For this episode of Berkeley Talks, we are revisiting an October 2023 conversation in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world.

Klein, who has since co-written the 2025 book Abundance with Derek Thompson, joins in a conversation with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

“To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need,” begins Klein. “It’s so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it. And yet, the story of America in the 21st century — more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism — is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are getting far more of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act than blue states?”

“There is this fight within liberalism,” he continues, “and actually also within the right, but I’m going to focus here on liberalism. There’s this division, this troubling of the liberal soul, about what kind of power government should have, how much it should be checked by courts, by regulation, above all, by process. That’s become the liberal way of restraining government. Give it the money to act, give it big ambitions, but make it possible for anybody to sue. And if anybody sues for any reason, then a long process of analysis and negotiation and hearings commence.”

This event took place on Oct. 5, 2023, in UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It was co-presented by Cal Performances and UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures as part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture Series.

Watch a video of the event on the Graduate Lectures website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Lucas Foglia.

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