Saikat Chakrabarti
speaker
279 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Saikat Chakrabarti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
completely sweeps in and changes the entire course of the Democratic Party and the entire course of this nation.
In fact, that's the only way we get out of this.
That's the only way to actually defeat authoritarianism is if we can prove that democracy can work to improve people's lives.
And that's what we're going to do.
So, Kat? Well, I actually agree with a lot of the goal of abundance. And I think everyone here agrees that America is really stuck. And the specific reasons why we're stuck, I think, might be where there's some disagreement or this broader than a thing than just process.
But the thing I really want to add to the discussion and the question we've been studying at New Consensus has been, how do countries get unstuck? Because if you look at the history of the 20th century,
Every modern developed nation, most of them liberal democracies, they went through these phases of rapidly transforming their economies and creating absurd levels of prosperity for pretty much everyone in their society. And, you know, they often did it after these periods of being really stuck.
America and the mobilization for World War II, we did after years of stagnation and the Great Depression. And what we've sort of seen is countries seem to do it by pitching the sort of sweeping transformation of the whole economy and executing at breakneck speed, they flip into this whole other mode of operating that I think is really different than how we operate today in America.
And we've been calling it mission mode at New Consensus, but it's different three really distinct ways. Countries in mission mode They have this whole other kind of leadership that pops up that doesn't just pitch a mission. They actually follow through and execute. They organize society actively to be a part of it. And really importantly, they capture the national attention.
You know, they really make a show of the progress. They call it the heroes and they use that as political capital to blow through obstacles, whether that's corporate monopolies or process. And the second part is they make comprehensive plans. They don't just pass a bunch of policies and take their hands off the steering wheel.
They actually plan for all the things that will need to happen to make things happen. And, you know, third piece is they create financing and executing institutions. And so America used to have a bunch of these all across our society. You know, during World War II, the largest that we've ever had was one called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
And the RFC wasn't just a public investment bank. It was like a project manager. It would go out and find problems and find bottlenecks and push and actively make sure stuff got done, things got built, do whatever is necessary to just push things along. And we've really tried to find examples of societies that managed to do this kind of broad-based work. prosperity through iterative slow reforms.
And it's really hard to find a single society that did it. You know, it's there's something about the scale and speed of a sweeping transformation that creates this momentum that gives you this escape velocity where these countries finally get the gumption to tackle all these obstacles that are standing in the way of progress.
And so that's the big piece that's missing for how do you actually get past all these obstacles that we're talking about.
Yeah, sorry, Zephyr, you want to jump in?
Well, yeah, you know, we have a huge housing shortage in California. I think the process that we use to build housing is crazy. Everyone knows it's not going to build enough housing. We'd have this process in San Francisco where you approve on a parcel-by-parcel method to decide which housing gets built. So that process is a big part of the problem.
But I don't actually think it's just going to be a process that'll fix it because what we see is often financing is a problem. Mm-hmm. Like last year, a bunch of construction projects in San Francisco got stalled because interest rates went up. So construction loans got very expensive. And our current approach to that is throwing our hands up and saying, well, I guess that's too bad.
But it's why it's really key that we have public financing institutions to try to make sure this stuff moves along and keeps happening. We can't have just this one solution. There's going to be so many bottlenecks that come in the way. Even if we fix the financing, there might be something else that pops up, right?
So it's this whole other mindset we really need to get into to try to figure out how to make sure the houses get built. Zephyr, what's your take on this?
First off, you know, just in the San Francisco versus Texas example that we're talking about, I just want to make like one sort of point there. Because Austin, which is a city that people refer to a lot where they did a lot of streamlined permitting. Construction went up, rents went down, really good. But it wasn't actually enough. The 50% of Austin's population is still cost burdened by rent.
Showing 201–220 of 279 · page 11 of 14
← Previous
Next →