Talking "Abundance" with Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

The book, the discourse, and beyond

It was my pleasure to chat briefly last week with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about their new book, “Abundance.” A lot of the main ideas here should be very familiar to Slow Boring readers so I tried to skip the basics and dive into some more advanced points that I thought were interesting.

This begins with my initial reaction to the book when I read it in galleys and hadn’t seen anyone else’s reviews which was that relative to other groups and organizations using the “abundance” moniker, I think Klein & Thompson is a strikingly left-wing work — very focused on achieving more public sector projects and advancing clean energy goals. We then get into the surprisingly (to me) furious backlash from the neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement, which on the surface has nothing to do with the topics of the books, and to what extent is this backlash a mistake or a profound factional disagreement. We talk about the book as a blueprint for this political movement and how it might have been received differently had Harris won last November. Last but not least, I try to ask the authors leading questions to suggest that the ideological differences between clean energy abundance and mainstream environmentalism may be larger than it seems at first glance.

I hope you’ll enjoy, and paid members can read the transcript below.