Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] Okay, how about writing a book? I don’t know how to rate whether or not writing a book is overrated or underrated because I don’t exactly know how people rate it. It was underrated for me. I signed on to do a book with Simon & Schuster, probably six years ago now. I put it down to launch Vox. The book I ended up writing is very different than the book I intended to write. It was one of the most generative, intellectual experiences I’ve ever had. It forced me . . . It is me pulling the deep model and rebuilding the deep model I have of how American politics works and functions. And one of the humbling things about that is recognizing how much in my model that I thought was there actually wasn’t. Or it was working off of intuition, but it wasn’t strong enough, or it wasn’t built on good evidence there. A really sobering thing for me in doing this book was, I had to do a chapter on asymmetric polarization because that’s a big part of this. If you’re talking about polarization, you have to talk about why the Republican Party has become a very different institution from the Democratic Party. And it was really to my surprise to find that, for all that political science had a strong view that there was asymmetric polarization going on, they did not have a good story for why it was happening. The causal mechanism is extremely underdeveloped. I had to go through a lot of different drafts, and a lot of reporting, and a lot of reading on that chapter to come up with something that I found convincing, but asymmetric polarization was a very big part of my story of American politics, and recognizing how undertheorized it was in my head was striking. So, I think that writing a book — it forces you to pull forward things that you might assume are pretty settled because some level of intuition, or value, or just hearing other people talk about it has made you think it is more sure than it is. Then when you actually have to put it in a coherent framework, you find out that there’s a lot of blank space in there. Telecommuting — how far can we extend the principle?…

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