r/ezraklein

Ezra’s discussions with Lee Drutman got me thinking about this video by the urbanist YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity. In the video they discuss the Montreal’s unique system of having local political parties, which only run on Montreal-specific issues. The result has been having the city be more proactive and innovative than most other North American cities.

Chris Hayes interviewed Ezra about AI and how the political system should interact with AI companies. Interestingly, Ezra was pretty dismissive of claims that superintelligence is near, and that instead we should focus on AI as it current exists. He said we should view it as something the government should have a say in, and that we need to focus on regulating its harms and ensuring it’s used to benefit society instead of just wealthy Silicon Valley investors.

Not EK, himself but this is covering one of the signature bits from abundance, how high speed rail failed in California, one of the most left leaning states in America.

I find Wendover is pretty neutral and unbiased. He is left leaning in that "reality has a liberal bias" way but he's rarely explicitly political, so I am looking forward to this one!

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps.

Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for whatever party is in power. And competitive districts in this country – already an endangered species – now teeter on extinction.

That is, unless something dramatic changes.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He’s one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates of selecting House members through proportional representation – a system used in many other countries that would make gerrymandering much more difficult. He’s the author of the 2020 book “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and writes the newsletter Undercurrent Events.

Submission statement: a top economics working paper (Best student paper at the 2025 European UEA meeting) adds some nuance to our discussion of zoning changes. From the abstract: "While zoning strongly constrains city growth, the effects of relaxing regulation take decades to materialize and are limited in inexpensive or densely built areas. This is due to the large fixed costs of redevelopment, which rise sharply with the size of existing buildings."

Some key findings:

1. In the data: "96% of demolished buildings are replaced with larger ones, with new structures on average 3.4 times larger than the ones they replace"

2. In the data: "While upzoning does increase construction, its effects materialize slowly over time: ten years after the policy change, only 9% of the newly allowed floorspace has been built"

3. Model prediction: "an ambitious but realistic upzoning of NYC could increase the city’s floorspace supply by 15 pp over 40 years. However, the take-up of upzoning remains limited in the medium run: at a 40-year horizon, only 18% of the newly allowed floorspace is built"

4. Model prediction: "Fully removing zoning regulations yields larger increases in floorspace (+58 pp), but even in this extreme scenario, residential rents in NYC decrease only moderately (-17 pp)...removing zoning would still yield sizable welfare gains for New Yorkers (+13 pp by 2060), with lower-income workers benefiting the most"

Bafflingly, these also seem to be created by the Mod. Doesn't this also go against the spirit and text of Rule 5?

Hope you all enjoy! I also gave this subreddit a shout-out, it turns out he knows about us 😅

What do you do when you feel anxious or insecure? Many of us try to push the feeling away, or we ruminate on it, or try to solve it, or avoid the thought altogether. But what would happen if we did the exact opposite?

The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön is the author of many beloved books, including “When Things Fall Apart,” “Welcoming the Unwelcome” and — my personal favorite — “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” And she has a way of inviting people to befriend the parts of life that typically induce dread — from uncertainty and suffering to loss and discomfort. And she argues that the process of sitting with these experiences and emotions actually releases their power over us. In a time as chaotic and tumultuous as ours, she has so much practical wisdom to share.

In this conversation, she shares what it looks like to actually let go of difficult emotions, the art of “collaborating with reality” when things don’t go as expected, and how to awaken yourself to the “nowness” of life.

Mentioned:

Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön

Welcoming the Unwelcome by Pema Chödrön

Another Kind of Freedom by Pema Chödrön

Book Recommendations:

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chögyam Trungpa

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

Enlightened Vagabond by Matthieu Ricard

On Friday, I moderated a forum with the top Democratic candidates for California governor, focusing on the state’s housing crisis.

California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office in 2019 promising to build millions of homes. And in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, designed to cut red tape and spur more construction. And yet the number of homes being built in California is basically the same as when he took office, and the state’s housing crisis remains, arguably, the worst in the country. So I wanted to know what the next governor would do about it.

We taped this at the Calvin Simmons Theater in Oakland, Calif. The candidates on the stage were Xavier Becerra, a former attorney general of California and health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden; Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose and a tech entrepreneur; Katie Porter, a former U.S. representative; Tom Steyer, a former San Francisco hedge fund manager, a climate activist and a philanthropist; and Antonio Villaraigosa, a former mayor of Los Angeles and speaker of the California State Assembly. This panel was recorded live. The Times did not fact-check candidates’ remarks.

Mentioned:

“Cost to Build Multifamily Housing in California More Than Twice as High as in Texas” by RAND

“What Worries Me Most About ‘Abundance’” with Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman, The Ezra Klein Show

Book Recommendations:

The Hour of the Predator by Giuliano da Empoli

Rain of Gold by Victor Villaseñor

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman

Ours Was the Shining Future by David Leonhardt

Listening to Ezra’s conversation with Helena Rosenblatt, and then the recent Abundance follow-up episode with Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman, I kept thinking there’s a deeper tension inside modern liberalism that Ezra is circling around but hasn’t fully articulated yet.

For most of liberalism’s history, “liberal” didn’t just mean procedural neutrality or individual rights. Rosenblatt’s point is that the older liberal tradition (from Cicero to Tocqueville to Mill) was deeply concerned with the formation of citizens capable of self-government.

That tradition assumed free societies required certain civic and moral capacities, like self-restraint, public spiritedness, reciprocity, and democratic participation.

But after the catastrophes of the 20th century, liberal thinkers became understandably suspicious of any politics centered on “forming” people. This is the argument that Samuel Moyn makes in his recent book, Liberalism Against Itself (hopefully, Ezra will invite Prof. Moyn to his podcast).

Liberalism increasingly retreated into neutrality: protect rights, avoid coercion, let individuals pursue their own conception of the good life.

The problem is that the vacuum never stayed neutral.

Markets shape people. Social media shapes people. Consumer capitalism shapes people.

And this is where I think the recent Abundance debates become really interesting. In the recent episode, Derek Thompson acknowledged that concentrated corporate power is also part of the problem, not just bureaucratic sclerosis.

That feels important because neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic framework. It was also a formation project. It produced a certain kind of self: hyper-individualized, entrepreneurial, optimized for consumption, detached from durable institutions and shared civic life.

In other words, liberalism stopped intentionally forming citizens, but the market never stopped forming consumers.

And I increasingly think this helps explain why Ezra has become more interested in meaning, belonging, institutional trust, loneliness, and civic life over the last few years. A lot of people are not just materially dissatisfied. They feel socially unformed and existentially untethered.

That’s also why I think some conservatives might have been partially right about the diagnosis of liberalism's ailings (though often very wrong about the solutions, like abortion bans and anti-gay crusades): free societies actually do depend on institutions that cultivate democratic character.

Consider families, schools, unions, churches, civic associations, mentorship structures, and public service. These institutions (what we call "civil society") have withered on the grape vine over the past fifty years. We are, to borrow the words of Robert Putnam, "bowling alone" and doom scrolling ourselves into oblivion, one Netflix binge at a time.

So I guess the questions I’m left with after the Rosenblatt and Thompson episodes are:

Can liberalism recover a thicker vision of citizenship and civic formation without sliding into paternalism or authoritarianism?

And can it also produce material abundance alongside social abundance and generate the kinds of institutions needed sustain liberal democracy in the face of democratic backsliding and populist demagogy?

Curious what others here think about this interpretation and whether it's a fair reading of Ezra's recent work on this topic.

Did listen to the Abundance recap podcast and felt like Derek was not willing to entertain what I take as a fairly serious issue about the optics of abundance.

I don't even think it's debatable that there is a lot of contempt for some of the key designs of new construction housing, whether it is called 'ikea' or 'cookie cutter' or that it's not historic enough for the neighorhood.

Ezra has probably talked about this elsewhere, but even the brownstones in Brooklyn etc I understand were held in contempt at the time, so there's always going to be something of a lag between what new construction looks like versus a more traditional/historic housing format.

The other thing I have read recently is that builders take out most of the mature trees when they are building in the suburbs. So it takes a decade or longer for that kind of landscaping to recover.

In the DC area, you see new neighborhoods with no trees and they just look a bit barren.

Here’s a shocking number: One out of eight American adults is taking a GLP-1, like Ozempic or Zepbound, according to a KFF poll.

GLP-1s are the biggest pharmaceutical story since antidepressants. But there’s still so much we don’t know.

“We’re only at the beginning of what’s been called this Ozempic era,” the journalist Julia Belluz told me. “I think we’re really just at the beginning of discovering the benefits and the harms of these drugs.” These discoveries begin in the research but are also expanding into how we think about our punishing beauty standards and the blurry lines between illness and wellness.

Belluz is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, with Kevin Hall, of “Food Intelligence.” She’s one of the best health and science reporters I know and has been reporting on GLP-1s for years.

In this conversation, Belluz takes me through what we know — and don’t know — about GLP-1s, their unexpected uses, how they are clashing with a culture obsessed with thinness and looksmaxxing, and whether everyone should be on them.

Mentioned:

“The obesity pay gap is worse than previously thought” by The Economist

“The Great Ozempic Experiment” by Julia Belluz

Book Recommendations:

Behave by Robert M. Sapolsky

The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum

Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken