About this episode
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.richardhanania.comDerek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic (profile, X account), and the host of the Plain English podcast. He joins me to discuss his new book Abundance, co-authored with Ezra Klein. Derek was actually responsible for the first article I ever published in a mainstream media outlet, which was a response to him in The Atlantic in 2012 on the question of whether clutch matters in basketball. He had encouraged me to submit it after I emailed him. I was really proud of the accomplishment at the time, and it got me thinking that I could publish in mainstream outlets, though it would be years until I would do so again. Derek had understandably forgotten about our initial connection, and it was fun to remind him of it here. After a bit of sports talk, we get to the substance of his book. I was already well versed in some of the intellectual currents that flowed into it, including progress studies, state capacity liberalism, and basic free market economics, yet I still learned quite a bit. Thompson and Klein do an excellent job of putting together the data, anecdotes, and anecdata necessary to make a compelling case of where liberalism has gone off the rails.We spend a good bit of time talking about how the authors decide to frame the issues involved. In particular, I wonder why they do not make a full-throated defense of markets, since so much of the abundance agenda involves getting government out of the way. This leads to a discussion of why conservative states do so much better on the housing issue, and whether a pro-abundance agenda can actually make for a popular political program. See Klein’s recent article, “There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball.” See also my article
