Every time I go to YouTube to watch a music video or a guide to fixing my toilet, I get suggestions for a channel called Jubilee. They make videos called things like "One Progressive versus 900 Black Conservatives" and "Can One Trump Voter Persuade Fifteen Gender Studies Majors?" We've certainly come a long way from "Ben Shapiro DESTROYS SJW with FACTS and LOGIC" and "Seventeen Ways Gilmore Girls is Problematic, Actually," haven't we?
For the last ten years, we've had debates about capitalism and socialism, free speech and hate speech, and whether wearing a sombrero to a Halloween party is a just a fun gag or equivalent to being a Klansmen. We've seen the alt-right and the dirtbag left. We somehow live in world where you're considered an ignorant rube if you don't know what BIPOC means and also where thirteen year olds drop incel lingo in TikToks. We've had vibe shift after vibe shift. But what, materially, has changed in the past ten years?
Basically nothing. Housing, education, healthcare, and childcare grow ever more expensive. Our cities don't look all that different from those of the 1970s. New infrastructure and clean energy projects are slow to roll out. The Chinese built three new cities in the time it took me to write this sentence, and New York can barely build a subway line. Why?
The answer for Jubilee viewers (if they actually exist, which I doubt) is that the other side, which is bad, has had too much power. There is, of course, some truth to this. Debates over the size of the government, the nature of the economic system, and cultural norms around gender and race are important. Some policies are better than others. Some cultural trends are good, and others are bad. But the stakes of the usual political frameworks are actually quite low. They receive too much attention too much of the time and have too little to show for it. The real issues, as smart people are increasingly recognizing, are permitting reform, municipal zoning regulations, administrative law, NSF annual reports, and the California Environmental Quality Act. At least that's what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue.
The thesis of the book is that it has become too hard to build things in America. It has become too hard to build housing, infrastructure, mass transit, and clean energy plants. It has also become too hard to invent new things and deploy them at scale. And if liberals want the future they claim to want, they are going to have to learn why this is so and get around to fixing it:
This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That's it. That's the thesis.
I said "liberals" because the book is aimed directly at the left (as represented by the actually existing Democratic Party, not the Trotskyite Acid Communists of your dream Left), and it makes many critiques of the left. This is because, the authors write, "we don't see ourselves as effective messengers to the right." For two progressive journalists at the commanding heights of establishment media (NYT and The Atlantic), this is probably true. A second reason, is that many of the issues preventing abundance were caused by the style of progressive politics that has been dominant since the seventies. (A third reason, I like to imagine, is that the authors know that for now any conservative who has serious proposals for policy reform are likely to be sidelined by rightoids who care more about humiliating the left/grifting than the details of housing regulations.)
The book details the barriers to abundance in housing, infrastructure and energy, state capacity (the ability to the state to effectively achieve its goals), and science and technology. What makes the book interesting is not this grab-bag of seemingly unrelated policy errors, but its ability to show a common thread that leads to failure. Essentially, that thread is the post-New Deal style of doing progressive politics.
An example illustrates this better than any explanation. Take the case of the proposed high speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which the authors take as illustrative. California has been governed by Democrats for a long time. By now, it should be a little Sweden inside America, with universal healthcare, comfortable trains, and affordable homes. Instead, it has the worst homelessness problem in the country and a stratospheric cost of living. And no high-speed trains. In 2008, voters approved a bill to construct the LA-SF high-speed rail line. The Obama administration provided federal support. In case you are not aware, you cannot, in 2025, take a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Or from anywhere in California to anywhere else. Maybe, one day, you will be able to take a train from Merced to Bakersfield, if the planners of the railroad do not scale back their ambitions any further.
What happened? Klein and Thompson write:
What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It's negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money.
Throughout the book, the authors detail the changes in progressive politics that led to these absurd delays and the general inability of progressives to get things done. These changes in progressive political culture emerged during a period of post New Deal mistrust of The Man, who wanted to build freeways through your neighborhood and dump poison in your streams. That was all well and good for the time, but now people are using regulations and legal precedents set in the 70s to block solar farms, high-speed rail, and dense apartment complexes. For the sake of, you know, the environment. (Certainly not to preserve their nice views and artificially high home prices!)
To avoid making this review any longer, I would condense the pathologies of this style of doing politics to three key components:
Too much "voice." The community activist politics championed by the 60s and 70s New Left has given way to NIMBYism and special interests . Policies designed to give greater power to the marginalized and dis-empowered have, paradoxically, led to greater control by the wealthy and special interests, who are better able to navigate processes like zoning meetings and notice and comment periods for federal regulations. Thus, a tiny minority of interests have power to veto and delay a wide range of projects, often on dubious or absurd grounds. More generally, liberals have a tendency to consult as many groups as possible, which not only slows down projects but also leads to:
"Everything bagel liberalism." In an effort to please all of their constituents (or, more accurately, the non-profits that claim to represent them), liberals tack on as many goals to a project as possible. Thus, the semiconductor fabs built by the CHIPS act need to provide childcare, use union labor, and make efforts to recruit women and underrepresented minorities into the construction industry, among many other things. Whatever you think of these goals, they are not related to constructing semiconductor fabs. Adding on additional goals makes projects more complicated, difficult, and costly.
Trusting process over results. The main incentive for anyone on a project is to follow all the correct procedural rules rather than achieving the main goals of the project. This leads to extreme risk aversion and deference to courts and lawyers. Thus the state takes too few risks and rarely delivers what it promises.
Ok, I could write a lot more about this book. I strongly suggest you read it. I suggest you read the papers in the footnotes. I have been following these ideas for a while now, so not too much of it came as a surprise. But it's nice to see the crystallization of a wide body of work into a single book. This book frustrates me with its details of how little we build, but it also gives me hope that one day our politics might become less stupid.
I am starting to think that one of the main reasons we are stuck in a "Capitalism vs Socialism: EPIC DEBATE" culture is that the many of the major policy failures of our time are sort of orthogonal to traditional ideological frameworks. As long as the core elements of the good life are kept out of reach for a huge number of Americans, we can all just keep spinning our wheels rehashing century old debates. (See the "Housing Theory of Everything https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/). But maybe if our politicians got serious about addressing the barriers to abundance, we could escape this doom loop.
Post-Script: My Criticism
A lot of the above was going ga-ga trying to get people to read this book, but no review is complete without criticism, so here's mine. I don't think this book really underscores the pain that will be necessary if American progressives take its arguments seriously. The book is often too kind to existing decision makers, and it is full of phrases like "this is a worthwhile cause, but..." when often the barriers to, for example, high-speed rail are erected by quite stupid causes!
A lot of Democratic constituents and interest groups are going to have to take bitter medicine, and others, frankly, will have to be crushed if this agenda is going to work. If Democrats are going to break free from the NGO-Consultant-Lawyer-Suburban-"In This House We Believe"-Sign-Owner Industrial Complex, they are actually going to have to give some people the boot. This requires both a change in temperament and policy. Some people are going to have to be told no. Others are going to have to be kicked out of decision making outright.
I wish the book would have reconciled with how to do that politically. It's not as if liberals are scrambling for good policies to run on. They know their projects fail to deliver. They know it takes forever to get things done. They just haven't had the factional infighting that could let them solve these problems.
I just listened to the two authors on the Lex Fridman podcast. (I know, I know, Lex is a corporealized LLM, but at least he lets his guests talk at length). I think they're completely on point with NIMBYism being the major barrier to affordable housing.
An HOA board president I worked with frothed at the mouth because apartment buildings were planned for a parcel of land a mile away, with acres of forest and train tracks between. It was being rezoned from light industrial and had been used for making concrete storm sewer pipes.
