Now All Biden Has to Do Is Build It

In the past few months, Joe Biden’s agenda has gone from a failed promise to real legislation. Taken together, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) have the potential to put America on a path to decarbonization, develop some of the most advanced and crucial supply chains in the world, and build all kinds of next-generation technologies. It’s hard to overstate just how transformative these plans could be if they are carried out in the right way. But that’s a big “if.” Because Biden’s legacy will not be written just in tax code and regulatory law. All of this legislation is about building things in the real world — from wind farms to semiconductor manufacturing plants to electric vehicle charging stations and so much more. Which means the hard work isn’t over. It’s just beginning. Felicia Wong is the president and chief executive of the Roosevelt Institute and someone who has had an unusually clear read of the Biden administration from the beginning. Wong has been arguing that Biden wants to fundamentally reshape the productive capacity of the economy. And now he’s gotten approval of bills that have the potential to do just that. But Wong is also realistic about the obstacles in the way of realizing that project. And so the question at the center of this conversation is: What will it take to turn the Biden agenda from written legislation into lived reality? We also discuss the death of the “care infrastructure” for helping families that was at the heart of the Build Back Better proposal, the challenges of building up the American semiconductor industry, why some progressives view these bills as “corporate welfare,” the conservative argument that government shouldn’t be “picking winners and losers,” how these bills could respond to America’s deep regional inequalities, how to address the problem of NIMBYism, what participatory budgeting and worker cooperatives can teach us about better ways to represent community voices, why we should want the government to take bigger risks even if that means more government failure, and much more Mentioned: “All Biden Has to Do Now Is Change the Way We Live” by Ezra Klein Book recommendations: The Middle Out by Michael Tomasky (accompanied by new podcast, "How to Save a Country") Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò Chords of Change (forthcoming 2023) by Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce 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 and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. 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.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

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

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  I was on leave for most of August, and coming back has been a bit dizzying. Because the day that I left, the Biden presidency had stalled. The Build Back Better agenda, it was dead. And then came one of the fastest 180s I've seen in American politics. In quick succession, Biden passed the CHIPS Act, a major bill funding semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which turned many of the major climate and tax ideas from Build Back Better into law. He canceled billions of dollars in student debt. All of a sudden, the Biden agenda was back. And so I wanted to step back and look at what Bidenism is. When you put the bipartisan infrastructure bill,

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act together, I think you see a legacy, or maybe not a legacy, maybe an approach begin to go here. And it's an unusually physical approach. All of these bills are about building real things in the real world. Roads and bridges and broadband and wind farms and solar panel arrays and semiconductor manufacturing plants and advanced battery supply chains and thousands of miles of electrical transmission lines and millions of heat pumps in houses and God knows how many electric vehicle charging stations. And the list just goes on and on and on. Biden's legacy, if it is to become a legacy, it's not just going to be written into tax code and regulatory law. It's not going to be sent out as checks.

• 1:52Ezra Klein?

  It actually needs to be built. And that means that the job doesn't end with the passage of these bills. It begins. And to be honest, nothing in the recent history of how America builds should make you confident that it will be built quickly, affordably, and fairly. This is not a case where passing the bill solves the problem. Passing the bill creates an opportunity to solve the problem. Felicia Wong is president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute. And she's been for a long time, I think, one of the clearest interpreters of what Joe Biden wants to do and the way he has changed. She has long argued that his agenda and his thinking is much more focused on directing

• 2:35Ezra Klein?

  and changing the productive capacity of our economy than people realized. And she was right, and particularly she was right because that is a part of Bidenism that became law. But she's also realistic about the challenges that are going to have to be surmounted before any of this can succeed. And that's the messy, uncertain space we try to inhabit in this conversation. I want these bills to work, so does she, but that is far, far from a foregone conclusion. So what has to go right from here? As always, my email, [email protected]. Felicia Wong, welcome back to the show.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me, Ezra. Great to be here.

• 3:18Ezra Klein?

  So you were last here in September of last year, and we talked about what you thought Joe Biden wanted Bidenism to be. And you described it really interestingly to me. It really stuck with me, this idea of a transformation towards a high-care, low-carbon economy. And a year later, he's got some of that done, some of that not done. So what is Bidenism shaping up to be?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think that Bidenism is still what I sort of call the sunny side of post neoliberalism, which to me may-

• 3:52Ezra Klein?

  Very catchy.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I know. Like, well, like, he wants all the good things about what a new economy could be, and I think he's sort of having to deal with some of the maybe bad things, but we can talk about that. Anyway, what I mean when I say that I think this is about the sunny side of post neoliberalism, like, I think he is very much still about public investment in a future economy. All of the legislation that this administration has passed, right, the Inflation Reduction Act, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, and the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, and even the American Rescue Plan, right, was really about using public funds and the power of government to make life better for working people, for working Americans.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And a lot of that was, especially the most recent legislation, CHIPS and Science and Inflation Reduction, is really about putting government money toward new sectors of the economy that he, that this administration, would like to see grow faster, more universally. So I think that that is still fundamentally what Bidenism is about. I would say two things beyond that. One is that, you know, that high-care, low-carbon idea. Care is out of the current plan, and that is really bewildering to me, and really a terrible thing for the economy, and I think a terrible thing for the American people. And we can talk about that, but care is out.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  So that high-care, low-carbon economy, it looks like we've got a lot more money on the low-carbon than on the high-care for now. And then the last thing I would say is that, in addition to the sort of public investment sunny-side part of Bidenism, what surprised me is that this team has really shown a willingness to use other tools, like antitrust, anti-monopoly tools, to sort of curb corporate excesses, curb private power. And I think that this team, especially a National Economic Council team, can see both public investment and antitrust as two sides of a coin.

• 6:02Ezra Klein?

  Let's spend a minute on the collapse of the CARE agenda before we get into everything that actually did pass. So Biden had a big plan to expand pre-K. He had a big plan to make childcare more affordable. He had a plan to make the expanded childcare tax credit, which is a very favorite policy of mine, permanent. None of that survived. What do you think it says about our politics that the hard infrastructure, virtually all of it ended up passing? And all of what was being talked about at that time is care infrastructure, virtually all of it died.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I think part of it, I mean, like, the top level explanation or analysis is really that, well, the deal was cut by like, you know, Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer, and it was really Manchin's bill. The Inflation Reduction Act is not the Build Back Better full plan, right? And so Manchin got to write a lot of that. And care was never really part of what he cared about. So that's, I think, at a very high level. I do think, though, that a kind of deeper power analysis is that the parts of the care agenda that are really going to benefit families, particularly women, particularly parents, working parents, that's just not what we have seen pass.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  To be honest with you, I don't, I don't really know why. There were so many great things about the care agenda, especially the pieces that were going to have home healthcare workers really be able to negotiate, not just with their individual family employers, but with perhaps state entities so that they could have, you know, higher wages. Like, some of that was really creative and interesting ways to think about using state power to help workers, in this case, female workers, women workers, women of color, mostly. I don't actually have a super great analysis as to why that didn't pass beyond a sort of general, you know, women don't have as much power in this economy as they should.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  But I do think it is an enormous shame, not just for America's families, but also for our economy. Because I, you know, women back in the labor force, it's good for the economy.

• 8:18Ezra Klein?

  So let's move then to the three big pieces of legislation that I think at this point look like together they comprise or will comprise a lot of Joe Biden's long-term legislative legacy. So the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. And you've argued that these should be looked at less as separate bills and more as pieces of a broader, integrated effort to make our economy into something somewhat different. So tell me about how you see them connecting.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I would actually also add the American Rescue Plan to that. So if you take all four of those pieces together, right? The Inflation Reduction Act, which is really about using tax credits and other kinds of loans to jumpstart a clean energy economy. The CHIPS and Science Act, which has a lot of investments in basic science, which I'm a huge fan of, but also has $52 billion to invest in an American, a made in America semiconductor capability. The bipartisan infrastructure plan, which is already going. It's over $1 trillion to do everything from fixing roads and bridges and airports to,

• 9:37Speaker 01

  really importantly, fixing things like water systems in America's cities, critically important as we look at what has been happening in Jackson, Mississippi. So those three pieces of legislation are really about using public funds to build sectors of our economy that many people, including obviously the people in the Biden administration, think ought to be built faster. Now, it's not just about public money, it's also about crowding in private investment. And if you talk to folks in the White House, they're very proud that, you know, recently Corning, the company Corning, has, you know, announced a new fiber optics manufacturing capability.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of new announcements about semiconductor manufacturing, about electric vehicle manufacturing. So that's all private money, of course. But those three bills together are really about jumpstarting, really, these new sectors of a future economy.

• 10:35Ezra Klein?

  So let's go into what some of these bills are. And I want to begin with the one that is least known, which is the CHIPS Act, because I think it's a really clean signal of what the Biden administration is trying to do. So how would you describe the CHIPS Act? Both what made it seem necessary and then how it tries to approach the problems it attempts to solve to somebody who has never heard of the CHIPS Act?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the CHIPS Act is actually one of my favorite pieces of this popery of legislative victories. So I'm glad you asked about it. There are really two parts, right? One is investment in basic science. So, you know, the National Science Foundation, et cetera. And I think this is really exciting. Maybe it's because, you know, I'm a Californian who remembers, or at least has some kind of historical memory, that much of Silicon Valley actually was built with government funding, government resources, government funding, you know, for the defense industry. Like, that's what the precursors to sort of like Apple and LinkedIn and Facebook really were in the Valley.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So part of what the CHIPS and Science Act does is actually to put government funding into basic research that is very much reminiscent of some of what we saw in the 20th century. Obviously, this is important for future questions of everything from, you know, AI to other kinds of information technology. But I think it is critically important as we think about what the vision for all of this ought to be, which in my mind is, you know, like, we should be seeing, I don't know, five, 10 new research triangle parks across the United States.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  That would be an incredible outcome in 10 or 20 years from all of this legislation. And I think some of the investment in basic science, which also asks that some of this money be spread through different kinds of research hubs throughout this country, like, that is just pretty exciting and pretty cool. So that's the first part of the CHIPS and Science Act. And then the second part is a $52 billion investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. That's incredibly important because, as we all know, semiconductors are parts of everything these days. Obviously, our phones, our computers, our cars. And we used to make semiconductors in the United States. We don't now make semiconductors in the United States.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  For the most part, they're mostly made in Asia and making sure that semiconductor supply chains are more resilient, meaning resilient to national security threats, resilient to other kinds of breakdowns in global trade. It's really important, a little bit for jobs reasons, but also more fundamentally for sort of supply chain resilience reasons, to start to build those in the United States. It'll be really interesting, too, to see how the CHIPS office ends up being staffed in the Department of Commerce. That is a lot of money to try to really invest in the American economy, and I think it will be very important. A lot of progressives have criticized the CHIPS legislation so far as not having enough

• 13:50Speaker 01

  corporate guardrails, and so it'll be very important, meaning you could see a very few companies get this money, you could see companies get this money and still end up, you know, mostly driving it towards executive profits rather than towards, you know, sort of building semiconductor manufacturing. So how this gets implemented from that CHIPS office in the Department of Commerce will be incredibly important.

• 14:17Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold on the corporate welfare piece of it because I want to come back to that. But this is a pretty, what's a way to put this? This bill, if they can do what they want with it and actually create the super sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing supply chain in America that they want, it's going to be a pretty remarkable example of government power and intention and planning. I mean, countries all over the world constantly want to develop some kind or another highly advanced, highly competitive manufacturing capacity, and they're constantly putting into play big programs in order to, you know, create it at home.

• 15:02Ezra Klein?

  And it often doesn't work. You mentioned a minute ago that a lot of the semiconductor manufacturing is in Asia. And I think when people hear that now, they think China. But that's not the case here. I mean, this is very much Taiwan.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:13Ezra Klein?

  At some degree. South Korea, I think, has a significant hold on it.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:17Ezra Klein?

  This is unbelievably hard to do stuff, and the supply chain is really, really advanced. And I think unlike green energy, which we'll talk about quite a bit in a couple of minutes, you don't have the kind of huge tailwinds where the economy has been orienting itself in this way for a long time. So you're a little bit, you kind of have a standing start, right? We don't have that semiconductor manufacturing supply, and we want it.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  We used to, but we certainly haven't for probably 20, 30 years. That's right.

• 15:43Ezra Klein?

  So how do we get it? And how does this avoid like the graveyard of industrial policy, of well-meaning industrial policy efforts that we've seen both here and in so many other countries?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  You know, that's a really good question. I'll be interested in two things. I'm not going to pretend to be a semiconductor expert or a semiconductor industry expert. And in fact, sorry, side note, that's actually one of the problems as we move towards this kind of industrial policy that requires sector by sector expertise, right, in aluminum, in steel, in semiconductors, et cetera. Most of the expertise in any of these industries is actually held by industries themselves. You don't see a lot of academic knowledge about this. You don't see this being taught a lot in business schools. You know, you certainly don't see a lot of think tanks with a lot of deep expertise in semiconductor manufacturing. So I do think that this is something where we're going to actually need

• 16:33Speaker 01

  actually a lot more research, both in academia and in nonprofits, to try to understand exactly what it means to develop stronger semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. So that's one thing I would be looking for. The second thing I'd be looking for here is actually whether there are any spinoffs from this. I mean, one of the things to remember about the late 20th century economy, mid 20th century to late 20th century economy, is that, you know, all of that investment in defense manufacturing, you know, basically in ballistic missile technology, there was all kinds of spinoffs that ended up, that's why you see the kind of commercial or consumer focused technology that's now part of Silicon Valley's DNA.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So I have no idea, to be honest with you, and I think it would be hubristic of me to try to claim that I understood exactly how to do it. But I think it'll be interesting to figure out whether that actually ends up opening new doors in our economy that we can't even really see right now.

• 17:31Ezra Klein?

  One thing that struck me as interesting about CHIPS is that of the three bills I'm focused on here, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS, I think CHIPS is actually the most ambitious statement of what we think government can do, in the sense that, again, it's an incredibly hard industry to build, and we're not building it on top of the kind of, you know, decades now of investment and work we're doing with climate, and nor is it like roads and bridges, which we do all the time, or broadband, which is a pretty structured space to invest in. But CHIPS is very bipartisan. It got a lot of Republican support, so it isn't like this is something that only Democrats believe they can do.

• 18:15Ezra Klein?

  But the traditional critique of industrial policy on the right is that it's just too hard for government to know everything it needs to know to build these kinds of industries. It doesn't have the information, it centralizes too much information, it makes bets that end up being the wrong bets, it moves too slowly, that markets are able to figure things out by pricing and through aggregating decentralized knowledge in a way government never can, and so government often fails when it attempts to say, hey, we're going to build this and we're going to build it this way. So speaking at a somewhat higher level of abstraction, as somebody who doesn't believe in that right-wing critique of what government can and can't do, what do you think is wrong with it?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  The question of, and you hear this all the time, you know, government shouldn't be picking winners and losers, but I definitely don't think that is what the intention of this legislation is. I think the point is to say that we care about this sector, right? It's not about we care about this particular company, and that is quite different. And so saying that you want a strong semiconductor sector in this country and asking what it's going to take to crowd private money in. This is a question about whether or not we want to see some of this developed in certain regions of the United States rather than having all the money run to like Austin,

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Texas, you know, New York or San Francisco. And I also think that it is about making sure that if there are any newer kinds of technologies or newer companies that might actually be able to compete in a market that has been dominated by a very few, in this case, it's primarily Intel in the United States. You know, I think the goal is to try to experiment with a lot of new ways of thinking about semiconductor manufacturing. I will be very interested to see what happens here. And last thing I'll say, I absolutely agree with you that it is the most ambitious because

• 20:23Speaker 01

  as compared to the Inflation Reduction Act where most of this is about financing through tax credits, CHIPS is much more direct, right? There could be direct monies given out of this Department of Commerce office and that'll be, that'll be different.

• 20:40Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go back then to the, the corporate welfare question here, which also goes to your point about so much of the knowledge being inside the semiconductor industry. So I want to read a statement from Senator Bernie Sanders, who ended up opposing CHIPS. He said, "What I cannot understand is why so many in Congress are so eager to pay this bribe. When the government adopts an industrial policy that socializes all the risk and privatizes all the profits, that is crony capitalism. The five biggest semiconductor companies that will likely receive the lion's share of this taxpayer's handout, Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, Global Foundries, and Samsung, made $70 billion in profits last year." Does it sound like these companies really need corporate welfare?

• 21:27Ezra Klein?

  So then, what is the point of giving these companies this big boost of money if they're making so much money already?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  I've thought a lot about Senator Sanders' critique of a lot of this, including of the CHIPS bill. And ultimately, I think it is about something, well, two things. One is, we still do really, even with all of these companies making significant profits, we really do see manufacturing itself in Taiwan, South Korea, as you just said. And so, bringing manufacturing home and trying to create a more resilient supply chain, because a lot of the supply chain here is quite attenuated. That was part of what drove costs of cars up early in the pandemic. So I think that's a really important thing that the government is trying to incentivize here.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And then, secondly, one of the important pieces of this legislation is that it does create regional hubs. And let's just think about this for a second. One of the major problems with our current economy is inequality, not just between, you know, the top 1% and the lowest income earners, but it's also regional inequalities. You see whole parts of this country that really have no jobs to speak of, and there are very few anchor institutions, you know, schools, universities, community colleges, hospitals. You know, you see whole places in this country that don't have private sector investment

• 22:58Speaker 01

  and also don't have these kinds of public institutions, and they're just not thriving. And it's bad for our economy. It's terrible for our politics. And I think part of what we are trying to see and do with CHIPS, or part of what this administration is trying to do, is to actually deal some of these regions back in. Now, I think this is going to be enormously challenging, and to me, that is one of the key things about implementing all of this legislation. But I do think that that is one of the intentions. That's where I think the actual ambition is.

• 23:59Ezra Klein?

  I've spent a lot of time on the phone with the Biden folks about the Inflation Reduction Act, and there's always, every time, a point in the conversation where they say, "It's really unfair to say these bills are just about money. They're about standards." And it's true. If you look at the Inflation Reduction Act and the climate spending, you get more money, and in some cases, you can only get the money if you pay prevailing wages, if you have certain work requirements, if a certain amount of the thing you're making is made in America or is bought from America. In CHIPS, as you're saying, there's, among others, the secondary desire to create more geographic equality and sort of more manufacturing hubs across the country with very advanced jobs coming out of them. And I obviously

• 24:43Ezra Klein?

  support all of those individual ideas. But I can also see the critique, which I've heard from others, that this is part of why government-run industrial policy often does fail, because they're trying to accomplish too many things. I mean, it's hard enough to build advanced semiconductor manufacturing, to also layer on a geographic quality requirement is going to make, you know, a job you might have already not been able to do even harder, or it's hard enough to decarbonize at the speed we need to decarbonize, to layer on by American provisions or prevailing wage provisions. Those things might be good, but you are making an uncertain job that much more uncertain. And it's the sort of need to balance all

• 25:28Ezra Klein?

  these political objectives that ends up making government less effective than people wish it were when it does these very big industrial planning projects. How do you think about that critique?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Look, I think it's pretty serious and pretty real. I think that what is happening now, the kind of inflection point we're at, where this administration has to think about implementing a combination of infrastructure plans, semiconductor plans, as we've just been saying, and then all of this green manufacturing, which is about many, many, many different separate industries, right? It's about solar, it's about wind, it's about heat pumps, it's about, you know, electric vehicles, it's about charging stations. First of all, it's incredibly exciting, but let's not kid ourselves, it's incredibly difficult. And one of the reasons it's difficult is that it actually has to do with implementation itself, right?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  We are talking about multiple different agencies. It's the Department of Commerce, which we've just mentioned. It's the Department of Treasury, which, the lion's share of the $370 billion is going to actually first run through the Department of Treasury, and this isn't something they really have a history or expertise on, right? It is the Department of Energy. It's the Environmental Protection Agency, which is where the Green Bank, which is where some of these loans are going to come from, that's at the EPA. So if you just think about trying to coordinate all the complexity you just laid out, and

• 27:01Speaker 01

  you lay that against these various, pretty complex government agencies, I am really looking for and listening for an overarching plan that I think is going to have to come from this White House, that's going to say, these are the goals, these are some of the regions that we're trying to reach, and, look, let's recognize that this isn't just one election cycle. Project, right? This is a, literally, it's a decade-long project. That's what the legislation says. But it's also a decades-long or even a multi-generational project in terms of trying

• 27:41Speaker 01

  to get all of this money out the door and all of these investments into the American economy. And so this administration is going to have to coordinate across all of these agencies and try to say, these are the most important things to do first. These are the most important things to do second. And that's going to be, I think of it both as an economic challenge, but frankly, also as a management challenge. So I agree with you that we are at this moment whereby, you know, everything, or at least many of the things, that could actually be the seeds of economic transformation towards, at least the low-carbon part of that high-care, low-carbon vision that I was hopeful for,

• 28:26Speaker 01

  that I remain hopeful for. But anyway, all of the seeds are there in the legislation that has already been laid out. But the question is, like, it's going to be pretty hard to deliver. Now, I got to tell you, Ezra, I don't think we have a choice. I think it has been very clear that the market itself has not either built supply chains that are robust enough, you know, found ways to make sure that these jobs are high-paying jobs for the majority of Americans. I mean, there's no question that the market itself is going to drive thinner supply chains and more inequality, just left to its own devices. So I do actually think that the government has to step in here.

• 29:11Ezra Klein?

  I totally agree that we don't have a choice. And I want to hold on to the planning space of this for a bit. And if I, I want to say, and I'll process this in the intro too, that if I'm picking at the pieces of this, it seem hard. It isn't because I don't want to see the bills work. It is because I so badly want to see the bills work. I think we so don't have a choice but to make these bills work. And I think there's a fallacy where people think, once a bill is passed, the problem is solved. And this is just the opportunity to solve problems. Like, all they have got in here, I wrote this in a column, it's like they've created the conditions for this building to begin to happen.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  I think they've earned the right to, like, get on the field.

• 29:49Ezra Klein?

  Yes, right. And when I was reporting on, trying to understand more deeply how the climate side of the Inflation Reduction Act worked. What we've really done there is layer a huge number of tax credits, loan guarantees, subsidies for this or that onto each other. What we really have not built out is planning capacity. And you were saying a minute ago that that'll be a real challenge for the administration. I think that's true. But what strikes me is that it is not a challenge that they have in any way given themselves a holistic set of new tools to address. In individual areas, there are new tools.

• 30:30Ezra Klein?

  They'll tell you about the hydrogen hubs and the ability to ask for proposals from different states for how electric vehicle charging might work. I mean, they have certain things they can do. But I think if you go back 10 or 15 years in this conversation, there were two theories about how planning might work. One is that you would price carbon and the market would do the planning for you. And we never were able to pass anything like that nationally. And it didn't work that well in the places they tried that. I mean, there's good books on how carbon pricing actually worked out. It's helpful. I would like to see it, but it's not a cure-all. And I think there are other countries where you have a lot more centralized planning and execution, where the government can simply say, this is a network of clean energy we're going to build, and now we're going to build it.

• 31:14Ezra Klein?

  And that's how this is going to work. And we're in this much more... I mean, at best, I think what we have is not planning here. It's coordination. Coordination across very, very different levels of authority, where it's like you often need cities to agree on permitting this particular clean energy installation or whatever it might be. And I wonder how we're going to get that much coordination done at the speed we need to do it with the level of public administration we have. We're adding a lot more people to the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Which I'm super excited about, by the way.

• 31:46Ezra Klein?

  Which is great. But you could imagine adding that many people into planning departments, or many more than that, around the country. It just seems to me that coordination is actually underfunded in all this.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I think that is exactly right, and I think coordination is probably underfunded, and it's certainly under-conceptualized or under-theorized.

• 32:06Ezra Klein?

  Yes, that's more important.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Like, look, I see this in three different buckets: the road ahead, the post-legislation, now we're on the field, what are we going to do next, right? So I think the first bucket is actually North Star vision-setting. It's what I was trying to say earlier, you know, in 20 years, Ezra, right? When your kids are young adults, what's this country going to look like as a result of this legislation, right? Are we going to see, like, you've been to the Research Triangle Park area of, in North Carolina, obviously you live in or near Silicon Valley, are we going to see much more of

• 32:49Speaker 01

  that in places that we sort of derisively today call, at least some in the media derisively call, you know, the Rust Belt? We actually going to see that? And I do think that to know where we're trying to go with all of this legislation with this multiple trillions of dollars, I do think that somebody, and frankly, I do think it has to be the president, that's kind of how our system works, right, has to set a North Star vision to say that I really want to see in 20 years, or I'd like my kids or grandkids to see in 20 years, these thriving. So I think that's critically important as a first step. I think the second thing that they do need to do is to actually help coordinate across

• 33:33Speaker 01

  agencies, sort of what we just said, you know, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Treasury. I mean, you've reported in some of these places, you've talked to some of these leaders, you've been in some of these buildings, right?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  These folks just don't spend a lot of time together. I mean, maybe sometimes the secretaries get together at a cabinet level or the deputy secretaries get together. But by and large, each agency has its own mission, its own culture, and trying to coordinate across all of these and say, you know what? The most important thing to do first is X. The second thing is Y, and the third thing is Z. Like, that's actually a management challenge. And I personally would like to see the White House take a stronger role in this. I'm glad to see John Podesta in his new green energy implementation role. I would like to see some of the policy councils,

• 34:32Speaker 01

  the National Economic Council, the domestic policy council, take a stronger role here. But I think otherwise, left to their own devices, the agencies are going to do what they would normally do. And it might be good, but the question is, is the whole going to be greater than the sum of the parts? So I think that's really important, this kind of prioritizing implementation. And the third bucket, I think it's staffing and capacity building. We all know how hard it is to staff that sort of a new administration. Who's going to be the Treasury Secretary? Who's going to be the Transportation Secretary? You know, and on down the line. I think now, you know, we've done an initial analysis at Roosevelt, and there's something like 300 new jobs just made possible by both CHIPS and the Inflation Reduction Act.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  So where are these folks going to come from? I mean, this feels like a small thing or like a maybe a medium-sized thing. But the truth is, you need great people in these roles. We just said these are really hard jobs. Where are we going to find these folks? And where are we going to find them on the timeline that is necessary for them to get in and begin to do their work while this administration is still in office? This isn't like, and a lot of, this is going to be a time when a lot of people actually perhaps begin to leave the administration. These are hard jobs. You know, being in one of these government jobs for a couple of years, it's pretty exhausting. You don't get a chance to like, see your family. I know many people who like, you know, live in Georgia and work in the White House and have like, three young kids. Like, they're tired.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  And so finding great staff, great human beings to actually think these problems through that you and I are just bantering about on a podcast, you know? Like, where are we going to find these folks? I think it's critically important.

• 36:13Ezra Klein?

  There's so much in there, and I'll just say on that last point that nothing will disabuse you more quickly of the notion that people in government are lazy, that spending a lot of time reporting with the people in government who are constantly calling you at 9:00 PM their time after a full day of their job so they can get into their reporter calls. I mean, it's the people who do these roles really burn out, which is also a long-term problem. I want to pick up on a few things there. One is, you alluded a few times in the show, including in the area I live in now, the Bay Area, to the way that defense industry money has often been the seedbed of later industries, of a lot of industrial planning in this country. And I sometimes try to think about what can we learn from

• 36:56Ezra Klein?

  that. And two things come to my mind there. One is that around the defense industry, we just waste a lot of money, and a lot of things don't work out. And people are just kind of okay with it. In a way, they're not with other parts of the government. And I'm not saying I am personally okay with every wasted dollar that goes into American defense, I'm not. But in general, defense just doesn't operate and has not traditionally operated under the tight scrutiny that other parts of the government does, which is why it's able to make often bets where the ones that don't pan out don't kill the ones that do or the ones that could. You know, I always talk about the amount of flak that the Obama

• 37:40Ezra Klein?

  administration got for Solyndra, but that same loan guarantee program was a lifeline for Tesla. And the other thing that always strikes me as interesting is that defense is a place where we end up being risk tolerant and collectivist. I think we often think of there being sort of, you know, the things that are collectivist are cautious and bureaucratic, and the things that are individualistic are highly risk tolerant, right? Like the heroic individual entrepreneurs. But particularly during wartime, not only, defense is a place where we often will take big risks, but do so with some kind of national purpose in mind. And then a lot of things technologically, traditionally have come out of that, particularly after war times. And I just wonder if there aren't lessons somehow to take from that

• 38:25Ezra Klein?

  that can be applied here.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, such a good question, in part because, well, two reasons. One is kind of, it's not enormous, but I think it's important to note that one of the reasons that, to some degree, infrastructure, but certainly CHIPS, was such popular legislation, is because it was seen through a national security lens, right? It was seen through this lens of outcompeting China. And we can have a conversation about that. I have a lot of feelings about that. I don't tend to think of it that way, and I don't tend to frame the need for CHIPS in that way. But I do think that is one important reason, that, you know, you see lots of support on both sides of the aisle for this.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  And I do understand that, that, you know, kind of goes all the way back to like, you know, Sputnik in 1957 being one of the reasons that we were able to see so much public investment in, in science, in higher ed, in K-12, et cetera, in this country 80 years ago, 50, how, 70 years ago now. So, at any rate, I do think that's one thing to say. But I also think that your flagging of the defense industry and how little scrutiny it often gets, it's really important because that kind of is a tell, right? That really shows us that our ideology and our beliefs around what is the values that

• 39:54Speaker 01

  we hold is important in this country. There is a kind of hierarchy of values that is conservative, small c, and it's just worth saying out loud, I mean, I'm not even critic, I'm a progressive, and I'm not even trying to criticize this, I'm simply trying to point it out, that national security and safety is something that people are willing to spend a whole bunch of money on without really holding it to that same kind of like efficiency standards that we might when we're talking about investing in other pieces of our economy. And I think that we should be investing

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Far more in things like, obviously, investment, obviously childcare, to get back to the sort of high care part of this economic future vision. And we should be willing to spend as much money there in that kind of investment as we are in things that ostensibly keep us safe. I think that is an ideological shift that is, at best, incomplete in our post neoliberal vision, and I think it is critically important. Because I actually think that is about our safety, but we don't conceptualize it that way.

• 41:07Ezra Klein?

  I'd like to dig in on the word efficiency there, because I think it's actually a pretty toxic word when applied, or the way it has often been applied to government. There's no doubt that many things a government does are actually inefficient, that from the perspective of somebody who would want to see them succeed, the way they are conducted is a huge problem. And that's one kind of inefficiency. But another kind of inefficiency that I find the government often gets held accountable for, and in response becomes risk averse and overly consensus oriented and bureaucratic, is the idea that everything should work out. And that seems really quite wrong to me, that the private market is pretty good at funding things that are almost certainly going to work out.

• 41:51Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, you can try to accelerate it, but even if the government didn't get into the electric vehicle charging station game too heavily, I'm not unbelievably concerned. We would never have a nationwide electric vehicle charging infrastructure. I just think it would come later. Whereas there are a bunch of technologies, and some of them are being funded here, like advanced hydrogen and next generation geothermal, but you want to be funding at fairly significant levels technologies that very well might fail. Like, all that money might go for nothing. Because if one of seven of them pan out, it is such an unbelievable boon to the future of the country, the economy, the planet, that it's worth it to have government.

• 42:35Ezra Klein?

  But we often end up, I think, in the wrong space here. Like, the right has done so much to make clear to the government that it will be held accountable for things that fail, particularly anything that fails that looks stupid in retrospect. And so then you often have government making, I think, overly safe bets. And people might turn around and say, "Look, this program worked out. Look how many things paid off." When, in fact, for the program to have worked out, for my definition, would have meant more things not paying off, but the things that did pay off being a higher reward for the higher risk.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Right. I think it's such a good point. Of course, I would think this, but I think it's, I do think it's also an ideological straitjacket, right? There's no reason to think that government shouldn't be trying to do things that are, in fact, more like moonshots. A moonshot was a moonshot when the Kennedy administration first conceptualized it. First of all, just on a purely political basis, that's kind of inspirational. We would like some entity, some set of institutions, to be thinking about what our collective future ought to be like in a very positive way. I think we've lost that in our politics. I think we absolutely need to get back to that. But on a slightly less visionary note, a slightly more practical note, I absolutely agree with you that it is important.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Who is thinking about fighting the next pandemic, right? And who is incentivized? And who has the job of thinking about fighting the next pandemic? Or thinking about the next flourishing region of this country, or regions of this country, as we talked about? The private sector is actually exceptionally good. I'm often critical of the private sector, but the private sector is exceptionally good at what it is good at. But not everything is a private sector job. And therefore, it means that we need to be thinking about government, not in this very circumscribed, small way, but actually in a much bigger way.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  And to do that, I think we have to kind of get out of this "small government is always better" mentality that I know you, Ezra, have heard brail against before. But I just think it's so important. I mean, As I was getting ready for this conversation, I was actually thinking a little bit about FDR, actually, and the kind of vision that he had for what government could do in the New Deal. And, I mean, that guy did not think that everything, he wasn't sure that everything that he was experimenting with was going to work out, right? But if you just think about the things that his administration put into motion very early on, in their first hundred-ish days, you know, it's the Civilian Conservation Corps, it's the Tennessee Valley Authority.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Did Roosevelt actually know that giving millions and millions of young men jobs in rural parts of this country, planting trees, did he know that that was going to work out? No, he did not, right? But when you think about the kind of creativity that the crisis that Franklin Roosevelt was living under, the kind of creativity that that made possible, I do think we have to get back to some of that now. So, I don't know. I think some of that conservative or right-wing straitjacket, it's kind of all in our heads. So I think we have to try very hard to push past that. And I do think that's part of what this administration is trying to do.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  But, look, it is very difficult. There's no doubt. Trying to resell kind of a vision of robust, energetic, imaginative, public-oriented government in this country, that is one of the biggest challenges for the future of this set of economic plans.

• 46:17Ezra Klein?

  There's the question of small government. And then there's the question of overlapping government, of sort of complicated government. One thing that is striking about both CHIPS and, actually, all these bills is that they're very deployment-focused. So, government does, and traditionally does, less than people would like in recent years, but still quite a bit, of funding, basic research, R and D. You know, we have a big National Science Foundation, a big National Institutes of Health. What we've been less excited about doing, although with some exceptions, like some of what was in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, is trying to deploy new technologies at large scale.

• 46:59Ezra Klein?

  And that's a lot of what this is about, trying to deploy a lot of wind and solar, a lot of electric vehicle charging, a lot potentially of demonstration projects that are going to have to be built into the physical world. Ultimately, a tremendous number of new energy transmission lines, because we're going to have to make our electric grid clean, and then we're going to have to triple or quadruple how much electricity we can generate, because we're going to make all the cars and all the homes and all the businesses electric and running on this clean grid. But if you start digging in to how you get that stuff built, it's not like the federal government can just wander over and say, hey, build it here. I mean, you were talking earlier about coordination between federal agencies,

• 47:41Ezra Klein?

  and I certainly agree with you that that is often less smooth than one would wish it were. But a lot of this is going to be coordination between multiple federal agencies, then multiple state agencies, often local agencies. I mean, in Oklahoma, every municipality independently permits or decides whether a transmission line can go through. And that's just, I mean, what I worry about what could really slow this down, it's those sort of mismatched authorities where, you know, a lot of the players who have to say yes to something don't have the national North Star 15- or 20-year vision or incentives, you know, in their agency in the same way that the federal government does.

• 48:26Ezra Klein?

  And I'm curious how you think about that piece of it.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think about that a lot, actually. I mean, I even think about it just with the American Rescue Plan, right? There was $350 billion in state and municipal money in the American Rescue Plan. Most of that's gone out the door. I don't have an exact count on it, not all of it, but most of that has left the Treasury Department now. But it's sitting under state or city jurisdiction right now, and a lot of it isn't going as the legislation had intended. Now, that's for lots of complicated reasons. It's not just Republicans don't want to do what Democrats wanted them to do. But, you know, cities have their own priorities, states have their own priorities. So you're absolutely right that the kind of federalism that we're talking about here makes a lot of this really complicated.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  And I know you've also written about or talked a lot about sort of Dimbyism at the local level, which is especially problematic in things like trying to develop more housing supply. So I agree with you that this multiple level, you know, basically the federalism that we that is the hallmark of American democracy also makes some of this building really challenging. We're not living in Korea. We're not living in Singapore, where some of this is just more straightforward, both by governmental structure and by culture. Like, some of this is just going to be challenging. So I agree with you. I worry a lot about coordination across agencies.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  I worry a lot about the federalism pieces. That's also why I do think that a few demonstration areas, I don't have to call them that, but a few areas where, like, look, it's actually working here, can go a long way, a long, long, long way. I'm excited about this moment, but I would never pretend that this is just going to be easy.

• 50:47Ezra Klein?

  I was corresponding recently with somebody who works on state infrastructure projects and has watched a lot of them flounder under local opposition, under the inability to get permitting. And something they were saying to me was that they didn't understand why we spend so much time and money on all these lawsuits, on making and remaking plans, but we really don't spend any directly compensating people for the fact that it actually is frustrating or a pain, or in some cases worrying, to have these projects located right near them. We've put all this money into these bills to give tax credits and loan guarantees and whatever to the companies that make

• 51:32Ezra Klein?

  these things. You know, if you're going to build a gigantic solar array, you're going to get a lot of money for that. We're really helping you out. If you're in a town that all of a sudden is going to have a bunch of wind turbines go up, and for all that I think wind turbines are great, you know, your town will look different if they're really big and you can hear them. And we sort of say, you should just get on board with this because it's good for the country or good for the world or because we're doing it. We don't really say you should get on board with it because actually, we're going to pay you out a little bit too. Like, yes, this is something that is going to make your life maybe a little bit worse. And, you know, no less than the company making the turbine, you know, you deserve some compensation there.

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  I'm curious why you think we don't do that, because I'm not as unsympathetic to what gets called NIMBYism as I sometimes sound like I am. It just seems to me that there are things that deserve compensation. And by mostly taking that possibility off of the table, we've made these very, very, very zero sum debates.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Look, I'm sure that compensation, if we really stop to think about it, I'm sure that like the sort of legal or sort of distributional questions of compensation could start to get really complicated really quickly. But again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't really try to think them through. Because I think that when it comes right down to what people want in their cities, in their towns, in their neighborhoods, there are two things that are really important. One is, is my property value going to go down? Is my view going to get worse? Is my street going to become more crowded? These are actual, real material things that are concerns. We often caricature them as concerns of like upper-middle-class people.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  But I think they're genuine concerns for qualities of life everywhere. And of course, what's happened in our history is that mostly black, mostly indigenous people have had to bear the brunt of that. And that is absolutely wrong. And so we should think of ways to actually compensate people, maybe even sometimes in reparative ways, if the building project is going to require something that is going to meaningfully and negatively impact their lives. So I think that's one thing. The other thing that I think that people really want, and I think it is at the core of much of our political economy problems, people actually want voice, right? You and I have sometimes talked about this as like countervailing power, whether it's

• 54:01Speaker 01

  through unions or whether it's through some other kinds of civic institutions. But I do think that people actually want a say. They do not want things to be done to them. I think what they want is for, to have some kind of input into the process that is going to make decisions that are going to affect their lives. Now, I think the problem is, and you've written about this, we have pretty lousy ways of solving those conflicts, right? The ways that we solve those conflicts is we like, we sue each other. And that is just like the worst possible way to deal with conflict.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And maybe part of what could be possible as we try to think toward this kind of new economic, sort of new thriving sectors, thriving regions of America vision, these conflicts aren't going to go away, right? But are we going to have better ways to actually? Talk about and solve these problems rather than either wishing they weren't there or then like having them end up in court. I don't know, but I would think about that.

• 55:13Ezra Klein?

  I think you could imagine a world where you were talking about Joe Biden's, you know, multi-year, even multi-decade, maybe North Star. And I think one way of understanding the vision he's putting forward is both that we are going to be a country that really builds again. This level of decarbonization is saying nothing of the infrastructure and chip investments. It's a project no less large than the interstate highway system, than the original electrification effort. I mean, this is huge, the amount of land involved, the amount of transmission lines, the amount of next generation technology. It's what is really being considered here is vast. I mean, I think I'm somebody who grew up thinking America was built already.

• 55:57Ezra Klein?

  And it turns out we're not, right? We modernized in the 20th century and now that's become archaic and we need to modernize justice completely again. And so you could imagine a world where that vision to be a country that is rebuilding itself over the next 10, 20 years, that has a lot more downstream transformation than just what is in these bills, right? That what maybe has to come at some point is exactly what you're talking about. And you could very much imagine it being piloted out in states like California that have a lot of problems with with NIMBY issues. But is there a more useful framework? A more scalable framework for voice where people both have, you know, more inclusion

• 56:40Ezra Klein?

  in projects and how they're designed and how they're figured out. They have more compensation from them maybe on some margin. But also, the way it's getting managed is not an endless array of lawsuits after the fact that frankly, don't involve most of the communities that might be affected. I just, I a little bit worry about the theory that we can just pass these bills and be done with it. Because I think creating the conditions for these bills to be implemented well and at the speed we want them implemented, there's a really big difference between these bills going fast and them going slow from the perspective of the climate. You could really imagine this being a kind of continuous effort. And I'm worried about it being a kind of big bang thing that then, you know, people think, well, we passed them. So now the climate thing is supposed to be fixed and we can just move on.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's a couple of things to say there. First of all, I think one of the biggest challenges is the challenge of speed, right? Because, yes, the climate needs us to do these things quickly. But our democracy and our sort of social fabric needs these things to be done, if not slowly, at least thoughtfully, right? Inclusively, like in ways that actually start to bring people back in. And I think that is going to be an enormous tension. But the other thing that your comments made me think about is, you know, there really are some other examples of economic problem solving

• 58:08Speaker 01

  that aren't just like pass a bill, throw a bunch of money and let it go, or just like let the market do it all, you know, let the large companies do it all. I think there are other models. They haven't tended to scale very much, but I would ask us to look at them again. One is this question of participatory budgeting, which I actually haven't really seen at scale. Some of your listeners or some of the other people that you've talked to might know more about how that might scale. But, you know, the question is, people have opinions about how to spend the public monies in their neighborhoods, libraries, parks, et cetera. And having a process where people can actually participate in that can be really important, far beyond the library or the park. So that's the first thing I would say.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And then the second thing is, you know, I spent a lot of time a couple of years ago trying to understand the power of cooperatives, like the Mondragon Cooperative and other kinds of economic entities. There's the Evergreen Cooperative, which I think is in Ohio. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, there are different places where you had more worker ownership in different forms. Sometimes it's shares of a company. Sometimes it's much more, it's whole ownership of a company. But You know, I actually think that for a long time, we thought of those things as, you know, maybe a little bit naive and, oh, isn't that nice that like that one thing that happened, you know, in that small region of Spain or something, that's the Mondragon

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Cooperative. But I would encourage us at this time where we have to build a lot of things and we want to build a lot of things in ways that are small D democratic, I would actually encourage us to look at those again. What are the lessons that we can learn from that? It has to be adapted to an American approach that is, I think, unique, both in our federalism and in the sort of complexity of our system. And as we try to do this in a way that I hope is post neoliberal, but let's face it, we've got a lot of private power and a lot of big corporate power in this country, and that's just the water we swim in. But I would encourage us to think about these other ways of both economic

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  problem solving and economic decision making. Maybe some of that is possible at this moment when there's so much legislation that now needs to actually get done.

• 1:00:29Ezra Klein?

  We've talked a lot about Joe Biden here as the central agent. But this kind of building, executing that kind of vision or just his vision is very much an all of society effort to some degree. And I wonder what you think has to happen within the Democratic Party, what we might understand as American liberalism, what we might understand as the environmental movement. You've sort of given reference a bunch in this conversation to, you know, decades of neoliberalism. I do think a lot of liberalism has been used to blocking things or trying to pass, you know, big bills nationally. The idea of being in

• 1:01:12Ezra Klein?

  a period where it needs to build, like actually kind of build this alternative, I think is a little bit organizationally alien. And I wonder, you know, what you think the rest of society needs to be doing during these periods. I don't mean every piece of it, but if you're a political activist who has been, you know, working day and night to try to pass bills like these or, you know, that eventually got compromised down into these, or, you know, you're a Democratic voter who cares about these issues, you know, what do you think your role is in trying to take? This opportunity to be on the field into actually, you know, winning the game that people felt they were trying to play.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question because I really worry about our civic infrastructure. I worry about our unions. I worry about whether it's activist infrastructure or the kind of weird think tank infrastructure that I'm a part of because I don't think we're really suited to this moment. I think we think in kind of issue area silos, you know, my job is to fight for a better child tax credit. My job is to fight for a better tax system. And those things are important. I don't really think that's about directly about the kind of building that we've been talking about now. First of all, I worry that our institutions are very weak. I've been really excited to see some of the, you know, new labor organizing, but most of that new labor organizing, like at Starbucks

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  or at Amazon, that's been happening outside of traditional unions. Traditional unions, and I say this with great respect and love for my, the many people I know who are in traditional unions or run them, but they, the numbers are not great. And so I worry that, meaning literally their membership numbers. So I worry that, you know, the, all of those entities are not suited for this moment. You know, we don't really have, I had spoken earlier about the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. We don't really have a lot of those kinds of entities right now where those are literally, they're mostly guys. Those are literally like guys going out to build something. They were literally planting

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  trees. That is a muscle in sort of the American civic infrastructure that has really atrophied. We've got a lot of groups that are really good at fighting. We don't have a lot of groups that are really good at building. But I do think that, you know, my kids are a little bit older than yours, as was my kids are teenagers, and they actually want to get out and build. They really do. Like, Mom, what you do, it's like, I'm sure it's meaningful. I'm sure it's important, but it, boy, it takes a long time. You know, all those words, all those Zoom calls. They want to get out and build. And I actually think there is a kind of energy amongst Gen Z in this country.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  You know, teenagers, they want to be out there building things. And I think institutions that can help. I would actually call for sort of national service would be something that could be pretty exciting in all of this. I actually do think there's a lot of room for new institutions, not just within government, but also on the outside, that could move toward this. And I think if we're going to do this, which, you know, we had lots of national service, like in the Clinton administration, for example. But I actually think that today's, if we're going to have a new set of outside actors, which I think would be terrific, I think we have to be far more attentive to the realities

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  of political power and corporate power and actually capital than we sometimes are. I think there is a less naive version of civic infrastructure that can build. And I'd be excited for lots of people, you know, who are in their 20s and 30s to start trying to build some of that because now would be the moment.

• 1:05:05Ezra Klein?

  That's a great place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Well, my first book is Michael Tomasky's Middle Out. And this one is kind of on brand for me, in part because Michael and I are actually the hosts of a new podcast called How to Save a Country. So Michael and I are kind of co-conspirators. The podcast launches in a few weeks. But I'm actually recommending this because it's a long form reported look at everything that you and I have been talking about today. You know, Michael really looks at all of the people and all of the academics and all of the activists who have been pushing Joe Biden for so long, such that, you know, at the very beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden actually said he wanted to change the economic paradigm.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  So that didn't happen overnight, Michael reminds us. So that's the first book that I'd recommend. The second book is Olafemi Tywo's Elite Capture, which is this amazing book. It started as an essay in Boston Review, and it really argues for a constructive politics.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  By bringing an almost radically strong class lens to race politics, to quote, "identity politics." It was such a pleasure to read. Like, it's kind of a weird book for such a short book. It includes these really long detours into like the philosophy of games or a history of the Black feminist Kambahe River Collective. It was both complicated but really straightforward. Like, you need class and race. That's kind of what he's saying. And to be honest with you, I didn't really understand all of it, which is one of the reasons I liked it. It kept me going back to it. And then the final book is not yet a book. It's just a draft, but it's so good that I wanted to recommend it to your listeners.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  It's Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce's "Cords of Change." So this was like a book that I felt, as somebody who's been in progressive politics for multiple decades now, it felt like it was a book that I'd been waiting to read without really even knowing it. I was able to review it for Deepak and Stephanie just a few weeks ago. And the subtitle of the book is called "Seven Strategies Underdogs Use to Win." So it's kind of a strategic history of lots of different strategies for social change. And in part, it's like a how-to guide. And I think their core message is that we need multiple strategies, plural, not just singular, if we are going to win

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  the kind of victories that we have been hoping for. And I think it reminds those of us on the left who sometimes feel like, this is so hard. This is like a Sisyphean endeavor. But it reminds those of us on the left that we actually have a rich lineage of victory, whether it's the abolition of slavery or gay marriage and AIDS activism. So it's a really powerful book. It's not out yet, but when it comes out next year, I really think that all of your listeners should read it.

• 1:08:10Ezra Klein?

  Build in the hype early. Felicia Wong, thank you very much.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Thank you. Great to be here.

• 1:08:24Ezra Klein?

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