Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when a liberal thinker shifts his attention from polarization to economic abundance? Ezra Klein’s new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, argues for an agenda of increased housing, infrastructure, clean energy, and innovation. But does abundance clash with polarization—or offer a way through it?
In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agenda interacts with political polarization, whether it's is an elite-driven movement, where Ezra favors NIMBYism, the geographic distribution of US cities, an abundance-driven approach to health care, what to do about fertility decline, how the U.S. federal government might prepare for AGI, whether mass layoffs in government are justified, Ezra's recommended travel destinations, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded March 7th, 2025.
Help keep the show ad free by donating today!
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on X and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on X
- Follow Ezra on X
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Join our Discord
- Email us: [email protected]
- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
Photo Credit: (c) Lucas Foglia
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:25.9 | Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:29.7 | Today I'm chatting with Ezra Klein, who needs no introduction, and when I say that, |
| 0:34.3 | in fact, I do not introduce the person. |
| 0:37.1 | Ezra has a new book out with Derek Thompson called Abundance. |
| 0:40.6 | This is one of the best and most important books of the year. |
| 0:43.6 | Ezra, welcome. |
| 0:45.1 | Always thrilled to be here, Tyler. |
| 0:46.8 | Your last book, and indeed our last conversation, was on political polarization. |
| 0:51.9 | How do the abundance agenda and political polarization interact? |
| 0:57.1 | It is an effort to recut the line of polarization. So you and I used to debate this. |
| 1:02.9 | You said for a while you thought polarization was going down. Do you still think that? Do you think it has |
| 1:06.2 | gone down? I think it is, it has more dimensions than ever before in terms of what a lot of our government does and in terms of, say, racially, how people vote, I think it's down a lot. |
| 1:17.7 | So I think if you go, one of the things about polarization that I think makes it tricky to talk about is we say it like it is a static thing. |
| 1:25.3 | But what you are polarized over really matters. |
| 1:27.2 | So when I was |
| 1:27.9 | writing a lot of the book that came out in 2020 in the cursed early quarter of 2020 before COVID |
| 1:35.1 | bisected the tour, that was a polarization that had a number of dimensions, but I had written a lot of |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Tyler, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Tyler and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.