Episode 3: Who Rigged the Game? A Double-Feature with Marc Dunkelman & Daryl Fairweather

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great. But when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's first guest is Marc Dunkleman, a fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University. Marc is the author of Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress, and How to Bring It Back. He'll be followed by Darryl Fairweather, the chief economist for Redfin. Her new book is Hate the Game. Economic cheat codes for life, love, and work. That's right, folks. Tonight's episode is a double feature of authors diving deep into how we got into this mess and how abundance is the path to renewed affordability, a democratic revival, and a progressive vision of American greatness.

0:47 You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Please welcome your hosts for the evening, Steve Boyle, Armand Domoluski, Nia Johnson, and Burhan Azeem. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. Hey, everybody. Welcome to week three of Radio Abundance. My name is Steve Boyle. I am here, as always, with Armand Domoluski and Nia Johnson. And we have a fourth today, a fourth co-host of Radio Abundance. Please welcome making his Radio Abundance debut today, Burhan Azeem. Hey, Burhan. Hey, guys. I was a part of all the YIMBYs for Harris stuff and everything with all the great work that these guys were doing.

1:35 City councilor in Cambridge, really into zoning and abundance stuff. We both passed a lot of really cool stuff in Cambridge, but also founded Abundant Housing Massachusetts eight years ago. We've been doing the housing stuff for a long, long time. My pet theory is that we call this so much of the abundance movement, but that, you know, Ezra and Derek can always talk about how, like, they picked it up from YIMBYs beforehand. And I wonder, you know, Abundant Housing Massachusetts, Abundant Housing LA, so many of these orgs were named after abundance. You know, that's how so much of the origins of, like, you know, this abundance concept started. But just excited to be here for today. Yeah, that was something Congressman Jake Aachencloss mentioned. And Armand brought this up first, actually, and introduced this idea. And Congressman Aachencloss was really excited about it. The idea that YIMBYism really is the, I think Armand first called it the proto-kernel, not only of the abundance movement, but of greater transformations in the Democratic Party.

2:25 Farhan, I think you're underselling yourself a little bit because you're somebody that we've been really excited about. I know Armand was so excited to have you be a part of YIMBYs for Harris and honored that you were a part of that event, to the extent that you've been mentioned on this podcast before in our first episode, while we were talking about some of our great voices at that event. Obviously, we talked about everyone from Governor Wes Moore and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Brian Schatz, Congressman Robert Garcia. But Armand also shouted out your name as somebody who is in a more local government to kind of rise into the ranks, but is really a sort of a brilliant voice and advocate for this new vision and direction. So we're really excited. You know, we were honored just to kind of connect and talk about being in the partnership and so excited that you've joined us as a co-founder and a builder on this journey.

3:13 One thing I find really exciting about having Burhan here really quickly, I feel like I spent so much of my life, all of us have duking it out with city council members or trying to block housing. So now that there's one here who's like, yeah, I'm bro housing. I was like, that's amazing. You know, the tide is the tide is shifting, right? We're starting to get a little bit of power. You know, on our first episode, Armand, Nia and I shared a little bit of our origin stories. Armand is the son of Polish refugees. He grew up surrounded by home building and construction and then got into this movement as a resident of San Francisco. Nia grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts and saw just how much harm car culture was doing to our world, both making the neighborhoods more boring and and also polluting the air and lengthening commutes.

4:01 There is death and injury from cars. Nia lives in New York now and can point very concretely to a better way of doing things. I shared my stories. I got my interest in politics was stoked by surviving terrorism as a young age and then kind of growing up and and building my life as an artist in San Francisco, seeing how that city's scarcity immiserated and hollowed out the artist community and the most vulnerable and marginalized people most of all. And then seeing the city fail to build affordable housing because residents and neighbors who talk nonstop about how we needed it could still say, hey, this abandoned lot or this empty McDonald's. I don't want four stories and shadows near me. Those are our origin stories and our moments of abundance, radicalization.

4:48 And Burhan, I'm curious if you can give us a little background and tell us yours. Yeah, it's kind of similar to Armand in my own way. So I was actually born in Pakistan, in Multan, on the outskirts near like a mango farm sort of situation. And then my sister was born premature. There wasn't a great health care and everything. So my parents got into debt, you know, just keeping her in the incubator and everything like that. My mom actually became so desperate that she wanted to try to get us out of there because that was the only way you would make it. And then she did. She won the lottery, the visa lottery that got us a ticket to New York. We came to New York and then we ended up staying with another family. There was 13 of us in this three bedroom. We would stay in the basement whenever the landlord would come over for inspections and everything like that because it's just illegal to have that many people moved around every year for a long time.

5:36 But I got lucky, eventually got a full scholarship that helped pay for MIT and stuff like that, which is where I went to college. And then from there, you know, I got involved in the local community in Cambridge where I moved to. And I was just shocked by how comfortable all sorts of housing was. And especially at that time, you know, I was young, 22, but the median age in Cambridge is 20, even including students. It gets to like 32. It's a pretty young city. But the next youngest city councilor was like 53, excluding the mayor at the time. And I just felt like, you know, there was so many ways that we could do better. And so I ran. I lost my first election, but I won the second one and then became the youngest city councilor ever elected in our city. And then since then, we've been passing a major zoning reform every year. So it's been pretty exciting. You know, I'm I'm really excited. I'm really excited about this episode.

6:22 And I'm also excited that we have you on it and joining us to talk about it. You know, we started we launched with two big double feature episodes featuring some pretty heavy hitting elected officials. Right. We had Governor Westmore of Maryland, who is a Rhodes Scholar, an Army veteran, now an abundance and affordability focused governor. And I happen to think a pretty compelling and potentially powerful contender for the presidency in 2028. We had Jake Auchincloss, who is smart as a whip and a millennial. He's 37 years old. He and I were both born in the same year. It puts me to shame a little bit and just a really exciting and unflinching advocate for abundance with with kind of the same wonkish spirit and detail that we have here.

7:09 We followed that up by focusing on the world around New York City, both in New York City and Zellner Myrie, state senator from New York, and his plans to build one million new homes in New York in the next decade, a plan he called Rebuild NYC. And then right across the river, right across the Hudson River in Jersey City, the mayor of Jersey City, Stephen Fulop, now running for governor of New Jersey, who has surged home building there. He's actually also a veteran, as is Jake Auchincloss. He saw, watched the first plane hit on 9-11 with his own eyes from lower Manhattan, left his Wall Street job, went to serve in Iraq, came back, became mayor. And under him, Jersey City's gone from 1% of all the building permits in New Jersey to more than 10%. So that's been very exciting. But we're not just going to focus on politicians and elected officials. Today, we've got two experts and authors.

7:59 One is Daryl Fairweather. Daryl Fairweather is an economist. She's actually the chief economist for Redfin, which is an apolitical job. We know her for her political inclination. She was a great supporter for Yimby's for Harris. She joined our big Yimby Cella fundraiser. She joined our kind of hosting panel for phone banking events. Her new book is called Hate the Game, which focuses both on the housing market and our economy, but also a little bit of game design and game theory and how to use the mechanics of games to get what you want. You know, she had a few great kind of references that we'll talk about later on the interview. She talks about the housing market as a kind of musical chairs, where not only are we kind of all fighting for our dwindling supply of chairs, but if you have a home, then you lock down your chair.

8:49 So other people have less chairs and make sure less chairs get added to the game, which I thought was a pretty great metaphor for the scarcity of a game like that, where you're trying to have only one winner versus a game like a country. And an economy where you want everybody to be a winner. And so we need to add more chairs. We also talked with Daryl about the game Monopoly and what it has to teach us about how, you know, the first person to amass wealth and privilege can can build on that and is basically set up to win the whole game from the start. So Monopoly is a big game. And that led us to talk about the economist Henry George, the creator of Monopoly was a Georgist, kind of best known for ideas on on like a land value tax and the notion that that the land that somebody owns derives its value from the contributions of everyone in the community and the arts and culture nearby and schools and police and firefighters.

9:43 And so even better than taxing income, if you want to take on wealth is to tax the value of land, both as a way of equalizing society and raising revenues, but also as a way to motivate people to get the highest value from that land, which is usually to build homes and make sure more people can live there. We also talked today with Mark Dunkelman, the author of Why Nothing Works. This is one of a trio of books right now, along with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance and Yoni Applebaum's Stuck that kind of as a sort of package form a sort of three volume manifesto for the world of abundance. And Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works is a phenomenal exploration of how we came to find our system the way it is today, how yesterday's solutions become today's problems.

10:32 You know, on this podcast and in our movement, we talked a lot about Progressive Abundance, the idea of a world of abundance for citizens and markets, yes, but also for governments and for achieving progressive goals with both the markets and citizen entrepreneurship, but also government entrepreneurship and creating new things. So one of the things that's really exciting for me is that Mark Dunkelman's book, Why Nothing Works, is largely very much about the origins and history and evolution of the progressive movement going way back well over a century, talking Teddy Roosevelt, talking populism versus progressives and the fights within the progressive movement between radicals and reformers. And specifically, one of the things he focuses on is the tension both throughout the progressive movement, but also through American politics in general, since our foundings between what he would call the Hamiltonian impulse and the Jeffersonian impulse.

11:24 That is to say, a Hamiltonian push to centralize authority in order to build things, which is well represented in the movement from the Articles of Confederation to the actual United States of America that has the ability to levy taxes and have a bank and make the country work, versus Thomas Jefferson and the idea of diffusing centralized authority so that you can't have tyranny and monarchy. And so the progressive movement itself has both of those tensions. How do we centralize authority to do things? But what happens when we diffuse authority to stop bad things from happening, but inadvertently stop good things from happening as well? And one of the subjects of that conversation that you'll find is not just the tension between those two ideas, but the fact that both are in crisis right now.

12:11 We kind of have to do both. We have a world where we've diffused the central authority to be able to create things and the power of creation, which has led to a world where neither governments nor markets, can build enough housing and amenities, can build enough housing and amenities. And we have a world where the power to destroy things is being centralized in the mass as expressed in the Trump administration. If our missions as EMB Democrats for America are to build America and defeat fascism, building America kind of requires the Hamiltonian impulse and defeating fascism requires embracing and enhancing the Jeffersonian impulse. And we have to walk and chew gum at the same time when it comes to defeating fascism and the threats of centralized authority. Man, this week, I think we've been seeing that in really deeply stark terms.

13:01 J.D. Vance on Twitter had a few tweets that I thought were really terrifying, that actually, honest to God, sent chills down my spine. Because, you know, Trump has long been the sum of all the founding fathers fears, but he's fairly incoherent in his blabbering. So he doesn't really articulate always kind of the rationale behind that movement. So to me, to hear J.D. Vance, who is highly intellectual and highly articulate, speak the case for fascism and dictatorship is chilling. So in particular, he said to say the administration must observe due process, and he puts due process in scare quotes, is to beg the question, what process is due as a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment and so many other factors.

13:49 He followed that up by saying, hey, you can't articulate a deportation standard that would simultaneously satisfy left wing critics, satisfy due process, which again, he puts in scare quotes, would be workable given resource constraints and would also deport illegal immigrants. And first of all, I want to point out that we are not just talking about illegal immigrants. First of all, if there is no court trial and no due process, then all of us are illegal, because if they say we are and there's no trial, then we are. There's nothing to stop us. There's nothing to stop us. And all of us are deportable. They're also at the moment stuffing legal residents and legal visa holders into vans, disappearing them, kicking them out of the country because they don't like what they're saying with their free speech. And Trump just this past week talked about building concentration camps in El Salvador for what he called homegrowns, which is to say American citizens.

14:44 Vance also said, quote, a burden of proof in scare quotes and a trial. In scare quotes and suggested that having proof and trials again in scare quotes was preposterous, quoting specifically that posing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin. So what he is saying here, the argument that he is making is that the rule of law and human rights are too slow and too expensive. So Trump must become the law and any of us are illegal and any of us are deportable if Trump says we are. It's something Elon Musk's been saying a lot, too. He often says and recently said there's a quote, the bureaucracy is preventing the president from implementing what the people want.

15:29 Then we live in a bureaucracy, not a democracy. But of course, he's got the American system backwards, which vests the power to make law and determine spending with Congress and not the executive. You know, years ago, we said or I said at least that Trump was a fascist and people said that's extreme. A couple of years after that, you've suddenly got his former chief of staff, General John Kelly, saying that he, quote, fit the definition of a fascist, frequently praised Hitler and would govern like a dictator. If he was elected again, you had General Mark Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying he was, quote, fascist to the core and, quote, the most dangerous person ever. You had former defense, former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, along with Trump's former White House press secretary, former communications director, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security, saying he was a fascist.

16:17 Now, many people agree he's a fascist, but say, hey, calling him something approaching a Nazi is going a bridge too far. But I would remind you that U.S. aid cuts, and this is already cited in a report by the Financial Times, just cutting U.S. aid and PEPFAR means condemning three million people around the globe to death. So if we've spent our whole life talking about the Holocaust and six million Jews dying, we are halfway there already. You know, connecting to the abundance piece, there was a lot of stuff that was going around Harvard last week, as you guys might have seen. You know, the Trump administration put in a six point seven billion dollar federal funding freeze on Harvard. And that was actually a very interesting week for me because there was a lot of fear that it would end up like the law firms where originally Paul Weiss tried to stand up and then there was no one there to stand with them.

17:04 And in fact, other firms tried to poach their lawyers almost immediately. And that led to a quick concession. And so there was a lot of work on our side in terms of the city of trying to organize faculty. We do an impromptu rally that was a lot of work. But in a couple of days, you got 1500 people. The faculty, as part of the American Association of University Professors, filed a lawsuit. And then by the time we got the governor and attorney general and everyone else who are like kind of supportive as well, Harvard realized that they did have other people to stand with them. And I think that was a really big difference, knowing that, you know, they weren't just going to be doing this alone. And the reason I bring that up is that the federal funding freeze is now in effect. And a lot of the biggest things is like, you know, Ezra and Derek talk about all this clinical research and everything like that.

17:52 And honestly, most of this federal funding freeze is for research, especially because we have many hospitals here. So there's like 20 year long studies, entire careers where they were, you know, trying to cure malaria or something like this. And they both have had a funding cut off, but had funding cut off in such a quick and abrupt manner that there's no stopgap. And so a lot of those experiments are just over. And so I think it's like a very tense and interesting time, but also in a way that, you know, I think have a lasting impact on the research side. That was my own little personal connection hook that I just wanted to throw in there. Well, it's amazing that you've been part of that and part of standing up there. You know, J.D. Vance just said on Fox News, if the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country.

18:40 But that is precisely what he is doing as they decide they want to punish Harvard speech and actions by revoking tax exempt status and taking on that institution. So they are they're doing it and they're they're telling you what they're doing and they're telling you the stakes of it. Armand, what do you think about all this? I hate, hate, hate the Trump administration for putting me in a position where I have to be on the same side as Harvard on anything. It's very clear that the Trump administration is trying to make a fight. There was a negotiation. Initially, the conversation was similar to what, like, they asked from Columbia, but Columbia folded. So then they went to Harvard and they just gave him such ridiculous demands. It was very clear that, like, they wanted this fight.

19:28 It's essentially saying that, like, Harvard's who Harvard hires, who Harvard admits should be controlled directly by the Trump administration using an incredibly vague criteria that they can define at any moment. Like, that's crazy. And then this, like, affirmative action for manga, too, which is, like, every department needs to have enough students and faculty that are manga. Oh, it's crazy. Well, the world might be dark right now, but this podcast ain't just doom and gloom. There's exciting stuff happening in the abundance movement as well, which is the mirror image of this and the answer to it, right? We talked with Mark Dunkelman, and you'll see that interview shortly, where he proposes that part of what fueled Trump's rise, both in 2016 and then again in 2024, was people giving up on a government that didn't seem like it was working.

20:19 But I think what the point of this podcast is and the conversation we've had so far and what's happening and the sea change that's beginning, at least in democratic states among democratic politicians, is a movement for abundance as a movement where government works and our economy works and our society works for everybody. And something Mark Dunkelman articulated was, you know, yes, this is everything that holds us back from building and creating. That's a problem we created, and that's sad and embarrassing and interesting to learn about. But it's also exciting and an opportunity and the good news, because that means it's within our power to fix it. So today's two conversations are really exciting, deep dives with two experts and authors with brand new books, which are excellent, that I loved reading, that you will enjoy reading as well, that are really exciting exploration of where we are today and where we came from, but also where we can go and how that brighter future and that kind of utopian progressive dream that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talk about in abundance can be realized and can be made manifest.

21:22 Arman, Nia Burhan, from our two interviews with Daryl Fairweather and Mark Dunkelman, before we get to them and show them off, I'm curious if there's anything you think people should be knowing or thinking about before we jump into them. I think we have conversations about how our governance has just made everything just impossible and dysfunctional. And like, I think right now, like in this political moment, it's all kind of coming home to roost all at the same time. I think that's I think the theme I've been picking up on in all of these interviews. I'd say for Mark Dunkelman, the one thing to keep in mind is think closely about the things that you're going to say about history. I think a lot of the conversations we have around abundance are often understandably about like a great potential future and the problems we face now.

22:09 But it's really helpful to understand how we got here and why we got here. And then with Daryl, well, I just think she's really great. I'm a huge fan. But I really appreciate that conversation about blind value taxation. It's a very specific and not as much discussed topic. But it's actually something very fundamental to how housing operates in America. I think it's a pretty good setup. And with that, let's get to our first interview with Mark Dunkelman.

22:42 This is reality. We are in that world now. We allowed that world to happen with all of our procedures, all of our love of the rules and the institutions, with a presidential election where the Democrats formed a united front of people who believe the institutions were correct just as they were. And we opened the door enough that this came through it. Liberals have become so afraid of bad things happening. They cannot make enough good things happen. They've become so afraid of the government abusing its power that they don't allow the government to use its power for good. There's a great piece Mark Dunkelman wrote, a very related book called Why Nothing Works. But the core of that book was written some years ago in a great piece he wrote about Penn State and how hard it had been to remodel, to redo.

23:30 Penn Station in, not Penn State, I'm sorry, Penn Station. Penn State has its own problems.

23:36 But Penn Station in New York City. And the point he made was that in this effort to make sure a Robert Moses could never happen again, in this effort to make sure that the government could not act in a way with such fearsome consequences for poor communities, for people who didn't have power, we made it too hard for the government to act consequentially. His book now has this epigraph that if Robert Moses was born today, he couldn't get shit done. And that's the reality of it. Yes, if you make it more possible to wield power, this is an old argument I have with people about things like the filibuster, you will make it more possible for power to be wielded in ways you don't like. And if the strategy of not allowing power to be wielded was working, then we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation.

24:27 But instead, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California, Illinois, and Chicago, leading to, if this continues in the census of 2030, a red shift so large that the Democrats could win everything Kamala Harris won, add in the blue wall and still lose the election. So I would say to the people who say, if we change things, bad things might happen. Bad things are happening. Maybe we should change things. Thanks for that introduction, Ezra Klein. Our first guest tonight is Mark Dunkelman. Mark Dunkelman is a fellow in international and public affairs at Brown University. Mark has served as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation, on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is the vice president for strategy and communications at the Democratic Leadership Council. His new book is called Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress, and How to Bring It Back.

25:16 Please welcome to Radio Abundance, Mark Dunkelman. And to kick things off, here's Steve Boyle.

25:25 All right, we are here with Mark Dunkelman. The book is Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress, and How to Bring It Back. Mark Dunkelman, welcome to Radio Abundance. Well, to be here. Thanks for having me on. We are equally thrilled to have you here. The book is spectacular. It is a must-read, whether you are kind of a veteran of the Yimby movement and the Abundance movement and looking for really deep historical perspective and policy perspective about how the world we live in today came about and how to untangle some of that. I would also say if you're new to the movement, this is a spectacular way to deepen your understanding of it. You know, if celebrities pass away in threes, apparently visionary books come out in threes as well. So you've had Abundance come out by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. You've had a book called Stuck, How the Privileged and the Property Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Applebaum.

26:16 And you've got Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman here. And, you know, if Abundance by Ezra and Derek is kind of a 101 and a spectacular introduction to the broader ideas and broader movement, I think of this book as the next step and the next level, a kind of 201 course on the deep historical context and how this came to be. I was also thrilled because it focuses on progressivism and the progressive movement from its origins to today. You explore a kind of a key tension within the progressive movement that I've also often seen as a key tension within American politics more broadly since the founding, which is a sort of a Hamiltonian impulse to centralize authority to get stuff done versus a Jeffersonian impulse to diffuse authority to prevent tyranny.

27:04 Today, we are in the midst of two crises that are fueling each other. So on the one hand, you've diffused the power to create in a way that has rendered governments less effective at delivering for their people and caused a lot of people to give up on government. And what that's led to then is an administration that is currently centralizing the power to destroy. And so we are seeing the ill effect of both movements at once, which is to say the question here that I want to start with, Mark Dunkelman, what the fuck do we do? That's an opening question worthy of a terrific podcast. The politics of populism that we're now seeing is explicitly the product of what progressives have done to themselves.

27:49 They've rendered the tool that they want to use to make life better for ordinary people incompetent. They've made it so the government seems more like a problem than a solution. And as a result, people have looked to a strong man who's going to break through. This is something that is both hard, I think, for a lot of progressives to hear, but also welcome. We did this to ourselves, meaning, one, that we are culpable in some way collectively for where we are today. We rendered government incompetent in ways separate and apart from what conservatives have done to, quote unquote, starve the beast. That's one. But two, the upshot of that is that if we are culpable, we can, in fact, find a way out of it.

28:37 We have some agency here. There are things that we can do to reduce the feeling that government isn't responsive to people's needs. What's so odd, and this is why I wrote the book, you know, you're supposed to write the books that you want to read. I wrote the book. I didn't understand when at the beginning of this journey, how it was that we'd gone from a place where government did these enormous things to one in which it just feels like we can't build housing. We can't take advantage of the clean energy revolution with high-speed rail as a joke, like, all of these things that should be doable. And, like, it's so easy for those of us in the progressive movement to sort of say, well, we can't do it because of the Republicans. They can't do it because of the conservatives. In fact, like, we played a role in this. And if we played a role, then we can unplay that role.

29:26 And so the core of your question is, what the fuck do we do? Let's first recognize what we have done and then begin to think through a way to rebalance that. Not so that we go back to the dark old days of, you know, power brokers doing things to communities and then having no say, but that where we can have some sort of thoughtful conversation about what needs to be done, and then we can get to an expeditious resolution. Speaking of that, your book has a lot about Robert Moses. What I found really interesting was that Moses got a lot of power by writing laws, tweaking things into laws, or getting on certain boards and so on. And one of the things I didn't realize prior to reading your book, actually, was that it's not like Moses was appointed to a role that is like, I have all this power.

30:16 It was like a very specific effort to do it. How much of this is contingent if there was not a man named Robert Moses who was trying to do all of this? Was there ever like a collective decision made policy-wise to do things? Like if the TVA, for example, had no involved Robert Moses, but still happened. And then both New York, it really was like there was no single person who was assigned to this. It just, he finagled the way to get all this power collectively. And so when you paint this as like there's an air of growth and then a backlash, how much of it was contingent on specific individuals versus like systems that were set up for growth in the first place and then got repealed? Yeah, that's a great question. Robert Moses is emblematic of a certain type of progressivism.

31:02 So you have to remember that at the moment that progressivism was born, the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, like the problem was not so dissimilar from today in the notion that everyone felt as though nothing worked. Right. There was no one to build the sewer system in the neighborhood. There was no one to improve the roads. There was no responsible party who was going to build a school system that educated everyone. Power was wielded by political machines, by courts, by robber barons, and by sort of local politicians who were very parochial in the way that they thought about things. And the question among reformers at that time was, how do we take this power, which is so thoroughly diffused across all these various self-interested parties, and put it in the hands of figures who will do what is in the greater public interest?

31:58 And so that was literally like a big part of what progressivism was. It was, how do we fix government? How do we make stuff work? And so the way that progressives answered that question in many cases was to say, let's take power out of the hands of the private sector. Let's take it out of the hands of these small-minded legislators. Let's take it out of the hands of these political bosses who are just catching chips with one another and put it in the hands of people who will do the great public interest. They will build the dam. They will build the bridge. They will build the sewer system. They will build the transit system, whatever it is. And that notion that we were going to put experts who were publicly minded and not self-interested in charge of things was like the zeitgeist of the era.

32:47 Robert Moses was among those people. So was David Lillenthal who ran the Tennessee Valley Authority. All of these various figures who would come to be known as the establishment in the middle of the 20th century, like they were the outgrowth of a zeitgeist that existed within America and specifically within American progressivism, which was that we explicitly wanted powerful, generally men, generally white men, generally wasps to be in charge of stuff. And they existed in all realms. Like there were the people that were running the utilities or on the public service commission. These sort of establishment figures were pervasive in American society. And that generation of progressives believed that they had the answers. Like that's what progressivism was about.

33:35 Progressivism was a movement to get all the craziness out of the way so that those move boys could cook. And then people, of course, realized like those boys cooking wasn't so great for everybody. And we pivoted toward a different regime. Like, Armand, your question is exactly right. Like Robert Moses was like in the reason the power broker was so evocative is because everyone knew in different parts of their lives that there was somewhere in their own experience. You know, speaking of Robert Moses, you write, I think, in the introduction of the book, you talk about people coming up to you and kind of whispering, oh, this is why we need another Robert Moses.

34:22 And of course they add, of course they add, they say, you know, not the racist parts of Moses or his taste for more expressways or his penchant for condemning the homes of working class people, but someone with sufficient authority to drive projects to their completion. It's certainly something I think about a lot, right? You think, man, how do we get the Robert Moses that builds high speed rails and public squares? How unfortunate we got the Robert Moses that bulldozes ethnic neighborhoods to build highways? You know, how can we get the good without the bad? And by that same token, you know, I think a lot about a government building cities, building neighborhoods. We talked with Congressman Jake Auchincloss about charter cities. It's also not lost on me that governments and especially authoritarian governments are really bad at this. You look at Xi Jinping in China building his own new cities or the new capital in Egypt, and they tend to be enormous and spread out and empty and devoid of culture.

35:18 And so, you know, why is government bad at this? How can they get better at this? I will throw into that, too, that you look at how bad authorities are at that and sort of you think, OK, well, centralized planning maybe can't do this. And then, again, my example is often theme parks. Walt Disney was a centralized authority, and he was able to build neighborhoods. He didn't build homes there, but they are functional neighborhoods. And then even adding on to that, when we talked about that sort of opening tension between Hamiltonian centralization of power and Jeffersonian diffusion of power and to be in a crisis that explains why both of those are important at the same time. The kind of idea that I want to add to that is that I was saying a lot in the book is the difference between the power to create and the power to destroy. And how can we centralize and empower governments and organizations that have the power to create but diffuse their power to destroy?

36:09 To put all of that together, the question is, why are governments bad at this? How do we help governments get better at this but make sure that they have the sort of empowerment and freedom to build cool stuff but not to tear things down? And what would a good Robert Moses today look like? I hate to paint with too broad a brush and say government is always good at one thing or bad at another. I also hate to divide government as either creating or destroying. Like, in order to build the high-speed rail line, certain neighborhoods are going to have to be destroyed. In order to build a transmission line that goes from one place to another, like, certain portions of a forest are going to have to be bifurcated.

36:55 In order to replace a dilapidated single-family home that maybe someone is still living in and put up a fourplex, right? Like, that single-family home has to be taken down. And so, these things are all connected. The central tension, which you're exactly right, you want to figure out some good balance where ordinary people and market-oriented things, like, people are going to vote with their feet and where they want to live and how they want to live. Like, that those have a role to play and it shouldn't just be some, you know, the fountainhead shouldn't get to just, you know, just sort of decide what America is going to look like in 20 years.

37:40 So, you don't want that. You also don't want a situation where anyone who is touched by any change has veto power over it. Like, these are the two extremes. One where there's a single figure who gets to decide what's created and what's destroyed. Another where anyone can say, no, I don't want that button. You need to find some balance between the two. And I think the hard thing for progress was to, this is sort of, this is actually, creates some differentiation between, I think, some of the other books you mentioned. The only is a terrific book, Doc and Derek and Ezra's awesome book, which is, you know, the founding of a movement. The question is not whether you take all of the considerations that go into whether we build something or don't build something.

38:27 What are the environmental implications? What are the implications for historic housing, for communities, for wealth, for inequality? All these things, all these things should be taken into account. To my mind, the problem today, which Robert Moses solved in a way that we don't want to emulate, the problem today is there's no one who can, has the discretion or the power to ratify a trade-off. If you accept that in order to build the high-speed rail line, the rail line has to be built through a certain neighborhood, there's no way to get to downtown L.A., right? Without, like, downtown L.A. is surrounded by neighborhoods. So if you're going to get a rail line into downtown L.A., it's going to have to go through one of them. Same with San Francisco, right? There are going to be places that are affected by this new infrastructure.

39:15 If you're going to get power from, and this is a story in my book, if you're going to get power from Quebec, which has a surface of clean, dam-generated hydropower, into the Massachusetts grid, and Massachusetts does not border Quebec, then that power has to be transported by a transmission line that goes through New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. Like, there's just no other way to do it. And the central question isn't, is there going to be some negative effect, some negative impact on someone who does not benefit? It is who, in the end, gets to decide which neighborhood is affected, which route the transmission line takes, where the tracks are going to be laying, which neighborhoods are going to be inundated with new housing. Like, someone needs to be empowered to decide.

40:01 It can't be that it's a star chamber of one like it was with Robert Moses, but it can't be what we've created in reaction to Moses, which is sort of an unbelievable goal, like an endless labyrinth of decision points where almost anyone has the leverage to stop anything from happening. And I think, like, that's the, that's the sort of secret sauce of my book, is that I'm really trying to home in on this question of who should decide. I just think it's one of these things where if you are traditionally progressive, and what I was before I started getting frustrated about this and examining myself 10 years ago, your view is, here's clearly the right thing. If it hurts these people, it hurts these people, it is bad, rather than all, all the choices that we have, including not doing anything, have harm and benefits to different groups.

40:58 We, as progressives, could be in a mind frame of accepting that there are trade-offs we had and wanting some responsible party to be making them in a way that benefits the great whole of us. Speaking of those trade-offs and the stakeholders, and one thing that I keep thinking about when I was reading your book was that there isn't really clear answers to who should have the power at what layer.

41:23 And so, for example, if you're talking about, you know, housing, right now, housing is really determined very hyper-locally, but there's efforts to look at it through a state perspective. And one thing I've thought a lot about is the notion that a lot of the processes we have that are meant to be democratic are not particularly democratic, like community engagement hearings, you know, in theory it's supposed to have public participation in practice. You're going to get people who are more likely to be opposed to a project to show up, and people of control by 2 p.m. on a Tuesday who are usually retired and more affluent. So, in your work, was there any, I guess, like, stuff you encountered? Have you thought about how to structure democratic input in a way that reflects how people actually act and think?

42:09 So, I mean, I think it's a great point. I want to address two things for my question. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, there was a whole explosion of research on what was called deliberative democracy at the time. There was a guy at Stanford named Joe Fishkin who did these really remarkable experiments where you'd have a community that was debating some mundane thing, like whether there should be a five-cent charge on plastic bags, and people were divided about it. And he would gather people in the community to, like, a hotel conference center and poll them. And then take a representative sample and break them into groups, 10, 15 people, and have those people talk around a board table for an hour or two and discuss the pros and cons.

42:55 And then he would re-poll them. And what was so remarkable was that, like, 75% of people came out of this conversation with a different point of view because it never occurred to them, like, what the cost was or the environmental damage. Like, actually having people talk to each other was a positive benefit. They were sort of a nascent look. I feel like it's not top of mind anymore, but, like, there is research to look at how can you get communities to engage in a meaningful way so that you're not just having sort of a, I mean, you know, at this point, the weirdos who are engaged in local government. I mean, the squeaky wheels, they get the oil. They aren't all weirdos. Like, you know. We go to those meetings, and we're definitely weirdos, so. Fair enough. All right, so I'm on the right podcast.

43:42 But that is a, you're absolutely right that that is a, that the challenge is to get an authentic view. It turns out, in many instances, that people are more welcoming to development than you would think. Almost everybody wants there to be more housing. They just don't want it near them or in a way that's going to impact their property value or their neighborhood or it's going to crowd their school room. So, like, this is why the question, who should decide, is so preeminent. You've got a local community that doesn't want the thing. They want it broadly. Like, the bridge has to be built somewhere or no one's getting across the river. The power line has to be built somewhere or no one's getting the load. Like, in all these cases, the fundamental question is, who gets to decide? Now, this is, this is the second, Armand, this is the second part that I, that I want to talk about because you guys, you know, this is Yimby, Yimby America.

44:32 And I do feel like within the realm of abundance, Yimbyism has caught on in a way that I think that the other notion of regulatory reform and whatnot that compose abundance have not. And I, I have a theory as to why that is in the realm of housing, the question is who should get to decide whether the housing project is built or not. And currently, the problem is that the neighborhood says no, when the property owner says yes, right? The developer or a homeowner has purchased a property. They want to knock it down or they want to add an advisory unit or they want to add a third floor. They want to, whatever, whatever, whatever it is that they want to do to add housing.

45:21 The person that owns the property is a yes and the neighborhood, the people surrounding are a no. And so in that case, the challenge is to take the power that the neighborhood wields and move it into one of two places. One is up to a mayor, to a housing commission, to a state agency, to a federal, whoever, that would say, yes, you can build this thing because I, as the mayor, say that it can be built. Or you can take the power that the neighborhood holds and return it to the person that owns the property, that's moving it down. That's essentially a Jeffersonian solution. That, that is saying the neighborhood shouldn't be able to prevent me who owns this property on the corner from building, you know, a triplex where, where, where, where there is a single family home.

46:10 The embyism has taken off because we as progressive are drawn to the Jeffersonian impulse to push power down. We don't like the idea that some government bureaucrat or some neighborhood council will tell us what we're going to do with the proper property that we own. So, there is a Jeffersonian solution to the housing crisis in that respect, right? Like, if you own the thing, like, even libertarians can be convinced that if you own the thing, you ought to be able to do the thing that you want to do with the thing that you own. That is a solution to the housing crisis that does not exist in these other realms of abundance-oriented development. There is no way to push power down to someone who will then allow you to build a transmission line above a forest, a neighborhood, near a school.

47:05 There is no pushing power down to whoever, whoever it is that's going to run the railroad or build the railroad through the downtown that somebody else owns. You, in those cases, you have to move power up into some bureaucracy that's going to make a decision in the public interest. And so, like, these are nuances and, like, it's all abundant to the sense that we, these are all what Ezra and Derek call supply-side solutions. Like, we want more housing, we want more clean energy, we want more economic growth. But the distinction in the world of housing is that you can solve at least some portion of the problem by pushing power down. And, like, that is, like, that is part of the, of the existing progressive zeitgeist in a way that pushing power up into figures that look like the man or the Robert Moses or the establishment is like, we have been for the last 50 or 60 years really allergic to those types of people and those types of power dynamics.

48:05 And so, like, there is something very specific and different about yimbyism than the rest of the abundance movement. I wanted to, like, ask a question that I think is tangentially related. There was this article by Jerusalem Densas in The Atlantic about, like, Americans voting too much and how there is so many opportunities to vote. And, like, yes, in theory, it's a good idea because, like, we all love democracy and democracy is good. But because there's so many instances of, like, or since, like, decision-making power has been pushed so far down that, like, being a citizen is a full-time job in and of itself. And, like, I agree with her premise, but I've gotten into a debate with one of my mutuals about this where he's like, it's all good. Like, all we, the public should vote all the time. It shouldn't be a bad thing for people to vote.

48:51 And I'm just like, like, if people aren't able to show up or aren't able to participate, then, like, what's the point? Everyone specializes in what they specialize in. And I think at the end of the day, if you're, like, a regular person and you're not specialized in a particular area, all you care about is the end result. Like, like, congestion pricing, for example. Like, all you care about is that, okay, my commute is shorter. Do I know how to get to that result? Probably not. How do you think about, like, balancing that out a little bit more? I mean, I think that you've gotten to, like, what is the central question of American democracy? Like, I think, like, beyond, like, the question of abundance, the central question is, like, we want everybody to have, like, a maximal ability to participate, to express their opinion, to have control of their own lives, to drive their own prosperity.

49:45 We have a right to pursuit of happiness, all of this stuff. And also, like, if you gave me the right to repair my car, like, I don't know how to do that. So, I actually need an expert to do it. Like, if that guy says that, you know, I need a new catalytic converter, like, I don't know what a catalytic converter is. I certainly don't know what it, like, I wouldn't know how to replace it. I, like, I wouldn't know how to, I, like, it'd be crazy for us to vote on whether I needed a catalytic converter and expect that we're going to get a better result than if my mechanic says I do. So, there are a few very well-known journalists in, like, the first quarter to a third of the 20th century. One was a guy named H.L. Mencken, who was known as the Oracle of Baltimore, sort of a very acerbic guy who started a magazine, was sort of a precursor to the New Yorker.

50:41 Another Dean Bolter, Lippman, Brahman, ended up as sort of a foreign policy writer. But the two of them, competitive as they were to the early 20th century, were, like, their general view of the world was that people were idiots.

50:58 Right, like, they're, they're, they're, if you read what they're writing, like, their view is really belittling the working class, anyone who hasn't been highly trained. Like, Mencken thinks everyone should only listen to Beethoven. Lippman, like, is really disparaging, you know, and, and so, like, their notion is oddly progressive. Like, that, the progressivism of that moment, like, the sort of notion was, like, ordinary people don't know about anything. They should not have any role to play in, like, these big decisions. And that, what, that was a progressive point of view. And I said that to someone who said to me, like, that's so offensive, right?

51:45 Like, that's, like, that's so, so, so the antithesis of what progressivism should be about, which would be about more engagement and whatnot. And, like, I remember thinking, I don't, I don't know exactly, like, it is, right? Like, there's just no other way around it. The way that they would have answered is sort of, like, in my catalytic converter story is, like, on issues of war and peace, like, what do we, what do I know about what the dynamics are in Southeast Asia or in, right? In, like, you know, like, like, we shouldn't be voting on what America's engagement with Peru looks like, right? Like, like, there should be someone who knows about Peru. Yeah, there's some guy who's obsessed with Peru, who did his PhD thesis on Peru.

52:31 And I think that he should be the one, like, who should be the Peru guy. Right, right. Or, you know, you know, should there be, should we be taxed at a higher rate or a lower rate? Should the expenditures be up or down? Like, like, these are all, like, like, like, you want to create some balance between the democratic impulse or the Ham, the Ham, the Jeffersonian impulse to give ordinary people more say. And a Hamiltonian impulse where you're giving people who really know about Peru or catalytic converters or whatever it is, more of a role. We went too far in the Hamiltonian direction in the mid-20th century. Like, like, and, and progressions wake up to this, right? Like, like, they see that the best and brightest, as David Halperton calls them, gets us into Vietnam, right?

53:19 Like, the city fathers who we have, who we have venerated and who, who are running the cities and making decisions. Turns out that they're, like, in many cases, they're, like, racist. Like, right? Like, Bull Connor is a, is a member of the establishment, right? Like, Richard Daly, like, like, like, these are not totally appealing guys, like, right? Like, they have done urban renewal where they, like, the city fathers, like, have, have basically just bulldozed entire areas of the country. Like, in many cases, like, like, this is not remembered, but, like, they were doing, like, the, their ideas in many cases was that people were trapped in slums and that if you bulldozed the slums and then build up modern new buildings, that these people would benefit. Like, they had no notion of the social capital or the, the feeling of disempowerment that would happen when the, when the neighborhood got bulldozed.

54:09 Like, like, like, some of them were bad, but some of them would thought they were doing the people who were living in slums and the people, like, which is sort of a remarkable and crazy thing to say today. But, like, that was their mentality. Like, in all of these cases, dawned on progressives that they moved too far in the Hamiltonian direction, that, like, the central problem was that decision-making was too centralized and, like, that this establishment was bad. So, like, Jerusalem's article, um, and Jerusalem's the best, you and I are doing an event, uh, in New York in a month, um, uh, super smart, understands all this stuff much better than I do, probably. But, but, like, like, there is sort of this, there is this tension, like, in what situations do you want public engagement?

54:57 To Armand's earlier question, like, what does that engagement look like? Is it a, is it a referendum, uh, uh, is it a deliberative democracy poll where people are congregating at a hotel, uh, conference center in order to debate something? Is it just vote for your representative and give them all the power or vote for them and then expect them to appoint someone who will be a, a star chamber in and of herself? Like, like, like, what is the, what is the, what is the system? I, I don't think there's any, any perfect answer. And, like, one, uh, we know that in some cases these people are going to make, like, whatever you have, like, not everyone is going to be happy with a decision because there are trade-offs to be done. But, two, it can't be that negative trade-offs when made are always an indictment of the process, and I think that's sort of the problem that we so frequently have, which is that the moment that some street is blocked off because of a project or that, that a railroad is run through a town or that a transmission line is placed in a place where it's inconvenient and ruins the view across the Appalachian Trail or whatever, whatever it is.

56:09 Like, we, we, we as progressives say, well, clearly the process that we use is bad. Clearly we didn't listen to the people. Clearly we didn't. Well, the truth is that no matter how we, how we make decisions, whether it's lots of voting or a star chamber, like, someone is going to get hurt at some point in the process, and we need to embrace a process that allows us to metabolize that frustration. Because in the absence of being able to pay the costs that come with progress, there won't be any progress. I'd love if you'll allow me to riff for a moment and try to synthesize a few threads in our discussion, because we're on some topics that are so complex and so challenging and so fundamental and also fascinating to unpack.

56:55 This question and our kind of meta theme of who makes decisions and how, thinking of Armand and Mark talking about, you know, city council meetings and how data-ist they are, thinking of Nia raising that question of, do we vote too much? I think of, you know, when I think of the founding fathers, right, they would have never, I mean, explicitly they would have never said or thought of themselves as founding a democracy. Because in their definition, what democracy was, was direct democracy, and they thought that was anarchy, whereas monarchy was tyranny. And so how do you both sort of check those impulses and also try and harmonize them? And then over time, you know, we've done two things. One is we've democratized who gets to vote and who gets a say, right, extending enfranchisement to first to non-property owners, then to non-white Americans, then to Americans who aren't men.

57:47 That's, I think, inarguably phenomenal. We've also kind of democratized what we get to decide. When you think of, you know, moving from maybe originally you elect your state government, your state government elects your senators, now we directly elect senators. I think that's good. But, of course, one of the things when you kind of knock on doors and talk to voters that comes out is, A, everybody needs to have a voice in the process, and also, B, it is unrealistic and even, I think, at times cruel to expect people, if you, you know, you've got to work all day, you've got to have a life and see your family. Nobody has time to be an expert on all these subjects. So how do you kind of harmonize a representative democracy where you don't have time to study all those issues, but you know enough at least to say, hey, this is someone I trust, and maybe that person makes decisions, maybe that person then identifies who they trust to make decisions, and so on and so forth.

58:38 This also, I think, really gets to this meta theme of both this book and kind of the wider trio of books in this movement right now, where today's problems are yesterday's solutions. We talked about, you know, the environmental movement, and now we've gotten to the point where environmental laws are making it or hamstringing us in tackling climate change. We think about, you talked about, you know, the sort of unit of decision-making in cities, right? If a city makes decisions on development, probably things maybe get built. If an individual property owner makes decisions on their development, probably that gets built. If the neighborhood does, then suddenly we get stalled. And so you take these different solutions and kind of Frankenstein them into a new homunculus that is a problem, which then makes me think, you know, when I think a little bit about a kind of unholy collaboration between government and business.

59:31 And what I mean by that is, you know, you sort of, you have kind of businesses in the private market that can do things quickly, but also do things that work and sort of test and refine that over time and let anybody kind of throw in new stuff, government that can act at scale. And then you think, oh, man, we can probably solve problems by, like, if the market builds something great, we'll require this many percentage of affordable units, and that's a win-win, except, oh, wait, then that makes it not pencil out, and then it doesn't get built, and then we get no affordable units. So this sort of win-win solution actually becomes a lose-lose problem. I actually use that as kind of my definition for when I try to think of the kind of a derogatory version of neoliberalism. That's what I think about, which is that collaboration between those two sides that actually means that neither gets to do what it's best at, and we get the worst of all worlds instead of the best of all worlds.

1:00:20 I also think there's kind of a theme here of not just who gets to decide, but what's appropriate to decide. And on one angle, that's like we're talking about, like, if it's your property, I mean, if it's not your property, if that's your neighbor's property, do you have the right to decide? Or, sorry, it's not your property, right? Let that person decide. By that same token, I was talking not very long ago in San Francisco to a member of a Chinese Democratic club. We were having a great conversation, but he was telling me, hey, you know, on the west side, in this neighborhood, you know, the neighborhood doesn't want four-story buildings. Shouldn't we listen to the neighborhood? And I thought, like, I get that, but also, if the thing that the neighborhood didn't want was for Chinese people to move there, then I think what you would think, what I would think, would be tough shit.

1:01:07 To make this our most profane episode yet, you know, go fuck yourself. Chinese people, of course, can move there. And so at what point do you say, well, of course, somebody can build a four-story building there? It just brings me back to the kind of macro arc of the book, which is very much also about the origins and history and evolution of progressivism, which I think is so important to know. If you just know today's definitions, you might be missing a sort of wider backstory. Even in my own lifetime, the definition has shifted. I remember when we first started using that word, I was so excited because the word liberal was tainted, but here was this word which had progress in it. Now we've got to this point where people who call themselves progressive are often thwarting progress. You've got a weird world of words where in San Francisco, the folks who call themselves progressives are the ones who are anti-tech and want neighborhoods not to change.

1:01:56 At the national level, the conservatives are the ones who are tearing down the system on the origins of the progressive movement. I remember reading, I was so excited to get into this book because I was kind of introduced to this way of thinking from Jill Lepore has a great survey of American history called These Truths. You should read that after you read Mark Dunkelman's Why Nothing Works and Daryl Fairweather's Hate the Game. But it was sort of a lovely eye-opening moment to see the original progressives as kind of the Yimbys of their day, right? The sort of rational scientific technocrats. But then also, you know, as you write about the Hamiltonian impulse, as you write about kind of radicals versus reformers, it sort of seems like we'd be on the reformer side. You've got maybe the more radical side saying, hey, we're anti-monopoly. There's more reformer side saying, well, what if we had experts and we worked with business?

1:02:43 But then, you know, at what point is that not so much centralizing authority as empowering like micromanagement? Like, I don't know that us on this side, as sort of pro-government and pro-market as we are, are really looking for commissions of experts to decide things. So there's a lot of complications in these terms, a lot of gives and takes and trade-offs, and also a strange evolution of the movement and the way our political words kind of shift into sort of an ever-changing meaningless over time. So the thing that I took away from a lot of that, I agree with most of it, but the element that really resonates with me is this notion that we use these terms, neo-liberal, progressive, liberal, neoconservative, Republican, Democrat, like none of them is perfect.

1:03:32 And we all bring their own baggage to the term. The hope for my book, or my hope for readers, is that I'm giving you a different terminology that cuts through all of this, which is that the Hamiltonian notion is that you take power where it exists and move it into the hands of someone who will make a decision because you've got some tragedy that's common, you can't build the sewer system, whatever it is. You put in the hands of somebody above you who will make those decisions. And then a second impulse, Jeffersonian, which is that there is power above you that is oppressing you, and you want to return that power to individuals who are pushing it down. So Hamiltonian pushes power up, Jeffersonianism pushes it down. But both of these have a role in the scheme of progressivism.

1:04:21 Progressivism is not either of these things by itself, nor is the American political tradition, right? Like, right from the beginning, and you started by talking about the founding generation, right? Like, right from the beginning, they have the revolution. They don't like the powerful Hamiltonian monarch, right? They don't like the crown, and so they create a very Jeffersonian system in the Artificial Confederation, where all the states are able to do their own thing. They realize that that doesn't work, that you can't have a monetary system, that people aren't feeding back to the Revolutionary War debts, that, like, you can't tax it. Like, the regulatory scheme doesn't work. Like, it's a disaster. So the Constitution, which replaces the Articles 10 years later, is a Hamiltonian correction to a Jeffersonian movement.

1:05:09 And then we go back and forth through history, just repeatedly moving a little bit to the Hamiltonian side and moving things power up into a centralized direction, and then to a Jeffersonian side and moving it down. In my view, right now, progressivism in particular has really got a Jeffersonian bent. Like, we're very averse to power culturally. But to your point, and to the LePort book, the beginning of progressivism is this strange mishmash, right? Like, we have moved from the 19th century agricultural economy into an industrial economy. There's a growing middle class. Places are connected like they never have been by railroads, which means that, like, these men in top hats who look like the guy on the monopoly board are making decisions that affect people in far-off places in ways they did before.

1:05:58 And so when you look at the way that high school history books teach progressivism, it includes this litany of changes that progressives seem to want. They wanted, you know, women's suffrage, and they wanted income taxes. They wanted this litany. But among the litany, they will say they wanted blue-ribbon commissions to control things, and they wanted public referenda, right? Those are two things that are totally at odds with each other, right? A blue-ribbon commission is empowering some group of experts to make a decision. It is explicitly Hamiltonian. A public referenda is letting ordinary people decide issues without the middleman of a legislature or a legislative process. It's letting people basically just vote on laws. Like, that's a very Jeffersonian solution. Nothing else comes from this book.

1:06:44 I would like to give, particularly progressive, the emotional and intellectual permission to say, we need to balance these two things. Like, neither of them is good, neither of them is bad. If you look at the world of reproductive rights and say to yourself, I think that women should have control over their own bodies. I am pro-choice. That is a Jeffersonian impulse. I agree with that. Like, you can say that, and you can say, if we're going to fight climate change, somebody needs to be empowered to say to the people that are emitting carbon into the atmosphere, you can't do that anymore. That is a Hamiltonian solution. To be progressive, you don't have to be one of these things or the other. You don't have to be a Hamiltonian progressive or a Jeffersonian progressive.

1:07:29 These are two ideas that we all hold in our head. The question is not to be consistent or to be extreme on any one. You have to think about these two things and realize that we need to come to some balance that works. Isn't the Jeffersonian ideal a bit of a crock of shit, to be honest? Like, even Jefferson isn't in some sense the Jeffersonian ideal had always been a bit of a crock of shit in a sense that, like, Jefferson said that he wanted to represent, like, the common man. But what he meant was landowners who were white men and that this kind of slaves, this kind of women, this kind of people of color. A majority of people were not represented by the Jeffersonian ideal. And if you look at it, the modern day, the Jeffersonian ideal would say community hearings, but it's actually giving power to the people who show up at this hearing who are older, wealthier, more tired, as opposed to, like, the majority of people in the city who are pro-housing.

1:08:29 I feel like there's a tension between this idea of devolving to the common man, but it's often actually very anti-democratic because it doesn't reflect the will of, like, a larger majority. I mean, I think you're getting to a real pinch there. I'm not going to go so far as to say that Jeffersonianism is a crock of shit. I mean, Jefferson may have been a bad thing. I wasn't saying that exactly, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that the reproductive rights movement is a Jeffersonian movement, right? In the sense that you're trying to empower women to control their own bodies, no matter what the majority of the country says. If 75% of the country was pro-life, I think my feeling is still that a woman should be able to make that decision on her own. You know, I think that if you asked the country in 1947, like, should anyone who wants to rent a room for the night at a hotel be allowed to do it no matter their race, I think in most cases, like, the majority of the country says, no.

1:09:34 I think that the person that owned the hotel should be able to say, I don't want African-Americans in this hotel. And the Jeffersonian notion is, no, that power should be taken from the hotel owner and devolved to the person who wants to rent the hotel. There are cases where I think that the Jeffersonian notion to push power down to the individual is actually the right way to go. I don't think that the Jeffersonian reaction to Robert Moses and to the best and the brightest and whatnot, I don't think that that was misplaced. I think that that was a moment in time where we had developed too much of a Hamiltonian system where, like, there were these unimpeachable voices. Yeah, Armand, as you mentioned that, it brings me back to this question we mentioned earlier, which was not just who gets to decide, but what's appropriate to decide.

1:10:20 And as you were talking about Jefferson, that made me think a little bit about the mythology and practice of any political movement, because there are always going to be some discrepancy and some hypocrisy there, right? In America, that's obviously best expressed by, we are a nation of freedom and democracy and human rights. And also, we started as a slave nation. And both of those things, neither one is less true for the other. They're both true at the same time. I think of two historical examples right off the bat. First is, you know, we passed this Constitution, passed the Bill of Rights, free speech, how exciting. And then our second president, John Adams, immediately you've got the Alien and Sedition Act. So that's out the window. Jefferson himself, you mentioned this tension between him being, you know, anti-centralized power while also being an elitist and a slaver.

1:11:06 I think of the Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson was very explicitly said, I do not have the authority to do this. And also, come on, guys, we kind of have to. He wanted to take it to a vote. And his team said, dude, are you crazy? That's that's going to be a disaster. And we did it. And it changed the course of the nation. I think as we're talking about this, we've talked about Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian impulses ebbing and flowing. We've talked about the complexity of holding both of those tensions in us at the same time. The thing that is prominent for me as we have this discussion is it seems to me right now to bring us full circle to how we started, that we don't have to just ebb and flow. We don't have to just hold them the tension together at the same time. We have to somehow go in both directions at once.

1:11:54 And here's what I mean by that. You can be Democrats for America. We have two missions. It's on everything we put out there. Build America and defeat fascism. You have to do both. If you only do one of the two, we're in trouble and you can't do one without the other. But building America takes oftentimes a Hamiltonian impulse and defeating fascism, I think, takes a Jeffersonian impulse. And somehow we have to like we can't even just find a balance. We somehow have to find some areas to escalate one, some areas to escalate both, figure out how to resolve the tensions and contradictions within that, because if we can't walk and chew gum and somehow move in both directions at the same time, we're in a heck of a lot of trouble.

1:12:39 I agree with all that. I mean, this is the political world that we haven't gotten to. But my view is that the reason that people have embraced Trump is because government doesn't work. Democrats, party of government have made government not work. And that is a shitty way to get people to vote for it, right? If you are if you are the champions of government and you are breaking it, like you're asking people to invest in a an institution they see is broken and that you are claiming is broken, right? Like our mantra is like you can't trust the government. But like that is that is the democratic point of view in what lots and lots of like it's ripe with with racism and patriarchal and colonial and settler and whatever.

1:13:26 There's a whole series of things that we criticize about the government and then ask voters to embrace more government as a solution. It's a banana's way to approach it. It's one of the reasons that it was so frustrating to me. You know, like we are essentially asking the American people to vote for the other party. And like, I think that's what's so remarkable about Trump is just not an appealing guy. Like most people fundamentally, certainly a majority of the country, in my view, do not see Trump as good guy. They are voting for him despite all of that, because they think that we are part of some cosmopolitanism that cannot figure out what is straight and what's passed backward. And until we get out of our own way, until we prove the government can produce, like we're going to be pushing voters and our own movement into a ditch forever.

1:14:19 And so like to your point, like build America and defeat fascism, like the best way to defeat Donald Trump is to have a government that works. We should be the party that is making government work. Exactly right. And this is this is the mission of the organization, right? We have to clean up the mess we made by taking down Trump, but also building up a successful and attractive alternative. You're never going to bring people back to the brink until they don't have a better option and a better way. I'm curious what we didn't talk about today that you think is both important to inject into the conversation and that might excite and entice people to read the book that they don't they don't know yet is is waiting for them there. The appeal of the book is that I'm trying to place this moment in a historical frame so that people can understand how we got here and not feel as though if they if they deviate from the old progressive tradition or the present progressive impulse to stop development and stop things, that they are somehow bad progressives.

1:15:18 Like that's the that's the plug for the book is like give yourself some license to understand the broader impact. And then, you know, I think what is exciting is that now like Jennifer Balka had a has a piece out today about how Democrats can't just be the can't just be the anti-Trump. We need to have our own proactive message. My hope is that that that these books, Derek and Esther's book, you only have a long book book stuck that these books are the beginning of a of a of a of a broader conversation that we can have that puts progressivism back on the right track. Awesome. Mark, give us the final pitch. Tell us where to find it. Book is why nothing works. You can find it everywhere. Books are full. Not not even fine books.

1:16:04 Just any books. It is. I mean, a genuinely phenomenal book of compelling and gripping read and eye opening as well with phenomenal details from the history of of how we got to this point that I think gives us the context and the framework we need to untangle the mess we've made and and build the future we're proud of. I read a lot of books. I'm a giant nerd. I've been obsessed with this space for 10 years from like really going to city council hearings in the Indy. It is very rare that I would say that there's a book that like completely like change the way I see something that's like, oh, my God, my 10 years of my life have been doing this like our part of a much larger historical context. I had no idea I was part of.

1:16:50 And so like, please buy the book. It's fucking great. It's all clear of you guys. Thank you for for having this conversation with me. And I look forward to engaging again. Thanks for being here and joining with us on on Radio Abundance. Let's keep it let's keep it flowing and and great to talk to you today. All right. That was Mark Dunkelman, the author of Why Nothing Works. Mia, you had a great point about how in trying to expand democracy, in many ways, we've actually watered down representative democracy. And I'm curious if you wanted to expand on that. Yeah, I think it's like something that you see very frequently. I think in some ways it's hard to be civically engaged. Life is so crazy, especially if you're working like there's so many demands in terms of like your work life balance. Americans out of all the developed nations, I think we work the most.

1:17:38 And if we all are working and our pay is not entirely covering our expenses, then it's like, how can people be civically engaged if everyone has to work almost twice as hard in order to live? And it also, I think, creates an environment where it's like only the people who are like wealthy enough to make their expenses are the ones who have the time on their hands to go and go to these meetings and be civically engaged. Like, yes, it's democracy on its face. But like, is it really democratic if people are effectively barred from showing up because they have to work or they have to take care of a family or they have other things to do? Yeah, it's kind of fucked actually how the housing crisis is like rent is really high. And so we have to work. And so we don't have time to go to hearings, which then are people only people have time.

1:18:30 We won't have housing. They oppose the housing, which makes it more expensive and makes us less able to go to hearings. Yeah, exactly. I think there is a balance to be struck. And I agree with Mark that we've swung too far on the Jeffersonian side of decentralized governance. There is value in having input from everyday people. But I think it's a question of like, how granular does that need to be? Especially because like everyday people do not care about every little thing. At the end of the day, people just want no potholes. They just want to drive on the road or bike or skate or whatever and not feel a pothole. They don't really care about the origin of potholes or how potholes form. They just want no potholes. But there might be some weirdo somewhere who really, really, really cares about potholes.

1:19:17 And I'm just like, let the pothole weirdo fix the pothole. What if it is a historic? The historic pothole, guys. It is like the historic pothole. It's been in our community. I think we need to have five years of environmental quality review to determine the historic status of this pothole before we can make any decisions about the pothole. I mean, what I'll say is that I think that, you know, as I was thinking about everything big of liberalism, and I really think a lot of it is that housing itself was just not popular enough or transit itself was just not popular enough to make it a single issue. So you tie all these other things to it so you can get enough votes to pass. And I wonder, you know, how much of it is getting people to believe the supply-demand argument and how much of it is having those conversations with people such that they're willing to fall in love with the city again, that it's actually really nice to be able to walk and to get around in this sort of way.

1:20:10 And that, you know, people are a community, not just a nuisance or a pollution. I think that's going to be a big culture shape as well. And you see, I think, in some ways, it is a generational shift. Mark made this point about why he thought that housing went first, which is very interesting. I don't know if you guys have thoughts about, like, why Univism started it with housing versus, you know, Univism for transit or high-speed rail in California. I wanted to push back on him at that point. I keep saying how long I've been in this. Like, I want to be clear. I was not, like, any important figure. Like, Sonia Trout, Laura Clark, like, Brian Hanlon, those sorts of people, like, now have big, important positions in housing. But I was there, and, like, all of us are renters, like, every single one of us. The reason that it became, like, a huge priority for us was that our rent was really high, and we were young and, like, trying to make it in the city.

1:21:01 And we figured out that the reason this was happening is because there's lots of people who go to these obscure things called the Planning Commission and the Zoning Appeals Board who block it. And so I don't really think the reason it took off first is because it was, like, more Jeffersonian in the sense that, like, well, we wanted to devolve it to the property owner. I think it's more of a, like, this was striking individuals, right? Like, the fact that transit is bad is, like, very complicated, and there's, like, different niche things that bureaucracies are determining versus, like, and a lot of people don't use public transit, except in, like, major cities like New York where most people do. But even in San Francisco, a lot of people drive. And then clean energy, it's, like, that is, you know, most people don't even know how to interface with, like, the decision to make a transmission line.

1:21:53 The housing was, like, a very discreet thing. Like, you're trying to get rent, trying to pay rent, trying to get home. It's so immediate, much more clear, and I think that's why it was the kernel. You know, it's interesting. It kind of is that whole longstanding, unresolvable debate between is history shaped by structural forces or that more great man theory idea of human agency and small shifts and small sample sizes. And, of course, the answer is both, but as Mark was talking, I both really like what he said, but also, you know, was wondering, is it just that, you know, for example, that great man, Sonia Trouse, a San Francisco school teacher going, why is my rent too high? I want to live in this city. I bet other people were going through this too. How do I find more people and how do we start making our voices heard and building things from there?

1:22:38 So, you know, I wonder if it's structural. I wonder if it's about the people involved and who took initiative and raised their voice and how things built from there. And I don't know. I will say, like, I think that there's, like, this, like, what's in the water effect. Like, there was this whole thing about how U.S. presidents, whether it was Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump, like, all of them were born in the summer of 46, right? Like, there was, like, a year and a half through which all these presidents were born. And, you know, I think that the California-specific origin story is around Sonia Trouse. And at the same time, like, aura in Texas and, like, all the stuff in Massachusetts was in that same year. And later that they became bigger in California, especially, you guys really took off. But it's kind of interesting to me that, like, three or four orgs started in that same first year.

1:23:27 And I really don't have a great explanation for it. But it's one of those fun coincidences of history. The structural answer is just that this was the beginning of, like, the return to the city in, like, real intensity. It was, like, the tech boom. You know, we've been in a recession since 2008. So, like, affordability in the city was not a huge pressing concern because nobody had a job. And if you look at that time period, really, like, towards the late parts of Obama's term, like, closer to 2015, that's when the economy started taking off. Like, I remember when I was here, it's, like, everybody had a job at a startup. People are talking about startups all the time. You'd go walking in the park and there's, like, people talking about, like, Uber for dogs. My friend and I tried to find a room in, like, a tiny apartment in the Castro would have a line outside the block.

1:24:13 Like, and this was happening globally. There was, like, a giant sort of return to the city because the global economy had finally recovered. Tech had really taken off. And tech particularly favors agglomeration economies of engineers, highly educated people, and so on. And so I think, like, shit hit the fan. Those are the years of, like, the ghoul bus protests. And I think what crystallized the movement for a lot of people, too, is Kim Mai Cutler wrote this piece called How Burrowing Owls and Vomiting Anarchists Explain the Housing Craises. And one of the reasons I even met Sonia is because I saw she was on a panel of Kim Mai, and I'd read Kim Mai's article, and it really struck me. And so it's an intersection of, like, particular personalities, but also there's, like you said, there's something in the water.

1:25:00 It's, like, the structural force of, like, why people are looking for an answer and what to do about the crazy rat.

1:25:10 The great fundamental issue now before our people can be stated briefly, it is, are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. In our hearts, we must have this lofty purpose, and we must strive for it in all earnestness and sincerity, for our work will come tonight. In order to succeed, we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly in strife to make their dreams come true.

1:25:43 That was that famous progressive pioneer, Teddy Roosevelt. Our next guest tonight is Daryl Fairweather. Daryl is the chief economist for Redfin. Her insights have been featured on 60 Minutes and the CBS Evening News, as well as in the New York Times and the Washington Post. During the Great Recession, Daryl worked as a researcher at the Boston Fed, studying why homeowners entered foreclosure. Her new book is Hate the Game, Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work. Please welcome to Radio Abundance, Daryl Fairweather.

1:26:17 All right, we're here with Daryl Fairweather. Daryl is an author and an economist. You're the chief economist for Redfin, and you have a new book out called Hate the Game. Daryl, let's start with some introductions and level setting here. Thanks so much for joining us on Radio Abundance. Who are you? What should people know about you, and what should people know about the book? Yeah, so I am an economist. I got my PhD at the University of Chicago. I have done research in the housing market. I've also done research in labor markets, too. Back when I was working in tech, I was working on employee engagement. But my main focus nowadays is housing and also just how to use economics to get what you want out of life, to reach your goals. So much of our economy, though, is tied to housing, so I always go back to housing, even in the book.

1:27:04 When I'm giving career advice, I'm giving a lot of advice about housing and explaining how the housing market works. But yeah, I'm just all about educating people on how they can use economics to make their own lives better. The book is titled Hate the Game, and you talk a lot about game theory and game design in both our economy and our lives. We're going to talk a lot more about games as we go. But one game you mentioned, which might become a new staple metaphor for me, you framed the search for housing as a game of musical chairs. It feels to me like a good allegory for scarcity, maybe as good an allegory as you can find. Because in musical chairs, as we know, everyone battles for an increasingly dwindling amount of chairs, and there's a new loser every round. In housing, people are able to, you know, buy their place, and they can squat in their chair the rest of the game, while everyone else faces an uphill battle with less and less opportunity.

1:27:55 Makes for a fun game if you're looking to crown a single winner. But in today's housing market, with nimbyism, with local rule, players who are lucky enough to get theirs can also conspire to remove other chairs from the game and prevent adding more. You mentioned in the book between 2012 and 2019, home prices grew more than 50%. You mentioned in that same era, the U.S. added 8.4 million new households, but only 6.8 million new homes, which is a 1.6 million home deficit racked up in less than a decade. So from here, the solution seems obvious. If you want everyone to have a chair, you need to add more chairs to the game. Is it that simple? Yeah, I think that's right. The housing market is even more unfair than musical chairs, because it's like, once you sit down, you don't have to play anymore.

1:28:45 And if you kick chairs out of the circle, then your price money goes up. It's like really perverse, the way that the housing market is set up. And I think it's really interesting that we got to this place just from like an incentives perspective, because like we didn't really have to, we don't have to have a housing market that works the way that it does. But because of local control and the way that we give homeowners, the people with the chairs, the right to write the rules essentially of the game, we get, we have this broken system that really only benefits people who are already homeowners. So, yeah, I'm definitely in favor of rewriting the rules of this game, coming up with a better model for how to allocate housing, make sure everybody has a place to live, because it's such an essential thing that everyone needs.

1:29:36 What's a better model look like for you? How would you design the game? Well, I mean, my preference is always to do like small but effectual changes to incentives. One of those is reowning. Like one of the reasons we just don't have enough housing is because we don't allow it to be built. We have a limited supply of land and allowing for multifamily zoning would just mean that we can do more with the same amount of land and build our homes. Another thing, though, I think is the tax structure. We incentivize people to stay in their homes longer, even beyond when it is valuable to them. And that prevents people who would find that home more valuable from occupying it. So I think we need a tax structure that encourages people to move when it's appropriate. And that means higher taxes on land.

1:30:24 That would definitely get us there. But also perhaps like subsidizing moving or just encouraging people to allocate the housing resources we have more efficiently. We want to increase the housing and also allocate it more efficiently. That's what I would like to see. Yeah, on that tax point, you know, you talk about taxes in the book and you frame the sort of benefits to homeowners just as an example of inefficiency in the system, but as a kind of institutional capture for incumbent privilege. Right. Where people who have that benefits are able to vote and organize and donate in ways that make their tax load less and and by that same token, regressively make it higher on people who are who are trapped out of that system.

1:31:10 And I wonder for for anyone who's not an expert on the tax code, if you could share a little bit more about what the system looks like now and what is there that benefits homeowners and a little bit screws anybody who isn't. Yeah, so we have a lot of tax incentives for homeownership. We have the mortgage interest deduction. It used to be higher than it is now, but it's still around. And then we also have tax deductions for property taxes. So if you are paying high property taxes at a level, you get some of that back in federal taxes because of that tax deduction. I mean, there are other things, too, where we encourage homeownership when it's not necessarily doing anybody a lot of good to encourage it. So we give a lot of subsidies to first time homebuyers who could probably equally benefit from rental credits. Like if you're on the verge between being a homeowner and being a renter, like, I mean, just giving unconditional cash is probably what people really want.

1:32:02 But instead, we kind of nudge people into homeownership because as a society, we think that homeownership is going to lead to like better social outcomes.

1:32:10 And also just like the way that we that we allow for local control in our zoning, that we just give so much power to homeowners because they're the people who are showing up at these community meetings, who have time to show up at the community meetings, who have money on the line directly and have a voting voice. But the people who don't live in the community yet or who are renting often aren't like given the same platform as homeowners. So one interesting argument is a lot is that currently the tax code treatment for multifamily housing construction versus multifamily for ownership construction is different. And so it's one of the reasons why like a low percentage of like multifamily housing that is built for ownership. Yeah, I did hear about that. I was at the National Multifamily Housing Conference in Las Vegas a couple of months ago, and people were talking about how the requirements to build multifamily housing are really expensive.

1:33:04 One of them, well, insurance costs are rising, and that's a problem for all types of housing. But it's especially hard for these multifamily housing projects. And then there are tax incentives that owners get for residential that like commercial doesn't get. And one thing this professor at USC, Professor Green, was talking about with me was taxing landlords, like small family landlords, like the big corporate landlords, because they're getting benefits that are really supposed to be going to owner occupants. Yeah, like currently, if you build like a large multifamily for rentals, you're treated to like long term capital gains. So same versus if you build it for homeownership, you're taxed at like the short term capital gains rate.

1:33:55 And so that is like a big distortion where, like you see in the United States, like we have a very low percentage of multifamily for ownership. And one of the reasons why we have like this, like, you know, the common idea is like, we want to buy a home, it's got to be single family, right? Condos are shipping. Another thing that people think of is for that phase of life. I want to also ask you about, you were talking earlier about sort of like the finance and financial incentives around housing. Something interesting I heard recently is a Kevin Erdman did a podcast with on on loss with Chris Allen and just, sure, Joe Weiss and Bells. All right. And they're talking about how one of the interesting things that he found was that when mortgage rates shift, you don't actually see that big a shift to ownership because or like purchasing their volume because the people who there's like his argument, essentially, there's a large swath of people who are currently renting and are paying more for rent.

1:34:59 They're like, they'd be paying for a mortgage. And so the issue is not like costs for them. The issue is that they can literally can't qualify.

1:35:08 And it's like curious and so I was like, what rules do you think might need to change around that? Or if there's sort of other things you've like for the mortgage interest deduction, one of the reasons that it's like not that good intended for home ownership is like just giving people more of a more money for first in home ownership doesn't help us. They literally can't qualify for a mortgage anyway, right? Right. Yes. So what was your the question? The question is just like, are there things you think should change around like federal rules around like eligibility for loans? Yeah. So I so you're right that renters oftentimes are paying more in rent than like what the landlord is paying for the mortgage. Part of that has to do with how rates fluctuated during the pandemic. Rates went to like 3 percent and then they went back.

1:35:55 So if you're trying to if you are renting right now, if you are trying to decide between renting that condo or sorry, buying condo versus renting an apartment that's equivalent, it's probably going to be cheaper to rent it now than to borrow to buy it at least like 7 percent 30 year fixed rates. And then there's the other added problem of, well, do you have a down payment if you have a very low down payment? You're taking on even more debt and paying even more interest. Do you have a credit score? Credit standards have gotten very high since the Great Recession.

1:36:24 You know, I think one of the reasons the housing market is so resilient right now, despite the fact that it's basically in the gutter, is that homeowners have great credit scores. They're not entering into foreclosure because the kinds of people who got these homes are not really vulnerable in this economy. So I think that going back to like a pre-Great Recession model where we're trying to get everyone into homeownership, no matter what their credit score is, we're probably not going to want to go back to that because we saw the consequences of it. I think instead what we need is to make renting financially equivalent to homeowning so that it doesn't really matter whether you can qualify for the home or not. Renting is not like a down. There's no downside to renting if that's what you choose to do.

1:37:11 Yeah. And I think from like a just like I think from like a zooming out to like more of like a theoretical like inequality standpoint, like I think a lot of the reason why like why like ownership is like always preferable to renting is because of like you're like you're like tying yourself to a particular location and the productivity to that location, which to me like I guess thinking about it like, okay, what makes the location productive? It's like the inflow of businesses, workers, like doing things near at or in proximity of the location. So it makes me wonder, like makes me think, like, is this value or is like the increases that come from property ownership, are they more so just like transferred value from the businesses and labor nearby?

1:38:03 I just would like to know your thoughts about that because that's been like a thing that's been in my brain for like a minute. Well, it's true that the value of land is not just about the land itself. It's about what is in proximity to it's like in real estate. They always say location, location, location. So if you are, you know, getting better amenities, if more job opportunities are coming, if, you know, the environment is improving, that's all going to lead to higher land values, which will benefit homeowners and property owners.

1:38:32 But I think like one reason that we try to encourage homeownership in this country is because of the belief that if you lay down roots, you invest in the community and then like your investments benefit your neighbors, your neighbors' investments benefit you. And it like creates this kind of social cohesion where we're all working together to make a community better. But what makes me uncomfortable about that is that in any economy, society, you're going to have transplants. You're going to have people who, by the nature of their job or what they do, are moving from community to community who are going to need to rent. So I think that we've gone too far in terms of like putting up homeownership at the detriment of people who, for whatever reason, need to rent, maybe because of their lifestyle or because of their income or their credit or whatever.

1:39:19 I think we've gone too far in terms of using a carrot and that carrot becoming actually like this huge reward that you get just for already kind of being wealthier. Oh, exactly. Because I think like a great example would be like pandemic where it's like most of like the essential workers, like people who are grocery workers, like health care workers, gig workers who are basically priced out of buying a home. People who like kept everything going and they were essential and a lot of the homeowners being wealthier were locked inside. So like I think like that is like a huge like example of like our huge like ripple to that idea that like, oh, like homeowner means like you are investing in your community or these are the only people that are investing in your community.

1:40:07 Like not to say homeowners aren't investing, but like they're not the only people. Right. Definitely. And by the way, this is my life. I've had the incredible fortune since 2021 to live both around country and a bit around the world. And being able to invest in a lot of different communities and lay down roots in a lot of different communities has been an extraordinary pleasure and opportunity. I think one that's enriched my life and what I learned from those different communities and give me the opportunity, I hope, to enrich those communities, too. So that choice isn't for everyone. And I don't want to say it is or that the system should be designed to benefit me. But yeah, on a personal level, I would love to inject the idea that you can actually enrich different communities at once and invest in different communities at once and and bring great culture and benefits and love to different places and different people at once.

1:41:01 And if technology can make that possible and people can have diverse lives where they try different places and and meet different people, I think we only stand to gain from that in confronting everything from our economics to our loneliness crisis and the things that that divide us when we get in our little in groups. We've been talking a little bit now about about where the value of land comes from. And Nia was talking about the way that the community around the land enriches the land and gives it its value. We began by talking about games. Again, the book is called Hate the Game. So in a second, I want to talk a little bit about Monopoly, the creator of Monopoly, or as it was first called the Landlord's Game. And you called it out, was a big fan of the economist Henry George, who believed that instead of taxing labor, we ought to tax land.

1:41:52 If the benefit, if the value of land is created by all of society, then its gains ought to benefit all of society. Daryl, are you a Georgist? Yeah, I think I'll just I'll just say I'm a full on Georgist. Before I was like a little hesitant. I don't like labels, but I don't know. I feel like if it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck. If it's a duck, it is a Georgist. And what does that mean to you? I mean, what it means is a belief in, I think, improving the economy by making it more efficient. I think all economists, you know, if they dig deep, it probably would be Georgists because they all kind of believe that. I think it also I mean, I don't know if all Georgists believe this, but just understanding that like the land was here before us. So like, why is it why is private ownership makes sense?

1:42:38 Like it's the one thing that nobody created. So why should people who just happen to get there first get to own it? So, yeah, I think from the economic perspective and from the justice perspective, that makes me a Georgist. Yeah. And I'm yeah. Like, as me and Daryl know, because like we're friends outside of this, is that like a huge Georgist for like largely the same reason. What I like about it is that it sets the foundation for moving away from taxing productivity, which I think right now, like I think it's something that we had to do, like I think to get to this phase in our economy. But it seems to me that we are hitting that point where we're topping out with that method. And I think we need to move away from taxing productivity to taxing inefficiencies and rent seeking and things like that.

1:43:24 I think right now, I think solely productivity based like economic discussion, I think, is creating a zero sum game where like you have like the socialists on one side and the capitalists on one side fighting this like zero sum game. And when to me, as a Georgist, it makes no sense because we could probably we could probably run everything that we need on just pure inefficiencies.

1:43:47 Yeah, we can have nice things. I think that's the abundance mantra. I'm like, we can do it. We can do it. And I think that like Henry George would have been more successful if he just had the technology. I feel like just not being able to have valid assessments of land value back in at the turn of the century probably made it like not that feasible. But nowadays, I just don't think there's anything in the way of adopting some more efficient tax structure. And it's probably going to have to have to happen locally. But I think that that is it's fine. Like we can just convince people at a local level. I am curious, actually, about sort of this technical aspect of it is that, you know, the way that we currently do property tax assessments is that there's like the assessor's office. They like do a combination of like they look at market rates and how comparable properties are, but then also do like objective assessments, like squares, blah, blah, blah.

1:44:42 Like how would you see in practice, like how would a George's like assessor to distinguish the value of the land from the permits to the land?

1:44:54 Well, I think they would use like a machine learning model similar to the way that a Redfin estimate or its estimate is calculated. Most assessors are pretty behind the curve on like this kind of technology of using data and big data to come up with assessments. They're kind of using these outdated rules of thumb. So I think like one intermediate goal is just to update assessments, you know, locality by locality and getting them to a place where they are accurately assessing land versus additions because they do break it out. Like they're supposed to break it out, but it's just like so wildly off. They don't even bother trying to get it right. But I think getting it like improving it is definitely achievable. And I think getting close to the truth or at least an unbiased version of the truth that, you know, a large data scale is definitely achievable.

1:45:41 There's always going to be outliers where people are, you know, arguing with their assessor. That happens now. So I don't think it's really that different. It's a model where we're just trying to get the land broken out more accurately. So it would be something like, let's say you signed a piece of land and potentially like a house near it. So it's like the land is comparable. And then you say like, well, this is one unit. This is two. And there's the difference in price. And so like whatever the remainder, you know, better go for a simplified, but like whatever the remainder is mostly the land differential. Yeah, we would create like predicted values of property values and the land values. And you would have the outcomes where some lots are selling without any homes on them. So you have like, yeah, your lots are just the land.

1:46:27 And then you have some lots that have homes on them. And then you can calculate the difference and you could extrapolate that out just based on the different features. All the data, I think, exists because we have all the county records. I mean, if you tap into the MLS data, then you have all the property sales too. So it seems like it's pretty achievable, at least to get something a lot better than what we're currently doing. You know, I love this theme, right? Because we're currently talking about how technology, how data, how machine learning, and dare I say, perhaps artificial intelligence can actually improve governance, make it more efficient, make it more effective, and be a tool for actually delivering social justice. I also love that we're talking about Henry George and that there is this bit of George's revival, at least under the surface in our conversations.

1:47:17 Because, you know, we in this chat, we're not just Yimpies, we are Yimpie Democrats. And as Democrats, we know that the value of the land in your community is a whole of society effort, right? If you live in or nearby a big city, then it is those renters and those transients and those poor artists and some of the riffraff that is creating the culture and the art and the vibrancy and the restaurants and the gathering places and the events that make that land so attractive. We know that it's the government public infrastructure, right, the roads and bridges and trains that make it usable and successful, that it's education and public services and social welfare that keeps the society, you know, cohesive and growing and vibrant.

1:48:03 We know that it's public services, including police and firemen, that make it safe to live there. And so we know that we're all contributing to that value that people who own that land are able to, you know, to benefit from, but also capture a lot of the value of. And so I think it's really exciting of both these two currents, right? Where can we leverage technology and emerging new technologies to deliver on genuinely progressive goals? And how do we, you know, how do we create more of a fairer and also more successful economics and tax structure that recognizes how value is actually created? Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like once you start viewing land as a public or something that is like inherently owned by all of us that can be taxed back, I think it definitely just aligns with a lot of the other values of progress, progressivism and redistribution.

1:49:03 I mean, there's definitely differences in George's followers in terms of how they would spend the revenue of a land value tax that probably separates the right leaning ones from the left leaning ones. But, you know, I live like in a majority Republican area and the Republicans hate the vacant businesses so much. So I feel like even though there are all these progressive values in George's and it's also an issue in terms of land value tax, also an issue that you can get a lot of centrists on board with if they see that there's this lack of productivity. They hate that, too. You know, I've been seeing a lot of debate around where does abundance stand on on redistribution. And to your point a little bit, the way I think of it, at least, is that in a sense, abundance is neutral on it. Redistribution is what you get to do with the gains of abundance.

1:49:51 And so, you know, we can have abundance and we can grow from that both the amount of, you know, opportunities for people and affordability created by the private market. We can use that to gain the tax revenue and the assets and the innovations that we can redistribute. And then what we do with them and how we redistribute them, that's for the next political battle. And so, you know, my message for progressives is, A, if you want to redistribute things, you need things to redistribute. This is a roadmap for having more to redistribute. And that is the next fight. And we'll be with you on that one. Armand, go for it. I would push back on that a little bit just to say, like, one thing about abundance is that the actual sort of, like, action within abundance are inherently redistributive in the sense that, for example, incumbent, like, large property owners who block new housing.

1:50:45 Both not just financially, but also in terms of, like, they prioritize, like, their views or the neighborhood character over the economic well-being of other people, that is redistribution. It is growing it for everybody, but is also making sure that part of the economic value of that growth inherently flows to people who are not incumbents right now. Like, if we built a bunch of housing, the people already in housing, which is so game because it would grow the economy, but the people who don't have access to housing or can't live near where their jobs are, like, those people are primarily people who are poor, who are working class, people of color. So there's a progressive agenda, even before the tax and spend aspect of it. So I wouldn't say that, like, abundance is neutral on redistribution.

1:51:31 I think, if anything, it's, like, progressive in its own design. And the second thing I would say is, like, even if we change nothing about existing tax incentive policies, just causing more growth with supercharged, like, existing social welfare programs. So I think, like, schools would have bigger budgets, you know, like, we'd have better budgets for transit. We'd have more train. So I think in both ways, we'd have more housing budgets. Exactly. Like, I think abundance is both, like, inherently redistributive and progressive, but also just, like, growth itself, even if we change nothing about existing social welfare systems, which I want to change and I want more of them. But even if we change nothing, just, like, providing more revenue, it would be more progressive.

1:52:20 Also, land value tax that we've been discussing is a wealth tax. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah. The 1% own a disproportionate, I think it's, like, 13% of all the homes in the United States, and they own, like, vacant land, too. I know that's always brought up this idea of, like, the poor elderly person who lives in a super valuable piece of land and how they would be hurt by land value tax. But on net, taxing land would be wealthy. It would be taxing also. It would, in and of itself, be, like, kind of a form of reparations, which I know is, like, when I really started to get on my radical. But because of the history of homeownership and redlining and racial covenants that have put more housing and land wealth into the hands of white residents relative to, like, black and brown and indigenous people, taxing land would, like, in and of itself, like, serve to correct this inequality.

1:53:15 There's a lot here that I want to bring back to monopoly in a second. But first, on this idea that abundance is naturally progressive. You know, I saw today somebody complaining and alleging that, for example, teachers and construction workers weren't part of this movement. And my mind immediately goes, those are two of the prime beneficiaries, right? If you want to teach in a city or a neighborhood and you can't afford to live there and your commute is 90 minutes, that becomes a problem. If a population in a city like San Francisco has been enduring for a while now loses kids and families every year and schools shut down, then suddenly not only can a teacher not afford to live nearby their school, they don't have a school to work at. You talk in the book about construction workers. So not only are we talking about housing where construction workers can also live at the homes they're building and be, for that matter, the ones to build those homes, which would create a lot of jobs.

1:54:10 You've also got this thing where part of the cost of a home, you talk about this when you talk about Seattle, part of the cost of the home is determined by the price of labor nearby. And if housing prices are high and construction workers can't afford to live there and there's less construction workers in the area and they're coming from far away, it drives up the price of housing higher, which makes it harder and harder for those construction workers to live nearby, which makes pricing even higher. And I think that, you know, we know in this conversation that a lot of zoning comes out of laundering Jim Crow and other racist rules through through housing law. And we also know that people who are vulnerable and marginalized are the first to to get their butts kicked from a world of scarcity.

1:55:01 So I am curious, you know, when it comes to teachers and schools and construction workers and people of color and and really the universe of folks who are marginalized or historically discriminated against, what is the role of of of abundance and building housing in delivering justice and better outcomes to those to them? Yeah, I think it's so ironic because before I was saying how the reason homeownership was encouraged was because like the government wanted people to have a stake in their communities and own something there. But like we've gone so far, we've created this perverse situation where the teachers can't buy a stake in the community. The firefighters can't buy a stake, the police officers, like the people who make the cities run in these expensive, mostly coastal cities can't afford to live there.

1:55:50 So that deteriorates community. It means that like where I live in Wisconsin, I run into my kids' teachers at the grocery store. I know in Seattle that would have never happened. And that's because housing is more affordable here, although it is becoming more expensive, unfortunately, because nimbyism is everywhere. And when places get more popular, they usually fall prey to those same forces that blue states and coastal places have fallen prey to. So anyway, that's what I'm trying to say is that I think the idea of promoting community is a good idea, but we need to be more thoughtful and careful about how we do it and make sure we're not excluding people from that community based on their ability to purchase a home at the prevailing prices and mortgage rates, because that's excluding a lot of people.

1:56:38 So on the Monopoly front, then, a couple of questions. No, because I think it is. It's a really nice kind of fusion of the topics we've talked about. I think he really loves the game Monopoly. I think a little bit of learning. I just want to know if you're the type to like flip the board.

1:56:55 The only time I've played Monopoly in the last 10 years was a life-sized version in London, which was fun. And one example of the modifications of the game, because, you know, Monopoly is a game where the first person to secure a privileged position through nothing more than luck gets to set the rules for the rest of the game, right? They get to build on their privilege while their fellow players fall behind, both from increasing rents and occasional jail time. And then you've also talked about modifications that different players have introduced to make the game a little bit more fair, right? Take some of that tax revenue, stick it under free parking. And that's also a random way to do redistribution, but it keeps the game going.

1:57:42 So I'm curious if you throw the board over when you lose. And I'm also curious what lessons we can learn from our country from a simple game like Monopoly. Yeah, I'm not usually the one throwing the board over. That's not really my style, but I am kind of the person provoking people to throw the board over with my moves. So I definitely play it ruthlessly, but I do like with the modifications because, I mean, the whole, the original version of the game was to show, like you said, that if you buy land early, especially valuable land, then you get to extract value out of everybody else and nobody else can get ahead. But if you start redistributing, then people do have a chance to get ahead. And I think that's kind of, I mean, that's the overall lesson in my, or one of the things I'm trying to convey in the book is that capitalism is probably always going to be unfair, but what you want is a system where people can play multiple times, where if they get knocked out once, they aren't knocked out forever.

1:58:38 They can just try again and have a decent chance at winning and that losing early on doesn't like disqualify you from winning ever again. And I think you do that through a social safety net, through redistribution, landing on free parking is one of them, but I know there are a lot of hardcore Georgists who hate the idea of free parking. So maybe it's not the best metaphor, but yeah, having like a negative income tax or something like that is a way to make sure that if people aren't winning, they're not like, they're not completely out of the game. For folks who aren't familiar with the negative income tax, you've mentioned it twice, if you could just explain it. I think a negative income tax is just like another way to say universal basic income. It basically means that if you fall below a certain threshold of income, instead of paying taxes, you receive tax revenue back. We have this kind of in terms of the earned income tax credit, you have to like have some income to do that.

1:59:29 More what I'm envisioning is like, yeah, if you're making zero dollars, you're at least getting a basic income that phases out the more you earn. But it's pretty equivalent to universal basic income. You could also have it like a universal basic income where you have an increasing tax rate the more money you make so that it goes back in the system that way. Yeah, so basically equivalent to a UBI. In terms of the politics of Monopoly, you know, the energy in the Democratic Party right now seems to be coming from two places. We're talking a lot about abundance generally, and especially the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and reconsidering how we've gotten in our own way from delivering the kind of broad-based affordability and opportunity and social justice that we claim to be about. And in the streets, a lot of the energy right now is being rallied thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC standing up and bringing tens of thousands of people at a time together to fight oligarchy.

2:00:21 And when I talk to elected officials and folks in the party, they're often wondering, how do we bring these two movements together, right? How do we synthesize? How do we connect? What's that intersection point between abundance and fighting oligarchy? We've talked a lot about the overlap between those two movements, and I'm curious, both in policy, but especially in politics. Do you see a connection between these two movements, and how do you think they can come together over the coming years? I think the connection that I see is a belief that just because you won doesn't mean that you get to, like, take your ball and go home. I'm mixing metaphors here. We're talking about basketball now. Just when you get to, like, take your ball and go home, you have to keep playing.

2:01:07 You have to keep trying. And going after the oligarchs, I think, is a recognition that just because, like, your dad or your dad's dad amassed all this wealth does not mean that you don't have to play the game of capitalism like everybody else. Or just because you won in your own lifetime doesn't mean that you get to check out. You still have to contribute back to society because society is, like, what got you there in the first place. So I think that, like, belief is also what YIMBYs believe. Like, just because you bought this home or your parents bought this home doesn't mean that you are a more privileged class than somebody who is still renting and trying to become a homeowner. I think that, like, everybody has to play and there isn't this free riding or rent sinking that you can do where you get to amass wealth without actually trying.

2:01:55 I think, like, the overall fairness that people want out of our economy is a connection between effort and results. And I think both YIMBYism and, like, the fight against oligarchy are about that. I was struck early in the book, you talked a little bit about your grandmother and the influence she had on you. You mentioned she was the first black woman to be a licensed architect in New York State, first black woman to be licensed in California, first black woman to receive an architecture degree from Columbia, first black woman to be inducted into the American Institute of Architects. You say she worked on Terminal 1 of LAX, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, the Mall of America. I wanted to learn a little bit more just about her influence on you and what it was like to be growing up in the shadow of both a pioneer and a great architect, and also how you personally lived the themes of this book and the themes we've talked about today.

2:02:49 Yeah, my grandmother, her name is Norma, or was Norma Merrick's cleric. She achieved so much in her career, and she was a big part of my life growing up. She definitely, like, taught me that there was no limit to what I could achieve, even though, obviously, like, racism and misogyny and all that exists. It doesn't mean that you can't get to your goals, which is kind of, like, also the message of the book, too, that, like, even though you have obstacles in your way, you can overcome them. So I think she, like, was the first person to put that message into me. And, yeah, the other thing that she taught me was that you have to be, like, being aware of the challenges in front of you is necessary, but you can't, like, despair about them. Like, you should understand what's in your way, but you can still overcome it.

2:03:36 And I think it's completely necessary if you are somebody who cares about creating a more just society. Like, you need to get to a place in your life where your basic needs are met and you're secure before you can actually, like, start affecting change. So if you give in to the despair, it's really just keeping things the same. So, yeah, she definitely was a huge influence on me. I'm a very interesting woman. Daryl, what have we not talked about today or asked you about that we should have? I don't know. My love of Beyonce. That's another in birds. I look at Beyonce in housing right now just to see if I get hired in. And apparently there's this affordable housing. Oh, yeah. She's donated a lot of money in Houston to affordable housing. Yeah. They have a housing check.

2:04:21 Will be named after. And the housing will be named after them. Beyonce and Kelly Rowland. That's lovely. I want to look at that. Yeah, we need to get her at the NBA. I know. We need to get her making the NBA TikToks or making a song. In Cowboy Carter, she had a song about a house getting burned down and not being able to get insurance. And she mentions, like, she name drops Fannie Mae. So, yeah. Oh, wow. Yep. We've got to get her on here. Yeah. I like that you had that because I was trying to reach the back of my brain for Beyonce lyrics to bring in. And I only got it as far as saying I'm crazy in love for upzoning. Daryl, this has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you and learn from your expertise and your perspective. Before we get out of here, plug the book. Why should we buy it? And more importantly, how do we buy it?

2:05:07 And how do we follow your work? Well, you can buy Hate the Game anywhere books are sold. It will teach you all the economics you need to know in order to get whatever you want in life, whatever that may be. So, if that's not a reason to buy it, I don't know what is. It's also endorsed by a Nobel Prize winner in game, like a Nobel Prize winner for game theory. So, it's real. It's legit. Which one? Roger Meyerson. Oh, wow. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Well, I've been holding up, but I definitely need to go again now. Shit. You got a Nobel Prize endorsement. Yeah, there you go. Daryl, thanks for joining us on Radio Abundance. Thank you for having me. All right. That was Daryl Fairweather. The new book is Hate the Game. Nia, what did you think? It was awesome. Like, I always enjoy talking to Daryl.

2:05:53 Like, we're best. We're, like, good friends. Maybe not best friends. That probably is too strong. But we are, like, really good friends. Amazing. How did you guys come to be friends? It was definitely through Twitter. I don't even remember the exact story. You guys remember? Nia, I actually don't know where Daryl is based. She's, like, based in a beach town in Wisconsin. Ah, okay. So definitely not. Definitely not. It's actually all over the book. I mean, it's kind of the story of where she's lived and when and why. What communities were attractive to her? Where was the rent and home prices too high? And she makes a lot of some really interesting observations. She talks about how, you know, in Seattle, for example, she used as an example. But in many of our kind of expensive coastal cities and towns, our blue cities and towns, it's not just that the rent is so high and homes are so expensive.

2:06:46 When that happens, if you're in construction and you can't afford to live there, suddenly you're living further away or there's less construction workers in town or within commuting distance. Suddenly, if you got to pay people coming in from further away, if you have less workers there, then it costs more to hire workers. Obviously, we like it when workers can make good money and when their wages rise. But you do get into this vicious cycle where rent and homes are too expensive. So less construction workers can live there, which drives up the price of construction, which makes rents and homes more expensive, which means less construction workers. And so you have this tornado of unaffordability. And and as we talked about in the conversation, especially when we got into the Georgia stuff and land value tax and building for everyone, you know, our communities take all of us and affordability and driving down the cost of living takes all of us and requires you have to have cities where everyone can be a part of them in order to build cities where everyone can be a part of them.

2:07:43 Yeah, like 100 percent. I think people think that like high property values are like something that comes free, but then like they'll be like, yes, I want high property values. I want like the value of my land to be worth all this money or the value of my property to be worth all this money. But then at the same time, they'll simultaneously complain about like, oh, why is everything so expensive now? Because it's like, well, like there's a trade off here. Like nothing in life is free and what you traded in exchange for higher property values was like higher labor costs because now it's expensive for anybody to rent around you. What I think is particularly interesting about delving to the minutiae of the economics of abundance and housing policy in particular is that it helps show how so much of it is win win. Right. You worry perhaps as a homeowner that if there's more housing around that, hey, property values might go down because that's a goal is to have lower rents and lower housing prices.

2:08:38 And so that's actually worse for me. But the value of your home is more than just the value of the property. It's also the value of the land. And so while property values might go down, land values would go up because you can now instead of one unit there, build three. And so in a way, it can be a win win where if you're a homeowner who owns a single family home, your total asset value goes up. But the value of a new person buying a home still goes down. And I think that those sorts of like very counterintuitive things really come out when you delve into the economics of it all. And really it helps show that there's like a foundation here that can benefit a lot of people, whether you're a renter or a homeowner. Yeah, I loved our discussion around around like Henry George and kind of the revival of George's economic thought and a land value tax.

2:09:25 It was exciting to see everyone kind of bond over that. But but there's also some action here. So I'm going to share. This is something Daryl pointed out on Twitter that's kind of emerging now. You know, we've been talking about Maryland a little bit, right? Our very first episode launched with Governor Wes Moore of Maryland and his secretary of housing and community development, Jake Day. Funnily enough, I think George Clooney just had an appearance on, I think, CNN where he was asked who his early favorites are for 2028. And he gave a pretty big shout out to Wes Moore and kind of an early endorsement for for Wes Moore as, quote, a proper leader and somebody who might be a great standard bearer potentially for the party going forward. Daryl pointed out that there's exciting things happening with regards to like a land value tax and specifically in Maryland. So I'm quoting now from the Progress and Poverty Substack, which says, here's the big news, SB 472, which allows Baltimore and other counties to set a higher land tax rate specifically for land within one mile of rail lines, has passed the state Senate.

2:10:20 So the bill passed on a vote of 12 to one. And it's now in committee in the state house and enjoys strong support from like the ATU local transit union. And and so there may be maybe a movement kind of, you know, little by little. And there's there's legal complexities all across our various overlapping jurisdictions of government around how you tax land and property. But there we might be moving in a more Georgia's direction and it's probably the right way to go, both to lower the burden of taxes in other areas of life and make sure that you're not as much taxing the things that you actually want to encourage. But when it comes to something like land, it really is derived from the community and other people and social services to seeing some momentum behind behind increasing taxes on land while maybe reducing taxes on other area.

2:11:11 Seems like it could be a pretty compelling direction that that hopefully little by little we move in. Yeah, it's particularly exciting. I mean, we think of this as fanciful, perhaps, but like Pennsylvania, I know, has already had a number of cities that have a land value tax already. It's something that's already implemented in America and it's really, I think, intuitive for people. You know, you walk around a city, you always see these empty parking lots or empty buildings. You're like, why doesn't anyone ever do anything with that? Like that's valuable land right in the middle of our city. And it's because if they actually built something on it, they would actually have to pay higher taxes, even though the land itself is valuable. Right. The empty parking lot, the empty abandoned building, the person actually has an economic incentive to leave and then just say 10 years that land is going to be worth twice as much. And so I can sell it. But in those 10 years, I don't have to do anything in between. And so I think it's a great revitalization tool of our cities that really want to incentivize, you know, the downtown and ask for it to like come back and become vibrant again.

2:12:05 You know, funnily enough. Right. So we began our first episode and and we had a quite strong Maryland focus with Governor Westmore and Jake Day. You know, our second episode had kind of a New York City focus. So we had Zellner Myrie, New York State Senator, who's running for mayor of New York City, as well as Stephen Philip, who's mayor of Jersey City, which is, of course, not in New York City or New York State. But it's basically part of the world of New York City because it's right across the Hudson River with Jersey City with that with its own kind of skyscrapers rising on both sides of the Hudson. I bring that up because it's funny because the other place where there's a lot of action on the kind of land value tax front right now is not just Maryland. It's also New York and New York State. So I'm quoting now from ABC News 10 in New York, which is says that State Senator Rachel May was it's both S.

2:12:52 I don't even know how to how to best sort of phrase all the numbers. S. One one three one a and a three three three nine a alongside assembly members, Tony Simone and Alex Boris. The idea here is a proposal that would realign tax incentives, reduce wasted urban space and prioritize long term community oriented goals in New York's housing market, establishing a pilot program in five municipalities statewide where the Department of Taxation and Finance would classify real estate in two groups, land only and buildings on land and impose a higher tax on land and a lower rate on buildings, with the idea being, of course, make it easier to build, reduce the tax version on construction and buildings. But if you're using if you have land, if you own land, good for you. But if you're not using that land to the highest and best value, both for yourself and of course, for the whole community and also for government, which frankly makes more in tax revenue, the more people that live there and are paying taxes to to to to shift that tax burden from from property and construction to land and kind of unused and underdeveloped and underutilized land.

2:14:00 So there is a there is some action here, yeah, both in New York and Maryland on the land value tax front and the kind of Georgia's revival.

2:14:10 You've been listening to Radio Abundance. Join the movement for Progressive Abundance at Yimby Democrats dot org. Yes, we can build again. Yes, we can trounce the fascists. Yes, you can be the difference. This is AI, by the way. You think these jokers actually got Obama? Check in with me in a few months. It'll happen. Thank you for listening to the premiere episode of Radio Abundance, a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America. Now it's time for you to join the movement. We're building a big tent and it's going to take all of us. Join us and together we'll fight to build America, defeat fascism and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. Join the movement at Yimby Democrats dot org. This is reality. We are in that world now.

2:14:56 We allowed that world to happen. We opened the door enough that this came through it. Liberals have become so afraid of bad things happening. They cannot make enough good things happen. They've become so afraid of the government abusing its power that they don't allow the government to use its power for good. If the strategy of not allowing power to be wielded was working, then we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. But instead, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California, Illinois and Chicago, leading to, if this continues in the census of 2030, a redshift so large that a Democrat could win everything Kamala Harris won, add in the blue wall and still lose the election. So I would say to the people who say, if we change things, bad things might happen, bad things are happening, maybe we should change things.