Clara: The reason I wanted to have this conversation is that you, Jasmine, had a really interesting post where you talked about civic culture in Taiwan compared to the US. In this post, you cited a Twitter thread by Kelsey about a microschool that she helps run as an example of the kind of bottom-up civic participation that Taiwan does well. You also talk about Abundance in that post, from an angle I haven’t seen discussed as much as I think it should be — a lot of it is implicitly or explicitly anti-localist. How does that square with building up an ethos of civic participation, of people trying to do things and build things and create things — of bottom-up abundance as opposed to top-down abundance? Are these compatible? Is it possible to do both?
Kelsey: This was one of the bigger things I felt some dislike for as I read the book, which was that I think Ezra and Derek are just more big-government liberals than I am. I am also in favor of a lot of the deregulatory policy that they're in favor of. I'm in favor of making it much easier to build stuff on your own land. But for me, a lot of that is coming from a slightly more libertarian ethos.
We agree on the same diagnosis of the problem — that government-run programs are often boondoggles that don't really deliver despite spending a ton of money, and that this is a big problem. They want to solve it, but I'm like, "Okay, maybe they can solve it. I hope they can solve it." You know what works to deliver services at scale without all those resources? Markets. Markets work great for that. I am fundamentally more interested in policies that let people do things than in policies that let the government do things.
Clara: I think the book does an okay job of carving out what it’s for — there's a bit in the science and innovation section where one of them says, "What should the government do? Well, it's things that people can't do on their own or that markets can't do on their own." Basic research funding, industrial policy, infrastructure, things like that.
Kelsey: I don't think that abundance is anti-letting people do things, but in terms of its orientation, it really does seem like it's pitched to policymakers who are trying to solve these things with the tool of government. And for one thing, liberals don't control the government right now. Any change going to happen in the short term is not going to happen at the level of the federal government.
Also, it's not so much necessarily a disagreement on policy positions as a disagreement on emphasis or ethos. I'm interested in it being legal to run a business out of your garage because I want people to get to do that. I am interested in it being legal to turn your land into apartments because I buy all the arguments about the benefits of building more housing, but also because fundamentally, I think it's your land and you should get to do what you want with it.
I am skeptical that there's any policy that gets the government able to deliver on huge infrastructure projects. So if we agree that huge infrastructure projects are really important, I would start thinking about what non-government ways to make them happen.
Jasmine: That's a good point. As I read the book, I was also thinking, "I agree with most of these policies, I agree with lots of the problem diagnoses." But I’m also somewhat more interested in localism or grassroots, bottom-up type efforts—especially since liberals don’t have institutional control. For me it was almost like a civic and political culture question, less so than a markets question, though I don't disagree with what you're saying.
Derek and Ezra have a theory for why people don’t believe in democracy and institutions, which is that they haven't delivered outcomes. If there was more housing, if everything was cheaper, etc., then people would just trust the institutions more.
I guess I am less persuaded by that hypothesis. I think part of the reason people don't trust big institutions is because they believe in themselves, and they want to do things themselves. Things like starting a micro daycare, or starting your own indie media project, or being an active participant and shaper of the world around you—being a person who is part of that, rather than just being delivered goods to consume by the government. The absence of this culture is part of why we have an institutional crisis.
Clara: Oh, yeah, I was going to say this is definitely where I think the argument is weakest.
Kelsey, you say that we can't deliver infrastructure. I would say that the American government struggles to deliver infrastructure, but plenty of places can do it. Obviously a huge part of the current institutional panic is that China can build bullet trains and California can't. And a lot of people think this is because of structural features of American civil service — American bureaucrats just don’t have that much autonomy and this is fatal to their general competence. This came up in an interview we did specifically about transit infrastructure with Alon Levy, Jennifer Pahlka talks about it, Joseph Heath writes about it a lot.
And in a sense this is the thesis of the book, right? American bureaucrats are so process-constrained, they can't do things. But I agree with Jasmine that even if we could fix this, I’m skeptical that creating more material prosperity will in itself restore trust in government.
Obviously, abundance in itself is great. But when I use, say, the internet, I'm not thinking, "Yay, I'm so glad that DARPA funded exploratory research that led to this technology being created!" People have access to an enormous number of goods for reasons that are ultimately downstream of government policy, but that doesn’t mean they feel grateful to the government for those things. Enabling lots of housing construction and making things cheaper are worthy goals, but I’m just not convinced they’re going to restore faith in democracy.
Jasmine: Ezra and Derek are big believers in individual discretion, and they use the anecdote about Josh Shapiro getting this major bridge repair done in 12 days a lot. But they're believers in individual discretion when the individual is a part of the government. Then they're less believers in individual discretion when the individual is a normal citizen who just really wants to do a thing.
I think this is why I care a lot about civil society. It bothers me that they don't have a vision for what the role of civil society is, because who tells the policymakers that making it easier to run your own schools is an important issue that should be high on their agenda?
I was listening to some of Ezra and Derek’s podcast appearances over the past few days. In the one with Kara Swisher, Daniel Lurie, the mayor of San Francisco, calls in to ask, "What about citizen voice?" Then Derek answers, "I'm going to give the strong version of my answer, which is that I think that having elections is enough public voice, and if people don't like it, then they should just vote that person out." This is deeply unsatisfying to me.
Clara: Daniel Lurie is interesting because the reason he became big in San Francisco politics was starting a homelessness nonprofit, and it was actually a really successful one. His nonprofit is the one that built Tahanan.
Jasmine: Oh, I didn't know that.
Clara: It’s an affordable housing development in San Francisco which is basically the only one ever to come in at, or I think actually slightly under, average market rate price per unit.
Jasmine: It's like the star of the housing chapter. That was Daniel Lurie's thing. Wow.
I also heard a different interview, I think with Jerusalem Demsas, where Derek said something about how elected officials need to represent the voices of the majority of people who benefit from abundance policy but don't show up to community meetings. I think that's kind of key.
There's this underlying idea that voice is veto—that the default way that people make their voices heard in politics these days is by stopping things or banning things or blocking things or slowing things down. This is absolutely accurate—that is structurally the way that it works in a lot of places. Certainly in the Bay, if you go to permitting meetings here, that is what you will see.
I think there's a way to address this that says, "Okay, so limit voice. It's just stopping things." But then there's a deeper question to me, which is why is veto our default mode of civic engagement?
Kelsey: There's a park near us. It's not a very nice park. It has like one piece of equipment and it's often broken. The kids don't like it compared to other better parks. When we first moved here, the kids' other mom messaged the city and was like, "Can I donate better equipment to the park?" Never heard back.
One of my proposals for how I would like this sort of thing to work is: I and my neighbors can come up with a mockup for what we want to do to the park. We can fund it ourselves. We can go around the neighborhood, show everybody the mockup and say, "Are you excited about us doing this to the park?" Then if we have a reasonable number of signatures on a petition, we get to build it.
It feels to me like there's this middle ground between "your representatives do whatever, and if you don't like it, you vote them out of office" and "you need six years of planning meetings to add a swing set to the park." It seems to me like you can have an efficient process where the community does things itself, not relying on its elected officials—because we are the people who are the most invested in our kids' park being good—and community input takes the form of community members saying to their neighbors, "Here's what I want to do to the park. What do you think?" The government doesn't need to be involved at all unless we're asking for their money.
Clara: This reminds me — and you guys have both heard me talk about this, because I talk about this all the time — Buffy Wicks, who is mine and Kelsey's California State Assembly member, has this amazing white paper out recently on fixing permitting in California. It has a lot of good proposals. But one that I really liked was a suggestion to proactively solicit comments from members of the community, but keep it in a fixed window for project approval. This means instead of just relying on the people who show up to that community planning meeting, you actually go out into the community and talk to people who are busy or don't know that the planning meeting is happening, but then you timebox it. Once the comment period is done, it's done, and you move forward.
Jasmine: I had a conversation with Audrey Tang about this for my podcast. She's a big believer in both democracy and democratic process and public participation, but also doing things quickly and making them happen.
Some examples she gave were that her first job in the Taiwanese government was to use technology to make the government more efficient, which is a notion many Americans will find uncomfortably familiar in DOGE. But for her, it was actually inspired by the Obama USDS.
I asked Audrey what some of the most effective things she did were. She mentioned that they actually extended the comment period for a bunch of reforms. I was like, "Oh, that seems really counterintuitive. Why did you do that?" She said that they had certain things that they wanted to change to be more efficient, like shortening the tax filing process from three hours to three minutes. But they knew that the bureaucrats would revolt if they changed these processes, so they extended comment periods to 60 days.
But every time they had these comment periods, it was a hard 60-day stop. Unless there was something extremely, deeply, and fundamentally wrong, it was very unlikely that they would change their plans. After the 60-day period was over and everyone's concerns were addressed, policy would move very quickly because all the consensus had been built during the comment period.
I also asked Audrey about collecting public opinion—for instance, what if only some people have time to show up to the meeting in the middle of the day. She said that "Well, what we did was we sent text messages to 200,000 constituents asking for their opinion on this one thing, and they literally just texted back their response. Now we use LLMs to organize people's thoughts." That's not that high-effort. There are ways of soliciting citizen input that are just less high effort than hosting a town hall meeting at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday.
Kelsey: The thing is that it's frustrating to spend that time waiting in a line to give a two-minute comment. I think there is a willingness and energy for making things better, but it gets kind of bled away if the process you're supposed to use to make things better feels incredibly dead-end and frankly, incredibly alienated from the products of your labor.
One example I gave on Twitter is that when I was a kid, there was an empty lot in the middle of a cul-de-sac, and the neighborhood dads all got together and built a treehouse. This is just very concrete, right? As a kid, it's inspiring to see your parents do that. It builds an ethos that the way you improve the world is by going out and improving the world.
We've taken the kids to the Temescal District Business Planning meeting in order to let them know that there is an encampment with some large, unleashed angry dogs that threaten and snap at the kids. We wanted to get that problem solved. We tried calling 311. It didn't work, so we went to the meeting. It doesn't feel empowering in the same way. It takes just as much time as building a treehouse, but at the end of it you don't have a treehouse. You have just contributed your words to "these aggressive dogs shouldn't be there."
Clara: And the dogs are still there.
Kelsey: The dogs are still there. Yeah, that too. I don't think my diagnosis would be that community meetings take time people don't have. I think my diagnosis would be that people want to see that time produce something, and they are willing to put in so much for their communities if it's worth it.
The main problem with all these vetocracy processes is that they take everybody's time and don't build things. I can't go to a meeting with my mockup of how I want my neighborhood park to look and say, "We're in for $5,000 and we have ten other neighbors in for $5,000. Let's build this." There is no process for that.
Jasmine: How did we get to the point historically where the thing that a lot of public interest groups do, rather than building things, is complaining? Was it always true that the only way for people to do anything was to complain? Why do we not have a world where interest groups lobby for the ability to take over their local park and run it the way that they want?
Clara: I mean, there's the history that is sketched out in the book and everywhere else, where it all goes back to Ralph Nader and the 1970s and everyone suing the government.
And then, in San Francisco, there are nonprofits that build things that are deeply integrated with the city, but they're incredibly corrupt. It's a huge problem. Maybe there’s a vicious cycle where when you do have nonprofits, and they get city funding, they often don’t use it to benefit the community, and this leads to more oversight and less room for judgement and more paralysis.
Kelsey: This is why I'm tempted by project or result-based instead of organization-based stuff, and also why I keep emphasizing that we could pay for Bushrod Park ourselves. I think to the extent that the nonprofit model is to get grants from the government for things, that encourages a lot of inefficiency. There's this sense of irresponsibility with the money. Everything is about doing the steps that make you most likely to get grants, instead of about doing the steps that get results.
Whereas if you are going to your neighbors and you're saying, "Will you put two of your paychecks towards making our community park good?" then everything is very narrow. You have one goal—a safe, good park for the kids to play in. There's no intermediate steps. There's no one you have to please other than the people who live right there, who will literally see the park and who you are part of a community with.
Clara: So, the natural next question I might ask is: this works great in neighborhoods where parents have disposable income to spend on playground equipment for parks, which is quite expensive. But what about neighborhoods where they don’t? Ultimately Abundance is a liberal book and I share the basic liberal redistributive agenda here. I think that is the solution for some neighborhoods. It kind of can't be the solution for every neighborhood.
Jasmine: Yeah. I do think that some people are time-rich. The whole thing about every time there are public comment processes, they get monopolized by people who work for companies who hire lobbyists, who spend all their time writing public comments—that's horrible.
I also agree that probably everyone has some issue that they are willing to spend a lot of time on because they care so much about that. For everything else, they're kind of like, "I don't have time to think about it." But when we were talking about the park, I was thinking about the book’s discussion of pull funding in healthcare. I was wondering, can you do pull funding for community improvement projects? Is that possible?
Clara: One book I thought about a lot as I was reading is How China Escaped the Poverty Trap by Yuen Yuen Ang, which has a lot of detail on Chinese bureaucracy in the 80s and 90s. And one really interesting detail is that in large parts of China for long periods of time departmental funding was just tied to economic development in the region. Bureaucrats’ salaries were benchmarked to economic development. It was all results-based. If your region was generating more money or if your department was generating more money, you would get paid more. .
Jasmine, you used the phrase "China envy" to describe the way a lot of abundance liberals talk about China. There's an implicit sense of "Oh, they have a more centralized state that can just come in and cut through local process and do stuff." But actually, China is very decentralized in a lot of ways, and they often really struggle with issues that require top-down, national level coordination. Food safety is a big one. But one thing they've historically been quite good at is tying government incentives to results.
Jasmine: It’s true. I do think there's something about being results-oriented in how bureaucrats are rewarded, but also in instances where they decide to delegate to the market or to private citizens, rewards and incentives also need to be outcomes-based.
When I was in Shanghai last year, I noticed that it was extremely beautiful and full of gardens, which was not true of Shanghai the last time I visited seven years ago. I wondered, "Why are there so many flowers all the time and why are they replanting it?" I started googling and found out that they had set some city-level municipal goals of increasing the number of gardens to 1000 by 2025 and 2000 by 2035. Then they had all of these rules about swapping out the flowers every 500m. It was hilarious, but it also worked, because the whole structure of the civil service is extremely results-oriented. It was like, "If we don't plant these flowers, we're getting fired."
When I was a product manager, people would ask me, "What tasks do you do?" I'm like, "I don't have a tasks role. I have an outcomes role." My entire job was needing to hit a number or to ship a feature. The only thing that matters is, do I get to that end outcome? That seems like not how the US government works, but it is how the Chinese government works. I was joking after my trip with my coworkers, "I think Chinese bureaucrats would make really good growth PMs."
Kelsey: I'm curious, Jasmine, how do you see good civil society working in communities that are more resource-constrained than mine? I've been focused on how it's maddening to see there be so much potential locked up in communities that have the wealth, and I do think that every American community could have that wealth if we do a good job over the next couple decades of continued economic growth. But in communities that don't, what do you think civil society looks like?
Jasmine: Good question. One thing that helped give me empathy for the way that SF housing and government works was reading David Talbot’s Season of the Witch and learning about the way that San Francisco neighborhood associations were formed. Most of these neighborhood associations are ferociously NIMBY organizations that hate development, but they were initially formed among low-resource communities because all the housing was getting bulldozed and everyone was getting kicked out.
This is one of the things working though — even low-resource communities have the ability to come together and spend time protesting and advocating for themselves and building political power. But then the question is: how do we redirect that energy away from vetocracy into something that is more constructive or collaborative?
Kelsey: I can think of a bunch of stuff I would want to try. For one thing, parents care a lot about their kids' education, including parents who are single, who are really tired, who are definitely also relying on schools for child care. One thing parents really value is detailed information about what their kids are working on—much more detail than goes into report cards. The problem has historically been that for teachers, that is a ton of overhead to provide that kind of guidance for parents.
I am skeptical of almost every proposal I've read for AI in education, but I think AI for helping parents understand what's going on at school has more potential. If the teacher doesn't have to do more work for the parent to get text message updates on how their kids are doing, I think that fosters engagement and a deeper understanding of what's going on, hopefully without being exhausting. So I'd be excited about stuff that's fostering engagement in schools by seeing if tasks that historically would have taken tens of hours of work by teachers can be done with any less than that.
Now, for the park example, our community can afford to put in a better park ourselves, but I would be excited about a system where the community raises some money for the park that's pegged to local ability to pay, and then that gets matched by city, state, or federal programs so that everybody can afford a park. But also everybody is putting money towards the park.
I really think that skin in the game is important here. I don't want parks that happen purely via grants and external processes, because I think the community involvement that comes from putting down an amount of money that's genuinely hard and kind of hurts is an important element of that. But of course, the equivalent of $5,000 for my family might be like $200 for another family. You want to make sure that every community gets good parks, whether or not they can take up a collection and afford them.
Jasmine: Yeah. I also wonder about better distribution mechanisms for government funding for people to do things, or even post-hoc distribution mechanisms or reimbursements. Let's say that right now, if you fix up some part of your street, if you install a bench, you might actually get a notice in the mail that's like, "Remove your bench right now or we're going to fine you."
Clara: That literally happened to Darrell Owens. He and some friends have been putting up guerrilla benches at bus stops in Oakland and Berkeley. And the city has been taking them down!
Jasmine: I guess the question that I want to ask is, if you do something for your community, can you file a reimbursement grant?
Kelsey: I would love that.
Jasmine: You’d have to prove it’s up to code or whatever, and then you’d get the money.
Kelsey: At least, they shouldn't tear the benches down.
Clara: I want to ask a harder question. Community involvement is great when we're talking about parks or benches or homeschooling co-ops, but at some point there are services that should involve the government. I think we need public schools, and we need Medicaid. As an individual, as much as I would love for California to be the home of abundant solar and nuclear and wind energy, I am not going to accomplish that through my local neighborhood collection drive. So are we in a position to say, "Great, we all agree with the abundance prescriptions on that stuff, we can move on"? Or do we have more to say?
Kelsey: I basically agree with the abundance prescriptions. It needs to be a lot easier to build energy. The government needs to either do it or put up big incentives for it, and we're not doing that. We should, because abundant energy is important for everything else. That's the part where I'm most like, "Yeah, that sounds right."
Jasmine: I broadly agree with you, and with the book's thoughts about energy—but there are certainly instances where local communities will say, "I don't want a wind farm near my house."
Kelsey: I think I'm much more in favor of helping a local community build something when it wants to build than letting them veto something they want to block — a "yes, and" approach to community governance. Empower people to have things they want to have, but not to kill things they want to kill.
Jasmine: Yeah, I think I’m biased towards that too. One of the projects in Taiwan that is interesting to me is the g0v project, and what they did was — there are all these government websites that sucked. Rather than even petitioning the government websites to suck less, they just built online interfaces that were better for the exact same government services. If you swap .gov for .g0v in the URL, citizens would automatically go to the better website. Once the Taiwanese government saw this happening, they decided to collaborate and support integrations.
That goes back to the earlier question I have, which is: are there ways more of the veto energy can be directed towards building energy? I think there are some zero-sum things where maybe these people just really don't want a wind farm there. But I think there are other instances in which people turn towards vetoing because they feel disempowered in general, and the only thing they know how to do is to veto. If they were able to receive a small grant or do something else in their community that felt productive and supported, then people wouldn't spend so much energy trying to veto stuff.
Kelsey: When I go to a city planning meeting, they will go through a bunch of projects that somebody has proposed and everybody can give statements about those projects. It's usually these days about half YIMBYs who are like, "We should build this because it's housing, and I would like us to build housing." And then half people who are like, "It will shadow my garden. It will compete with my store across the street. It will ruin the neighborhood."
It really does feel to me like what Jasmine was saying—if we were debating something other than "Should we let these people build this building?", then a lot of that energy could go somewhere constructive. Instead of these back-and-forths and people construing their role as blocking things. Maybe historically that was warranted, but these days it's just this exercise in futility.
Jasmine: Yeah. The Black Panthers' Free Breakfast program is another example I mentioned in my Substack article. They decided, "We are going to raise our own money to start distributing breakfast." Then the government found this so threatening that they just started giving out free breakfast too, thus scaling the public good. Again, there's this interesting dynamic where when communities stand up their own programs, this can actually result in better public services for everyone. So I'm also very curious about why we don't have more direct action type stuff going on.
Clara: I have to say, I think a lot of YIMBY rhetoric doesn’t help here. I’m thinking of one of the stupidest YIMBY-NIMBY fights in recent SF history, about the Castro Theatre. The Castro Theatre is a historical movie palace in San Francisco. A few years ago it was bought by a concert promoter that mostly does live music. People were freaking out that the Castro would no longer be a movie theater. But among other things, this manifested as a plan to change the seats that was tied up by community activists for years. Now, there were other concessions granted about programming requirements. But this was about seats! And the seats were ancient!
And the thing is, in my heart, I still felt myself siding with the activists. I'm a person who loves old movies, and I love the Castro Theatre, and all the YIMBY messaging on this topic was so alienating. There was a horrible blog post from GrowSF about how nobody wanted to watch old movies in uncomfortable seats when they could have all the latest amenities. That made me furious! I think I literally read it while at the Castro for the SF Silent Film Festival. But of course, this was the exact same process that plays out every time anybody objects to anything. The whole thing made me a lot more sympathetic to NIMBYism on an emotional level, because it feels disempowering to be told that the things that you care about aren’t just painful but necessary sacrifices, they’re things no right-thinking person would care about or want. You get polarized into wanting to fight back.
Kelsey: I think these things are not win-wins. The book gets at this at one point. Homeowners in fact lose out if their communities get up-zoned because they like living in quiet, wealthy communities where there aren't very many poor people around. This is a thing that they value, even if they won't usually say it in that many words. It's not very helpful to condemn people for trying to do civic participation towards something that they want.
In practice, of course, I think we are all much, much worse off when the Bay Area and New York City in particular can't upzone and can't absorb people. The lack of economic mobility, the lack of dynamism — that's all really damaging. But I think you have to say, "We're not just doing this for people's own good. Sometimes people want something and we're saying that society cannot afford for them to have that thing, you know, unless they're willing to buy the theater themselves, in which case they can do whatever they want." They will advocate against it because it's making their lives worse. The community input here is not meaningless or wrong, it's just one element of a broader picture.
Jasmine: This reminds me of an Amia Srinivasan essay in the London Review of Books about cancel culture and universities. I think she makes the argument that when students protest for some speaker to get disinvited from a university, they are also exercising their speech rights. The students, in my opinion, should be totally free to publish an op-ed in the paper saying they hate that speaker. It's just then the onus is on the university to, in most cases, ignore the students and say, "Thank you very much. We still believe in our values. We are going to host the speaker anyway."
Part of it is just that the bureaucrats should have—this is what Ezra and Derek are implicitly saying— the courage to make hard trade-offs, and accept that sometimes they’re going to make people mad.
When I was a PM at Substack, every time we did something, everyone would get really mad at us. Sometimes it was about content moderation stuff, sometimes it was that we introduced an algorithm and everyone hated the algorithm. Every writer would email us at once and be like, "We hate you guys and we're going to leave the platform.” We’d have anti-Substack memes going viral on Substack Notes about whatever product decision we just made.
Obviously we're a private venture-backed company, not a public institution. But as a PM and the person who managed a lot of the product comms, I would have these meetings with my team where we would collect feedback in advance from some trusted writers to anticipate the reaction. Then before we launched, we would have a team sit-down where I said, "Tomorrow everyone will get mad at us and you guys should be prepared. Some of these people are going to say that you should revert the feature. But we have thought this through for a month now and we know that this is the right decision. Here are all the reasons we’re doing this. Here's what we will say when people get mad at us. Now we are prepared to weather the storm.”
Kelsey: That is a fascinating story. I have really respected Substack for its moral courage on free speech, especially during a time when it was very hard in Silicon Valley to say, "No, we believe this about content moderation." It's interesting what your internal experience of that was like.
It does seem to me like people will be mad and you should still do things, taking into account their feedback. I think this is a spirit that's totally missing at all levels. I guess actually at the federal level, we now have "We're not going to do town halls because our constituents just yell at us," and I haven't been impressed with that. But I also think that sometimes you have to be willing to say, "Yep, we're making you mad."
Congestion pricing jumps to mind as a public example of this. It was really unpopular until it went into effect. Kathy Hochul backed off of it because she didn't want the electoral consequences. But then once it happened, everybody was like, "Oh no, you're right, this was a good idea." When people see things work, I think it does change the dynamic.
Jasmine: The book has a policy argument, which is something like: many progressive issues are supply problems, and therefore the government should either deregulate or invest to increase supply. But also, in the background, it’s making the cultural argument that Democrats have become bad at handling conflict. They're scared of risk, they're scared of failure, and they're scared of people yelling at them. That has made Democrats unable to act.
Clara: We've been dancing around the DOGE of it all. And I think this is the point where we have to talk about it, because we've all just said that government bureaucrats should have the courage of their convictions and be empowered to do things and not listen to people complaining. Meanwhile, Kelsey and I have been having the parallel, heartbreaking experience of trying to do advocacy around the cuts to USAID, trying to convince anyone who will listen that they’re making a huge mistake and millions of people are going to die.
Kelsey: The “You can just do things” energy does need to be accompanied by moral seriousness about what you're doing. This seems to me like it was missing both from a lot of the highway projects that you talked about and from DOGE's recent decisions and from some very slash and burn accelerationist lefty views of how to do things.
If you're making decisions in policy, you have a lot of power. You are going to destroy a lot of people's lives. You can and should do things that people object to vehemently on the basis of math. But you should be really sure of your math, and you should approach it, I think, with an attitude of humility, public service, a sense that your job is to do right by these people, and that if you're doing something they disagree with, you have a really good reason. I don't know, but it does feel to me like there's a long track record of people going, "You can just do things," and then just bulldozing entire communities or cutting off clinics that prevent millions of people from dying.
Clara: And on the one hand, I am a strong believer in personal virtue as a precondition for high public service. But obviously, the current moment is an illustration that we cannot have a system that counts on personal virtue.
Jasmine: Yeah. There need to be some institutional checks and balances. I guess there's a distinction between rules that are made to check overreach versus rules that are made to add more constraints to how you carry out a goal. I don't know, maybe there's not a distinction here, but part of my brain is still just like, "Oh, you have to win elections and have good people in office."
Clara: It’s really hard to think of a system that both gives civil servants the freedom and leeway that they need to do their jobs well, that is robust against — I mean, the counterpoint to this is that the current system neither gives civil servants the freedom they need to do their jobs well, nor is it robust to DOGE. Right now we're batting zero for two, so we should be less concerned with formal checks and balances because they're clearly not achieving the thing they were meant to achieve. That's maybe more grim than I want to be.
Jasmine: My guess is that Ezra and Derek might say, "Yeah, right now our checks constrain our own side and they don't constrain the other side." But I don't think I understand our political process well enough to know what the appropriate design would be that would prevent DOGE.
Kelsey: DOGE is prohibited by the existing rules. We had those. In fact, I think one narrative you could have is that we had rules that prohibited DOGE. We had rules that prohibited basically everything. A lot of people got really fed up with how many things the rules prohibited and just with the sheer impossibility of doing stuff. That gave DOGE a really good opening because they were like, "We're going to come in like a wrecking ball and break all the rules." A lot of people responded, "Oh, please, thank God, that's what we need."
In fact, I think they broke some rules that were there for good reasons, and they did a lot of really damaging stuff. But you kind of only have something like that in the context of a very paralyzed bureaucratic state where it's very hard to get anything done through formal channels.
Jasmine: I think that's right, but there’s also a different problem, which is government failing to communicate about what it does accomplish. They need better comms, both as marketing for the things they can do, and also as education about what trade-offs are being made.
I wish that politicians trusted the public more to understand why decisions are happening—for people to internalize what is going on and why. Because I think there's basically two failure modes for abundance. One is the DOGE thing, which is when the people in power are uncaring and immoral. That one seems like a harder problem to solve.
But then there's another problem where government is delivering or making trade-offs that might make sense to them inside the bureaucracy, but that are totally illegible to everyone else. So people don't understand why things are happening and get dumber overall and then continue to vote for more and more destructive things.
I think of people like AOC who are on Instagram Live all the time—it's probably good and would help a lot if all politicians got significantly better at communicating with their constituents, whether online or in person or just explaining more of the decisions they're making and the trade-offs and the progress on various goals. More of our media should be in that world.
Kelsey: I do have a lot of feelings about this. And at the same time, I'm aware that as an educated technocrat in an urban area, I am not the set of people that they're having trouble communicating with. So I try a little bit to stay out of the messaging debates, just because I'm aware that the messaging that appeals to me is probably actively counterproductive for reaching the median voter. But certainly that they need to communicate better — that seems unambiguous.
Jasmine: Or communicate at all. I think politicians should be actively putting out something like, "Hey, here's what we did this week." Not the Elon "What did you get done this week?," but some effective way of telling everyone this is what we're doing and why, all the time, would help a lot. I think people tend to revolt when they don't know what's happening, this perception that “The government's not doing anything, so you might as well shake it up. Let's hit the box and see if it responds."
Kelsey: Another angle I want to bring up is that the most important place where people interact with government is actually schools. Almost everybody goes to a public school, most people send their children to a public school. That is by far the largest person-government interface. It's not that Ezra and Derek ignore it, but it feels to me like a pretty big place to start if we're trying to change the way people relate to the government. Also something where it's less clear what the abundance policy prescriptions are, but we very, very badly need some, because what we're currently doing is not working both on a test score level and on a public trust level.
Jasmine: I don't think it's bad that they don’t cover every single thing — they didn't give a plan for civil society and a plan for schools. They couldn't have put everything in one book. But this conversation is about what needs to complement the strategy in Abundance. My case is that if we only do the things in Abundance, I don't actually know that this will win back legitimacy and achieve their goals. There need to be complements.
