Speaker unverified: belief

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…e, but what you need to do is explain why they should like your party. You need to have some message. You need to accept some fault. You need to think about what it was about you that drove them away. One of our deep views about politics right now and not politics policy, the texture of the economy of the country is that the last period in American politics, in the economy was about demand. The fundamental problem coming out of the financial crisis was demand. We had too little demand in the economy. Behind that too little demand in the economy was this other thing that was building up, which was a cost-of-living crisis. Housing was getting super expensive, healthcare in certain ways, energy. But energy is more complicated in ways we can talk about elder care, child care, higher education, right? This is a point, my wife is a journalist at the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey with Derek, and she wrote this piece on in early 2020. The pandemic that went very viral called the Affordability Crisis. And it sticks in my head because she’s writing at a time when people were saying, “The economy’s great. Everything’s great.” You looked at measures of consumer confidence in 2020, February of 2020, terrific. She’s like, “So, how come if the economy’s so great? Everybody I talked to is so upset.” And she’s like, “Look, people are making more money than ever, but it’s getting eaten up and eaten up and eaten up by these things they really need.” They keep getting more expensive, even as consumer goods get cheaper, then the pandemic hits, the problem becomes COVID, but then you have inflation and inflation moves the problem of the economy, the fundamental problem everybody’s paying attention to. From the demand side, how do we get more people at work? How do we get them to spend more money to the supply side? We don’t have enough. We have a constriction of semiconductors, of used cars, and then eventually everything, everything is getting more expensive. We’ll see what happens with tariffs. We do get, by 2024, the rate of inflation under control, but prices are still much higher and now people are paying real attention to prices. And the affordability crisis, which again is a cost-of-living crisis, which had been growing for a very long time, is now at crisis levels and it becomes the substance of politics. You had all these Democrats saying, I don’t know what the problem is. Inflation has come down to whatever it was, 3 to 4% in 2024, and they’re right about that. But one, the price level of everything remained high. Two, people were now like, “The housing so expensive. I’m never going to be able to afford a home.” My parents went to public university, debt free. I could never do that. And what we’ve done is fail. Two, people were now like, “The housing so expensive. I’m never going to be able to afford a home.” My parents went to public university, debt free. I could never do that. And what we’ve done is fail. I mean, Democrats in this case, Republicans haven’t done that great on it either. But in blue states, Democrats have failed on cost of living. The reason California, Illinois, New York are losing hundreds of thousands of people to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, is that they failed on cost of living. It is too expensive to live there, and the reason they failed at cost of living is supply. They did not make enough. They actually made it too hard in many cases to make enough of the things people needed. Some of those are straightforward. We didn’t let people build enough homes. Some of them are more like we’ve made it too expensive to build public infrastructure like high-speed rail or the Second Avenue subway. Some of it has to do, I think, in the long run with innovation and the relationship between Democrats and technology. But one of our views is that there are other things in politics that will matter too, but we are in a period where the cost-of-living supply affordability is the fundamental economic question. Donald Trump himself has said he won because of the price of groceries. He’s got this very funny quote where he is like, nobody said, I don’t have a Donald Trump impression, but he’s like, “Nobody ever used the word groceries in politics before I did.” Well, it’d be good if he then wasn’t making it more expensive, but Democrats believe his weakness is cost of living. They’re probably right, but they don’t have a strength on it. The key question our book is trying to refocus politics on is how do we make more of what we need? How does the government either organize itself or organize markets to create more of what we need, and how do we admit as liberals times when we’ve made it so the government makes it too hard to make more of what we need? I’ll say one last thing and this is a pretty long answer. I thought one of the most important things that has come out recently is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Brian Deese, who’s a former head of Joe Biden’s National Economics Council, and Deese helped negotiate every major Bill Biden passed. It’s a very- He’s helped negotiate every major bill Biden passed. It’s a very straightforward piece about what it is Democrats have not done to make it possible to build at the level of their goals. And he says things like, “We should just remove federal funding from cities that have highly restrictive home zoning codes.” He says, “We should have a goal for how much nuclear we build in the next 10 years. We should be trying to reach a goal of new nuclear capacity.” It’s a very, very important piece because Deese is right at the center of Democratic policy. Instead of retrenching, he’s like, “Okay, we didn’t get there. What do we do now to make it possible to get to the place we promised you we can go?” And we should say that the book you’ve mentioned, which I’ve gotten a chance to read, and I think it’s incredible, highly recommend, it’s called Abundance. I think of it as a kind of manifesto for what the left would represent in the coming years. So I think people should read it from that angle. And both of you have been writing about this topic from different angles for a while. I think in ’22, Derek, you wrote an article on this topic of abundance titled A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. And Ezra, you wrote an article in ’21, a supply side progressivism titled The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting. And you’ve just described, laid out this more progressive perspective on supply side economics that you’re presenting in Abundance. I was wondering if you could give the broad, high-level explanation of this idea of supply side progressivism?…

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