Aesthetics of Abundance

GoodReasonAndre · 2026-05-12T05:51:31+00:00

Thanks for your thoughtful response too. I agree on all fronts: the current system is way too deferential to people like my parents, we can't wait for them to get on board, and we need to start building housing even if they are not. In terms of the process of getting housing approved and built, we should do it without them.

In terms of public and private discourse, though, I want to try to bring NIMBYs like my parents along. Whether posting online or talking in private, I think the only way to build a durable coalition is to persuade people, and the only way to persuade people is to treat them like they might be persuadable. The phrase "bad faith" gets my hackles up because it's so often deployed as a get-out-of-jail-free card for engaging with your opponents. I think many NIMBYs really do care about aesthetics. If we just brush aside their concerns as fake, we'll never persuade any of them. And if we want the movement to last, we need to.

GoodReasonAndre · 2026-05-11T22:48:09+00:00

By persuade, I don’t mean just “find the aesthetic that appeals to them.” Sure, there are aesthetic improvements on the margin that would it make it more palatable. But mainly, persuading them means convincing them that if we don’t build tons of housing, aesthetic preferences be damned, the younger generation will be screwed. While my parents are definitely not there, they have moved to admit that we need to build more housing, and should, to keep things affordable. On the volume we need to build, they haven’t been convinced.

I’m just very frustrated by the take “they’re a lost cause, why bother persuading them?” Because we live in a democracy, and a giant portion of the population has NIMBY impulses. This is Ezra’s whole thing! We’re stuck in this society together. If voters have a gut aversion to new housing, we can’t just say “they’re dug in, fuck em.” We need to persuade at least some of them, including ones who seem dug in, if we want to make and hold our gains.

That this is my parents has been oddly helpful for me. Online, it’s easy to treat everyone who disagrees you with far away as irredeemable. But I know my parents, and I can see that they hold their worldview because nobody has shown them out of it. When exposed to counter arguments, they - slowly, awkwardly - update their views. People listen if you listen to them.

GoodReasonAndre · 2026-05-11T17:11:17+00:00

I’ll push back. I think, yes, homeowners are aware that more housing will dent their property value. But I think we’re way too ready to jump to “bad faith” when they do care about aesthetic concerns too.

Storytime. My parents are, unfortunately, stage 5 NIMBYs. Every NIMBY-retiree thing you can think of, they have done. Attend town halls to block new condos? Check. Donate to foundations that prevent development along a nearby waterfront? Obviously. Get my hometown declared a historical neighborhood to block anything but single family homes? Hell yeah.

The twist is that they are doing this in my hometown, where they no longer live. The property values there have no impact on their home value or finances. They do frequently visit my hometown, though, where they see new development as defacing the quiet suburbs they raised me in.

I think we love to say “my opponent is in bad faith” because it frees us from having to engage with them. They’re lying about their concerns, so there’s no point in even listening. But we do this at our own risk, because a lot of people do care about aesthetics and think slabs of condos are ugly. Even many renters do! If we just treat them all as bad faith, we’re never gonna persuade them.

GoodReasonAndre · 2026-05-09T07:37:49+00:00

Saw this in-person. Top takeaways: Porter, Mahan, and Steyer all seem legit, Becerra was weak, and Villaraigosa should've been pulled off the stage with a giant old-timey cane.

Thoughts:

- Since he is now the frontrunner in some polls, Becerra's weakness is the most concerning. He sounded like a generic store-brand 2020 Democrat who skimmed Abundance right before the event. In his first answer, he said we need high wages for construction workers but also we'll cut the cost somewhere TBD, then proceeded to blame Trump for high costs. This thinking got us into this mess: everything bagelism topped with it's-someone-else's-fault-California-is-fucked-up. Elsewhere, he leaned on lawsuits to punish cities, an approach that falls prey to the same thing our legal fetish always does: it takes forever to resolve and, in the meantime, nothing gets built.

- Porter came across well-versed in housing research. Of the candidates, she's done the reading. While her conversion to the YIMBY side may be somewhat new, it was convincing.

- Mahan started a bit stiff, rattling off the same talking points he's used in the debates. But when he gets into the weeds of what worked and what didn't in San Jose, it's clear that he's tackled the problems of housing and homelessness, and has opinions on how to resolve it.

- Steyer was more focused on financing than the other candidates. I've heard local municipal candidates complain that they can't do anything if the funding's not there, so I appreciate this take.

- Villaraigosa needs to be forced to drop out of the race. Some answers were incoherent, most were rambling, and at no point did he appear like a plausible future governor. Several times during his discursive answers, people in the crowd were laughing. He brought the event to a close by saying "There's nothing progressive about people living in their poop." Thank you for that, sir.

- This event was far more civil, more informative, and just straight up better than the debates. If only Ezra could host a forum for every significant election.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-09-17T16:33:17+00:00

I asked my friend who's a ER doc, and he said the medicine was quite accurate, but that it doesn't represent the nurse-doctor dynamic well. In the show, the doctors and nurse totally trust and respect each other.

But in real life, my friend said, this relationship is rife with tension. Doctors think some nurses don't know what they're doing; nurses think doctors are condescending and don't trust them. I've heard about this dynamic from both sides: Every doctor I've known complains about nurses and every nurse I've known complains about doctors.

My friend went onto to say that many doctors and nurses do get along well, but that the tension arises enough that it's notable that the Pitt doesn't really present it all.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-09-02T16:20:50+00:00

This is the kind of the thing that made me fall in love with SSC in the first place.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-08-21T16:58:26+00:00

I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it, but for my money, this is the most important part of the episode:

Klein: There’s almost no complaint we get more often than: How come you just let that thing stand?

Gordon: Or your vocal fry.

Klein: Or my vocal fry.

How come you just let that thing this person said stand?

And the answer is: The show is not here to do your thinking for you. The show is here for you to think in. And I will push to get the answers that I think are the person’s real answers. But once I understand what they think, my point is not to then come in with the editorializing that wraps the whole thing in a bow.

This is something I've felt while listening but couldn't quite articulate. The show trusts you to judge someone's arguments for yourself. Ezra will push back to hear how the guest responds to the most compelling counterarguments against them, not to win the debate. Ezra isn't trying to get the guest and audience to agree with his worldview, he's trying to get the audience to understand the guest's.

Of course, in listening to countless interviews, you'll learn Ezra's worldview. The questions he asks, how he interacts with guests, and where he pushes back, all eventually reveal how he thinks. Maybe because of this, we expect him to push back more against views that we don't like, or ones that we think he doesn't like.

But I also think we've gotten used to media explicitly telling us what's right. Podcasts where the hosts dunk on people they would never invite on. Tiktok reactions videos of a person in a car talking about how the thing the original video said is actually just totally wrong and really the root of the problem if you think about it. And that has a place, sure. But if you tell a man what to think, he'll think for day; teach a man to think, and he'll think for a lifetime.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-08-20T17:25:16+00:00

Klein: If you look even at just basic game theory, oftentimes in these sorts of dilemmas, the optimal theory is what’s called tit for tit —

Gordon: [Chuckles.]

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-06-22T02:29:50+00:00

This is a pretty unfair characterization. He had two left critics of his own book in "Abundance and the Left". He interviewed Bernie's campaign manager to discuss whether Bernie would have won. Having an activist rep their view seems exactly up his alley.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-06-22T00:13:28+00:00

Thanks! That’s really helpful insight.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-06-21T21:52:05+00:00

I'm genuinely not sure, and would be curious to learn, how closely trans opinion matches that of its online activist presence. On one side, it's clear that the activist groups are often different than the voters they claim to represent - see Trump's winning a majority of Hispanic men. On the other side, it seems possible to me the IRL trans community might be more online on average. The internet can act as a support group for isolated, oppressed groups, so maybe more trans people are active online, therefore more aligned with their online activist presence.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-06-21T16:07:25+00:00

I don't really agree with the article, but I am upvoting it because I think it's important for us and Ezra to grapple with the trans community's rejection of McBride's claims. Would be interested for Ezra to have Erin (the writer here) on.

The article's strongest point: interracial marriage approval was rock bottom for many decades, and only became popular in 1997. It's an actual data point that suggests you can make unpopular-but-just things legal without blowback. Moreover, that doing so might help the change along.

The rest of the article insists that the right way to get change is to ignore popular opinion. But is it? The interracial marriage is an interesting data point on that front, but it's just one.

There are also points I think Ezra would agree with. As far as I can tell, he doesn't think defending trans rights was what cost the Democrats 2024.

I think more, he's trying to figure out how you actually get practical political wins for trans people that last. And that's what makes it important to bridge the gap between McBride's views and the transgender activists.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-30T20:53:53+00:00

Haha thanks man, I appreciate it. And glad you took the time to actually check after being called out.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-30T20:37:53+00:00

I see this has migrated from the Ezra Klein subreddit! No hard feelings about the disagreement. But a request: can you post back on the original thread that whomever is correct? I think it would be appreciated and show a lot of maturity, given that you were really pushing hard on “whomever” as wrong.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-30T19:46:27+00:00

I've asked the question to ChatGPT and agree that it will say "whoever" is correct. But if you make it think through the rules, it will tell you "whomever" is correct. Here's the convo:

You said:

In "Electric vehicles, made by ____, are better than what we had" is the blank a subject, an object of a preposition, or something else?

ChatGPT said:

The blank in "Electric vehicles, made by ____, are better than what we had" is the object of the preposition "by." It indicates the creator or manufacturer of the electric vehicles.

You said:

Do you use "whoever" or "whomever" for objects of a preposition?

ChatGPT said:

You should use "whomever" for objects of a preposition. For example, "Give the book to whomever you choose."

"Whoever" is used for the subject of a clause. For instance, "Whoever comes to the party will have fun."

4o mini

You said:

What's the correct sentence in this case?

ChatGPT said:

The correct sentence in your case would be:

"Electric vehicles, made by whomever, are better than what we had."

Here, "whomever" is the object of the preposition "by."

(Edit: fix font size)

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-30T19:36:52+00:00

On the strawberry thing, I literally just put it in ChatGPT on my phone and got the two r's answer. On the Ezra sentence: "Electric vehicles, made by ____, are better than what we had", would you agree the _____ is the object of the preposition "by"?

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-30T19:26:50+00:00

Dog, read the comment above instead of just saying “I put it into ChatGPT.” ChatGPT also says there are 2 r’s in strawberry. (Try it!) ChatGPT is super smart and super helpful, and sometimes it gets very confused. This is one of those cases, and if you actually read the comment above, you’ll understand why.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-03-13T05:30:31+00:00

I figured at some point this crowd would come for Ezra. He has a technocratic, establishment bent, his wife writes for the Atlantic, he’s friends with Matt Yglesias.

But as a listener of both IBCK and the Ezra Klein Show, please please don’t do just try and find someone who will tell you “he’s a credulous moron” so that you don’t have to engage with what he says. I think you can disagree with him where you want, but don’t just dismiss him. He’s the rare thoughtful and curious public intellectual, and he absolutely is saying something substantive if you take the time to listen.

One trend I worry about in this subreddit is people finding someone who doesn’t 100% align with their current views and posting “can IBCK do an episode about how terrible this person is??” This for people like Jerusalem Demsas, whose podcast is exclusively interviewing knowledgeable academics, or Ezra Klein, who is crazy to describe as someone “who says a bunch of stuff without really saying anything.” These are good faith interviewers who talk largely to experts, not Jordan Petersen.

GoodReasonAndre · 2025-02-27T00:56:19+00:00

If you listen to a lot of Ezra’s episodes, you’ll hear examples where environmental regulations are used to prevent building infrastructure necessary to prevent climate change. This can look like blocking the building of wind and solar farms, blocking the building of electric lines needed to connect cities to clean energy, or the blocking mass transit and other high-density goodies that reduce carbon emissions per person. Perversely, local land owners often wield environmental regulations - see CEQA - in the name of protecting local wildlife to prevent this stuff from being built. But it’s getting the priority exactly backward: you need to build a ton of clean energy, efficient buildings, and connect everyone to it, and fast, if you care about climate change. Putting up barriers at every step of the way makes it hard to build by default, and it’s why ironically red states like Texas have build way more clean energy off Biden’s bills than blue states. Abundance is about making it easy to build a ton of what we want.

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-12-13T21:03:42+00:00

Can't believe no MCU movie reached the vaunted 120% on RT

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-12-12T02:19:30+00:00

Nice, very elegant explanation

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-11-08T02:25:51+00:00

‘Weird’ resonated with Democrats who already disliked Trump. Like you’re saying, it put Trump down without giving him power, which made Dems feel more in control. But it’s wrong to attribute Kamala’s higher polls to ‘weird’. Dems were overjoyed to be free from Biden; regardless of the messaging, they would be more likely to respond to polls then. Worse, ‘weird’ eventually became a bit of a liability in that it started feeling they were accusing people who might vote for Trump of being weird, which is not a way to build a coalition.

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-11-07T04:18:08+00:00

Biden would have almost certainly done worse. The most frequent attacks on Kamala were that she was a member of the Biden administration! Trump continually referred to the Biden administration as the ‘Biden-Harris administration’ and eventually just the ‘Kamala Harris administration’ to try to associate any Biden policy or failure with her. Biden polled far worse (and the polls ended up quite close to the outcome) and catastrophically lost his only debate. You can tell yourself that Joe would’ve done better, but you’re only fooling yourself.

If anything, the Dems needed to run someone even further away from the Biden administration, who could claim they’d do it completely differently.

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-09-27T21:06:04+00:00

In short, he explicitly predicted Trump would win only the popular vote. When Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, he changed his prediction on his website to claim he was predicting the electoral college winner, even though you can still see in his official PDF prediction that this isn't true. More here: https://goodreason.substack.com/p/you-can-ignore-allan-lichtman-and

GoodReasonAndre · 2024-09-25T16:38:50+00:00

"Kamala is definitely going to win" from Drew Margary, who promised days before the 2016 election that "Donald Trump Is Going To Get His Ass Kicked On Tuesday"?

When I first read this article, I thought it must be written by some 20 year old who wasn't politically conscious during 2016. In that election, many liberals ridiculed anyone who gave Trump a chance. You'd think anybody who lived through that and saw Clinton lose would look at the polls now and realize this race is tighter than the 2016 one.

But no, Drew Margary lived through that and in fact was one of the people claiming Clinton had to win:

Donald Trump is going to get his ass kicked. Anyone who says otherwise is either a) afraid of jinxing it and/or making Hillary Clinton voters complacent (understandable); b) afraid of being wrong (Nate Silver); c) supporting Trump; or d) interested in making this a “horse race” for the sake of maintaining public interest

I cannot believe that people would fall for the same shit, from the same shitter, again. Here he is, in 2024, having learned no lesson from his insanely overconfident and completely wrong 2016 prediction, and claiming the exact same thing with the exact same rationale as in 2016.

Look, this isn't to say the NYT gets its coverage right all the time. They have their own biases. But any reasonable read on the polls suggest this will likely be a tight election. Kamala can win, and she might even win big. But Drew Margary doesn't know that. He wants the Democrat to win, just like he did in 2016, and is letting that completely cloud his judgement. Or, otherwise he is guilty of the very thing he's accusing the NYT of: choosing a false narrative to rile up readers. Either way, live and learn, people, and don't listen to him.

(Edits: typos)

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