ABUNDANCE: Derek Thompson on How to Actually Rebuild the American Dream

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is probably the most talked-about book in the country right now. And the most hotly debated. It’s a book about how we got here — here being a country without enough housing, a country that has lost its ambitious optimism, a country that has forgotten how to build. The prescription Ezra and Derek offer to cure what ails us is conspicuously pro-growth: more housing, more clean energy, more scientific development and technological innovation. But to pull that off, they argue, will require Democrats to question their endemic zeal for regulation. This view has fired up some liberals while simultaneously drawing ire from others. Today, Rufus sits down with Derek Thompson to talk about the book, the reaction to it, and how to convince political leaders from both sides of the aisle to embrace a liberalism that builds.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn Presents.
0:05.7	I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, Derek Thompson's rallying cry for abundance. Every now and then a book comes out that is vitally important and
0:35.6	that is vitally important and perfectly timed.
0:40.9	It's in the window of every bookstore. Everyone's talking about it.
0:45.7	That book right now is Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
0:52.5	Abundance, no subtitle, answers two pressing questions so many of us have in this moment of
0:58.9	political and economic turmoil.
1:01.7	How did we get here?
1:03.8	And what can we do about it?
1:05.2	Is there a path forward that could pull our country together and address the new, daunting
1:10.5	challenges we face?
1:12.5	Derek and Ezra's answer, abundance, a liberalism that builds.
1:17.8	An unapologetically pro-growth, pro-construction agenda to bring down the cost of housing,
1:23.7	address the challenge of climate change, and accelerate the technologies that can transform our world of scarcity into one of abundance for all of us.
1:33.4	You've probably heard of Derek and Ezra.
1:35.5	Ezra is an opinion columnist at the New York Times, and Derek is a staff writer at the Atlantic.
1:41.3	They're Democrats.
1:42.6	But in abundance, they are deeply critical of their own party.
1:47.2	As Derek puts it, we have to look in the mirror and say that the reason the Democratic brand
1:52.7	is profoundly in the shitter is not because Republicans have lied about outcomes in democratically
2:00.0	run places, but rather, much more depressingly, because
	...

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