Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the argument against the abundance agenda that most genuinely troubles you? I will admit this myself, that it does not know what to do about the question of voice. One thing we’re tracking in the book — there’s a lot of great research on this from people like Zach Liskow and Leah Brooks — is that one of the key reasons it has become much more expensive and cumbersome to build is that over decades, we put into place all kinds of ways for citizens to exercise voice when something they don’t like is happening. They can go to the planning board meeting. They can sue under the California Environmental Quality Act or sometimes under the National Environmental Policy Act. There are just a million of these, depending on which particular process you’re looking at. On the one hand, you want that to be possible. You want it to be possible for people to come and say, “This project will harm me.” You don’t want the government to be capable of being completely imperious. But one, it’s very unrepresentative who shows up. This is a classic example, but the people who show up to block an affordable housing complex are the people who live on that block now, not the people who would live on that block if the complex was built. The second is that it’s just unrepresentative in other ways. Who has time? Who has enough information to know how the policies work? I am pretty familiar with, as I know you are, the way federal regulations go through. There’re all kinds of public comment periods. Those public comment periods were built for the public to comment, but the people who actually know how the public-comment periods work are lobbyists, are special interests, are people who have the organized money to participate. So, it’s tricky. You don’t want to take away the opportunities for voice because it’s very easy to tip into abusiveness. In some ways, having this book come out at the same moment that Elon Musk and DOGE are doing things with, let’s call it, very, very little public input and very little agency input even — you can see what the dark version of this, our mutual friend, Steve Teles, calls what they’re doing, dark abundance. But with all these things, you’re going to have to strike a balance, and it’s hard to know how to strike the balance. I have a section on the fiasco of high-speed rail in California. Towards the end of that, I say, “Look, China’s built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the period of time that California was failing to build 500 miles.” On the one hand, all these things I’m describing happening in the California high-speed rail situation do not happen in China. If they want to move the storage facility, they just move it. They don’t go through years and years of lawsuits about moving it a couple of feet back. That allows for a very imperious and even abusive government of individual rights. It also allows you to build trains. There are a lot of things here that are uncomfortably about striking a balance, as opposed to saying, “We are all wrong the way we do it now. of individual rights. It also allows you to build trains. There are a lot of things here that are uncomfortably about striking a balance, as opposed to saying, “We are all wrong the way we do it now. We would be all right if we did it this other way.”…

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