before abundance.

Thompson: Oh, great. Maybe I’m just totally ripping off her point here, because I read it months ago, but I think she’s right.

It consolidated what used to be entirely disperse regulatory authority in the government in order to bring it to help consumers against corporate power.

That strikes me as exactly what we were talking about when it comes to state capacity and your line, which you repeated so much on our book tour about deregulating government, getting government out of its own way, getting government to work faster and better for the public. C.F.P.B. seems like an absolute unalloyed triumph in that respect.

At the same time, I think people who fixate on corporate power, while they have some very good ideas, have some not very good ideas. Last year — I’m not going to open up this can of worms all the way — but I was engaged in a very protracted debate against anti-monopoly folks about the degree to which Dallas was a housing oligopoly.

I don’t think it is. I don’t think we should be fixated on punishing builders who are successfully adding housing.

That seems like taking this one lens and applying it where it shouldn’t be applied. And that tells me that if the lens of corporate power leads to both some very good ideas and some not very good ideas, then it might not be the single best lens through which to see improving America.

I am not a populist; I’m a liberal. I am concerned not about corporate power specifically but about power, about how power can manifest in strange places. It can manifest absolutely at the level of corporations in monopoly. It can also manifest at the level of the neighborhood, as Marc was just explaining, when a group of neighbors stop a new apartment from going up by lobbying the City Council and mayor not to build housing where it should be added.

What is that if not the application of power?

In 2017, The New York Times — where we are sitting — published this incredible piece about the incredibly expensive per-mile cost of connecting Grand Central to the Long Island Railroad.

Why was it so expensive to build a tunnel in New York? Partly it was about consulting fees, partly it was about construction, partly it was about the fact that public union staffing levels in New York City are like four times higher than they are in the typical city or state of Europe, France, Spain, the U.K. And that’s why our construction costs are so much higher.

I’m going to interrupt you. If I’m a populist sitting here, I’m somebody who believes more in this critique. Here’s my answer to what you just said: Yes, it’s all true.

But you sure seem more excited when you start talking about the power being misused by the neighborhood group or by the public-sector union or by the poorly run government. But you sort of yada, yada, yada your way past the corporate power.

I think that some of the critique comes from a feeling that you could certainly have a version of abundance that understood corporate power as one of the many blockages, and often a very central blockage. But in practice, the way “Abundance” is written, the way many of the people arguing for it seem to argue for it, there’s a: Yes, the anticorporate folks are right sometimes. Let’s go back to talking about how government doesn’t work. Let’s go back to talking about where public-sector unions increase costs.

And that it’s in that where the real message, the real priority set is revealed.

Thompson: There’s a way in which I’m not exactly sure how to answer that question. It’s a really good question. Why am I more excited to make the point that I seem more excited to make?

You know that feeling when you’re in a room and everyone around you is freaking out about something, and in a weird way, that calms you down because you’re like: Oh, everyone is freaked out about this thing, so I don’t need to add my anxiety to the median level of anxiety in this room?

That’s kind of how I feel about certain aspects of fearing the influence of corporate power in monopolies and energy and entertainment. I see it’s being covered. I see people writing about it. I see people getting agitated about it. I think it’s good that the government is winning lawsuits against entertainment companies that are abusing their own power to raise ticket prices.

I think it’s good, but that’s not what the debate is.

I’m excited about adding an impression that I think we introduced, you and I, to the conversation, which is that we are so used to seeing this version of power exist at the level of corporations, and we’re so used to seeing the way that can have a pernicious impact on consumers, that we miss other instantiations of power.

A neighborhood can, in a strange way, be an instantiation of power. It doesn’t seem like some nefarious thing when a nice-looking woman stands up at a City Council meeting and says: I would prefer not to build an apartment building behind my farm because I’m afraid of my horses being freaked out by the construction noise. But I want us to see that is power if it stops an apartment building from being built.

So it’s always difficult, but important, maybe, to respond to a question about affect. Maybe the first thing I should have said was: I encourage people to read the transcript, where my affect is invisible, rather than watch this on YouTube, where my affect is visible.

But if I’m really reaching down into understanding why I am passionate about getting people to see these other ways that surprising accumulations of power can stop things from happening in the public good, it’s because that’s where I think we’re missing the story.

Dunkelman: This is a conversation among progressives — between the populace and the abundanceniks, or whatever we’re called — that is more than a century old.

I go through this in my book. At the turn of the 20th century, the railroads have completely remade the American economy. Power is accumulating, and the people who are concerned about these monopolies have two wildly different ideas about what to do about it.

One idea is anti-monopoly. It’s Brandeisian, and it’s: Big is bad, small is beautiful — and how do we carve these things up so that the old 19th-century kind of capitalism that Louis Brandeis had seen on the streets of Louisville, Ky., growing up could be reestablished?

But there was a second idea, which was that we should build up what was then just a shadow of a government so that it could accurately and powerfully regulate with centralized power.

Theodore Roosevelt established the Bureau of Corporations. We eventually get the Federal Trade Commission. Before that, we have the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is a big bureaucracy designed to regulate the railroads.

That’s a different idea. That is taking power as it is and pushing it up into some big, powerful, competent government bureaucracy that will do the things that ordinary people can’t do for themselves.

I think the misunderstanding here is that those who say we need to attack corporate power are just taking the Brandeisian notion of it.

The abundance ethos hearkens back to the old ideas that existed from the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s, that we should be building up government power so that government is capable of taking on these corporations, that we have people in government who can make discretionary decisions about where we’re going to build transmission lines, how we’re going to improve transit, where we’re going to build housing, how we’re going to regulate this and that.

We want bureaucracies to be able to move speedily. We want them to be able to make decisions in the public interest. And strangely enough, it is the reforms that we’ve seen since the ’60s and ’70s that have slowed government down so that they cannot be responsive to the corporate challenge.

So to my mind, there’s some confusion here. The idea that we should abandon abundance in the name of just attacking corporations misses the point that government should be a competent institution that can accurately and thoroughly review and challenge corporations when they’re doing wrong.

Thompson: Can I throw the baseball back to you? How do you situate the corporate power critique in your current conception of abundance?

Maybe an alternative way to ask that question: A time machine materializes right next to us over here. It takes us back to December 2023, allowing us just enough time to add a Chapter 7 to the book, called “Abundance and Corporate Power.”

Do you write that chapter, and what do you put in it?

I have a couple of answers to this. I think we wrote the book with a couple of thoughts, but one was that it was a book about blind spots of liberal and leftist governance.

Interestingly, this is actually an argument. The populists often do think this to be a blind spot of liberal governance. But to me, corporate power is actually something that the left, broadly speaking, understands and is relatively attentive to.

I mean, we were writing this book when Lina Khan was the chair of the F.T.C. So it just wasn’t that much about things where I thought progressives kind of had the right idea. But that created the impression that it isn’t concerned with that.

So then you get into two things that are more substantive. One is that when you are talking about building things — and this is a book about building things, this is a movement about building things and typically building them in the real world — you are necessarily forced into a complex relationship with corporations and functionally everything else.

First, because things are built by corporations. Most things will continue to be built by corporations. Whether you’re talking about drug development, where there’s a mix of, obviously, public research, but then the pharmaceutical industry actually does do a huge amount of drug development, and nobody has a theory of getting away from that — to when you’re talking about building commercial buildings, often building housing, decarbonizing. Almost anything you can think of that needs to be built at a large scale is going to be built in part by corporations.

So you need to find a way to align corporate energy with your program. Just being anti-corporate as an orientation isn’t going to work.

I think that’s one other reason I’ve always said that the theory of power in “Abundance” is liberal, in the sense that it believes power can concentrate poorly anywhere. It can concentrate poorly among corporations, in government, among unions, in neighborhoods. There is no safe concentration of power.

So I think if I could add Chapter 7, I probably would.

Marc, I take your point that a lot of the things we focus on in the book, or, frankly, that you focus on in your book: Corporate concentration isn’t the reason the transmission lines aren’t getting built, and it’s not the reason that housing isn’t getting built in this or that city.

But one thing that we are, at a principles level, arguing for is that government should be stronger, more capable of being decisive, and then more capable of turning those decisions into actual concrete and steel and law and so on.

The way money affects politics at its highest levels, from state houses to the federal government — I wouldn’t have really thought of a campaign-finance reform chapter in the book the way we initially conceived of it. And also because I have a bunch on campaign finance reform in my first book, in my own head, I’m like: I’ve covered this. [Laughs.]

On the one hand, I think progressivism already has the right view on this, but it has not been able to instantiate this into policy. The more powerful government is, the more worried you have to be about the distorting influence of money inside it. A political system as porous to money as the one we have currently becomes very dangerous.

I just put out a podcast with Alex Bores, the candidate who is running for Congress in New York.

This super PAC funded by co-founders of Palantir and OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz is dumping money to destroy him. Bores is a former employee of Palantir. But what’s going on there is he wants to regulate A.I., and these companies and investment firms that are making functionally unimaginable amounts of money from A.I. are trying to build a death star to destroy anybody who might regulate A.I. in a way they don’t like.

So a system where you cannot trust there to be a good structure of who has voice and who has influence, because it is so dependent on donors, is not a system where just saying: Let’s make government more powerful and trust that the people running it are going to do the right thing — really works. Because you have a fundamental corruption of the central decision-making apparatus.

There’s a sense of that being true — and a cynicism coming from that. While I’m not sure I buy a bunch of the critiques, I think the feeling that if billionaires like this book and implemented it or got really behind it in the system as it exists, then it would just give them a really big voice. Because it’s not specifically oriented toward taking some of their voice away.

I think there’s validity to that. That’s the version of it that I would give credibility to.

Thompson: Yes, I think I agree. I don’t consider myself anti-billionaire. But I don’t think you can look at what’s happening with money and government right now and the increasing role that billionaires have over campaign finance and not be a little bit concerned about the last 15 months.

What we saw in 2024 is that billionaires contributed by some estimations between 10, 15 and 25 percent of total campaign spending, and got a president that cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent by an average of $300,000 — and paid for it with the largest cuts to Medicaid health care for low-income people in American history.

That is a terrifying vision of the future of plutocracy, if that’s an omen.

And if you look at the direction of billionaire incomes made possible by the rise of technologies like A.I., which are currently in private markets — which means that retail investors do not even have an opportunity to benefit from the tripling and triple quadrupling of Anthropic and OpenAI’s enterprise value — that clearly points toward a world in which billionaires have an enormous amount of political power. That scares me.

I don’t have a perfect solution to it. It’s something I’m thinking about a lot right now. I had a conversation on my own podcast with Gabriel Zucman about the feasibility of billionaire taxes, which is their own can of worms.

But I think it’s absolutely a problem we need to think about more in the next few years.

Dunkelman: I’m struck by the degree to which we’re avoiding this central question: Who should be making big decisions?

In the ’50s, ’60s, there were these public figures like Robert Moses or Robert McNamara, who were purportedly speaking for the public interest.

Progressivism turned against that model. We have become culturally averse to power, almost no matter where it is. That means we don’t like billionaires, but we also don’t like autocrats. We don’t like powerful bureaucrats.

Whoever is making the decision, our solution in every case is to move the decision-making power somewhere else without really thinking: Well, what is the system we think would be fair to get to an expeditious decision that actually does serve the public interest?

We can have conversations about the influence of money in politics, but fundamentally, what we need is government to be competent in small doses so that we can grow from that. The promise of abundance is that we will re-empower government to be able to make decisions expeditiously across the board, and we should hold the public figures who are making decisions accountable through elections.

But, ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We need to have systems that allow some discretionary power to the people who are in powerful parts of government to be able to make decisions and then evaluate them.

I would hate for us to predicate our efforts to empower government to make decisions about housing, about clean infrastructure — any of these issues — on a change in the way we finance campaigns.

We’re going to figure out how people feel about A.I. more and more in the next few years, and almost no matter how much money they put up against Alex Bores or whomever, if A.I. turns out to be wildly unpopular, they’re going to have a problem.

That actually gets us into A.I., which we’ve been circling here a little bit.

One other group of people from whom you’ll hear the word “abundance” quite a lot are the people who run A.I. companies.

For instance:

Archival clip of Elon Musk: A.I. and robotics will bring up what might be termed the age of abundance. Other people use this word, and this is my prediction: It will be an age of abundance for everyone.

Archival clip of Sam Altman: I had the one interest of radical abundance, and just: What were the technological leverage points to just make the future wildly different and better?

Archival clip of Demis Hassabis: As we get closer to A.G.I. and we made breakthroughs, and we probably talked about last time, material sciences, energy fusion, these sorts of things helped by A.I., we should start getting to a position in society where we’re getting toward what I would call radical abundance — where there’s a lot of resources to go around.

And then again, it’s more of a political question of: How would you distribute that in a fair way?

So that’s Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis.

A lot of people are very skeptical that these A.I. companies are going to bring anything that would feel to a normal person like abundance. What they’re instead hearing about is a scarcity of jobs that is coming down the pike.

We thought of having A.I. in the book; we mostly cut it out because it felt like it was moving too fast. It has gotten a lot farther now.

How do you think about the ways in which A.I. could create abundance or create scarcity?

Thompson: I had an interesting conversation last year when I was simultaneously working on “Abundance” and this cover story that I wrote for The Atlantic called “The Anti-Social Century.”

For the latter story, I talked to Robert Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” and he made this interesting point about technology, which he significantly blames for the rise of solitude in America. He said: Too often we adopt a technology and then we adopt that technology’s values without thinking about incorporating that technology into our values.

One example of his was the television — and we’re going to get to A.I. in a second. With television, most people put one in a room and then immediately started watching it for five or six hours a day. It was as if the human body were designed by evolution to do nothing but sit on the couch and watch streaming images on a screen — that’s how immediately it insinuated itself into modern life.

That’s different from, say, the Amish, who are very purposeful about screening a technology to ensure that it fits with their values before incorporating it. Something like solar energy, which they say does fit their values, you can often find near Amish farms, whereas the television set, they said: It’s going to interrupt the values that we have about family interconnectedness and time spent looking at other people in the face. So we’re going to keep it out of our homes.

I don’t think that we should take the Amish approach to television with artificial intelligence. I don’t think we should ban it, but I do think we should take a kind of Amish-lite approach to thinking about incorporating this technology into our values, rather than adopting the values of artificial intelligence mindlessly.

What the latter would mean is allowing data centers to be built absolutely anywhere, including in many places where, as The Wall Street Journal reported, residential developers are selling land that is needed for homes for people to build a house for computer chips. I don’t want a data center moratorium in this country, but stories like that feel awfully close to allowing the values of A.I. to supplant the values of people, including having a home to live in.

There’s a lot that I agree with there, but let me drop this down to, as you put it at the beginning, the level of vibes.

One of the vibes projects in “Abundance” is to try to create a political vibe that is simultaneously progressive — in the sense that it cares about social goals and equality and distribution and a bunch of things that progressives typically care about — and is also pro-technology.

Right on the cover of our book, we have this somewhat solar-punky image: You see technology and forestry, and we talk about rewilding at the beginning and vertical farming. We are trying to create a kind of vision of the way technology can be pulled into politics, to make things possible that are currently not.

I would say the level of vibes has gotten harder. There is a very reasonable sense that technology is concentrating power more narrowly in the hands of a more narrow group of people.

Elon Musk is well on his way at the moment to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. You see the power Sam Altman and Dario Amodei wield. People are scared of A.I.

The way Jasmine Sun describes A.I. populism is that it’s an elite project that is being shoved down people’s throats. It’s not something they want, but something that they’re being forced to accept and adapt to.

At the level of vibes, this politics that merges progressive goals with a view that technology can be harnessed for them — it seems very far. GLP-1s are very widespread, but I think the way the left feels about them is very unsettled. I’m curious for you to talk a bit about that level, because I think it’s very hard for a positive politics to grow out of a deep enmity and suspicion. Yet I understand why the suspicion is there right now.

Thompson: Let me talk first about A.I. and then GLP-1s, because I think they’re quite different. The populist energy, the anti-tech energy that faces artificial intelligence is very different from the dispersed anxiety that people feel about some of the implications of GLP-1s, despite their being one of the most popular drug categories in the last few decades. In that respect, they definitely deserve a little bit of distinction. But I like the prompt.

I think you’re right. It’s just that I don’t see any place where the left is excited about a new technology.

Thompson: Right. So I really like the two or three sentences that we had about artificial intelligence in the sci-fi vignette that kicked off our book. Because while we don’t have a fully fleshed-out A.I. policy in that book, we say two things that I think are worth holding on to.

We first imagine that the profits of artificial intelligence — because it is a technology that is built on human achievement and human intelligence — are taxed and redistributed to the public. No. 2, we envision that the workweek has shrunk, and implicit in the idea that artificial intelligence allows the workweek to shrink is the idea that to the extent that it reduces labor, that reduction of labor is not borne on the backs of a dramatic increase in unemployment but is rather distributed among a stable set of fully employed labor force that is working a bit less and earning more because of higher productivity.

If I were crafting an abundance A.I. message, what I would say is this is rapidly looking like it’s going to become a multi-trillion-dollar industry. We have to restore the ability to tax corporations that could be among the most profitable in the history of capitalism. That’s Part 1: We want to tax these companies and redistribute their income to the people.

But we also need to think about what kind of labor market policies we can begin to build to ensure that there isn’t a displacement of workers, and so that if this technology makes people more productive, it results in something that looks much more like a four-day workweek than the equivalent 20 percent of the economy just being shunted onto unemployment.

On GLP-1s, I definitely get the impression that there is an aversion to the technology within certain aspects of media. There are magazine and newsletter writers who are against GLP-1s because they promote a new thinness culture. Or they might represent some kind of unnatural way of getting a normal body.

A biohacking optimization culture, peptides, now Clavicular — which is a whole weird, dystopic looksmaxxing thing.

Thompson: That it accelerates us toward some kind of transhumanist future with which we feel uncomfortable.

While enriching a small number of people.

Thompson: Yes. But I also think it’s important to look at the fact that this is, by all accounts, the most popular category of drug in the last 20 or 30 years. The pharmaceutical companies can’t sell it fast enough. The peptide makers with the relationships to Chinese or whatever labs, they can’t sell it fast enough.

Here you have an emerging technology that looks like it might have implications for neurodegenerative disease, for inflammation, for cardiovascular disease. These are diseases that are among the highest mortality burdens in the country, in the developed world. Why aren’t we devoting even more public resources to studying this drug faster and finding new ways of bringing down the cost in the next few years for all Americans?

What if the federal government spends a lot of money to promote a certain drug category, rewards certain companies with advanced market commitments — hundreds of millions, billions of dollars — for companies that build these drugs so that the government, essentially, is buying those drugs, and then can distribute them to the public at cost?

Which is what we did for Covid vaccines.

Thompson: Exactly. Right now, the federal government just seems M.I.A. on this in a way that I’m not sure I entirely understand. If I were in government looking at this revolution, I would frankly be interested in something like an Operation Warp Speed for GLP-1s.

Marc, I want to pick up on something that Derek said a little bit earlier in the A.I. part of that, which I think is really pregnant, which is: Should abundance of time be a goal?

One reason I ask is that you’ve done a lot of thinking about the progressive movement; it comes up a lot in your book. When I go back into the progressive movement, one thing I am struck by is how much broader its conceptions of human flourishing were than what liberalism tends to offer, or for that matter, what socialism or democratic socialism tend to offer today.

During the progressive movement, you have a lot of talk about parks, about public spaces, about the liberal arts and certain forms of enriching education. Obviously, you have temperance movements. There’s a lot of talk in that era about work and the role it should play or should not play in our lives.

Now we just accept it as so central. We have two-earner families, and everybody works all the time. But particularly if we do end up in this world where A.I. is a labor-replacing technology, which to some degree it will be, should the goal be — the five-day workweek isn’t set in stone, maybe it should be four days or three?

Brink Lindsey, in his abundance-adjacent new book, “The Permanent Problem,” is circling some of these ideas. But I’m curious, given your more historical perspective, what you think of that and what you think of leisure time — or time that you have autonomy over — being a long-term goal for abundance.

Dunkelman: In the moment of every new technological transformation, we have had some notion, some dream, that maybe we could have less work and more leisure for the same income. And in most cases it’s part of the American DNA to use the extra time to do more work. John Maynard Keynes famously expected that we would be spending less time at work.

We’d be at our 15-hour workweek by now.

Dunkelman: Right.

But the labor movement did create the weekend. We have taken time back at times.

Dunkelman: We have. I suspect that we are going to find, with the rise of China, with the enormous challenges that we face and the various new technologies that we have in other realms, that there’s going to be a demand for speedy progress on all sorts of other issues. Those who want to spend time doing that are going to spend all week and all weekend working on those challenges. So I’m less sanguine that we’re going to have less time.

What’s so interesting about Derek’s analysis of what happened with GLP-1s is that in situations like Warp Speed, we have clear delineations of who makes decisions. We are empowering people to take chances, to make enormously consequential decisions about where money goes and to try things quickly.

That is exactly what we don’t have in these other realms of abundance. It is very hard to figure out who makes the decision about where the transmission line is going to go, how we’re going to build the new transit line, where the housing’s going to go. That’s an interesting model in these other realms. How are progressives going to change decision-making processes across the board so that we can make expeditious decisions?

The transmission lines question brings up another area that both interfaces with technology, obviously, but also politics. For me, a lot of abundance comes out of thinking first about the YIMBY movement and then thinking about climate change and decarbonization and the need for a really aggressive green-energy build-out, which was being conceived of and attempted in the Biden administration. It became very clear that the laws and permitting we have were not going to allow enough solar, wind and transmission lines to get placed.

Then Donald Trump gets elected, and a couple of things happen. One is, in the Inflation Reduction Act, he guts credits for wind and solar, trying to mess all that up, and also makes it, in some cases, harder to permit and harder to finance. There were hopes that you would see big-level permitting reform — at least maybe that would happen under a Republican presidency — but that has not happened in any real way.

Nor is Donald Trump exactly doing fossil fuel abundance, because he has gotten the Strait of Hormuz into a complete mess. And so oil prices are really high, but most of the debate is how to make oil cheaper again.

When you think of where we were, talking about green energy a couple of years ago, and you think of where we are now, where it’s just: Can you even keep oil affordable? It seems like a total, absolute disaster.

And I would add this, and then turn it to you, Derek: One thing that worries me is that when people lose political fights, they sometimes backfill into just saying: Well, maybe I was wrong about everything. We are acting like climate-change science has somehow stopped being true because the politics of climate change have proved to be harder than people hoped. But we are just warming the world really fast, and there’s no reason to think that will not have all the terrible effects that people have feared.

I don’t think this politics is gone forever, because you’re going to have huge natural disasters and storms and things like that. But I don’t know. We’ve gone from a place where the question is: How fast can we build out the decarbonization — to whatever the hell this is now. And it’s a real fall.

Thompson: It doesn’t just seem like an abject disaster. It is an absolute disaster. This is what you and I were talking about a lot with audiences in May and April of last year: Donald Trump wins an affordability election, and if you asked people who switched from the Democratic to the Republican column why they switched, they said over and over again: It’s the cost of living, it’s affordability, it’s the price of housing.

What’s happened to the cost of living, affordability under Trump? All of it has gotten worse. And it’s not just that it’s gotten worse because a comet came in from outer space that Trump couldn’t possibly control. It’s often directly because of Trump’s policies. He has often governed very explicitly as a scarcity candidate.

There’s a scarcity of labor — in large part because the amount of legal and undocumented immigration coming into this country has fallen off a map, such that the labor market is barely growing anymore.

We have trade scarcity. We’ve essentially made it legal for all sorts of goods sold into the country to be highly taxed. Some of those goods are inputs into things like building transformers.

If you look at why the costs of electricity and energy are rising — despite the fact that, within the context of A.I., it’s often blamed on the data centers — when you talk to energy experts, they will say it’s not so much about the exciting reason, that A.I. is driving up the cost of your electricity. It’s much more about the slightly more boring reason, which is that the hardware guts of the electrical grid are getting scarcer and more expensive — in large part because we have tariffed the inputs, which makes it harder to build transformers and stations.

He’s made it difficult in so many different ways to achieve the very thing that he was elected to achieve. That is an absolute tragedy for America, for consumers, for families.

It is, however — and I do mean this — an opportunity for people who think of themselves as abundance liberals to refocus this question around: How do we solve these problems on the supply side? How do we make it easier to build the housing that is currently not being built? How do we make it easier to build the transformers that currently aren’t being built, but are also in many cases being tariffed?

I think Trump is a disaster. But Trump’s disaster is often instructive to the opposing party.

I do think this is an opportunity for someone to run on the idea that we know the economics work in many of these industries. We know supply and demand works. There are supply-side solutions to many of these problems, and if we implement them in a way that the Trump administration has not, we can begin to fix some of these problems.

But this is a place where, to go back to something I was saying at the beginning of the conversation, I see a big difference between having a vision and not. The big byword of the era right now is “energy affordability.” We’re all talking about affordability, and I also think energy should be affordable and people should be able to afford it.

That is not, I think, a forward-looking vision of this. I want to see clean energy abundance described. I want to see a political party that actually has a vision of a world in which we have more energy and the fruits of that energy available to us, available to people in poorer countries — that is able to describe why it wants that and how it’s going to achieve it.

We’re at the intersection of a few things that people will come to believe have failed. Climate politics has proved very hard, and one reason it has proved hard is that over a long period of time, endlessly trying to motivate people to avoid a disaster that they cannot feel day to day is very hard.

You’re trying to create a tremendous amount of political motivation by warning people of a thing that has not, for the most part, happened to them yet. And you can do that to some degree. The degree to which the public doesn’t really prioritize it has been a difficult lesson to learn.

Obviously, Trumpism has not taken the mantle of cheap energy away from the Democrats for all the reasons you just described. But what separates abundance from what we’re really seeing in a lot of places is that you’re supposed to have some vision of what clean energy abundance is and what it looks like and what it can achieve.

That is just not a grammar that people are used to talking about. The left has a worried relationship with energy. It just wants to avoid the problems of fossil fuel energy use and decarbonization. The right just wants energy to be cheap and plentiful and to drill.

The idea that there is some other future we could attain, a future that is not just the same as the present but without climate disasters — or the present on the right, with climate disasters but also a longer period of cheap fossil-fuel oil — I would like to see that brighter future described, and that’s a place where there’s been a lot less by now than I would have hoped.

Thompson: I might disagree with the way you’re splitting out the economic case and the vision case. There’s a way in which the last few months in particular have demonstrated that the case for clean electricity is also the case for cheap energy in the long run. What we just saw is the degree to which a totalitarian theocratic regime can use drone weaponry to control an artery of gas and oil in a way that can raise the cost of fossil fuels for the entire world.

One way to not rely on that one artery is to build more energy at home, to insource your energy. What are some ways to do that? One is to take advantage of an unbelievable cost revolution in solar and storage — not to mention, I would like wind, geothermal and nuclear, but those are alternatives for now — to use the cost revolution in solar and storage to build more in this country such that we have not only clean electricity but also clean electricity that isn’t going to ride the insurance spikes of a world in which there’s a war on the seas that every few months drives up the cost of hydrocarbons that are put on ships.

The distinction I am making, though, is between a world that is being described in terms of the present — we can have what we have now, but it is not subject to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz — and actually imagining energy and clean energy as a generator of future wealth and change.

Something that makes abundance distinctive from where a lot of Democratic Party progressive politics have been for a long time, and you’ve written a lot about this as well, is there has been a long-running skepticism, going back to the beginning of the environmental movement, of energy. You want to reduce, reuse and recycle, and you want to put on a sweater.

Abundance is, distinctively, pretty pro-energy. It believes that a world in which we all have access to much more energy would be a better world, and dramatically so. It would make possible all these technological innovations, like vertical farming and mass desalination. It believes that the technology is there, or nearly there, to do that cleanly, and that if you really invest in that, both in terms of things we know how to build — like wind and solar, as well as things that we are getting better at building, like batteries — and other things we would like to have revolutions in, like geothermal and nuclear, that something really different is possible.

I agree that you could use the current moment to pivot to that. What I’m saying is I am not seeing people really do that, and it’s actually an important dividing line. Is what you’re talking about just securing a better energy supply than we have now? Or is what you’re talking about a world of clean, energetic wealth that you can somehow describe, but that is quite different from the world we now live in?

Dunkelman: This is a perfect case for abundance in this sense. To Derek’s point, we’ve now got incredibly expensive fossil fuel energy because of the current crisis.

But set that aside. We have, at our fingertips, technology that makes it possible for us to replace much of that with clean, environmentally sensitive forms of electricity generation.

The thing that we don’t have, the real cog in the wheel, is transmission. It is the fact that clean energy is created in certain places — it used to be that you would mine the coal or bring the oil or gas through a pipeline to the place where it was going to actually be converted into electricity, and then it would be brought locally to the people who were nearby.

Now we’ve got the problem of having the wind and solar power being generated in places that are far away from where the load is going to be expended, and we need to build lines that connect the generation to the place where people want to use the electricity.

You’ve got a solar farm here and a city there, and between the two of them are a wealthy neighborhood, a pristine forest and a struggling, more marginalized neighborhood. The line has to go through one of those three places.

Abundance Democrats have not articulated the way that we’re going to come to that decision expeditiously. We have given in to our fantasy that if you just put these three groups, some of whom are going to be affected by this new transmission line, into a room and have them articulate their problems, we will magically come to some sort of consensus. But in most cases we don’t, and we often get tripped up by it.

This is the big challenge coming for abundance: We have to build a system that allows for us to make trade-offs. We need a system where everyone has a voice and no one has a veto, where we get to a decision expeditiously and it’s not subject to endless litigation.

The challenge for our movement, for abundance, generally, and for progressivism, is: How do we make government work?

You’re right that abundance should be bigger than: Let’s get rid of red tape. This is not getting rid of red tape. This is metabolizing a whole series of conflicting interests so that we get to a decision.

Well, I agree with that. At the core of abundance is the idea of a strong state, a state capable of making decisions, a state capable of executing on those decisions, implementing them and building things in the real world.

The Trump administration began with DOGE, which, on the one hand, was enormously destructive of state capacity. On the other hand, it was proof that you could do a lot more to the state than people thought you could, that the rules or regulations were not nearly as binding as people thought.

I am seeing Democrats begin to metabolize the idea that if they are put back into power, they’re going to need to take some of those lessons to build something different.

I want to play a clip from Pete Buttigieg just the other day.

Archival clip of Pete Buttigieg: My word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do.

We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say: Here you go — I give you the world as it looked in 2023.

That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need.

So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things, too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

So that Buttigieg clip is fan service for me. That’s what I want to hear somebody saying. But I wouldn’t say he goes on to say what those different terms should be.

This is a really big, unsettled question for Democrats, and you heard it also in the Newsom clip earlier: They know that after DOGE, after all this destruction and after the recognition that things can work differently, that they have to work differently. They cannot just build back; they can’t even just build back better. They have to build something different. But I don’t think they know on what principles different things should be built.

Marc, this is obviously in your wheelhouse a bit. What would you tell Pete Buttigieg?

Dunkelman: We need to make it so that when various bureaucracies within the federal government are thinking about whether to cite new wind farms off the coast — and there are implications for energy, for the fishing industry, for wildlife and birds and for the energy companies onshore, and all of these things that have divergent interests — right now, the federal government, and government, generally, gets caught up in those negotiations, again with the fantasy that if everyone gives their voice and we just have an equal conversation ——

But wait, I want to stop you for a second because I feel like you’re framing this as if — you keep saying “the fantasy.” But it’s the law. There are courts. I talk to the people making these decisions. They are worried about lawsuits.

Dunkelman: Absolutely.

They’re worried about the project getting dragged out. One reason Elon Musk just gutted things during DOGE — the Trump administration didn’t try to do anything through statute, through law. They didn’t try to remake the Civil Service or its rules, except through executive order.

To change things architecturally, and to change things in terms of who can decide what, at the level you’re talking about — to make power wieldable in this way — it requires new laws, and that makes it harder. Because it can get filibustered, and nobody is going to throw you a parade for remaking the Administrative Procedure Act. Who wants to spend all their time on that?

I’m not saying that even directionally I disagree with you, but I do think it’s worth saying: What you’re describing is not just a bunch of progressives imagining it would be nice. It’s actually how the whole thing works. You get sued if you don’t follow it.

Dunkelman: That’s absolutely true, and that’s the system that we’ve built over the course of the last 50 years. This is the challenge for abundance, and you’re right, it’s not a simple fix. It’s not something that a DOGE could have done.

We need to have in our minds a process that we believe is fair and that when people don’t get the outcome that they want, they will abide by it and understand that was determined to be in the public interest.

I am one of 17 Cincinnati Bengals fans in the entire world. We all know each other. There was a moment in the last Super Bowl ——

The amount of angry emails I’m about to get because of this comment. There are 19 and the other ones are pissed. [Chuckles.]

Dunkelman: Fair enough. You’ll get three.

In the Super Bowl a few years ago, there was a call at the end against Logan Wilson for pass interference at the end of the game And it was not pass interference. I feel very strongly about this — all 17 of us feel very strongly about this. But it was called, and the play went on.

I think that without that call, the Bengals likely would have won the game, but we lost. I don’t sit here today and litigate whether or not the Bengals were actually Super Bowl champions several years ago.

We haven’t created within the government a system by which we can take a whole series of conflicting signals, requirements, demands and concerns, and metabolize them into a decision where someone decides — someone who understands that there’s an environmental cost, that it’s not great for the fishermen, that we’re giving up some clean energy — but this is the thing that we’re going to do. And those who lose, who didn’t get what they wanted, are forced to stand down.

This is the criticism I have in the real world for abundance: I’m not sure that we are articulating how we’re going to make these trade-offs in a way that makes sense and is fair to those who need to have a voice, but doesn’t allow for interminable debate.

What’s your version of this?

Thompson: DOGE was a total disaster. Some people say: Oh, you know, what we’ll just do is we’ll build DOGE, but better. That’s what raises the question: What is the thing we want progressive abundance DOGE to do better? There’s a little bit of a blank space there.

Let me try to fill out some ideas. One of the failures of the Biden administration that you and I talked about a lot on the tour was the failure to spend money authorized under the bipartisan infrastructure bill. I talked to a lot of people at the state level about what they saw as the reason rural broadband money, tens of billions of dollars of it, didn’t actually build rural broadband and why several billion dollars of electric-vehicle charger stations money was also not spent.

The answer that I kept hearing: They felt like the people they were talking to in the Biden administration were coming up with excuses to extend the period of time to come up with more instruments of delay than were necessary by the rules inscribed by the law itself.

That brings me to a point that you might think of as DOGE but better, but I sometimes think of as being a little bit separate: This idea that abundance is not just a set of ideas and laws and rules — it’s the people who execute them.

One thing I think the incoming, hopefully, Democratic administration in 2029 will value is not just a new set of rules that value speed but personnel who value speed. You can actually go quite far by bringing in people who really want laws to be passed and then money to be spent expeditiously and are looking for ways to do that legally.

Not by violating the law, because as much as it’s talked about how much Donald Trump, and Musk when he was in government, just ran through everything with a chain saw and machete — you look at all the various ways that Trump has lost in the courts. That has consistently slowed him down in doing all kinds of things.

The Trump administration is now paying back $166 billion in tariff fees. That’s not moving fast. That’s moving fast, and then moving very slow, because you have to undo everything you just did. So you want to follow the law, but you also want to bring people into government who really want to move quickly.

To the question of what we want to do quickly: The bipartisan infrastructure law was in many ways a very abundance-like law. They wanted to spend money to improve American infrastructure.

In particular, if you look at the delays happening right now with transmission lines and transformers, we need to find some way, whether through regulation or legislation or personnel, to build this stuff much faster. You cannot electrify a grid if there’s interconnection queues and transformer delays of months and years. That’s the kind of thing you’d want the progressive DOGE to do.

What’s also important right now: The delays in the drug development pipeline at the level of the F.D.A. and clinical trials, are absolutely horrendous. There’s a group of people, including the researcher Ruxandra Teslo, who are looking at what clinical-trial abundance would mean, how you could use a combination of artificial intelligence and innovative public policy to renovate the way that we test drugs, to get the same safety benefits — but going at it in the same way as Warp Speed. Despite what the anti-vaxxers say, the Covid vaccines were really remarkably safe, given the health benefits they gave to the American and global populations.

Ezra, you talked about this a lot when we were traveling the country. I’m wondering how your thinking has evolved here and what you think a good DOGE would look like in 2029.

One of the lines I used often on the tour, as you remember, is: The left is overformed by institutions, and the right is underformed by them.

A different version of it was: The personality type of the left has become bureaucratic, and the personality type of the right has become autocratic.

That is where I think the opportunity is, and where the danger is. One thing DOGE very naturally did was create a rallying around the institutions of government among liberals — they’re trying to gut the N.I.H. and the National Science Foundation and U.S.A.I.D. and all these things, and we need to defend them.

One of the dangers, and I think this is what Buttigieg is getting at, is if liberals are pushed back into being the coalition of the status quo — the coalition of the institutions, the coalition telling you: Believe in government, believe in science — even if it’s not working for you.

Something that the left has to be very careful of is that it’s now the coalition that relies on the people for whom the institutions have worked. The left is the coalition of college grads.

Thompson: And you’re saying all left of center here.

I’m saying all left of center. I don’t mean the far left but the left-of-center coalition in this country, the Democratic Party.

It will naturally be fundamentally sympathetic to institutions, and one of the things we focused on in the book is this point, which came up earlier from Nick Bagley at the University of Michigan, about the procedure fetish. The argument he’s making is that the Democratic Party is full of lawyers, and lawyers look at the question of legitimacy through whether or not you have followed procedure: How do you legitimize and say that what the state is doing is appropriate? Well, you follow the rules.

Bagley — who is himself a lawyer who trains administrative law students, and who was also chief counsel for Gretchen Whitmer — makes the point that, no, for most people, legitimacy is attained through outcomes.

What I understand to be the meta-argument running through all of “Abundance” is that the point of government is to deliver real things to real people. You have to know what it is you’re trying to deliver.

If it’s housing, then the only thing that matters is not if you follow the rules. I’m not saying you should break the law, but you need to make the law. You need to structure the law; you need to structure the institutions such that they deliver the housing.

If they don’t deliver the housing, it does not matter how many laws you passed.

There is this debate I remember from the 2020 primary among the Democrats — Noah Smith, the economist and writer, calls it “checkism,” this tendency to just one-up each other on how much money you are promising to spend on green energy.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is how much green energy you got for that money.

You get this with the N.I.H. and other things — and we did a lot of work on this in the book. The National Institutes of Health is a marvel. It’s also a gigantic pressure toward conservatism. I don’t mean it in the political sense; I mean it in the cautionary sense, in what gets studied. They create more herd mentality, the more conventional wisdom.

You have to be very careful about institutional failure, particularly in government, where failing institutions cannot be outcompeted by newer, younger corporations.

The principle for me, which is maybe a bit different from your question of how to centralize more decision-making authority, is how do you take the reality and the constancy of institutional failure seriously? In particular, how do you do that when you are the coalition of people who are heavily formed by succeeding inside institutions?

What I find laudable in Elon Musk, amid the many things I find not laudable in him, is the relentlessness with which he tries to achieve his goals. That guy believes in getting us to Mars and creating an electric vehicle transition and all the rest of it, and nothing else matters to him. He tries to create organizations that run through walls, and he actually does make tremendous things happen in the world.

There is a culture among Democrats to hear the word “no” and be like: Well, the institution said no. It said we don’t do that. It said we can’t do that.

And then they explain it away. They speak from the institutional perspective and tell everybody why we can’t do anything. We can’t do it because of the filibuster, and the filibuster is just the way the Senate works. We can’t do it because of the way notice and comment periods are structured. Or we can’t move faster because of environmental review.

Instead of finding these things and saying: This is a problem, and we have to fix it, because what we promise to do is deliver for people.

The way I would think about the different terms is that the institutions are not the point of government — delivery is the point of government. The point of the institutions is to deliver. If they are not delivering, and if we don’t know if they’re delivering, then the institutions are not the thing we defend. The institutions are the things we upend, change, remake.

We have to treat them as much more liquid and malleable and have to take reports of their failure much more seriously than we do.

Thompson: The N.I.H. is a really interesting flashpoint for the perspective that you’re advancing.

Consider three approaches to the N.I.H.: a pro-establishment liberal approach, an anti-establishment MAGA approach — which we’ll call just current policy in 2026 — and an anti-establishment, abundance liberal approach.

The establishment approach would be to say: The N.I.H. spends $40 billion a year and is the jewel of global biomedical research. It is one of the most important, successful institutions in America. You cannot criticize it; you cannot touch it. It exists on a kind of spectral plane that we simply cannot broker any criticism of.

The current anti-establishment, MAGA approach essentially says — for a variety of reasons that are too complicated for me to go into right now: We hate universities, we don’t trust scientists, and we really don’t like mRNA vaccines. So we’re going to attack the universities. We’re going to destroy a lot of their scientific programs. We’re going to cut the N.I.H. grants by billions of dollars and also basically defund mRNA research because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump don’t like it very much. That’s catastrophic.

But then you come to category No. 3, and the abundance liberal approach. It doesn’t say: How dare you attack the N.I.H., which is a perfect program — it’s celestial, and you have no business criticizing it.

Instead, it says: You know what? Current policy is horrific. What’s also quite embarrassing is the fact that, according to their own testimony, American scientists who are funded by the N.I.H. spend up to 40 percent of their time filling out paperwork. These are the smartest people in the world, whom we entrusted with coming up with the most important breakthroughs about the cosmos and the human body and curing diseases. And what do we do for almost half of their time? Force them to check boxes.

That’s a failure, and it’s a failure that we inscribed with decades of cover-your-ass rules that force scientists to essentially become bureaucrats.

The abundance liberal approach is to say, again: What do we want to accomplish with the N.I.H.? Don’t we want an abundance of scientific breakthroughs? Isn’t a good way to do that — to unleash the productivity of scientists and unburden them from some of the paperwork requirements that we’ve added in the last few decades?

Let’s find a way to allow scientists to be scientists by reducing that burden. That’s an approach that I would like to see a “good DOGE” lean into in 2029.

Dunkelman: We’re getting a crucial distinction within abundance that we need to acknowledge.

One is your description there of scientists being forced to spend an incredible amount of time doing paperwork, which is incredibly inefficient. I don’t know anyone who’s going to hear that story and not think that’s an obvious reform we need to do.

There is a sense that government doesn’t work, sort of in the spirit of Bill Clinton’s reinventing government initiative from the 1990s. We should be rethinking these processes so that we are able to work more efficiently.

That is an important part of abundance. To your earlier admonition, that you don’t want abundance just to be: We’re going to get rid of red tape. That’s half of the challenge.

The other challenge is trying to metabolize conflict within the government, because some of that paperwork is ridiculous. But there are moments where we’re having ethical challenges about whether we can do this study, whether we’ve studied it to the point of feeling comfortable that it’s not going to have terrible side effects that we’re not aware of.

We’re going to have to make hard choices. What we have yet to articulate, and this is a criticism I have in my own book: I argue that we need to have a system where people have a voice but not a veto. I’m not sure that we have yet articulated this. It’s going to take some changes to laws, statutes and regulations.

The bureaucrats and liberals within government, the people who will be in the coming Democratic administration, I think they do want to get things out quickly, but they are deathly afraid of the consequences of making a choice that comes at a cost, particularly of a Democratic constituent.

As we come to an end here, I wanted to play a clip from Bernie Sanders. He was asked by my colleague David Leonhardt about abundance. I thought his answer to this was really interesting.

Archival clip of Bernie Sanders: If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy — absolutely correct. It is terrible.

I brought in, over the years, a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont, which is maybe better than most states, how hard it is to even get the bloody money out because you have so many — oh my God, we have 38 meetings, we’ve got to talk about this. Unbelievable.

I worked for years to bring two health clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed. I wanted two more, to renovate one and build another one. You cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center. It’s still not built, all right? So I don’t need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy. It is horrendous, and that is real, but that is not an ideology. That is common sense.

It’s good government. That’s what we should have. Ideology is: Do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living? Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class? Do you stand with the working class? That’s ideology.

This ideology versus common sense distinction Sanders is making is a rich text, but I want to hold it to the side for a minute. I love that answer, but I want to point something out.

I covered Sanders getting that money for community health clinics, which was in the Affordable Care Act, which passed in 2010. He’s saying one of the two is still not built.

One of the things I am saying around all this is that nobody should be angrier than the left if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy.

Sanders is saying: We all know bureaucracy sucks. We all know the government can’t do anything. We all know the meeting structure is crazy. But that’s not the point of politics.

But I think it is the point of politics, particularly if you are the political party that, in your ideology, believes very fundamentally that the government can do big, good things.

Actually confronting the ways in which bureaucracy is horrendous needs to be a very high-order issue. Because if you can’t do that, then the other parts of your ideology won’t work out.

You can confront the billionaires, you can raise taxes, but if people don’t trust you to spend the taxes well, then they’re actually not in the long term going to help you do that.

You see this now: Democrats promising to just cut and cut taxes on the middle class, because people don’t believe their taxes buy them that much. Raise them on the billionaires — but not on me.

My point here isn’t a critique of Sanders. I actually think what he’s saying in that answer is really important, and something you don’t hear that many people on the real left say.

In terms of prioritization, the question here is: What does it actually mean to prioritize fixing the horrendous bureaucracy so that you can build the damn health clinics?

Some things are the level of principle and who decides. But some things are the level of: What do you choose to do?

To me, it’s very core to abundance that you need a vision of where you’re trying to go, and then, in the near term, you have to choose to do the hard things necessary to get there.

Thompson: I have two statements and a question. I had a maybe 35-and-a-half-minute conversation with Zohran Mamdani last year over Zoom. And the one sentence that fell out of my mouth that got the most agreement on the other end of the call was when I said: It sounds to me like you are saying that Democrats cannot ask government to add more functions until they prove to the public that government can function in the first place.

I think he recognizes that, despite the attempt to distinguish common-sense ideas from ideology, as you just heard from Sanders, in many cases, it is the ability of the left to act with common sense that preserves the popularity of the ideology. To add government functions, you have to prove that government can function in the first place. That’s statement No. 1.

Statement 2 is that it’s notable in that quote that Sanders says that common-sense good governance is not an ideology, but caring for the working class is.

That’s interesting, because what he’s describing — the inability to build a health clinic — is essentially the idea that if Vermont politics were more common-sensical, they would be more likely to help the working class.

So I’m not sure I have the same distinction, or I see the reason to distinguish between a common-sense policy and an ideology.

The problems that America faces are not a shortage of ideologies but a shortage of good governance and of common-sense governing. I wonder to what extent you, as my co-author, prize the degree to which abundance is an ideology to the exclusion of its being a mere common-sense approach to governance?

I’m glad you turned this back on me, because I’m not sure I realized I thought this until you just made me think about it.

Sanders is using the word “ideology” there when I think the word is “vision.” When he’s describing this distinction between good government — bureaucracy that actually works, community health centers that actually get built — and then he says: “Ideology is: Do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living? Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class?”

I think he’s making a distinction between the way government and society work right now — are they working well or poorly? — and where they are trying to go that they have not gone.

I sort of understand that distinction he’s making. There’s a version of abundance which is just good government and a version of abundance that is a vision of a world that is quite unlike our own.

In a place like California or New York City, could there be a world in which you are a firefighter in San Francisco or Brooklyn and be able to afford a home in the city you’re keeping from burning down?

That is no less radical right now than Medicare for All is. Frankly, it’s more radical in those cities because at least we do actually have health care coverage for at least some of the poor in this country.

What we were talking about with clean energy abundance, a vision of a radically increased energetic standard of living, is actually a quite different world than we live in.

If we can actually figure out a way to make A.I. serve the public’s ends, and not just be a way to replace white-collar workers, that could create a radically different world.

So I think there is a real distinction between abundance as efficiency and abundance as vision.

To a bunch of the points, Marc, that you’re making: Abundance as efficiency and good government is hard enough. You’re really trying to change the guts of how a lot of our institutions work, and you are changing things that are answers to hard problems.

I probably believe a little bit more than you do that some things are just overgrown; they’re not all an actual effort to weigh values in a thoughtful way. But nevertheless, changing that will be hard.

But the point of changing all that, at least to me, is to make it possible to go somewhere we haven’t been: a world in which you don’t have to be afraid of your health care and how much it will cost, where you don’t have to be afraid of how much your rent is going to go up, or this economic insecurity and precarity so many people live under. That’s very important, and I believe in that.

There is also this vision of not just how to be more secure, but how to have possibilities and ways of living open to us that we don’t currently have. We could have high-speed rail in this country — bullet trains zooming around the way they do in Japan — and we don’t. That would feel really different to people.

If all abundance does is push forward zoning reforms for housing, that will be good, but I agree it’s not a vision. It’s supposed to be creating a different world than the one we live in.

Thompson: I’m glad you made the distinction, because if someone said: Your book has no vision, — I would say: Well, it does begin with a four-page vignette of what the future in 2050 would look like if we got abundance right.

Dunkelman: For a long time, I would argue that the progressive movement was born from abundance. That was the centralizing authority — that it could do big things really was the predominant ideology from the late 1800s through to the 1960s. There was an abundance-oriented approach to progressivism that we got away from.

We don’t want to go back to the old, but we need to find some core notion that government is capable and willing to make the hard choices that will drive humanity forward. That’s a fairly new conversation within the discourse on the left.

If your book, my book, a bunch of other books — if this movement refocuses on giving people faith that these public institutions can work, that they can make decisions expeditiously, that is a huge boon to the broader progressive project.

In the absence of government working, people turned to Trump, and it feels to me as though abundance, as an ideology or a vision or whatever you want to call it, is the most important antidote to the ascendance of MAGA. The people who were Reagan Democrats and who were Obama-Trump voters, and also the people who would be considered our base but simply don’t come out to vote from election to election — they need to believe that when they’re casting a ballot for a Democrat, that Democrat is going to be able to effectuate a change that is meaningful.

I think that’s a good place to end.

Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience? Marc, why don’t we begin with you?

Dunkelman: The first book I always recommend to anyone is Lizabeth Cohen’s “Making a New Deal,” which I think is the greatest pure book of history that I’ve ever read.

The second book that I hope people will pick up is Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck,” which gets into a lot of these issues explicitly in the realm of housing. He talks about how a lack of geographic mobility, for many of the reasons that we have here, has really been the hindrance to socioeconomic mobility. It’s a great book.

To a degree, my own book is in conversation with Robert A. Caro’s “The Power Broker.” That book was indicative of a way that progressivism used to work, and people too often ascribe it to Robert Moses, the man who was enormously powerful and influential in New York.

But there’s a third book I would recommend, by Marc Reisner, called “Cadillac Desert,” which essentially traces the same arc with a guy named Floyd Dominy running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the West. It is the same core story, but in an entirely different realm of public policy.

And I would love for listeners to understand the broader arc that I try to articulate in my book of how progressivism has changed, and how our ideas about how to drive progress have evolved.

Thompson: My three books: No. 1 is a weird choice, maybe, for a Reform Jew. But “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, in the first 30 pages in particular, is probably the most interesting analysis of the concept of morality that I’ve ever read.

At my ripe old age of 39, I find myself often wanting to re-enter reading experiences that I had when I was younger in the hopes that the reconsumption of that object would put me back in that mood again.

There was a period when I was in my 20s, when I just moved to New York, where I read a bunch of books that I adored: “The Emperor’s Children” by Claire Messud, “The Interestings” by Meg Wolitzer and “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt. I just reread “The Secret History” and it is so good. I finished the book two weeks ago and entered a brief one-hour period of mourning — that wonderful experience you have with a novel where the turning of the last page is a true, tragic event for the soul. It’s absolutely extraordinary.

I have a 4-month-old at home, so that means a lot of audiobooks. So the last book I’m going to recommend is specifically the audiobook of “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy. It is the trippiest version possible.

It’s an extraordinary book. If you haven’t read it, it’s a sort of 20th-century Dante, explaining an absolutely hellacious experience of a bunch of people in the mid-19th century along the Texas-Mexico border.

The guy who reads the audiobook has the most incredible, sonorous Southern accent. It’s just this amazing auditory experience. So if anyone wants to feel incredibly tripped out while they’re making coffee in the morning for their family, definitely get the audiobook of “Blood Meridian.” It’s a really extraordinary experience.

Derek Thompson, Marc Dunkelman, thank you very much.

Dunkelman: Thanks for having me.

Thompson: Thank you.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Annika Robbins and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Lauren Reddy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Brianna Johnson. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy, Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

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