What happens when a liberal thinker shifts his attention from polarization to economic abundance? Ezra Klein’s new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, argues for an agenda of increased housing, infrastructure, clean energy, and innovation. But does abundance clash with polarization—or offer a way through it?
In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agenda interacts with political polarization, whether it’s is an elite-driven movement, where Ezra favors NIMBYism, the geographic distribution of US cities, an abundance-driven approach to health care, what to do about fertility decline, how the U.S. federal government might prepare for AGI, whether mass layoffs in government are justified, Ezra’s recommended travel destinations, and more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded March 7th, 2025
Read the full transcript
Thank you to listener David Kemp for sponsoring this transcript.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m chatting with Ezra Klein, who needs no introduction. When I say that, in fact, I do not introduce the person. Ezra has a new book out with Derek Thompson, called Abundance. This is one of the best and most important books of the year. Ezra, welcome.
EZRA KLEIN: Always thrilled to be here, Tyler.
COWEN: Your last book, and indeed, our last conversation was on political polarization. How do the abundance agenda and political polarization interact?
KLEIN: It is an effort to recut the line of polarization. You and I used to debate this. You said, for a while, you thought polarization was going down. Do you still think that? Do you think it has gone down?
COWEN: I think it is. It has more dimensions than ever before… in terms of what a lot of our government does, and in terms of, say, racially, how people vote, I think it’s down a lot.
KLEIN: One of the things about polarization that I think makes it tricky to talk about is, we say it like it is a static thing, but what you are polarized over really matters. When I was writing a lot of the book that came out in 2020 — in the cursed early quarter of 2020 before COVID bisected the tour — that was a polarization that had a number of dimensions, but I had written a lot of that book in the Obama years. I was thinking during a lot of it, polarization over the Supreme Court, polarization over Obamacare, polarization over taxes.
You remember back when we used to talk a lot about the Grover Norquist tax pledge in Washington, and that was a big thing about how the parties were so divided. Compared to then, I think now we have less policy polarization, and more system-level polarization.
COWEN: I agree with that.
KLEIN: The debate is less over taxes. I actually think we could do more. We’ll see. The Republicans still like tax cuts, and they’re going to pass a big one, but in some theoretical way, I think if you follow the intellectual currents here, we are less polarized over things like Obamacare, over taxes, but the question of whether or not the system itself is legitimate, I think is highly, highly polarizing.
COWEN: You don’t think we’ll end up with one party that’s the pro-NIMBY party?
KLEIN: No. This is an effort to do two things compared to the other book. Derek obviously will have his own versions of this. One is, at the end of my last book, my beloved wife, Annie Lowrey, said to me, “You don’t really do any chin stroking in this book. It’s all descriptive. You don’t say much about what you think the world should be.” That rang in my head.
Then the other was that I was watching, in my own view, polarization just get more dysfunctional. I don’t think polarization about the system itself is a healthy form of polarization. To the extent these two things have a relationship, it’s a relationship to describe a different cross-cutting cleavage than what we have.
I would like to see fights between people who believe in what I would call different forms of abundance politics, as I say in the introduction. I think you have a version of this, let’s say, state capacity libertarianism. You can see Jim Pethokoukis on the right with his Conservative Futurist. There are different people I feel more allied with on the right, even if we don’t have all the same views, as opposed to, I think, what we are actually having, which is over legitimacy, which I think is a pretty toxic form of division.
COWEN: Is the abundance agenda primarily a view of elites? And insofar as it succeeds, it will succeed to the extent that politics is not directly ruled by democratic forces?
KLEIN: I don’t know that I think that’s true, but it’s always a little bit true. In my own head, I think there are two kinds of policy and procedure overhang. One is the kind people actually want. A lot of NIMBYism is popular at the level at which it is happening.
But then, there’s a kind that comes from drift. It doesn’t end up being in the book, but I wrote a Times piece about this. I don’t know if you tracked the story a while back that there was this public toilet being built in Noe Valley in a park — I used to live near this park — that was hooked up for water. The cost estimate was $1.7 million. They released a ribbon cutting for this. [laughs] They came out to announce that they had gotten the money from the State of California to build this $1.7 million toilet.
Then my colleague, Heather Knight, back then at the San Francisco Chronicle, reported on this, and people freaked out. They were not happy that the city had gotten $1.7 million for a toilet. They thought, “Why?” I went and tracked down, how does a toilet get to $1.7 million? One of the justifications from Rec and Parks in SF was, “Look, we’ve built all these other toilets that were $1.6, $1.7 million, and nobody complained about that.”
It’s this baroque process where you have seven, eight, nine agencies. You have all these public comment periods. There are all these rules on the grant proposal, and how that goes out, and what the procurement is, and how you do the bids on the contracts. Nobody asked for that. That’s drift. That is process building on top of itself. That is nobody really having the power to say no or wanting to go through the difficulty of saying no.
I cut that differently from some of the — there are places where people do not want to see an affordable housing complex built down the block. Then there are places where people would actually like to have an affordable public restroom next to the playground where there are kids who — I’ve been through this period of mine very recently — who are not fully potty-trained, playing. They’re not out there hoping that we can add $1.3 million in cost by process; they just don’t really know that it has happened.
COWEN: If the abundance agenda is, to some extent, an elite movement, it seems that high density, for the most part, is bad for elites. In California, very wealthy elites — they want to move to Woodside. In Northern Virginia, they want to move to McLean. Does this mean the NIMBY part of the movement is just never going to get very far? That you can take a bunch of places, say, near metro stops, and allow for somewhat denser housing, but it will stop there.
KLEIN: Is that true, though? I live in New York City now, and my sense is, very wealthy elites — while they have a weekend house or vacation house, possibly in the Hamptons, they live in Manhattan in glass towers, or they’ve started to buy really expensive property in Brooklyn or in —
COWEN: But that’s one state, right? The country as a whole — the elites want the ranch two hours from Houston.
KLEIN: It seems they want both, to me. I feel like, the elites of DC live in McLean — that was true 20 years ago, and it feels less true now. You still live there, but is that really what people do when they get rich in DC now? I feel like they buy expensive DC property because DC got safer, and the food got better, and all the things that everybody knows.
COWEN: I think that’s true. They may be more likely to live north on Connecticut Avenue, but they’re still not angling for that to be much denser. Quite the contrary.
KLEIN: That might be right. Look, I think that people, when they get rich, want space. So, to the extent that density makes it harder to have space, I think people at a certain level of wealth probably have both a place in the city and a place a bit outside the city.
COWEN: What’s the argument against the abundance agenda that most genuinely troubles you?
KLEIN: 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. We would be all right if we did it this other way.”
COWEN: Do you worry that higher residential density might lead to lower fertility? I don’t think we know that for sure, but it seems plausibly true if you look at East Asia.
KLEIN: It seems to me that lower fertility is driven by women having more opportunities, and that the opportunity cost in leisure, money, pleasure, et cetera, of having children young goes up.
COWEN: That’s clearly a factor. It might be the major factor, but still, if you’re in a smaller apartment, it’s very hard to have three kids in Boston.
KLEIN: Is that true, though? My mom was out in New York recently. My great-great-grandparents, I guess it would be, lived in tenements in New York. We toured the Tenement Museum, which is a great tour to take because they have these preserved tenements from that period. These were very, very, very small places where you had, in the one we were in, I think it was six or seven people in the family were living there, and there was a boarder. That was very common.
If you go and you look in high-fertility immigrant communities — I used to live in San Francisco — you go down further into Daly City, things like that. People talk about this as very overcrowded. On some level, certainly it is, compared to the way I live, but in most places, people just live with less space.
So, I do think there’s a cultural norm thing here. Density, plus the norm that the kids all have their own room, is going to be very, very bad for fertility. But that’s going to be another consequence of, I think, the almost feedback loop of low-fertility societies. You begin to have expectations that cut against high-fertility families.
COWEN: I’m a NIMBY for central Paris. Are you?
KLEIN: Probably for central Paris, but I’d want to be very careful about which places I became a NIMBY for. I’m a NIMBY for Big Sur, and I’ve been thinking about, how do I resolve something like that?
The chapter on housing — which I’d be very curious for your thoughts about — the chapter on housing, I try to make this argument that the cities are the frontier of the modern economy, that the frontier is not the edge of the landmass, but the places where ideas happen. Cities are broadly the places where ideas happen, and around those ideas are a lot of engines of mobility, and we’ve thrown that process into reverse.
I have this great research in there from Peter Ganong and Shoag, who show that over decades, it used to be that we had income convergence across states. That was driven by people moving from poor areas to richer areas. But now that is actually thrown into reverse as people leave richer areas for poorer areas because the cost of living is so high. We used to have this driver of mobility, which is, people moved to the high-productivity, high-income area, even if they themselves were poor. Now it’s so hard to build a house there or buy a house there that they can’t do that.
The reason I bring that up is that I think you should have very different intuitions about places that are highly economically important compared to places that aren’t. My view is not that every patch of land on earth needs a high rise. My view is that there are a number of high-density cities that play huge roles in idea generation, and in economic mobility, and you should need to have an extremely good reason to make it very hard to build in them. I’m not as familiar with Paris as you are, I’m a little bit familiar with Paris —
COWEN: But you know it’s lovely. That’s all you need to know.
KLEIN: Yes, I know it’s lovely. In Brooklyn and New York, we’ve made a huge swath of the land historic preservation. I think you want to have a very high bar for what you’re going to say is actually a beautiful, culturally important space worth preserving. There are some of them, and some of them are in Paris, but the question is, how do you set a limit on that?
Different people have thought about that. Maybe you have only a certain number of designations, and it’s functionally a cap and trade for historic importance. I think you need something like that to protect against the creep of those designations covering, in effect, a quarter of these entire cities or half of these entire cities.
COWEN: What do you think about the geographic distribution of US cities? As you know, for a country of our size, our biggest cities are not actually that big. We have a Nashville, and we have an Austin, and now there’s a Chattanooga. Are the gains from that potentially high enough that it’s okay to thwart more activity in or near New York City, in or near the Bay Area? The geographic diversification of American intellectual and business life seems quite important to me.
KLEIN: I agree it seems important. It does not seem to me that our policy to force that into happening is all that good. I don’t really know why. I think I probably am a little more skeptical than you on how well that dispersion is working.
I think it is remarkable that New York does not have one significant AI company. Just remarkable. It doesn’t even really have one significant tech company. The power of these agglomerations is so overwhelming and so sticky that I think you want to be very skeptical of the idea that if you begin to gate one of them, you will have constructive and productive spillover to some other nearby secondary city. I love the secondary cities, but I don’t think that’s how you improve them.
COWEN: What if we think about our top three universities? Say, Harvard, MIT, Stanford — they’re incredibly gated. They take very small numbers of people. They generate ideas at a world-beating pace. Nowhere in the world comes close to them. Doesn’t that mean if you have good selection, the price is super high, gating can be just fine, and people are free to go to plenty of other schools?
KLEIN: They are, but would Harvard be better or worse if it were twice as big? I think it would be better. I’m not sure what the limit on that is. There is some limit, but I don’t think they’re exactly where they should be. I also think the question of universities is a little bit different because you do have this very early forcing mechanism, which is, kids apply. They have to go somewhere, and if they can’t go to Harvard, they’re going to pick the next one down.
Whereas with a lot of what we’re seeing in the cities, what happens is that people live in far-flung ways further out from the city. You spend an hour and a half in traffic every day. It’s not that having applied to have your job in San Francisco and been rejected, your second best is Reno. You might live an hour and a half out, and that might be a pretty hard life for you. I think this is something that a lot of measures of affordability miss.
Annie has written great pieces about this for The Atlantic. She calls it “The Wrong-Apartment Problem.” That you can run a measure of housing affordability and find people who do not actually look that rent burdened, but in practice, they’re living 97 minutes away from the place they would like to live in order to be able to afford the home. I think we should see that as a pretty big public policy failure.
COWEN: Here’s a question from a reader, and I’m paraphrasing. “I can see why you would favor Obamacare and an abundance agenda because Obamacare throws a lot more resources at the healthcare sector in some ways. It did have Medicare cuts, but nonetheless, it’s not choking the sector. But if you favor an abundance agenda, can you then possibly favor single-payer health insurance through the government, which does tend to choke resources and stifle innovation?”
KLEIN: I think it would depend on how you did the single-payer healthcare. Here, we should talk about — because it’s referenced glancingly in the book in a place where you and I differ — but the supervillain view that I hold and your view, which is that you should negotiate drug prices. I’ve always thought on that because I think in some ways, it’s a better toy example than single payer versus Obamacare.
I think you want to take the amount of innovation you’re getting very, very, very seriously. I’ve written pieces about this, that I think if you’re going to do Medicare drug pricing at any kind of significant level, you want to be pairing that with a pretty significant agenda to make drug discovery much easier, to make testing much easier.
A huge number of the choke points that make it hard to discover new pharmaceuticals — it’s not that if you could do it, you can’t make money off of it. It’s that it is very, very, very, very cumbersome to take flyers on these drugs. We could have had the GLP-1s decades ago, but there are a lot of reasons within the system that it would have been costly to try that out.
Heidi Williams, who we both know, has some very, I think, good ideas for doing this. I think a huge failure of the way we talk about what we call healthcare reform, is, it’s always health insurance reform. We are extremely focused on the question, can somebody go in and afford the hospital bill — which is good, I want them to be able to afford the hospital bill — and not what is that hospital actually providing to them and what is it that we can put in place in the system at every level to make sure the pace of drug discovery and drug advancements is going really well.
We spend some time in one of the chapters Derek wrote on the story of Operation Warp Speed. I always find two things really remarkable about that story. One is that they really did quite a bit under Donald Trump. It’s very unfortunate, I think, that both policy and structure of policy got disowned afterwards, but they did quite a bit to speed the ability to not just bring these things to research and to market, but the government was very active in there trying to figure out how to make sure supply constraints and secondary items like vials — because the vials need to be refrigerated and so on — that it wouldn’t retard the rollout.
The government was acting in many ways in what Derek called a bottleneck detective. Months later, I was talking to some of the people who were working on trying to create pan-coronavirus vaccines. This doesn’t seem to have panned out, and I don’t know if it didn’t pan out exactly because they weren’t able to figure it out or because of what I’m about to say.
This was still when COVID was very, very live in people’s minds. Here are these people working on a vaccine that could have genuinely ended the threat. They described spending so much of their time, among other things, sourcing monkeys because they just could not find the monkeys they needed to test the vaccines on. That was one side of it. I thought the government was doing a good job on that with Operation Warp Speed.
Then when it came out, because the government had done a lot for it, there was a very strong equity component in it. When that came out, it was not that the richest people were the only ones who could get COVID vaccines. If you were wealthy and connected, it was a bit easier for you, but the cost of that vaccine at the beginning was zero. It was zero for everybody in America. People could go, and they could get it in CVS. We really did pair an aggressive supply-side policy with an aggressive demand-side policy. I don’t think we do that enough.
In my critique at least of my side of this, I think liberalism doesn’t do this enough. It will often ask, “How can we make it so people can afford something?” but not “How can we make sure there is enough of the thing? Also, “How can we make sure there is value in the thing that right now there isn’t because we haven’t done sufficient innovations?” The question of single payer and the system — it’s like, did you radically increase the number of medical residency slots? What kinds of things are you doing inside the innovation system and inside the way we bring devices and drugs to market?
Then the point I think that you’re making, or that your reader is making, if you drive the price of things too far down, you are going to create shortages of them, and you are going to reduce the incentives to innovate in the future. You have to be very thoughtful and careful about that.
COWEN: That’s not an accident. If you look at the pure or single-payer systems — Canada or the UK — they’re very fiscally strapped. They grossly underinvest. Most of the incentives are to stint and drive down prices and not actually want to see too much innovation. In Canada, they even send a lot of people to their deaths under possibly dubious circumstances, which is a pretty radical place to end up in. So, why trust these systems to fine-tune where the incentives ought to be when they’re just basically fiscally, if not quite broke, badly ailing?
KLEIN: My view has always been that you want a floor, not a ceiling on your system. I’ve never actually been a supporter of . . . People often mean different things when they say single-payer systems, but when we’re really talking about something like Canada or the NHS — that’s never been the structure I would move towards.
I much prefer the kind of system you see in a place like France, where what you have is a significant healthcare, a basic provision floor. A huge amount of the value of healthcare comes out of basic healthcare. Then you have supplementary insurance which you can buy on the open market — and people do — or if you can’t afford it, there are subsidized versions of it. So, you have what I used to describe as a floor without a ceiling.
I prefer multi-payer systems. I do want things provided universally at a basic level, and then I do think, for some people who can’t afford above that, there should be public provision of it. I think you want to be very, very careful about not having any exit from either the government pricing regime or the structure of government insurance because there are things that come into the system that it’s hard to know how to ration them. It’s hard to know how to provide them, and you do want to make sure there is sufficient incentive to develop them.
COWEN: What if someone said, a true abundance agenda — of course, this could never happen — but it’s basically to zero out Medicare and Medicaid, which is a lot of money, and spend all of that on science and birth subsidies and social security for that matter. Why isn’t that the true abundance agenda?
KLEIN: The true abundance agenda would be to zero out Medicare and Medicaid and spend — ?
COWEN: Christian Scientists — they still have decent life expectancy. People would have maybe higher social security. They could still buy healthcare. We’d have many more people. It’d be a much younger society, more dynamic society. Scientific advances would mean we’d cure many more diseases, forms of cancer. People would probably live longer. Why not do that? Just go crazy on innovation and number of births.
KLEIN: One, I think that’s hugely probably a false choice. You can fund innovation, but if you don’t have provision of healthcare . . . This is the other side of your arguments about drug pricing, but your view is that you get a huge innovation signal from the fact that in a rich country, virtually everybody — and certainly all older people — have healthcare and they’re able to buy it. One, I don’t buy that you could close down Medicare and Medicaid without substantially harming innovation. I don’t buy that on a political level at all. One of the —
COWEN: It’s not going to happen but you could have prizes for really good drugs, right?
KLEIN: It doesn’t fit my politics.
COWEN: Why not?
KLEIN: I see abundance as a corrective to where we are because I do care about equity. Robin Hanson and I used to argue about this back when he was big on his healthcare-is-all-signaling tip. I think there’s something to the fact that some of healthcare is signaling, but healthcare plays a lot of roles for people.
One of the huge roles in addition — beyond the roles it directly plays in treating people with disease and treating people who need pharmaceuticals and so on — is that the amount of anxiety, fear, et cetera people have when they are sick, is tremendous. One thing we see in a lot of different studies, in a lot of different research around health is that one of the main ways healthcare affects wellbeing is it reduces anxiety and depression, particularly around when people get sick.
Think of anybody in your life, how they begin to act when they get sick. Throwing people to the wolves on that and saying, “Don’t worry, we’re investing a lot in basic R&D,” is not compassionate and humane. I’m not —
COWEN: Even if you cure a lot more cancers, say. If you’re talking about equity, the person who dies at age 46 of cancer — Medicare doesn’t save them. That’s true inequity. We could increase defense spending, which would help much poorer places around the world. It seems the opposite of equity, especially Medicare, to channel so much money to relatively wealthy older people who, for sure, have gotten in 65 years of life.
KLEIN: I just don’t buy that you should begin to so radically discount the life and life quality of older people. As you know, people who are older end up at the doctor quite a lot, and putting them back out on the street on that, I don’t think would work.
I could come up with versions of this that I think would, in some ways, be a tougher philosophical test. What you just said, what if you begin to cut out half of defense spending, and you move it into public health subsidies for the poor worldwide? Or for that matter, you could do that with Medicare and Medicaid and all of a sudden PEPFAR is covering everything for everybody under the poverty line in the entire world.
[sighs] There’s a certain nationalism in this. I do believe you have to take care of your people, but I think that once you have accepted the basic view, as I have, that health insurance is a way that is valuable to take care of people, both in terms of their life outcomes and in terms of the quality of life they lead, then I think you are in a place where zeroing it out for poor and elderly people is a bad idea on the merits and also, obviously, a horrific idea politically.
But abundance is not just a relentless expansion of supply. I do want to say that because you can push anything. One of the critiques I’m getting on the left is, funnily, the opposite of the thought experiment you’re offering, which is, “Oh, here come Ezra and Derek saying all that matters is how many solar panels we build, and how many drugs we invent, and how many trains we build. What about the child tax credit? What about childcare for everyone?”
The theory here is not meant to replace every other argument in American — or for that matter, global — politics. It doesn’t say you don’t need to think about child tax credits, which I intensely support. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about the provision of health insurance. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about the provision of public education.
There are a certain set of problems that have become very binding on policy things that people who believe what I believe about the world should care about. I’m a Californian. I lived in California for much of the writing of this book. California is a place deranged by supply constraints. The fact that it’s deranged by supply constraints, by the inability to build high-speed rail, by the inability to build homes, by the inability to build clean energy at anything like the pace needed to reach the goals California itself has set for itself should be seen as a real problem.
It doesn’t mean it replaces the problem or completely moves it out of anything on the demand side or the subsidy side of the system, but it is a thing that, if you are a liberal, I think, who wants to be honest about the problems of liberal governance, you have to confront.
COWEN: With all the talk of supply constraints, shouldn’t you of all people be obsessed with fertility decline? It makes everything unaffordable. It limits market size.
KLEIN: I kind of am.
COWEN: Then we need to take money from somewhere and spend it on birth subsidies. I’m saying take it from Medicare.
KLEIN: Do you think birth subsidies work?
COWEN: We don’t know. I think we need to try them more and more extreme.
KLEIN: I am extremely open to birth subsidies. The question of where you should take them from in the budget is an interesting one, but I’m extremely open to birth subsidies. I think people should be paid for being parents. Part of why people do not have children earlier — particularly for women — a huge financial penalty that is lifelong. I’m not sure we know though, whether or not there’s a birth subsidy at a level that is politically in any way viable that actually works. I would love to see any country in the world pass some non-authoritarian, like non-Romanian decades-ago policy that seems to have an effect on birth rates.
I both think we are going to have severe political problems as societies shrink, and in my own moral framework, I think the continuation of human experience is a beautiful and important thing in the way it has just been absorbed into a liberal expressive individualism. I hear people talk about it as if it’s a good that is akin to whether or not they should take an international trip, like what are the cost benefits? I think that’s mistaken. I’m pro trying to think about fertility. I just have not seen any policies that work.
COWEN: The more uncertain we are about birth subsidies — and I agree that’s the correct view — doesn’t that mean we should all the more commit to some kind of revival of cultural conservatism on matters of family? That there’s an asymmetric pairing. Families should be expected to have three or four children, and that’s the alternative. Yes, we should try subsidies, but the more uncertain we are, we’ve just got to go the Ross Douthat route. I think he has five kids now. Good for him.
KLEIN: I don’t think this is wrong. I just don’t think it’s doable. I listened to a fascinating interview between Bari Weiss and Louise Perry recently. It was a Valentine’s Day interview on Bari’s podcast, Honestly. Louise Perry, for people who don’t know her, is a conservative British heterodox feminist thinker. I don’t exactly know how to describe her.
COWEN: Emergent Ventures winner also.
KLEIN: Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
COWEN: She’s great.
KLEIN: She was saying towards the end, as Bari was pushing her on solutions, because she’s making some points. She’s thinking about the sexual relationships between men and women in this podcast, more than birth rates. She’s saying things like birth control, at least the pill — it’s not that it should be banned. It should only be available for married women, that it is good for married women to be able to space out children, but we should not take so much of the weight and the stakes, and the incentive to marry off of the singles dating market.
Now, it’s obviously not my view, but I think it gets to what I don’t think is going to work in the view you’re describing here, which is, when society and technology have changed so much, when you have things like the pill, when you have the opportunities we now have for people to live lives of real expressionism, of building their identity around work, which we train people to do from a very early age, I don’t know that there is a way to insert an ethic, a cultural application of shaming or re-moralization around this that will substantially change behavior. If there was, I think some society already would’ve done it effectively.
Now, Ross, and the societies I think we would talk about here — that’s coming from religion. It’s not coming from just cultural conservatism; it’s coming from religion. Religion is very, very, very powerful, but I don’t know how we re-religionize people. Getting people to actually believe is different than telling them, in an abstract way, that birth outcomes are better and society is more cohesive in Utah, where the influence of the Church of Latter-day Saints is still very strong.
I actually think this idea, that we should just move back to a more shaming cultural conservatism, has functionally all the same problems of the idea, which is we should just have more pronatal policy. It just doesn’t appear to work. Lots of places try it and it doesn’t work. Hungary is not a huge birth success story right now, nor is Russia. There are places that still have more of this view or have tried to reinsert it, and it didn’t work.
Israel is a little bit of a more interesting case from this perspective, but when you are there . . . People do, to some degree, what they see around them, and the influence of the Haredi families, of the ultra-orthodox families, which are huge, is everywhere. I was just in Israel, not just now, but back in June, and there was obviously a lot happening that you could notice, but you really could feel the difference of being in a high-fertility society there.
I’d had this interaction with somebody at Prospect Park before I had gone to Israel, and he had four kids with him. We had just been chatting, and I must’ve said something that made him think a little bit like I was asking, “What are you doing here with four kids?” I’d asked if they were all his because they looked different. I thought it might be a group of kids. He’s like,” Oh, yes, but . . .” He was explaining it away. He was like, “We’d only meant to have three and then we had twins.”
In Israel, nobody’s explaining away why they have four kids. Tons of people have four kids, tons of people have six kids, tons of people have eight kids. You have a society there that there is an anchor weight of just what is normal being placed by the fact that there is still a huge conservative religious community. But just doing the thing I think JD Vance was trying to do when he was scolding childless cat ladies — that doesn’t appear to work.
COWEN: But at the macro level, it can work if enough things change over enough time. Keep in mind, if this doesn’t happen culturally, it will happen through replacement. It happens one way or the other.
KLEIN: That might happen, but I don’t know.
COWEN: One favors one version of it, no matter what.
KLEIN: It could or it couldn’t, right? I understand there’s a view that if liberal secular societies begin to shrink, eventually it’s just going to be the Amish will take over the world. Maybe. Or maybe, as the Amish society grows, they will be impinged upon by all the pressures that hit all these other societies, and within a couple of generations their birth rates will fall very rapidly. I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all, would you?
COWEN: It may not be the Amish, but whichever are the remnants of high birth-rate cultures, it seems to me they will dominate. Maybe it’s Niger in Sahelian Africa.
KLEIN: Yes, but my understanding of the research on this is that while the fertility numbers are higher in obviously Sub-Saharan Africa, they’re also on a downward trend. It seems to be a downward trend everywhere, which would make sense because you have a universal technological shock to fertility. The richer people get, the more of that shock there is.
COWEN: Keep in mind though, before the pandemic, the US was above replacement rate. It doesn’t seem so utopian to think we could get back to 2.2, 2.3.
KLEIN: I have two contrasting views here. On the one hand, I am of the view that it seems likely that as societies shrink, they will figure out a cultural answer paired with policy answers, so people can actually have the lives that they say they want to have, which is lives where they marry and have two or three kids. I think the evidence is pretty good that the pressure there has to be on marrying younger. You’ve probably seen the charts that have been going around — I think from the FT — but basically if people were marrying younger . . .
The difference here is really about whether or not you get married. The piece of leverage is on marriage. People are much more unlikely, correctly, to have children outside the context of a highly committed, stable relationship. It’s very, very hard to have children as a single parent. People do it, obviously, but that’s going to be one of the main ingredients of fertility falling, because it’s just an incredibly, incredibly difficult thing to do. So, there’s that.
It seems to me that you should be able to, practically, if you begin to reorient the cultural and policy machine of society, to bring up the birth rate by 0.4. That can’t be that hard. Then you ask yourself, “Why doesn’t anybody seem able to do it?”
To the extent I’m pessimistic about both the ability to control use policy here and pessimistic about the ability of culture to act in an organized fashion — people have chosen to change the culture and the culture had a downstream change — is because I think that some of the societies in Asia and other places that have entered into a very rapid shrinkage and have treated it as a problem, one of them would have figured something out by now.
Now, maybe it just hasn’t been long enough and South Korea is going to execute an amazing turnaround on this, but what I’m observing in South Korea, and frankly what I feel like I’m observing even a little bit in America, is that gender relations worsen as this happens, right?
COWEN: I agree.
KLEIN: It’s not like it brings everybody together to deal with this problem and think about how we can have the families we want to have and so on. It actually creates enmity, it creates scarcity, and those are very, very poor political conditions for what is both a cultural and policy project based on a cross-gender cohesion and long-term planning.
It seems like it should be possible, but, look, you look at this as much or more than I do. I feel like you’re sounding more optimistic than I suspect you really are. Or if you are not, then what is your answer for why no one has done it successfully yet?
COWEN: I genuinely don’t know. I fear it’s, as with negative emotional contagion — another topic we’ve discussed offline — that once you get on it, it’s hard to reverse, but it’s, in fact, not impossible to reverse. There are periodic historical reversals in both directions, and at some point, we’ll see another one, but we need some quite bracing, strong, maybe almost Straussian movement towards some version of cultural conservatism and religion to make this happen.
KLEIN: Is it cultural or is it religion? I think that’s the real question here.
COWEN: It’s both. They’re a package. We might have a future that is religious without that much belief in God. That might be fine.
KLEIN: That might happen. One of the things I just think is true about the world is that religion is a functionally unmatched — depending on which side of this you sit in — either understanding of ultimate reality that enhances human cohesion and cooperation, or just a cultural technology that enhances human cooperation and cohesion. And as religion weakens, belief itself weakens.
You obviously had Ross on, and I thought that was a fantastic conversation, but as belief itself weakens, we have not replaced that with any other technology — cultural or otherwise — that is able to create cooperation, particularly long-term cooperation, cooperation that requires sacrificing now for gains later, or not even in this life with anything of even nearly matched power.
Worse than that, we’ve probably then added in a bunch of discohesive technologies, like social media, that make it harder to cooperate, make people more short-term oriented, make people’s attention spans even weaker. So, the underlying text of this, I think, is quite rough. I don’t really buy cultural conservatism. I think it probably needs to be something like religion, but I don’t think you can do religion instrumentally. I don’t think the efforts to do that really work at mass scale. People have to believe.
COWEN: Let me give you another right-wing view, and tell me what you think. The notion that the most important feature of state capacity is whether a state has enough of its citizens willing to fight and die for it. In that case, the United States, Israel, but a pretty small number of nations have high state capacity, and most of Western Europe really does not because they don’t have militaries that mean anything. Is that just the number one feature of abundance in state capacity?
KLEIN: I think two things about that. One, I think if you listen to the right in America right now, they would say, “We don’t even have that anymore.” And it’s a reason that JD Vance and others make this constant point that nationalism is not an idea. It is about having a physical connection to the land and the culture, usually multi-generational, that makes it enough your home that you would fight and die for it. That was a major theme of Vance’s RNC speech.
The reason I’m not sure I think this is true is that I think that the question of whether or not people will fight and die for their country operates very differently under actual threat than under abstract discussion. How much would you have said Ukrainians were excited to fight and die for their country six years ago, eight years ago, fifteen years ago? It turns out they’re extraordinarily heroically, courageously willing to fight and die for their country under the actual conditions of threat and invasion.
Then, I think you get into an interesting question about what kind of state capacity in this fight-and-die measure you are really looking for. Are you asking the question of how willing are Americans to fight and die for their country if their country tells them that the defense of Taiwan is in the national interest? I’m not sure how willing Americans are going to be to do that. How willing would they be to fight and die for their country if China was sending armed divisions, landing on the shores of America? Probably much more so.
I think some of what we’re talking there about state capacity reflects actually the success of peaceful institutions over a long period of time. The way in which it will turn around is under conditions that we should not want to see coming.
COWEN: They’re probably coming. Doesn’t America have a remarkable record, say, with Latino soldiers, maybe not born in this country, but who exhibit extreme bravery in recent times, fighting for causes in Iraq, Afghanistan that are quite obscure in some way?
KLEIN: It does.
COWEN: They were told it’s important, but American soldiers are amongst the best in the world. America does that. I know there’s an issue with Haredi, but Israel clearly does that. You go to West Germany, and you tell people, “Well, this is how it’s going to be.” I think there’s just no enthusiasm. People haven’t grown up with guns or martial spirit. There’s a culture of vacation. It just seems like an obviously huge gap to me, where America is clearly in the lead. Ukraine great, Israel, but not many places. That’s how we should think of a state capacity.
KLEIN: Don’t you think in Germany, though, that that reflects an absorbed view of maybe that martial . . . It is not as if there’s something in the German people that is unwilling to fight and die for their country.
COWEN: Oh, sure. That’s why they don’t have state capacity. But if you went to the Dutch, I don’t think you would see so much more enthusiasm, or try Luxembourg. Switzerland would be an outlier.
KLEIN: I think the place where we probably disagree on this is that I think under conditions of threat, that would change very rapidly. I guess you could say this is definitely a view many people hold, which is that our societies have become soft under conditions of too little threat.
You’re, of course, right about the extraordinary success the American military has integrating immigrants, integrating first-generation Americans. It’s again a reason why I think that part of JD Vance’s speech was, let’s call it unkind as a very low level, because plenty of people fight and die for this country who do not have seven generations buried in the same Kentucky graveyard,
But at the same time, I think that there is something missing about it. Something that’s jogged for me is, you’ve read the book, Where Is My Flying Car? What is the name of the author? I’m just blanking on it at the moment.
COWEN: Storrs?
KLEIN: Yes. Josh Storrs Hall. He’s got an entire section in that book where he is arguing that one reason we have simply ceased inventing and ceased having the heroic entrepreneurial energy to invent, is that we are not sufficiently exposed. Countries are not sufficiently exposed to invasion anymore. He basically says, look, for much of human history, before we had all this annoying liberal internationalism, if you were an underperforming society, you could simply be swallowed up by the overperforming society next door. Now we don’t let that happen, and that allows a softness and stagnation to take root and infect societies.
I just think if that were true, among other things America would not be as dynamic a society as it is because we are much less exposed to invasion. Whereas a lot of societies that existed under that kind of martial threat and for that reason, have ended up with very martial cultures, at least for long periods of time, don’t seem to have that dynamism. I don’t think we would look at a bunch of the countries in Africa that have been fighting wars for some decades now on and off and say, “Wow, that’s amazing state capacity there.”
I think there’s something wrong with this theory because I don’t think it predicts enough about what societies are doing well, and what societies are doing poorly, and in what ways.
COWEN: What should the US federal government do to prepare for AGI? We should just lay off people, right?
KLEIN: [laughs] I would not say it that way. I wouldn’t say just lay off people. I think that’s some of what we’re doing.
COWEN: No, not just, but step one.
KLEIN: Do you think that’s step one? Do you buy this DOGE’s preparation-for-AGI argument that you hear?
COWEN: I think maybe a fifth of them think that. Maybe it’s step two or step three, but it’s a pretty early step, right?
KLEIN: I think that the question of AI or AGI in the federal government, in anywhere — and this is one reason I’ve not bought this argument about DOGE — is you have to ask, “Well what is this AI or AGI doing? What is its value function? What prompt have you given it? What have you asked it to execute across the government and how?”
Alignment, which we have primarily talked about in terms of whether or not the AI, the superintelligence makes us all into paperclips, is a constant question of just near-term systems as well. I think the question of how should we prepare for AGI or for AI in the federal government first has to do with deciding what we would like the AI or the AGI to do. That could be different things to different areas.
My sense — talking to a bunch of people in the companies has helped me conceptualize this better — is that the first thing I would do is begin to ask, what do I think the opportunities of AI are, scientifically and in terms of different kinds of discoveries.
Let’s take drug development. I am pretty convinced that within the next five to ten years that the set of tools we are developing using AI — not all of that AGI; some of it are narrow systems, like the AlphaFold system — should get us to the place where the systems are developing molecules with a much higher probability of actually making it through trial and doing something beneficial in the human body.
I think we are getting better models of different parts of the human body. ARC is trying to create a cell model right now, and I think this is going to work. Then I think you need to actually ask, how do you prepare other parts of the system to absorb what in theory will be a rapid increase in valuable candidates.
COWEN: Yes, so more bureaucrats for the FDA if we need them, even though AI could evaluate those drugs. A lot of government, we could just lay people off.
KLEIN: You’ll need to make it much, much easier to get rats, monkeys, and human beings for testing. That would be another piece of it. That’s actually extremely difficult right now. I think you’ve got to go one by one, like that. One of the reasons I’m not probably in agreement that the first thing you’re going to want to do with AI is lay a bunch of people off, is that the first thing AI is going to do is create much more of something, some kind of information that is going to overwhelm choke points somewhere.
If what you’re basically doing with AI in terms of thinking about opportunities is . . . Well, the AI’s about to proffer a much higher hit rate of good things we should do. Then probably, at least for some period of time, you need a higher rate of ways to do them. Now that doesn’t mean we should have —
COWEN: But reallocate labor to the growing sectors. If you need more people in the FDA, lay people off other places, and then when you have bottlenecks, throw labor at them if that’s what’s called for, but you can’t just always think the number of people working in the government should expand.
KLEIN: No, I don’t always think the number . . . well, actually, as you know, the civilian side of the federal government has held steady at about two million people since, what is it, the ’50s?
COWEN: The consultants is what everyone thinks about.
KLEIN: But I think you would not want that. This is something I talk about in the book, I think you’d actually want to insource a lot of what the government does. Look, the reason I’m being squirrelly at this moment — I’ll give you a non-squirrelly answer now — is because I don’t like the way Musk is doing it. If you had asked me three months ago — and I believe today what I believed three months ago — I would’ve said the civil service rules we have are archaic. They make it much too difficult to hire and fire. They make it much too difficult to reorganize systems.
It actually is the case — say what you will about whether or not you think what they’re doing is a good idea — it is the case that it used to be much more in the president’s power to reorganize, create, fold agencies, subagencies, et cetera. We have, I think, made it too hard by a lot to restructure and manage the administrative state. The thing that I would like to do is create much more flexibility and much more power with the people we call bureaucrats.
I would like people to have much more agency, much more ability to actually hire and fire. I would not want to do it indiscriminately. The idea that just everybody in the federal workforce is probably bad, and on the margin, getting rid of any of them for any reason is probably good — it’s just not an idea I share. The thing where they fired all the probationary employees — that was disproportionately young people and people who had just had promotions. The federal workforce —
COWEN: I’m not sure that’s happening by the way. I know it’s been in the media, but —
KLEIN: I’ve known people who’ve gotten fired through it, I guess I would say. Something seems to be happening around that. I’m not sure they’ve done it at the mass level, but they do appear to have done it to some degree in some places. I am seeing a lot of extremely indiscriminate work. People who, for instance, it took a long time to recruit into the federal government because it was hard, and they had to get exemptions in order to give them higher pay. That’s a thing that happens a lot, and it’s a long time of bureaucratic fighting.
On the one hand, that it took so long to get them in is a problem I want to solve. On the other hand, indiscriminately now knocking them out is not something I would like to see. I think the question of how to ready the government for AI is a real one. I would like to see a little bit of what this AI looks like before I start doing mass firings to support it. I would like to decide, actually describe aims for this AI.
You said this a couple of times: What should the aims of the AI be? You’re not a person who just thinks the category of AI is undifferentiated. You need to tell it what you want it to do, or at least tell it what you want it to figure out to do. What is it doing here?
COWEN: Oh, sure, but I’m struck by how small many companies can become. Midjourney, which you’re familiar with, at the peak of its innovation was eight people. That was not mainly a story about consultants. Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person. I suspect that’s two or three people, but nonetheless, that seems not so far off.
It seems to me, there really ought to be significant parts of the government — by no means all — where you could have a much smaller number of people directing the AIs. It would be the same people at the top giving the orders as today, more or less, and just a lot fewer staff. I don’t see how that can’t be the case.
KLEIN: I agree with you that, in theory, should be the case, but I do think that, as you actually see it emerge from “in theory should be the case” till we figure out a way to do it, it’s going to turn out that things the federal government does are not all that like [putting] an image prompt into a thing.
COWEN: It is so hard to get rid of people. Don’t you need to start with the chainsaws? Maybe the next Democratic administration rehires what’s needed over —
KLEIN: I don’t think you start with the chainsaw this way because one, you’re breaking things right now that AI’s not about to fix. I think you have to have a very low opinion of the federal government and what the people in it do. Maybe we have different opinions of them, probably, to think this is all going to be . . . you’re not going to break things that were needed.
I worry that a lot of things I’m seeing them break, like people who I know who worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on financial scams, I don’t think knocking them out of government is going to create a macro problem in the US economy, but I do know these people were getting money back for consumers who had gotten scammed. Frankly, I think the capacity to scam people on AI is about to go much higher. I think that a good thing that was happening is going to happen less well right now.
My gut is that AI, as it emerges into the kind of view and flexibility where we could integrate it into core systems — which it’s not at yet in most cases — is going to create places where you need to expand and places where you need to contract. That’s why I was trying to ground this in an actual example, like drug development. If it is throwing off way, way, way more good candidates for drug development, yes, there are parts of the system that can contract, parts of it they’re going to need to expand.
Energy, again, if you read any of these projects or any of these slightly more utopic visions of AI, which I certainly hope we’re going to live in, the idea is that it’s going to throw off a bunch of realizations and discoveries about how we can make much more energy-dense materials, and so lay down everything from solar panels to get better at doing advanced geothermal. That would mean some parts of DOE maybe become less important. It would also mean our ability to permit and do other things becomes more important.
I am not sure, particularly at the beginning, what you need is less so much as the ability to reallocate. Now look, your view that you do mass firings and then you hire back what you need — I guess I understand where you’re coming from on that, but I want to see the thing we are doing the firings for working first, not fire people and hope that Sam Altman’s view of billion-dollar companies with three people is actually going to work at the Social Security Administration in the year of our Lord 2027.
COWEN: You know full well Steven Teles’s work on kludgeocracy. We have at least 50 years of the kludge that is just accumulating. Everyone in government knows about this. It’s not some secret. Various administrations have tried to address it. Al Gore did a bit — that was fine, but it didn’t really stop it. I don’t see that there’s any other recipe besides quite a bit of disruption. Again, there’ll be future administrations to sort it out.
Like the New Deal agencies — they weren’t so great to begin with. They didn’t have experience or data or staffing, but over time, pieces fell into place. Maybe the options are just more and more Steven Teles’s kludgeocracy or we take some chances today and do some things that actually hurt. Then over an 8- to 12-year period sort it out with AI and most of all, with future administrations, I don’t really see what the alternative is.
KLEIN: Well, I think there are two questions here. Let’s say there’s a good version of this and a bad version of this. I’ll outline the way I see both. Let me start with a good version of this. If I was saying what I hope the story of this period will ultimately be, I have to describe it as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which I think is a little bit of what you’re saying.
My critique of Democrats is, they became culturally process- and bureaucracy-obsessed. They saw the state and inside their own agencies, inside things they, in theory, run, they were anything a lawyer said you had to take as holy writ. No matter how off the wall or stringent the interpretation of what was clearly a looser original statute was, it was careful. Every process had to be followed to a T. Democrats, in theory, the party of government, cannot run government effectively because of some of the reasons you just described and some of the reasons I just described.
Then in comes Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and if they have proven anything, it is that a lot of the things that previous administrations — by the way, Democratic and Republican — treated as inviolable were just not. They weren’t real. They were norms, not rules, norms not laws. It is clear that some of the firings were illegal. Clearly not all of them. It is clear that some of the withholding of money is illegal. My gut is, having seen the five-four decision the other day at the Supreme Court which went against the Trump administration — but it was a five-four decision — it’s not going to be all of it.
There is a lesson that is being taught here by Musk, which I think liberals have to look at very uncomfortably, which is that things that they treated as facts of the system that could not be in any way altered and then used as excuses for low-performing government services for genuinely . . . Probably what Elon Musk is calling waste and what I would call waste are not the same thing, but there is what I would think of as a lot of waste. They allowed a civil service system to emerge and evolve that everybody knows is crazy. Everybody knows it’s crazy.
Here comes Musk and Trump — antithesis. I don’t think they’re trying to make things work. I don’t think it’s zero-based budgeting. I don’t think they’re holding things to a standard. I think they’ve cut off huge amounts of lifesaving work. I think they are creating a lot of risk in parts of the system that could really blow up. I think what they want is control, not a working government.
COWEN: No, I’m not defending —
KLEIN: Well, I think you are a little, at least on the margin. I’ll take that as a Straussian.
COWEN: Some parts of the approach are necessary, and it’s not even clear to me what they’re doing.
KLEIN: I think it’s not always clear to them. Then, my hope is that the next administration — if this all doesn’t blow up in our faces in a truly terrible way — is able to do synthesis, which is to not try to destroy the federal government, but to take the lesson of DOGE seriously. That a lot of what liberals, a lot of what the establishment was treating as “It just has to be this way. These are the rules, these are the processes. There’s nothing to be done about it.” No, it actually seems you can do quite a lot of it.
I’ve thought a lot about the payment systems and the Treasury privacy data. How many social insurance programs work poorly because they couldn’t get any access to that data? I’ve heard about this a lot in the design of systems beforehand, and this turned out to not be the case. You could get access to the data if you really wanted it. There’s no reason we needed to have the software procurement systems that led to healthcare.gov. We just didn’t. And it is true that then over time, this has been adapted somewhat in that area. USDS, US Digital Service, and 18F were significant there, and they’ve destroyed them. There was a lot you could do.
That, I think, is the good version, where what we’ve had is a fire, and it’ll do things that I am very unhappy about, but it will also open the way to something that is not as relentlessly and illogically bureaucratized as the way government was run under, say, the Biden administration, and is not as destructive and corrupted as what we’re seeing under Trump and Musk.
I think the bad version of “there’s no choice, but we have to come in and do something like this” is that they actually don’t know what they’re doing. This isn’t zero-based budgeting. They don’t know who they’re firing. They don’t really know what the people do. They’ve not evaluated things on a cost-benefit scale. They’re trying to use loopholes.
And it does turn out that the system manages a lot of risk. Most of the risk it manages in any given year — it’s going to be fine if you don’t have anybody there managing it. But when things do go wrong, when you do roll snake eyes — and you always do, eventually — it’s going to turn out we really needed some of this.
You see them freaking out about this on the daily, basically. They go fire all these people who are on nuclear safety and don’t even realize they’ve done it, and then are desperately trying to get back in touch with them to come back so we don’t have huge problems in the nuclear system. Or Musk saying that he didn’t mean to turn off all the payments on the Ebola work, but it turns out they did, and then saying that he turned it back on. In fact, you talk to people on the ground there, and he didn’t.
So, I’m worried about risk exploding, which is why I wouldn’t have wanted to see it done this way. I think that people who are in my position — and I think people care about effective government — really need to look with some anger and shame about the way in which the people who believe in government basically gave up on government reform and left that to this kind of process.
COWEN: If we think steady-state — when I look at the private sector, it seems to me large foundations, charitable foundations — they’re not better run than smaller ones, on average. If someone says, “Five years from now, we could have a USAID that maybe even gives away more money, is more effective, and total personnel is 300 or 400 people plus AGI,” that seems entirely plausible to me and actually a good goal.
Could you imagine supporting a future vision for USAID with 350 employees plus AGI? Way, way less with the US-based contractors, get rid of that part of the law — that’s just domestic wealth, corporate cronyism welfare — and give away more money and have way fewer people. Why isn’t that a good vision?
KLEIN: I could imagine that. I think USAID is a weird one to imagine would work like that because I think what you would then get . . . Somebody is actually providing somewhere what USAID provides. If it’s not the contractor that’s out there working in Africa and working in Latin America and working in other places, if you imagine . . . Let me try to flush this vision out.
USAID is functionally gutted now, so you’re going to be down at that low level of staffing. Then in 2028, we have something we’re willing to call AGI. You’re basically getting AGI to do the work that GiveWell was doing at a more AGI-like level and evaluate, what is the highest benefit per dollar that we can spend through USAID, and it’s doing a better job of that.
Then, of course, that is going to have to be spent out in the real world. Vaccines have to go into people’s arms. HIV, AIDS, retrovirus drugs have to be handed to people. The AGI is not going to do that. Then you have this question of, in this world, are you expanding staffing somewhere? I’m fine with that world. My disagreement with what is happening right now is that I really think it is important to be clear that the disagreement is about whether or not we should be doing aid, not over what aid is effective.
They could have gone in and restructured USAID and what it spends money on. They have not articulated any desire to save lives of people in other countries at all. This is where I think this conversation can get a little hiding the ball. I think efficiency is always towards what. What are you trying to make more efficient? There are always values in that, and the language of efficiency is often a way of trying to hide the values.
But yes, the question, hypothetically, could you imagine a world where aggressive reform of USAID led to a USAID that was much more laser-focused on public health provision, and maybe some forms of functionally cash-transfer programs, and probably support for certain kinds of government functions in other countries, and administering that required much less administrative staff in Washington and in the US? Absolutely. But that’s a goal you can define and work towards right now.
AGI is not even really doing anything in that hypothetical. What is doing something in the hypothetical is having a coherent vision of foreign aid and then a willingness to upend the bureaucracy to achieve it, which on the one hand, I don’t think you’ve seen necessarily from a lot of the nonprofit industrial complexes, as it gets called. But on the other hand, on the values level, you certainly have not seen from this crew.
COWEN: At the end of your podcasts, you ask your guests to recommend three books maybe they’ve been reading lately. I’ll ask you to recommend three travel spots. It doesn’t have to have been recent, and it could be around the block in Brooklyn. It could be anywhere. Tell us just three spots where people ought to go or think about, and why they’re interesting or important to you.
KLEIN: My father’s Brazilian, and I’ve been to Brazil many times. I think of Rio de Janeiro as one of the most beautiful and vibrant and dynamic and exciting cities in the world. Brazil itself is just tremendous. It is one of those countries you could spend a lifetime exploring and never reach the terminal point of it. There’s so much I have not done there. Brazil just itself to me — you could pick all kinds of places.
Start with Rio, but try to travel out of Rio. Go to some of the spots where Brazilians vacation in the summer. There’s a place that I went with my father to a conference when I was young called Barra Do Sahy. It’s an island. You can see your feet in the water. I was young, so I’m not sure how accurate my impressions of it are. It sits in my head like a Shangri-la. I love it. I’ve had a lot of experiences in Brazil like that. That’s one.
I love Berlin as a city. Now, partially this is because I’m into electronic music, and it’s a city that takes electronic music incredibly seriously. You have just this remarkable mixture of nightlife that I find really, really exciting, and really vibrant. It’s just a fun city to walk around. It has great museums. It has great food. People are friendly. There are a lot of immigrants. There’s a lot to see, and there’s a thing to experience there that I just like.
I’m not sure it’d be exactly true for everybody, although I think probably even people with radically different tastes in mind would find a lot to love in Berlin, but if you have my specific tastes, [laughs] Berlin is just an extraordinary place to go. I spent a week there last year, and if I could, I think I would spend a couple weeks there every year. It’s one of the places — Mexico City being the other — where I’ve landed and spent some time and just immediately had the view, “I could live here. I could just do this. It would be wonderful.”
I am just a huge fan of American second cities, and I travel a lot around music. I go to a lot of music festivals in small places, not all electronic. One of my favorites is one called Big Ears in Knoxville, and it’s a lot of folk music. It’s a lot of experimental music. Knoxville is just a great place and a great city. Again, the food is great. I think in general, at this point, the food in places like Knoxville — all smaller cities — are just better than in the really big cities because so many people have been costed out.
San Francisco’s food just isn’t good anymore. It’s not a good food city, hasn’t been for some time. It was one of the most disappointing things to me about living there. California cuisine used to be so vibrant, but I think now it isn’t, and it’s just because we’ve pushed out the people who could make it. The labor costs are too high, et cetera. I think, actually, just traveling around America itself is, as you would say, underrated. As somebody who tends to like urban travel, that’s part of it. I guess I did three there, so I shouldn’t keep going.
COWEN: Even four, if you count Mexico City.
KLEIN: [laughs]
COWEN: A plug again for the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Ezra, thank you very much.
KLEIN: Thank you, Tyler. I really enjoyed it.
Photo Credit: (c) Lucas Foglia