The Origins of Abundance
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. So this week on Tuesday, March 18th, my book, Abundance, came out. I am excited about it. You've heard parts of it on the show. And I've been trying to restrain myself from completely overloading this feed with content about the book or its ideas. But I did do this show with my co-author, Derek Thompson, on his great podcast, Plain English. And Derek took us through something that I really enjoyed and hadn't expected to do, which is an intellectual genealogy of the book, how this came to be, both in terms of he and I working together, he and I coming to these ideas, and all of the other different writers and forces and movements and researchers who helped inform it. I thought it was worth sharing with all of you, too. Thank you.
Ezra Klein, hello and welcome. I am thrilled to be on Plain English. What a wonderful and rare opportunity to talk to you about abundance. This is exciting. We're going to answer somewhere between 10,000 and 11 billion questions about this book in the next few weeks. So I wanted to hold this conversation to the relatively high bar of What can we talk about together here that other interviewers probably won't even think to ask us? And the first thing that I thought of is that nobody else knows the story of why this book exists in the first place. So in my personal chronology, the story of this book starts in the fall of 2021. I am rolling off of book leave for a related but distinct project on the history of technological progress in America. I haven't had a very easy time with book leave because, as it turns out, writing a book is, among other things, a total pain in the ass. But one of the themes of this progress book that I was writing was the distinction between invention and implementation.
Just because somebody comes up with a good idea does not mean that it's going to change the world. ideas are cheap, building is hard. And I'm rolling off of book leave with this idea sort of swimming in my head. And in September 2021, I see that you have published an essay in the New York Times that's called, quote, the economic mistake the left is finally confronting. And you use this essay to introduce a term that you call supply side progressivism. What was this essay about? Why did you read it?
2021 um you know even when i go back to that essay you can you have moments as a writer i know you do and where a bunch of things that have been bothering you for a long time coherent to one thing you realize you've been thinking about one thing and not many and And so there are a couple of things floating in my head over the 30 years before that. One is that I felt progressivism had developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology. And this had happened, in my view, after the 2016 election, when a lot of Democrats turned on social media and the billionaires who ran social media platforms as prime reasons that Donald Trump had won, but also, and I don't actually think this next part is wrong, prime reasons that the public commons were becoming filled with toxicity.
And because the leaders of social media platforms sort of represented tech, they had become synonymous with tech, and they were these, you know, mega and quite unaccountable billionaires, I felt that the left had, in its anger at these companies, begun sort of giving up on technology. But then at the same time, two other more positive things were happening. One was the YIMBY movement. which was the sort of emergence of a strain of, at least at that time, I would call it progressivism, centered in California where I was living, which was not just saying we should build more houses. I think this is actually a quite important distinction. And I would really recommend Connor Doherty's book, Golden Gates, which is just a fantastic history of the Yimby's. But
It was not just saying we should build more homes. It wasn't just like, here's the supply and demand curve. It was saying that was illiberal, that you were not a social justice focused progressive. If you lived in a big economically important city like, you know, San Francisco or Palo Alto, and you were fighting the building of these homes, it had to be part of the self-definition.
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