Abundance and the Left

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Abundance,” the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, hit bookstore shelves a little over a month ago, and the response has been beyond anything I could have imagined. And it’s generated a lot of interesting critiques, too, especially from the left. So I wanted to dedicate an episode to talking through some of them. My guests today are both on the left but have very different perspectives. Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the most prominent voices in the antimonopoly movement. Saikat Chakrabarti is the president and co-founder of New Consensus, a think tank that has been trying to think through what it would take to build at Green New Deal scale and pace. And he is currently running to unseat Nancy Pelosi in Congress. I found this conversation wonderfully clarifying — both in the places it revealed agreement, and perhaps even more in the places it revealed difference. Mentioned: “How the Gentry Won: Property Law’s Embrace of Stasis” by David Schleicher and Roderick M. Hills, Jr. “The High Cost of Producing Multifamily Housing in California” by Jason M. Ward and Luke Schlake Zephyr’s Book Recommendations: The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank Saikat’s Book Recommendations: Destructive Creation by Mark R. Wilson Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The It is a wild thing to release a book into the world.
0:35.1	Abundance, the book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, has been out for a
0:37.6	month and a half. It hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week, which
0:41.7	thank you to all of you out there who have read it or listened to it. No way that would have happened
0:46.8	without you. And it's doing things out there that I never really expected it to do, creating
0:51.8	arguments that I didn't see coming, which is amazing.
0:55.2	And so I wanted to have on today two people from the left, which is where much more the pushback
1:00.0	than I necessarily saw coming has come from.
1:02.8	One from the anti-monopoly left, which I think sees abundance in ways I didn't initially
1:07.9	foresee as a threat, as a challenge.
1:11.5	And I also wanted to have somebody on from the part of the left that has become obsessed with building,
1:15.3	the Green New Deal left, the industrial policy left, the left that thinks we have lost the ability
1:21.7	to accomplish the missions the left has set for America through the government.
1:27.7	So my guest today are Shokat Chakabati, who is running for Congress in San Francisco against Nancy Pelosi.
1:34.2	He's the president and co-founder of the new consensus think tank, and he was AOC's first chief of staff.
1:40.2	He helped recruit her for Congress and run her campaign.
1:43.2	And Zepertitsch, who is a law professor
1:44.9	at Fordham University, a key figure in anti-monopoly thinking. She has mounted runs for governor,
1:50.7	for a state attorney general, for Congress, has authored a number of books. I found this conversation
1:55.9	both great about abundance, but also about some of the broader goals, questions, animating impulses and
2:02.3	theories of the left as it tries to define itself for this next era.
	...

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