Is Climate Change a Reason to Avoid Having Children? and Other Listener Questions Answered

It’s that time of year, when we invite listeners to send in questions, and I answer them on the air. And as usual, you delivered. I’m joined by my producer Annie Galvin, who asks me some of the most intriguing questions of the many we received: Is climate change a reason to forgo having kids? What would happen if Trump were allowed to return to Twitter, in the event of an Elon Musk acquisition? Should Biden run again in 2024? Is wokeness killing the Democratic Party? We also discuss the recent congressional hearing about U. F. O. sightings; whether it’s a good thing that so many talented young people are going to work in consulting, finance and corporate law; the worrisome anti-institutional direction of the Republican Party; why government is failing to deliver on liberals’ policies and promises — and how to start fixing that problem; whether Americans’ distrust in institutions is warranted; why I could use some recommendations for a good reading chair; and more. Mentioned: We're hiring a researcher! You can apply here or by visiting nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/News “Your Kids Are Not Doomed” by Ezra Klein “Empirically Grounded Technology Forecasts and the Energy Transition” by Rupert Way, Matthew Ives, Penny Mealy and J. Doyne Farmer “Ibram X. Kendi on What Conservatives — and Liberals — Get Wrong About Antiracism” by The Ezra Klein Show “A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture” by Ezra Klein Public Citizens by Paul Sabin “This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful” by Marc J. Dunkelman “Are We More Polarized? Or Just Weirder?” by The Ezra Klein Show “Donald Trump Didn’t Hijack the G. O. P. He Understood It.” by The Ezra Klein Show “Robert Sapolsky on the Toxic Intersection of Poverty and Stress” by Vox Conversations Book Recommendations: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney Music Recommendations: “Spring 1” by Max Richter Christian Löffler Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:20Ezra Klein?

  So we're here. We're doing it. The long awaited Ask Me Anything episode, and I'm joined for it to answer a bunch of questions that have been sent in by you and curated by our team, by our great producer, Annie Galvin, who's gonna both ask them and hold my feet to the fire if I completely dodge them. So Annie, always a pleasure.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. Happy to be here. All right, so let's start with a fun question, and then we'll get to the deeper ones. So Matt is not alone in wanting you to talk about the aliens, especially in light of government UFO reports. And just to give a little context, last month, officials told Congress that the UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Database, now contains about 400 reports, and apparently, there's been less stigma around reporting them. So what is your read on aliens these days, Ezra?

• 1:11Ezra Klein?

  So you called this a fun question. I don't know that it is a fun question. I think this is very weird on a couple of different levels. So what I now understand to be the situation is that the US federal government has come out and said, "We have tracked, us personally, fundamentally impossible flying objects," right? "Impossible by our understanding of the technology possible in the world right now. We have tracked these objects. We have tracked individual ones of these objects through various different sensors." So the idea that it is simply one radar failing, or one pilot seeing a light flare, doesn't hold up. And we have no idea what they are. And that's really weird.

• 1:56Ezra Klein?

  Okay, that's a very strange situation to actually be in. There was a theory for a little while that maybe Russia or China have technology now that we didn't expect. I think if you look at how the Russia-Ukraine war has gone, that does not seem plausible. So aliens, something else, I don't know. But at the very least, for the federal government to come out and say, not only do we have unidentified flying objects, but they are fundamentally unidentifiable, that we have validated that they are there to the best of our abilities through multiple sensors catching them simultaneously, and we cannot explain them to you. I would have thought in some abstract way that would be a bigger story for longer.

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  But I would say here, you do see a dynamic of the news where if there is no new news, there's just not a lot we can do with it. Right? We can't create iterative information on this story, so it's not a way to keep covering it. I always think of things like this sometimes as the Chyrons you see in the TVs running in the background at the beginning of a movie, right? When all the characters are going about their normal lives before everything goes straight to hell. And it's like, another unidentified aerial object discovered that we can't... It's just a little bit weird. I don't know what they are. And as somebody who generally likes mystery, the unknowability of them at this point,

• 3:21Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a thing people haven't fully gropped, that we have moved at this juncture from these being, we don't know what people have seen, to we are saying, we know these things were seen, and we don't have almost the technology to know what they are. And that's really an interesting place to be left.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  And just to be clear, because Matt asked about aliens specifically, for those of us who aren't as up on the UAP beat, we're not really talking about aliens, or maybe we're talking about aliens. We're just talking about these flying objects.

• 3:53Ezra Klein?

  Who knows?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 3:56Ezra Klein?

  I don't know what they are. I'm not telling you they're aliens. Maybe they're us from the future. Maybe they're angels. Maybe, I mean, we genuinely don't know what they are. Maybe they are. Maybe China has technology we still don't understand, right? There are things that could be true here, and I'm open to them being much weirder. I'm always open to reality being weirder than anything we've come up with. So I'm not sitting here saying there are aliens. Maybe they're drones from, uh, who knows? But it's very strange.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Ooh, maybe they're the people who are running the simulation that we're living in. That would be cool.

• 4:27Ezra Klein?

  Exactly, right? Maybe that's just what it looks like when you fix a bug in the simulation.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  All right, well done. Okay. So to pivot a bit, Ralph asks, what does Ezra think of the potential that Trump might go back on Twitter if the Musk deal were to go through and Musk had the power to readmit Trump to Twitter?

• 4:50Ezra Klein?

  So Elon Musk has said very clearly that if he acquires Twitter, which he increasingly seems to not want to do, at least at the price he initially tried to do it at, but if he ends up acquiring Twitter, that he thinks it was wrong to ban Donald Trump, and he will undo that ban. Trump at different times has said he wouldn't go back to Twitter. So focused is he on the wild generational success at his Truth Social that he wouldn't go back. I'm of many minds on this. I fundamentally think having Trump back on Twitter would be dumping toxins into the ecosystem. But at the same time, I don't think it would be good for Trump or good for the right. I don't think Donald Trump's Twitter presence, after maybe powering his initial rise,

• 5:35Ezra Klein?

  I don't think it was a net negative for them. In general, Trump did better in the polls, and I think better as a politician when he wasn't getting everybody worked up about things he said on Twitter. And I think he's in some ways been stronger as a politician without the ability to constantly focus attention on his craziness. So maybe a way to think about it is this. Imagine that we're going through the same period that we've been going through. Joe Biden is president and inflation is high and Russia's invaded Ukraine and COVID is still a very difficult issue that increasingly is splitting the Democratic coalition and Democrats are disillusioned and, you know, the young people, I mean, Biden is bleeding young people's support. If Trump had been on Twitter during this period, then every three days, a new cycle would have been about

• 6:19Ezra Klein?

  him. And he would be generating a kind of cohesive momentum for the Democratic side by continuously acting as his foil for Biden. In many ways, I think Joe Biden's signal problem at the moment, which is often a problem for presidents in this point in their cycle, is that there's no other force, right? It's just him out there. And, you know, whatever is going on, he's sort of responsible for. And if people don't like it, he's responsible for that. So I kind of side with people of the counterintuitive take that Donald Trump being back on Twitter is probably bad for the Republican Party and Donald Trump. But it might also just be bad for democracy and the world and what people are spending their attention on, because I think Donald Trump is fundamentally a poisonous figure in the

• 6:59Ezra Klein?

  national debate. So, you know, I don't think it is an advantage to the right if Musk puts Trump back on Twitter. But that isn't to say I think it'll be a good thing for like American life to have Trump back there. And then I think the question will be, is the media better at ignoring Donald Trump's provocations now than they were? Which I kind of think on the margin, we probably are, but it'll be tested.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's move to some questions about a topic that we get a lot of questions about whenever we open things up for AMA questions. So what I'll do is I'll read a few of our specific listeners' questions, just to give people a feel for this topic and why it's interesting to people. And then Ezra, you can dive in however you'd like to approach it. So first of all, Michelle says, just two days ago, I Googled Ezra Klein on having a baby climate change. Maybe a popular Google.

• 7:54Ezra Klein?

  Huge, huge in Google terms.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, from our inbox, it would seem so. So the timing of this AMA opportunity is perfect. What considerations did Ezra and his partner weigh in their decision to have biological children? Hossam asks, if your children one day ask why you chose to bring them into a world that you knew was going to be decimated by climate change, what would your answer be? Jennifer says, as a father of young children, why did you and your wife decide to have children, given scientific predictions of how Earth will be impacted by the climate crisis over the next 100 years? And then finally, Kristoff asks, how do you feel about the state of the world in general, and specifically with regards to climate change? And how did that play into your choosing to have children?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So there's a lot there, but Ezra, what are your thoughts on this topic?

• 8:44Ezra Klein?

  So as Annie says, every time we've opened up an AMA for years, this has been the most popular question, this and, and what is your meditation regime? And I have dodged it for years. And I've dodged it in part because, you know, a lot of these questions I'm happy freelancing on, but anything that might on the margin, even though I'm a little skeptical it would, to help change whether or not people had children, I just, I don't know. I've always found it weird I get asked, and I don't want to be responsible for telling you. But we get it so much, and so I want to do a careful job of it. So this is the rare question that actually led to a column before I would answer it on the show. So we'll put this in, in show notes, but I wrote like a 2,000 something word piece for the Times going through this.

• 9:28Ezra Klein?

  And so let me tell you where I've ended up working it through a little bit more carefully. So there are two versions of the question. One is, why bring children into a world that will be decimated by climate change? And the other is, is it moral to bring children into the world, knowing that they will contribute to climate change? Right? Those are the two. This is such a hard one because I don't, I don't want to take away from the difficulty of this decision for people. I don't want to take away from legitimate fears about the future. And I don't want to be, sound like I'm minimizing climate change. But, but I also, every time I get this, I think we have scared people beyond the point they should

• 10:07Ezra Klein?

  really be afraid. So, one way I've thought about saying this is that I think this kind of thinking relies on an underestimation of how bad the entirety of human history has been, and an overestimation of how bad our future is likely to be. By that, I mean this. So if you're saying that the kinds of outcomes that we think we're going to have for the next, let's call it 100 years, are so grievous, decimating, right, to use that language, that it would be immoral to bring a child into them, I think what you're saying, on some level, whether you know it or not, is that it would have been immoral for most people, most human beings, to bring children into the world, like, anytime before 1975 or

• 10:50Ezra Klein?

  something. You know, if you go back into the, the deep human history, and there's research on this, about a quarter of children died before their first birthday, about a quarter, about half of everybody died before puberty, you know, 47%, I think is the number. So that's further back, but, but that's most of human history, right, just like, to start. By modern standards, most people have been poor on a level most human beings I can't even fathom today. Right? It's just like, that was all of human history. Like, people starved all the time. They died from a cut, right, they got infected. Okay, so let's say, nobody's really saying that climate change in the near future is going to make things worse than they were in 1500. But even if that's what you're saying, right,

• 11:34Ezra Klein?

  you're, you're saying, I mean, do we think it was immoral to bring children into the world before 1500? I think that would be a weird, a weird view on some level. Then going forward, right, into more into things that are closer to modernity, you know, people lived under much more subjugation. People have been much, much poorer. Much more of the globe has been enslaved. Gender rights were, they're very modern, at least in the way we think of them now. The kinds of economic domination people have had over each other in the modern world, you know, up until, I mean, ongoing for many people in the world right now, but up until a couple of years ago. I think to really grasp how bad life has been for most people forever, which is also to really grasp the remarkable nature of some of the progress we've seen over the past, let's call it

• 12:19Ezra Klein?

  100 years, it's tough. So I don't think it's plausible to say that, given the pathways we're on, we're looking at a level of normal human suffering that is even out of sample for what human beings have had before, to say nothing of, in the bottom half of the distribution. So I think you get a question of what are we saying is going to happen? And this is, you know, a topic that is bigger than, than one show, but to say quickly, I think that people have in their heads some of the really, really terrible projected possibilities for climate change. You'll hear climate people talk about this is RCP 8.5, I think it is. But these are the scenarios where things really, really go bad. So we keep burning more and more coal. We get up to four, five, six degrees of warming,

• 13:03Ezra Klein?

  that kind of thing. And when you imagine like an uninhabitable earth, that's what we're talking about, you get into fundamental feedback effects that break planetary systems in a way that that might be irreversible. I mean, we don't really know how this stuff would work out, but, but that's really scary things. Even if you go back a decade, you know, very serious climate people thought we were on track for 3.5, 4, 4.2 degrees of warming. Now, because a lot has actually gone well, much more than I think people realize, we're on track for, you know, at a current policy level, 2.6, something like that, over the next, you know, 2.6 by 2100. And that assumes current policy, but if things keep getting better, which our policies have been getting better, and also, very importantly, our technology has been getting

• 13:47Ezra Klein?

  better and better and better. I mean, a huge amount of the reason why our scenario looks better now is that solar and wind and battery costs have come down so quickly, so quickly, so much quicker than was expected. I was looking at this paper that was looking at, I think it was 2,900 predictions on how quickly solar would come down, and the average was something like 2 point something percentage points a year, and like the high end predictions were 6%, but it was like 15% year after year after year. And so, things have gotten better faster. And so now, we're kind of on a 2.6, 2.7 track. I think it is plausible to say that we're, you know, if you assume trends, something like a 2.2 track. If the Paris

• 14:29Ezra Klein?

  Climate Accord commitments are met, which that's a big if, but maybe a 2, maybe even a little less than 2. And then, we're in a scenario of things that are, I mean, bad, right? People will suffer, people will die, we will give back a lot of the insulation we have gotten from nature. And the worst of it, the worst of it, is that it is unequal, that rich countries will have basically consumed all these fossil fuels and then made poor countries pay the price. It isn't that rich people or rich countries can fully insulate themselves from climate change, but it is wrong to think they can't insulate themselves quite a bit. I say this in the piece, but, I mean, I live in California. The condition of people in California breathing in a lot of wildfire smoke is not the condition of

• 15:13Ezra Klein?

  people in low-lying areas of Bangladesh, whose homes and livelihoods are in the path of cyclones. And so, I think we're in a position where what we're doing is immoral, where what we're doing is going to make the world a lot worse than it could be, is going to create tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of refugees, going to increase civil war. Like, it's bad. I mean, it is so bad that most of my columns, I would say, on some level or another, this whole thing I'm doing about how to build more is basically motivated by climate change. But it is not bad in a way where bringing kids into it is somehow worse than, you know, what kids have endured before. I mean, most people are going to live better lives. So then, I think there's another question, and this is more, I think, responsive to this issue of, you know, what have rich countries visited

• 15:56Ezra Klein?

  upon poor countries, which are people visited upon poor people, which is, it is simply true that people use resources, rich people use more than poor people, and so maybe you shouldn't have kids.

• 16:07Ezra Klein?

  And there's a logic to that. I don't think the logic holds very far, though, or at least not as far as people think it does. What it fundamentally does, in my view, is mistake a collective problem for an individual problem. And I'm not somebody who thinks you should never do that. I think I've said in past DMAs, actually, that I understand people's nodes for social contagion from this perspective. So the idea that I don't like it when people say, "Well, don't worry about driving an electric car or not eating meat because this is a collective problem and no individual thing matters." But I think you do have to imagine, when you're thinking about individual action, is this an individual action that scales? Can you imagine this creating industries or creating politics where kind of everybody does it, where it changes

• 16:52Ezra Klein?

  everything? I don't think any political movement that at its core is saying you shouldn't have a family is going to scale. I just don't. That's a very fundamental thing for people. And maybe, if there was no other answer, we would just have to bite that bullet, right? You do the best you can and you figure out what you end up with. But that's not true either. The point of all of this is to decouple people from carbon emissions. And we can do that. You know, in America, in the 70s, per person, carbon emissions were over 20. I think now there's something like 14. In Germany, they're closer to nine or eight tons of carbon per person. Like in Sweden, they're, you know, under four. We know, I mean, what we need to

• 17:34Ezra Klein?

  do here, it's pretty straightforward. You need to electrify things. You need to make sure that the electrical grid is powering itself off of clean energy. And that, you know, once you plug everything in correctly and, you know, you work through the industrial processes, that basically makes it so people are not emitting a ton of carbon really at all. And as David Walswell says to me, I'm paraphrasing here, him here, but as he says to me in this piece, "Then we can end this mathematical calculation of like weighing people as the problem." And I think this is really important because these things link up in my mind. It is a political problem to get this done. It is a political problem to build the infrastructure, to elect the politicians, to change society such that we can have the net zero carbon emissions world we want.

• 18:19Ezra Klein?

  We know it is a technical possibility. There is nothing about that world that is impossible. Maybe we'll need to do some carbon negative technologies, right? Like carbon, like various forms of direct air capture, et cetera. I mean, we can talk through the details of it. They're complicated, but, but it is doable stuff. Like, we have invented it and like it is to be celebrated that it seems as possible as it does. But to do it, you need to win this political fight. You need to have a vision of the future that people can see themselves in. It's appealing, that's thrilling even. And that vision then needs to think well of people, right? I mean, there needs to be room for people in your vision. So an environmentalism that becomes very fundamentally ascetic, very fundamentally about sacrifice, very fundamentally skeptical of people is, among other things, almost

• 19:04Ezra Klein?

  going to be by definition, a politically powerless environmentalism, right? I mean, if it's all the environmentalists who don't have kids, I think that has a pretty obvious logic about where that's going. And meanwhile, it's young people who are the engines of social change and political change and young people leading these movements that have moved us as far and as quickly towards better climate outcomes. So I don't want to say that it's a completely crazy thing to say, I don't know, I feel like we use a lot of resources and I don't want to do that. But I think that I would at the very least say that if that's your view on it, there are a lot of things I would ask if you're doing first. Are you a vegan? Have you moved into a dense city? What kinds of climate activism and climate donations are you making?

• 19:48Ezra Klein?

  Rather than not having kids, should you go and try to work for a hedge fund and in an earning to give kind of way, give all your money to carbon offsets or what you think to be effective political programs? Should you just be buying carbon offices? I mean, there are a lot of ways that you can try to involve yourself and make decisions before you say, I'm going to deny myself a family. Because I don't think the politics of that ladder up to a climate solution. In fact, they might cut against it. So it's really fundamentally an individual choice. You know, if you want to make that choice, great, right? I don't think anybody should feel forced to have children and to other things going on in our politics. I don't think anybody should be forced to have children. But nevertheless, I don't think people should mistake not having children for something that is mandated by climate science.

• 20:32Ezra Klein?

  The way in the piece to say, look, like, I can't tell you whether or not to have a kid, but nor can any climate model. That's not what they do. And so I think that the choice of whether or not to have a child is an intense one and a difficult one. I sometimes refer to it as like, it's a human event horizon. Nothing about your life is really the same after that. I often think of this conversation as suggesting that we've either scared people to a point on climate that has become paralytic. It seems like there's almost like no answer except not being human anymore, which I truly don't believe is true. Or it's sort of moved a political problem into a question of personal sacrifice in a way that neither solves a political problem nor through sacrifice can solve the substantive one.

• 21:14Ezra Klein?

  And so it's probably not the best place for people to put their energies or their worries. And I guess I'll end this on something Leah Stokes said to me, which she's at UC Santa Barbara, she's been on the show before. She's like a brilliant, wonderfully effective political scientist and researcher and climate expert and climate activist. And she said to me that the way she and a dear friend of hers who works on these issues too, thought about this was not how bad would her children's life be? It wasn't, was it moral to have children given climate change? It was, would having children because of the time commitment keep her from doing everything she could to politically try to avert the worst climate outcomes?

• 21:58Ezra Klein?

  And she came to the decision in her own life that, no, that she could still do this work. And that's frankly, the decision that most climate people I know have come to. But I think that's a reasonable way to think about it. I mean, if that's the issue, right, then I think the fundamental question of a child is actually time. I think the political acts you can take that are really consequential are not whether or not to have a child. And so I think that's a much more personal decision. And that's one where my reasoning on it is not for the audience and their reasoning on it is not for me to dictate to them.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  So let's follow up with some more questions on the plane of politics and policy. So we've gotten a few versions of this next one, but I'll just ask one. Is wokeness killing the Democratic Party? You've written a lot on the debate over messaging within the Democratic Party. Where do you come down on the question of wokeness?

• 23:04Ezra Klein?

  I do not believe wokeness is killing the Democratic Party. I don't believe the Democratic Party is dying either. I mean, I will know it at the moment. They control the House, the Senate and the White House. So I think a lot of people hold the view that for liberals or for Democrats or something, wokeness is the problem and things like Twitter are fine. And I hold the opposite view. I think for the most part, the set of views that people call wokeness are fine and things like Twitter are the problem. Which is to say that I think a lot of the bad dynamics people have identified in these areas, these sort of cancellation behaviors that are disproportionate to offense, these

• 23:45Ezra Klein?

  sort of mobbing behaviors, this sort of endless one-upsmanship on purity. I think this reflects a dynamics of social media more than anything, at least in the way it's being worried about right now. We've also had these dynamics in communities and other ways of organizing humans before, but recently, the rise of algorithmic social media, the rise of internal chat systems like Slack, all that created a situation where I think the people who ran institutions or administrated them didn't know what to do and made a bunch of bad decisions when they came under fire. Nevertheless, I think that most of the things people are worried about here, like can trans people have basic human rights and equality? Do we need to think more seriously about how to pursue equality in this country?

• 24:29Ezra Klein?

  Are there still fundamental things about this country that are structurally quite racist? All that to me is true. Do we need to think more seriously about representation and how people are referred to and spoken about, but going way beyond speech, actually how policy treats them? I mean, if people listen to the Ibram X. Kendi episode, the part of anti-racism I find very appealing is the actual focus on racial inequality as the right thing to be targeting. So I actually find myself in alignment with most of the ideas. And then the behaviors people don't like, I see almost equally in all directions. I wrote a column for the Times about this last year sometime, but I really make a distinction between what people call cancel culture and what I would call cancel behavior. And people behave in all directions at all times in ways that would get people canceled if they had the power to cancel them.

• 25:14Ezra Klein?

  And I see it coming from all the different ideological movements simultaneously. And then, I mean, really, seriously, like, take two seconds and look at where the right wing has gone on this, to actual speech codes, book bans, laws. So the idea that the right is somehow a bunch of free speech warriors, it's risible at this point. So I don't have the same view, I think, of the wokeness debate that a bunch of other people have. I then think there's a separate set of issues of is what gets called wokeness. Again, this is all very imprecise in the language. I think it's good for people to specify what they're talking about, but is this kind of miasma of issues? Bad for the Democratic Party? Or bad for liberalism or progressivism or something? And that, I think, is probably on the margin true.

• 25:56Ezra Klein?

  Not as bad as people seem to think it is, because actually, a lot of Democrats who have to run in key elections have perfectly good political antenna and have run around this perfectly well. So take an Eric Adams in New York as a more extreme example. But Democrats nominated Joe Biden in 2020, who was not the most woke candidate by any means, and was very explicit that he was not going to defund the police or abolish the police, and they won the election by quite a bit. And I can give you a bunch of individual examples in different places. It does not seem to me that Democratic politicians are having to struggle with their extremism in a way Republican politicians aren't. I do think there's a dynamic in politics broadly, some of it social media driven, as I was mentioning a minute ago, that does give the edges of all the coalitions much

• 26:41Ezra Klein?

  more power and weight in the public conversation. And so you have a lot more difficult issues where politicians have to decide which parts of their coalition to distance from, but I don't think it's distinctive to Democrats or even distinctive to wokeness. The final thing I'll say here is that I don't think wokeness is a good cleavage for Democrats. I think that on, you know, any kind of polling analysis you want to run, economic populism is probably better. That's just clear. And this is because it doesn't split the Democrats within their own coalition, right? These issues really do split Democrats inside the Democratic Party and the unit Republicans. What you want is for the main cleavages of American politics to be the things that split the other party and give you the power then to, you know, make good policies and say reduce

• 27:24Ezra Klein?

  racial inequality. Now, I don't think it's easy, actually, or at least not as easy as other people think it is, to refocus American politics on simply the issues you wish you could, like Medicare prescription, drug negotiations, poll very well. But in part because they're not that divisive, they don't attain that much media attention. What can you actually get people talking about is a really important part of all of this. I would say, one, I don't think the Biden administration right now has a theory of like, really, like, what they're going to get people talking about. I think I've said this before, but in a lot of ways, I think Republicans have theories of attention. Certainly, Trumpist Republicans have a theory of attention, but not a theory of strategy, right? He knows how to get attention, but doesn't know how to, like, act strategically.

• 28:07Ezra Klein?

  The Democrats are very strategic. Their leadership, like, they're not at every individual action, but in general. But they have no theory of attention. They're just being drifted around on the winds of public events and random controversies. And I think it would be smart for Democrats to think more seriously about what they want to split the electorate over. I think you can understand some of my work right now as saying that I think a more productive cleavage, and I'm not saying here politically for Democrats, I just think more productive, would be trying to really build some division over this question that I think actually splits both parties internally, over whether or not in American politics it should be easier or harder to build things. You know, I think there's a lot of, get a lot of attention

• 28:48Ezra Klein?

  if Joe Biden, in addition to proposing 500 billion in climate investments, was actually taking on a bunch of parts of his own coalition, environmentalists and others, who are standing in the way of that, who have made it very, very hard to build, who sue everything under the national Environmental Policy Act despite even when those things are good for the environment. I think that oftentimes what gets attention are things that are divisive within an individual coalition. And it would be healthier to try to generate controversy by taking on something that would be good to take on. Like, why can't Democrats build things effectively? As opposed to some of these cleavages over race and sexuality and gender. But that doesn't, you know, mean not doing that is killing the Democratic Party.

• 29:31Ezra Klein?

  The Democratic Party is kind of in a relatively banal space, given how bad inflation is. I mean, if you look at how they're trending in the midterms, they're gonna get hammered. But they're gonna get hammered in a pretty normal way. And, you know, then their secondary problem is that the structure of American political geography is against them. But there isn't something that's killing the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is limping along competitively, neither dominant nor minoritarian. And it has some pretty serious geographic disadvantages. It needs to think about how it wants to, how it wants to approach. But I don't think the way to approach them would somehow be to like throw racial justice overboard.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting to think about wokeness as a content of beliefs and also kind of a mode of expression. So that's helpful. Speaking of our not super woke president, Jean asks, should Biden run again in 2024?

• 30:24Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, all the hard Democratic questions.

• 30:28Ezra Klein?

  Look, I mean, it depends where he is in 2024. I think the plan is for Joe Biden to run again. I think they've been very clear about that. I think he's been very clear about that. Since you asked, let me tell you the thing I worry about, which I'm not saying is where we are. And I want to say before I say anything here, I am very confident in this judgment. Like, Joe Biden is not senile, there's no dementia, he's not sick. He's fine. Like, I know people working with him every day. I do a lot of reporting on this. He's fine, but he is a much older person. And that does slow you down. I think there's a simply like an energy level question in the long term. I know a lot of people in their late 70s and in their 80s. It's tough. I'm amazed at the energy Biden has.

• 31:13Ezra Klein?

  I think he's done a really remarkable job on a couple of hard things recently. I think his performance on Russia, Ukraine, particularly in holding together Europe and the coalition here has been really, really underrated in how well he's done it.

• 31:28Ezra Klein?

  But let's say Joe Biden came to the view that he shouldn't run again. He would be in his 80s. It's kind of nuts. He's a transitionary figure. The problem is that the vice presidency with Kamala Harris hasn't worked out that well. From everything I can tell as a reporter, they're not that close. Her polling is not good. The way her staff has been run, I mean, there's been a lot of reporting on this, a lot of turnover. It just hasn't looked good. They gave her some pretty impossible tasks, like the refugee crisis on the border, democracy reform, when they didn't have the votes for democracy reform. So I'm not sure I think she was set up for success here, but nor has politically. She played that hand incredibly well.

• 32:10Ezra Klein?

  And so the problem is that they don't kind of trust, I think, that she could take over smoothly and kind of run in Joe Biden instead and win. But to have a primary, like a bruising primary where, you know, like maybe she comes out the other end, or maybe somebody beats her, like that would also split the Democratic Party in a very dangerous way, particularly if you imagine Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis running. So if Joe Biden is doing great and runs great, anything beneath that scenario, Democrats are in some trouble right now. If Harris had really consolidated Bidenism, that would work out just fine. But I guess maybe one place to end this kind of long answer is to say that it should really

• 32:52Ezra Klein?

  be a central, central, central project of the Biden administration right now to strengthen Kamala Harris. I don't really see them doing that effectively, but she probably will be the candidate, if not in 2024, then in 2028. And they need to figure out much better than they have how to put her in a great position for that, both to make sure that if Joe Biden doesn't think he should run again, he has the ability to say no to running again, right? He should, as a human being, not feel like he's got the entire weight of the country on his shoulders, but also because, you know, the vice president tends to become the nominee at some point or another, and they need her to be stronger with the public than she is right now. And that is something that is possible to do by giving, you know, her kind of some of the right roles.

• 33:37Ezra Klein?

  But I feel like they keep handing her some of the toughest jobs in politics on the most controversial issues. You need her to be handing out prizes to people, not always be in the center of the toughest thing. And so, I don't know, I think they need a better strategy for succession right now than they have.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good point. Okay, so moving from electoral politics to actually governing, Ryan asks, what should we do to overcome the cludgeocracy and restore faith in local government, rise above partisan politics, and save our communities for future generations? I loved your episode with Alex Tabarrok and have passed it around YIMBY and activist circles to much acclaim, but how do we fix things? I get the sense you're working on something around this problem, and can we help?

• 34:26Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, so I love this question. Thank you. Maybe you can help, actually. So let me define some terms here. Cludgeocracy is a term comes from Steve Telles at Johns Hopkins, very, very smart political scientist. He's sort of talking about the way a somewhat paralyzed and captured political system will start coming up with ever more Baroque workarounds to get things done. And over time, things just become cludgy and inefficient and weird. And, you know, you got to know how to go to the floor 14 and talk to the person in sub office B to get, you know, to get to go work around on regulations nobody can handle. YIMBY, by the way, is yes, in my backyard, people. It's true. I am working on something along these lines. I am pretty focused right now on what I have called in

• 35:09Ezra Klein?

  some episodes and columns, supply-side progressivism, what I've been thinking of more recently, more like a liberalism that builds. And my basic view is that it is a central problem for liberals, that in places where liberals can govern, they cannot govern better. They do not govern better. And when I have looked into that and have tried to focus in on it, it's not as easy as they don't believe all the things I believe, and if they did, then they would govern great. It is that the way governance is built in blue areas, and nationally, for that matter, often by Democrats and liberals, has made it really, really hard to wield power. There's different versions of this. Paul Sabin talks about it in Public Citizen. Mark Dunkelman has had, who's a researcher on some of these issues,

• 35:54Ezra Klein?

  had this great piece in Politico a while back on why it's been so difficult to upgrade Penn Station. But the basic shape of the river here is that there's a strain of liberalism that is very comfortable and excited to wield power. And then a strain of liberalism that rose in reaction to that. And in reaction to sort of the New Deal liberals and progressives wielding power in often heedless, reckless, terrible racist ways. Think Robert Moses building highways through black communities. Think of corporations or governments dumping toxic waste into rivers. And they created, among other things, a very legalized system in which it was very easy to sue the government, stop it from doing things, try to make it do more environmental analysis. That's all for the good, and it did a lot of good.

• 36:38Ezra Klein?

  And then over time, it got kind of crustier and crustier. So I mean, you know, environmental impact reports went from pretty swift, relatively thin things to these like multi-year behemoths now that they are. So things just don't get done. They just don't happen. It's incredibly expensive to build infrastructure in America. It comes in, if at all, very late and over budget. There's no high-speed rail in California. In 2019, New York tries to do congestion pricing. To do it, they need the feds to give them license to do it because some of the roads are built with federal money. So Trump just says no, or doesn't say no. They just don't act. Then the Biden administration comes in and says, of course, we'd love to work with you on this congestion pricing. It's good for the climate, good for mass transit. But then like they agree on an environmental assessment, which is like less intense than an impact report.

• 37:22Ezra Klein?

  And then when that comes in, they come, the feds come back with another 430 technical questions and comments. And that's congestion. I think you're just hanging cameras on light posts. And that's a negotiation between Democrats. And so I think it is a very fundamental issue, like a fundamental issue. If you care about things that I care about, like say decarbonization, like can you actually, even if you pass that bill, even if Biden got billed back better done, can you actually build that stuff at the speed you need to build it? It's a real reversal, I think, of a lot of the ways that people think about it, which is to be conservative with our climate and like try to conserve the climate we've had requires you to be very aggressive about building new infrastructure right now. And we're not set up to do it.

• 38:04Ezra Klein?

  I think it is a mistake liberals make that they see a problem and they're like, we should pass a bill. And then if the bill passes, people think the problem is solved, but it isn't. You know, the stimulus of '09, it was supposed to build a high-speed rail, electronic health records, and a smart grid, where it's marquee projects. We don't have high-speed rail, we don't have a strong national system of electronic health records, and we don't have a great smart grid. So there's a real problem here. And I'm doing a lot of work on this and trying to look at a lot of different case studies. And what I would say, as a way, I appreciate being asked, I could really use help. A lot of you all work in government and, you know, or interface with government and see this stuff. And I could use insight and I could use leads and, you know, I worked on this project and I saw it this way.

• 38:48Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, we always say our email, it says our client show at nytimes.com and I won't be able to reply to everything. But I'm somebody who has, I think if you listen to the show, like, pretty liberal goals. And I do this kind of critique, not in the spirit of just critique, but in the spirit of wanting to achieve those goals. You know, I want liberalism to work. And then, you know, to the points about Trump and other things, I think one thing that opens the door for populist outsiders and demagogues and just the right more generally is when liberalism just kind of fails. It fails to deliver. Like, California is a hotbed of democratic talent. But I think it's going to be very hard for, you know, executives from California to run nationally because California's become unaffordable for people.

• 39:31Ezra Klein?

  And particularly in the major cities, like, you really have to explain away, like, how come you have this huge homelessness problem? How come you have this huge housing problem? Liberalism's failure to build enough has both, like, made its goals often unachievable, has worsened inequality, and has made the right wing stronger. So I really think trying to understand what has gone wrong in the way liberals run government and trying to think about what lessons and what kind of lenses can be taken out of it such that people can begin to fix that and begin to turn the dials in the other direction. My basic view is that, like, it's a bias against getting things done, a bias towards inaction over action, operating at a million different levels and decision-making vectors and nodes.

• 40:14Ezra Klein?

  And you kind of just got to figure out how to create a perspective that... Turns it back on all of those simultaneously because people start looking at the problem to be solved. As can government deliver the things it says it will deliver, right? State capacity, the way Brink Lindsey, the Niskine Institute defines it is can government execute the policies it promises? So yeah, I'd love feedback. I'd love help. I'd love, you know, leads on things I should be looking at. I know about this congestion pricing thing, you know, because somebody sent it to me. And, you know, I'm trying to think about productively, constructively. How can governance actually give people the things that it promises? And that'll be a project you'll hear a lot of on the show in the coming year and hopefully some, some good will come out of it.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  To hold your feet to the fire a bit because of Ryan's question, you diagnosed the problem really well. And I know it's a massive problem and a kind of ongoing project, but he did ask, how do we fix things? If you could wave a wand, change something in the way either, let's say California's government or the federal government works. Can you think of a small fix?

• 41:21Ezra Klein?

  It's really hard because I don't think there's any one problem. This is what I mean, that I think it's kind of like a bias that got set in society over time. One, I don't know how to solve it. I, I do think part of it is being able to give people a lens through which to see the problem correctly. And then people at many different levels can begin to ask that question. There is a fair amount of discretion in this stuff, not entirely, but, but some. So a government that understood its main problem is things aren't getting done. Might just say, hey, you know, we're, we're willing to move this program forward faster. And we will experiment and change it on the fly as opposed to trying to model everything out in advance. Or thinking you can model everything out in an impact assessment.

• 42:05Ezra Klein?

  So some of this stuff can be done by, by decision makers. A lot of it can't be though, and it is going to require new laws or new approaches to laws. We do something that a lot of other countries don't. I mean, it would be easy, I think, listening to this to say, for somebody on the right to say, "Oh, yeah, the problem is just government shouldn't build things." But that's not, one, it's not viable because a lot of things need to be built by government. But number two, it's just not true. Like, you can look at Canada, you can look at a bunch of governments in Europe. The Transit Cost Project has done this. And you'll see that we just spend a lot more per kilometer of rail than they do. I mean, we just spend a lot more than other countries do. If you compare us to a Canada, a Germany, a Spain, they're getting a lot more bang for the buck.

• 42:47Ezra Klein?

  They got government, they got unions, they've got a relatively wealthy, post-materialist culture. It isn't something intrinsic to government. But one thing that is a little bit unusual here is how much we try to check government through the legal system. In a lot of other places, you know, there's obviously a comment period and there's a bunch of negotiations on the front end with unions and communities and so on. But once it's done, it's done. And here, we really make it easy for anybody to sue the government and for them to sue the government endlessly, which also then creates a huge amount of effort to try to make yourself bulletproof to lawsuit before you ever break ground on a project, which takes a long, long, long, long time. And so I think we're going to have to think about things like the way our administrative

• 43:30Ezra Klein?

  law works, the way a bunch of the environmental policies we've passed over the years, like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act and the California Environmental Quality Act. And, you know, there are a lot of these acts at different levels. The way they work is probably not, at this point, they're not having the intended effects. You know, among other things, they're slowing a lot of things down that are good for the environment. Everybody knows what I think about the filibuster. I think you actually need to be able to pass laws more smoothly. Majorities need to be able to pass laws more effectively so they can also just revisit them. The cost of any individual piece of legislating is so high now that people don't want to revisit things and make them work better. Like, that's a problem. You know, the number of civilian employees in the government has actually stayed

• 44:13Ezra Klein?

  much more steady than people realize. So what we've actually done is outsource a lot of needed expertise. Seems to have been a particular problem on California high-speed rail. We just, we need really well-paid public servants, like civil servants, who are also able to like do their jobs because they're not so hobbled by weird rules and regulations. I'm very intimidated by this project, in part because I know there is not one solution. But I really do think there's a lot of value to being able to see a problem and begin to see how that problem has operated in different domains, and then try to think about how it operates in your domain. So, you know, my hope is to be one of many people here who is doing generative work. And I'm sure I will come up with over time like a

• 44:56Ezra Klein?

  list of things that I think could be better on the margin. But there are going to be so many, operating in so many different ways. I'm almost like trying to create like a lens on a particular problem that people can then take and look at the problem through their particular expertise. It's not going to be, it's never going to be me who solves it, but I'm hoping to be able to focus attention on it and give people some kind of analytical tools for recognizing it and why it might have happened for many well-meaning reasons and, and things you want to be careful about undoing, but nevertheless need to think about their, their downsides in, in the modern situation.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm going to pivot to a, what strikes me as sort of a spicy question. And this is from Will. Who is the public intellectual you disagree with on at least 50% of the big issues you care about, but whom you respect the most?

• 46:04Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, that's interesting.

• 46:08Ezra Klein?

  One, I think the question of disagreement here is kind of a fascinating one because it fully depends on where you set the boundaries. So there are a lot of people I disagree with on a lot of issues in American politics, which is, I think, what this question is actually about. But I mean, we disagree, we agree on very fundamental things about, you know, liberal democracy and I don't know. I think probably the answer I'd give on this is Tyler Cowan over

• 46:30Speaker 01

  I knew it.

• 46:30Ezra Klein?

  marginal revolution. Yeah, I mean,

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I would have put money on that.

• 46:33Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. And the reason is very specific. I think that something is a little bit underappreciated about Tyler is it, whatever you think of his politics, and I know many people on the show do not agree with his politics, do not like his politics, a bunch of parts of his politics I don't agree with. Is it, I think he does a very good job of exhibiting a number of intellectual virtues in both the way he kind of tries to understand the world and the way that he comports himself within it. Not to say he doesn't have his moments of slipping up, as I do, as we all do, but I think there's an ecumenicism to him, right? Like, he really does read and learn from and try to highlight a lot of different kinds of people. Like, even if he's more conservative than you are, he's very interested in liberals and, you know, he seems very able to absorb from a lot of

• 47:18Ezra Klein?

  different folks, which is actually something most people can't do that well in politics and in punditry. And I think that he's able to maintain a lot of restraint and a cool temperature that allows him to be heard by a lot of different kinds of people. And I could kind of keep going from there, but, you know, as I've kept going in my own career, I've come to think a lot more about the role that the people in these jobs have in modeling different kinds of agreement and disagreement and ways of moving in the world. Just a role of virtues, right? I think that there's the layer of are people right? And then the layers of are they comporting themselves in a generative and generous way? It's a little bit like the old line, when I was young, I admired smart people, and now that I'm old, I admire

• 48:03Ezra Klein?

  kind people. I do feel that way pretty deeply. And there are other people I would note on this. Like, I've always thought that James Fallows, the journalist, you know, exhibits a lot of really profound virtues in his work. So yeah, so I would say Tyler, and I would say Tyler because I think that the way he, even if you don't agree with him on a lot of things, and again, I don't, I think there's a lot to learn from the way he moves through the intellectual world, sort of no matter where you're coming from.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yes, and we can link our episode with him in the show notes. All right. On a topic that comes up on the show sometimes, Matt asks, "I feel like you've been dancing around this idea of trust in institutions for a while, and mentioning that trust is declining, it's low, it's a big problem, et cetera. But what I want to ask is, aren't our institutions themselves untrustworthy? And if so, isn't it in some sense better that people don't trust them? Were they more trustworthy in the past? Or do we just have a better understanding of how bad they always were? And finally, how do we make our institutions worthy of our trust again, perhaps? And then start trusting them more?

• 49:11Ezra Klein?

  Well, I'm not going to answer the last part because I don't know. But I will say, I don't, I don't think there is reason to believe our institutions are worse now, except for possibly because we are able to see their failures more clearly. And that maybe paradoxically makes them worse rather than better. And what I mean by that is that, look, elites have always gotten a ton wrong. Their knowledge of the world has always been very limited. They've always been self-dealing and captured and corrupt. I mean, none of that is new. And in fact, if anything, there might be ways in which it's less prevalent, at least in America now, than it has been in the past. I mean, I don't think you can even read documentation or histories of early America without being kind of stunned by how much corruption there was. You know, go read like Robert Carroll and Lyndon Johnson.

• 49:54Ezra Klein?

  People talk about Johnson as this great master of the Senate, kind of so unbelievably corrupt. But we didn't have the kind of media we have now, which, you know, has this very fundamental value, this oppositional antagonistic coverage. Like the media, even media organizations that people think of as liberal, they are so excited if they can unearth a scandal in liberal politicians, right? I mean, there is no mainstream media organization that if they like got their hands on a scandal that could lead to the impeachment of Joe Biden, they would not report it tomorrow. Because like they'd win Pulitzers, right? Like we've actually set up the whole industry in this way. So as a, as a result, like there's a tremendous amount of reporting artillery focused on what is going wrong in institutions.

• 50:38Ezra Klein?

  Then add in now social media, right? So these things get, you know, passed around, they get amplified. Oftentimes, nothing was wrong and these things get amplified because they're taken out of context or there was like an edited video or whatever it might be. And then, which I think also creates actually a, a problem, the institutions know they're under this kind of constant scrutiny, right? They know that everybody can see them in the way they're working. Members of Congress know that their testimonies are live on C-SPAN and then people are going to clip out like a 45 second piece and then put it on the internet. And so they're very cautious and careful. And I think if anything, that's probably the thing here, making them worse than they've been in the past. Like I, I suspect they're less corrupt than they've been in the past, but they're somewhat less efficient because they can't negotiate internally well, because they're more risk averse, you know, et cetera.

• 51:23Ezra Klein?

  And so I think that we're in a little bit of like a puzzling moment on all this where institutions are more transparent, we have more voice in them and we don't like how they work. In fact, if anything, we like how they work less and less and less. And that's not because they're worse than ever. It's actually because a lot of the things we apply to them to try to keep them in check have made their failures and flaws so visible that they're now unignorable. And so having lost their mystique and then because of that in part, having lost their authority, you know, they also lose their capability to act well. So we don't live in a time of particularly bad institutions necessarily, but we live in a time where it is very hard for institutions to act institutionally.

• 52:08Ezra Klein?

  And that has created, I think, a cycle of mistrust, bad outcomes and frustration. And I don't, I truly don't have an answer to it.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Here's a question from Sean. What is something you realized was a significant problem that you previously discounted?

• 52:23Ezra Klein?

  Well, it's a good one. I think that, you know, to everything I was saying earlier about a liberalism that builds and supplies that progressivism, my estimation of the problems that can be caused by outdated or overly expansive regulations and then a kind of adversarial legal system built on top of them is much higher. So that's something where I've been resistant because I do think a lot of regulations do a lot of good. I'm not anti-regulation in some abstract way. But I think in part because it often seems to me that what corporations are doing around regulations is just trying to get freedom to do many things that I think are bad, that I discounted some reasonable critiques there. And I now take them a little bit more

• 53:08Ezra Klein?

  seriously. So my, I was more dismissive of regulatory burden and litigation cost in the past than I am now.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Sam has a question about policy and politics over time. So you have blogged about and covered American politics and the policymaking process for nearly two decades, not to make you feel old.

• 53:29Ezra Klein?

  I feel, I feel old for a lot of reasons.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  But given that fact, what has been the most significant change in the political environment that you've observed over that time?

• 53:41Ezra Klein?

  Hmm. I think the most significant change right now is that the Republican Party has become a fundamentally anti-institutional party. You know, you go back 10 years, 15 years, something like that. In many ways, Republicans were as or more institutionalist as Democrats, right? I mean, if you think about George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush, or Mitt Romney, it's different institutions, right? But, you know, they're the party of big business. And, you know, they're the party of, in certain ways, like social, I don't know what I want to call this exactly. But they tend to be more defensive of existing social arrangements, which tended to be institutions. And the party, particularly under and then post-Trump,

• 54:22Ezra Klein?

  has become very different than that. You know, at this point, Republicans are almost at war with like all institutions. They think business is woke, culture is completely against them, government is totally against them. You know, maybe not the Supreme Court is like the only one. And so, you know, they've become very skeptical of elections and the sort of machinery and institutions that safeguard our elections. Is the Republican Party becoming fundamentally hostile to institutions and to a lot of the connective tissue that composes like the fabric of American life and functioning is a really, really profound change. Now, again, I want to say there's always some of these dimensions of the party. You can go and listen to our episode with Matt Contini.

• 55:06Ezra Klein?

  It's not like the John Birch Society wasn't skeptical of American institutions, but it was a more suppressed tendency. And that tendency completely winning out and then kind of creating a feedback loop, right? Where because the Republican Party is more anti-institutionalist, more conspiratorial, people who are more anti-institutionalist and more conspiratorial join it, so it becomes even more that way. Let's say you get a Republican Party that's like highly anti-mask, highly anti-vaccine, highly, you know, at the same time, you know, hates Disney, right? Like, there's a lot going on here that's almost like towards all institutions simultaneously and has made it then that, you know, one of the two political parties that holds power in this country at any given moment is, I don't know, it's in a much more fundamentally radical place.

• 55:50Ezra Klein?

  And in many ways, I think in a much more dangerous place. I think the Republican Party is a much more destructive than constructive institution right now. I think it knows much better what it wants to pull down than what it wants to build in ways that I think are very worrying. But it's a really profound change. And I always say that the amount of change we have in American politics is often hard to see. It is obscured by the fact that the parties which host and adapt to that change maintain the same names. So, you know, over time on the internet, you say, oh, well, you know, it used to be that people that AOL would, you know, own everything, but now you have Google and, right? So everything changes because the incumbent players, their names change. The Republican and Democratic Parties really do change. They just keep the same

• 56:34Ezra Klein?

  name. And so people don't, I think, I think it can be hard for people to track actually how different what has happened is. It's like, we had a multi-party system where, you know, the part of the Republican Party that is now dominant had started out as like, you know, the radical Tea Party Patriots Party, and they went from 4% of the popular vote in 2010 to winning the presidency in 2016 or whatever. Like, people would really grok that, but, but I think we often don't. So, so that'd be my answer.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think something that those institutions that you listed have in common, too, is that there's at least a perception that they're run by liberals. So there, it kind of dovetails with this own the libs fervor that's so powerful right now on the right. All right. So Daniel asks, as a longtime practitioner in the strategy consulting industry, I've noticed a recurring pattern of disdain that you've expressed toward these organizations. I'm curious if you can expand on your opinion of these firms, the work they do, and whether slash why you feel it's a net positive or negative for society as a whole. And I think there's a little shout out to Roget, our former consultant in this question as well.

• 57:44Ezra Klein?

  Our former McKinsey. So, a couple of things here. He's, he's right. I do sometimes poke management consulting in the ribs of it. I don't have a huge abstract problem with management consulting or strategic consulting. I mean, I have problems with some of the individual projects that a McKinsey, et cetera, will take on, but, but that's not really my issue here. I think my issue here is that I think that there are a certain set of industries that, in my view, don't add that much social value. And I would here particularly call it finance and management consulting. Not that they should be abolished, but they're not, to me, things that are fundamentally transforming the world for the better. At best, they make things on the margin a little bit more efficient. They're very middlemanny, right? They're, they're, they're mediators in an advanced economy.

• 58:29Ezra Klein?

  And a lot of what a McKinsey does is sort of like wander around, get paid by one organization to see what they're doing, and then get paid by another organization so that organization can know what the first one is doing. Like, it's just kind of, kind of crazy business model. But they, because they actually have so much excess profits.

• 58:47Ezra Klein?

  They're able to snap up or hoover up a tremendous amount of young talent. Like the percentage, you know, over the past 20 years of like Ivy League graduates who go into consulting or finance is really high. I mean, like high double digits in a way that I just think is a is bad. Right. It's just bad. And so the thing that I have a stronger view on is that we've gotten into a place where young people who their whole life have been on a kind of achievement track and are used to, you know, the next thing being like well set up for them. And we've gotten into a place where these organizations come in to good schools and go to the brightest people

• 59:29Ezra Klein?

  and are able to say, hey, look, sign with us early in the year and you'll have something that, you know, you can tell your family is great and is going to pay you well. And, you know, they have this whole pitch of you can come here and you'll really learn, you know, business analysis and you can go off and do whatever you want. You can go do public service after you do this. And it's like, no, like, that's bad. You should just go do some public service, like go learn things on the job. Um, and again, I'm not saying that everything that McKinsey or Boston Consulting or Bain or any of them do is bad. And I'm not saying there's no use for finance or any of it. It's just, I don't think we're allocating talent well. I mean, if every one of those kids went and became a public school teacher, wouldn't that be better?

• 1:00:12Ezra Klein?

  Like, I think it would. But the problem is we, you know, you make a ton of money at McKinsey and crap teaching at a public school. It's not really McKinsey's fault, but it's still kind of a bad situation. Or, you know, climate, like, it would be better if more people were getting into climate tech. And I mean, I think there is some amount of boom industry in that now, but, and, you know, you could say something like this about a lot of what ends up happening in law school, which doesn't read exactly the same way when you look at these graduates. But I think a lot of people who, you know, graduate out of college and want to go save the world get talked into going to law school. I almost did. And, you know, most of them end up in corporate firms or firms that are doing things that are, you know, again, to me, kind of middle man-y in the economy.

• 1:00:54Ezra Klein?

  So beneath this critique is not really a critique of any of these individual industries. It's much more a sense that we are using like the most important thing we have, which is people and talent poorly. And we've sold a lot of people who want to do a lot of good, a bill of goods that is a bad bill of goods. Like, the best way to get into public service is not to go to McKinsey. It is probably not even go to law school. Like, to something I was saying earlier in the show, I think we've like over-legalized our political system. It's a particular problem on the democratic side. I mean, isn't it just a little bit weird that Joe Biden and also Kamala Harris and also Hillary Clinton and also Tim Kaine and also Barack Obama and also Bill Clinton

• 1:01:37Ezra Klein?

  all had law degrees and Al Gore started a law degree that he didn't finish? I mean, I've like, I've gone back and counted this up. It's very few, like, democratic nominees, like Ron Klein also has a law degree. The Democratic Party is really lawyerified in a weird way. And again, nothing wrong with lawyers, but I think we've told people, like, that's the way to learn about public service. And that works for a small number of people, and a lot of people end up with crippling dead and they end up doing corporate law. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with corporate law either, like, corporations do need lawyers. I just, I don't think we're allocating talent effectively. So that's kind of what, what that's getting at. I'm not saying I know how to fix it or I know where everybody should go and everybody can, it's easy to get a little starried about things like STEM.

• 1:02:22Ezra Klein?

  But I also sort of think that it reflects a society where actually building things become really hard. And so a lot of people are focused on the rules and on efficiencies and on, you know, mediating between like different institutions in a way that is not what you would see if we were sort of optimizing for more fundamental and more important forms of progress. So that's my concern there.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of something you talked about with Agnes Callard, about just the way that we allocate sort of status and prestige and certainly salary in our economy and society. It just massively favors industries like that if you're looking for a high salary and high prestige. But it would be great if we could do that for teaching once again in other professions.

• 1:03:11Ezra Klein?

  Totally. Nursing, nursing is a great thing to do. And status is very connected to money. I mean, I think fundamentally, Agnes and I kind of disagreed on this, but I think I'm right about it. I think fundamentally in our society, status follows money. And I think if you look at the jobs that get read as high status, they're the jobs that pay a lot of money. But on the margin, you know, status is also about what people socially think. And so part of when I jab these things in the ribs a little bit, you know, that's part of that view of mine that I think probably a lot of smart young people listen to this show. And I don't think that you should just kind of automatically go into things like management consulting because it seems high status and is like a next step that seems

• 1:03:52Ezra Klein?

  to retain optionality. I think that that should be seen as kind of like a weird fallback that people end up in. And instead, you know, people should go work for local governments and they should go into teaching. And that, you know, there's a lot of things we really need and we really need great people doing. And we've made those things seem almost weird compared to a bunch of, in my view, actually weird things that we've overly normalized. I think people should look at you a little weird if you have gotten a great education. Like, I'm gonna go work at a bank and try to make as much money as humanly possible. And I think they should applaud you if you go and teach eighth graders. And I think we've gotten that backwards.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've heard that their offices are really nice and their office snacks are really good, so.

• 1:04:39Ezra Klein?

  They're great. Sure, it's all great. I mean, that's the thing. When you have an industry that throws off a lot of excess profit, you can do a lot with that excess profit. I'll say something about Wall Street that they're able to do. And I mean, this is why sometimes people make these choices, a very compelling argument. I've done a lot of reporting on this over the years, actually. I've written pieces about this. You know, compelling argument that the Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan will make to young graduates is, look, here you are with your degree in English, but you don't actually want to teach English. So come to us and we will actually train you to do the things business needs. And you know, you'll learn how to use spreadsheets and make models and whatever. They're actually acting in a way as a kind of graduate school because they have the money that other industries don't to train people. You know, so I mean, maybe that's, but we're getting people to

• 1:05:23Ezra Klein?

  make kind of bad decisions in at university or, you know, even before it. But also, I think it reflects like a misallocation of of resources that things like taxation could be used to to manage. I mean, you know, you could put a transaction tax on the financial industry and use that money for a lot of good things that that would, you know, I will say like as a kind of like on the margin thing, you did a transaction tax and you basically just use the money to increase the value of a lot of jobs that we think of as socially worthwhile, ranging from teachers to sanitation workers to city government employees to like, I think that would be better. Now, frankly, a transaction tax would make so much money if you did it well, that you could probably use it for a lot more than that. But yeah, I am saying that we should have a reallocation of status and

• 1:06:08Ezra Klein?

  money to to other parts of society.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a proportionality thing. Okay, so I'm kind of curious about this. This might be opening up another Pandora's Box, but Peter wants to know, Ezra, do humans have free will? It's just a casual.

• 1:06:28Ezra Klein?

  I'm in general a free will skeptic. And the way I would say that is too, well, not that in any given moment, there isn't some choice, right? I'm sitting here, I'm looking at a can of Diet Coke and a bottle of water. And I do think to a large extent, I have free will over which of those I choose. And I was just talking about, you know, people having decisions to make about what they go into. But I think that a lot of what we think of as free will is not really under our control. It has to do with predilections and resources and capabilities that come from from well beyond us. So one, a lot of just what choices we can make have to do with where we're born in society and how we're born, right? You know, do you have developmental disabilities, right? Are you tall? All kinds of things matter here. But even beyond that,

• 1:07:12Ezra Klein?

  I think that a lot of the decisions I make get me like a nice social acclaim, right? I work really hard and people think that's great, but I don't really even feel like I have control over that. Whatever kind of willpower I have or intense kind of energy for my work, I have one, I have a great job that I really enjoy. But two, it's somewhere behind me. Like, I can't stop. If I could stop, sometimes I would. But I don't know that I deserve a ton of acclaim for that. Or like, my love of reading is somehow, it's subconscious, but even it's like sub willpower. Like, I read to calm myself down. If it doesn't feel like that to you, of course, you're going to read less than I do. And so there's just a lot in us that even the things that we still think of as sort of

• 1:07:57Ezra Klein?

  will, that we still think of as part of our decision making, like impulse control. I like, I'm very, very highly impulse controlled, but that's just kind of how I am. And I'm using myself as an exemplar because I feel more comfortable, you know, taking away my own agency than taking away somebody else's. Yeah. But impulse, I mean, we know that different things matter for impulse control. Like, if you have more adverse childhood experiences, if you have more childhood trauma, you're gonna have, on average, much lower impulse control as an adult because of the constant fight or flight response in your psyche, because of the way your executive functions did or didn't develop. And so at some point, you and somebody who had a really costed upbringing are both going to be adults and will, you know, applaud the person who

• 1:08:39Ezra Klein?

  had the easy upbringing for making all these good pro-social decisions and maybe throw you in jail for, you know, getting into a fight at a bar or something. But was that really your fault versus the other person's fault? I mean, I'm not saying that it's easy to know what to do about the situation once you're in it because we, you know, we want to incentivize good behavior and to some degree punish bad behavior. But was that understood as will? I don't really think so. And so I just think what is properly understood is somebody's free will. And what is properly understood is them making decisions that they deserve both moral and like distributive acclaim or, you know, punishment for. It's just a lot smaller than other people do.

• 1:09:21Ezra Klein?

  And to some degree, like my views on everything from taxation to prison policy follow from that. If you want to hear somebody who's got very, very interesting views on this, I had him on the show back in the Vox days and you can find a lot from him on this on YouTube, but he probably goes a little further than I would. But, but Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford behavioral and neuroscientist, I think is very compelling for a socially contrary view on this point.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Great, we can link that too. Okay, so let's ask one more question before we get to our final question as it is somewhat related. And Brian has a question about ergonomics and reading. And he wants to know Ezra, do you have a special reading chair?

• 1:10:04Ezra Klein?

  Oh, no, I don't have a reading chair. I actually-

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Where do you read? Yeah.

• 1:10:08Ezra Klein?

  It's not, not a good scene, actually. I've wanted to find a special reading chair. Special reading chair. It makes it sound so like, like a blankie or something. But I have all kinds of weird like back and shoulder and chest issues. And so I need something that doesn't hunch my shoulders forward. I need something that's like very like ergonomic and I haven't found it. So if people have reading chairs they really like, I'm certainly taking, taking possibilities and suggestions.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot to be said for like old school recliners because you can really get your whole body in the position that you want.

• 1:10:41Ezra Klein?

  No, they hunch my shoulders forward and then my sternum begins to pop. It's like the craziest thing. If you, if you saw this, so like when I'm reading in any of these chairs, I'll read for a little while and then I'll like, kind of get up as if to like stretch out my back and you'll hear this deep resonant pop in my chest as my sternum pops into, it's a total horror show. Like people turn around in coffee shops and look at me. It's gross. Bodies are gross. I'm gross and old and broken down. But yeah, I've been looking for something that would simultaneously be comfortable and keep me from hunching. And I've not, I've not exactly found it. So maybe somebody out there knows the answer. Weirdly, due to a recommendation from somebody else at The

• 1:11:25Ezra Klein?

  Times, I do my work in this like little weird ergonomic rocking chair, almost, that can kind of like rock forward. It's this Dutch thing, you know, it's, and it can kind of like be forward and, and I don't know. My ergonomics have gotten better over the past year, but it's because things got so bad that I actually had to get ergonomic help. And I'm trying to continue taking care of my body now that, now that I've gotten that wake up call.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so always our final question, but with a bit of a twist. Ezra, can you give us a couple of books and a couple of music recommendations that you've been enjoying lately?

• 1:12:01Ezra Klein?

  So I guess I'll begin with books. I've been rereading some Neil Postman for partially a project I'm doing, but partially because I think he's so unbelievably brilliant and prescient. The place to begin there is Amusing Ourselves to Death. And if you just haven't read it, it is not just a classic, but it is much more relevant to our world today than almost anything being written today is relevant to our world today. So Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, you should actually just read this book, not like file this away as like a neat recommendation in the back of your head. Andrea Wolff's The Invention of Nature. And I think people are not going to like that title for a bunch of different reasons, but it's a great biography of Alexander von Humboldt,

• 1:12:41Ezra Klein?

  who was a naturalist, discovered a million things, had really, really fascinating theories of nature, structured a lot of how the West understands nature today. Now, I think a lot of people would say that there are a lot of indigenous perspectives that, you know, he ends up borrowing from or kind of taking credit for whether or not he came up with it similarly. And I think that critique is reasonable, but it is a fantastic biography, just a really beautifully structured and thought through book. And I've really been enjoying it. I'm only about half done, but, but it's great. I guess I'll do a fiction one. I recently read Beautiful World, Where Are You? By Sally Rooney. And I found all of her work kind of very depressing in a way because

• 1:13:24Ezra Klein?

  just to the extent she is a voice of a generation, like the level of anxiety and self-loathing and self-questioning that her book reveals like really worries me about people's psyche. But to go back to something, we mentioned Tyler Cowen earlier in the episode. He described this as a Sally Rooney book as almost like written by Rush Douthat, and I think that's right. It's a very, very unusual book, and it's kind of mixtures of like, young leftism and almost social conservatism. And I don't know, I don't even know what I think about it, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I'll do some music. So I really love and have listened to a lot over the past year, Max Richter's, particularly his song Spring Number One on, I think it's like Vivaldi remixed or reconsidered or something.

• 1:14:08Ezra Klein?

  It's a beautiful, beautiful album, but Spring Number One by Max Richter. And I've been listening recently to a lot of sets by a DJ named Christian Loeffler. You can find albums from him on Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or whatever you use. But I've been listening to a bunch of sets he's done on YouTube, which are worth checking out and you can find by searching his name.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Very cool. Thank you. So Ezra Klein, your podcast is The Ezra Klein Show. Your book is Why We're Polarized, and your column is At the New York Times. Thank you for doing this.

• 1:14:38Ezra Klein?

  And thank you, Annie.

• 1:14:50Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion, and it is made by an amazing team of people. It is produced by Roji Karma, Annie Galvin, and Jeff Geld. Original music by Isaac Jones and Jeff Geld. This episode is fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Mixing and engineering by Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Christina Samulski, and Kristin Lin.