Building The Ezra Faction

We have to do more than consume content if we want to catalyze the Abundance Movement.

If you could pull a lever and make any one person’s policy views real, who would it be? I suspect many readers of Modern Power would choose Ezra Klein. 

Ezra’s national platform might¹ include: 

1. Supply-side reforms to allow us to produce more housing, clean energy, transit, doctors, etc. 

2. State capacity reforms to improve government’s ability to deliver on policy, including improving gov ops systems like hiring, procurement, and oversight. 

3. Democracy renovation to get better forms of democratic signal via reforms like open primaries and ranked choice voting, fusion voting, and citizen assemblies. 

4. Systematic monitoring of existential risk: pandemic detection, nuclear, or AI risk. 

5. Improved efficacy of government R&D dollars to drive scientific breakthroughs. 

6. A stronger social safety net via cash transfers. 

At the state and local level in California, the “Ezra faction” would use modular construction to build affordable housing in San Francisco, modernize CEQA so it couldn’t be used to block student housing in Berkeley, (or housing anywhere), and appoint a “product manager” (Jen Pahlka’s language from her forthcoming book Recoding America) to adjudicate tradeoffs for affordable housing in Los Angeles, avoiding everything-bagel liberalism. 

Ezra’s approach is evidence-based, with a healthy dose of skepticism toward technocrats’ “cramped professional thinking.”  This approach properly locates expertise downstream of citizens’ values, pairing centralized expertise with community knowledge held by the folks who are closest to the problem, all with the aim of building a more just and egalitarian society. 

Through this thought experiment a paradox emerges: Ezra is influential in liberal circles, and yet in liberal states like California we don’t get the policies and outcomes alluded to above. 

Why not?² Because the ideas I’ve ascribed to Ezra—I’ll collectively call them the “Abundance Agenda”³—lack political power!  

And these ideas lack political power because we, the readers and writers of Modern Power, in fact have access to magic levers but are not yet pulling them. 

“Getting Stuff Done” In Politics (aka Building Political Power)

Society is big and complex. Political change happens, per Max Weber, via “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”⁴

Mechanically you get stuff done in politics by building power, and this power-building can take various forms, but at the core, it requires individual people to put in work to earn trust with other voters, shaping voters’ thinking and ultimately their votes. 

This work can happen at the level of citizens (to influence their vote in elections), elected officials (to influence their votes on policy), or agency officials (to influence their decisions on policy implementation). 

The more time you put into these “organizing” efforts, the better chance you’ll have to achieve the outcome you want. 

So who is it that gets stuff done in politics and policy? 

We can build two broad categories: 

Category 1: Volunteers — People who volunteer their time and are compensated in some alternative currency. There are two overlapping flavors of volunteers: 

(a) Narrowly self-interested — These folks have a vested stake in the outcome. An example is a NIMBY showing up to a community meeting. Narrowly self-interested volunteers show up because the meeting’s outcome will have a large impact (real or perceived) on them as an individual. 

(b) True believers — These folks are compensated in an identity-based way. True believers are ideologues. They could be environmentalists who chain themselves to pipelines or anti-abortion activists who protest outside women’s health clinics. They show up because they are deeply passionate about the outcome as a symbol of the world they want to live in.

Category 2: Professionals — These folks get paid to build power. It’s their job. These could be public intellectuals, think tankers, lobbyists, political consultants, or organizers.

On cultural/social issues (like gay marriage or abortion), volunteers abound, either because they are personally implicated by decisions (e.g., they are gay or they are women of child-bearing age) or they have a “true believer” ideological commitment to an idea like equality or choice. Professionals who work in the space are funded by similarly motivated donors.

On economic issues, which we focus on in the Abundance Agenda above, there are relatively fewer volunteers, and relatively more professionals. For example: the oil and gas industry pays to lobby to make it harder to build clean energy;⁵ the American Medical Association lobbies to keep foreign doctors from practicing in the US and to limit the number of spots in medical schools;⁶ the Building Trades unions defend CEQA and various zoning regimes to strengthen their negotiating hand for Project Labor Agreements.⁷

The key point is that narrow interest groups — whether “organized capital” (companies or trade associations) or “organized labor” (unions) — have business models that fund professionals to build political power toward specific, narrow aims. 

Recapping: on economic issues, the people who get what they want in politics have professionals working toward their goals. The slow boring of hard boards is not magical work, it just takes persistence, and when the issues are less emotional (economic issues), there is less passion to fuel persistent volunteerism, so people need to be paid to do the work.   

This gives us two levers to pull: build a business model to fund professionals to do the work, or cultivate passion around Abundance issues to drive volunteerism. 

What might that look like? 

Business Model to Hire Professionals: The Abundance Union

Unions have effective collective action business models⁸—every union member pays dues in the range of 1-2% of gross income into a shared pool, and then that pool is used to finance activities of the union, which should⁹ improve members’ lives. 

Imagine we built an Abundance “Citizens’ Union.”  Rather than fight for the traditional work-related package of wages, benefits, and working conditions, this union would fight to make the Abundance Agenda real. 

What could such a collective political action model accomplish? For the sake of this hypothetical, let’s look at the city of San Francisco.

We’d target Ezra listeners to fund the work. I’ll overgeneralize Ezra listeners as urban knowledge-economy workers who went to selective four-year colleges, are millennial or Gen X, and recognize the brokenness of the current social compact (built for Baby Boomers) even though they themselves have done well. 

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations (BOTEC): 

Ezra audience: 1,000,000¹⁰

San Francisco Ezra audience: 50,000¹¹

SF Ezra households: 30,000¹²

Median household income: $177,000¹³

Conversion rate of Ezra households to “Abundance union” dues: 10%¹⁴

Dues: 2% of pre-tax income

Total funds = $10,500,000¹⁵

Is $10.5m for San Francisco meaningful, or not? It can be hard to put local political spending numbers in context because our views are warped by the scale of federal politics, where $14bn was spent on federal elections in 2020 and tens of millions of dollars are routinely spent on long shot Senate campaigns. 

Let’s look at the numbers: 

• Political: In the 2022 general election, candidates and allied groups spent $13m¹⁶ in SF between candidate races and ballot props. The typical Board of Supervisor race over the last few election cycles cost less than $1m.

• Policy: On policy, excluding government staff who are spread thin across too broad a workload, the key organization with policy generation resources is SPUR. SPUR’s budget is $7m, split across 3 cities, 7 initiatives, and an assorted set of funders and restricted programs. 

So a $10m  investment across policy and politics, with $5m per year dedicated to each, would almost match the current political spending per cycle, and roughly double policy spending focused on San Francisco. 

For fun I also constructed a slightly more detailed $10.5m annual budget for SF policy & politics. This would be a massively influential operation were we to finance it.¹⁷

Moral story to impassion Volunteers: The Abundance Ideology¹⁸

As we said, we have two levers to pull to close the gap between our policy preferences and our policy outcomes: build a business model to fund professionals to do the work, or cultivate passion around Abundance issues to drive volunteerism.

We went through the business model exercise. What would it look like to cultivate passion, such that it drove much higher levels of volunteerism and civic leadership? 

The best route is probably through identity. You can see this working in YIMBYism, where over the past ten years groundwork has been laid such that there are now a small army of super-volunteers who carry around YIMBYism as an identity and do the slow boring work of politics (e.g. live tweeting city council meetings; reviewing Housing Element submissions). 

A more scaled version of this can be seen via the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have a passionate core of supporters doing real political work, especially in places like San Francisco. 

The crux is to have a set of ideas defined enough to be motivating, but flexible enough to be effective. Traditional ideologies are appealing because of the world of heroes & villains they paint, but their simple solutions to complex problems have a bad track record in governance, in everything from communism to Reagan’s freemarketeerism.¹⁹ We hope to do that ~ideology-corralling work via Modern Power over the coming years, but in the short-term, Ezra remains an effective shorthand. 

What could an army of motivated volunteers accomplish in San Francisco? I’m going to skip the lengthy calculations, but per SF political insiders: 

• SF is very responsive to citizen involvement, but dominated by low-hundreds of volunteers who know where the levers are. A couple thousand Abundance folks learning where the levers are could swamp the status quo volunteers by 10x.

• We have nationally-renowned political & policy experts who live in SF. What if a handful focused on SF issues? 

• Performative things work in SF because very few voters pay attention to the substance. If we get a small % of activated volunteers and donors paying attention to the substance, the elected officials will have to pay attention to the substance.

Next Steps

The gap between our values and our outcomes exists because status quo interests have either a business model or passionate volunteers to support their work, and we Abundance folks don’t have either! 

In the traditional business analogy of working “in the business” vs. “on the business,” where “in the business” is the day-to-day operations and “on the business” are the systemic changes that improve the business at a structural level, most of us spend ~25-30% of our income on taxes (“in the system”) and 0% of our income on strategic political contributions (“on the system”). This is especially true when talking about investing in political reform in blue cities and blue states. 

And many of us spend 5+ hours per week thinking about politics — listening to Ezra Klein podcasts among other content — but in the mode of Eitan Hersh’s political hobbyism. What could we accomplish instead if that time was put towards Board of Supervisor races, advocacy efforts, organizing voters in our neighborhoods, etc? 

We believe activating the Ezra audience into actual political power-building, via money, time, or both, is sparking flint against steel — it is the catalytic move that can set all types of slow boring work into action. The question, reader, is “if not you, who? If not now, when?”

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Thanks to Aston Motes, Jen Pahlka, Jesse Wolfson, Maggie Muir, Mike Greenfield, Monica Chellam, Todd David, and Zack Rosen for improving this post.

1. These are not researched claims I arrived at by carefully going through all his published materials. Instead these are intuitions based on regularly reading and listening to him over the past few years.

2. One can’t blame Republicans for problems in blue cities like San Francisco or blue states like California. More on this theme here.

3. What, *exactly* is and is not part of the Abundance Agenda is still being hashed out — I’m just gesturing at a set of ideas that are in the ballpark.

4. We learned about this quote via Matt Yglesias’ Weber-quote inspired Substack Slow Boring.

5. Oil & gas lobbyists are trying to stop clean energy with facebook ads.

6. The AMA's "Advancing Health Equity" plan leaves out everything that matters

7. California unions and environmental law.

8. These models are buttressed by laws that ~compel all workers to pay dues once a workplace unionizes. This helps unions avoid the free-rider problem where a worker might get the benefits of union representation without paying the costs, which over time undermines the ability of the union to support its activities.

9. There is ample evidence that unions improve worker conditions on core workplace issues like wages, benefits, and working conditions. It is substantially less clear that unions as a whole are productive players on non-work issues (e.g. housing costs!)

10. Per internet research, Ezra has an audience of ~500,000 per podcast. To keep the math simple, I’m going to double that to a million to include readers of his NY Times columns.

11. Of those 1m, I’ll assume half live in the coastal “superstar” metros of San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, NYC, DC.  Of those 500k, I’ll allocate 150k each to DC and NYC, and 50k each to the remaining 4 cities.

12. Now we assume all of these are upper-middle class earners, many of them paired with other Ezra fans, so maybe we have 30k households.

13. Based on our millennial / Gen X age brackets.

14. We don’t have the same tools that a traditional union has to organize people—namely a mechanism to avoid the free-riding—so we’d only get a subset of Ezra fans bought in.

15. Does it pass the smell test that we could get a few thousand families to spend a few thousand dollars a year to improve San Francisco? Roughly, yes.

16. Note that $3.5m was spent by Abundance-aligned groups which were created in the last 2 years, so $10m is a better number for this exercise.

17. Illustrating how influential this would be in terms of organizing: SF YIMBY just this year hired 1 full-time organizer for the entire city. For as big a reputation as the YIMBY movement has, and for as many people identify with YIMBYism in SF (e.g. Ezra listeners!), the work of political power building is chronically underfunded.

18. We’ve taken one cut at a moral story here.

19. A great short book on the history of success in the US of pragmatic problem-solving paradigms vs. rigid ideologies is Brad DeLong’s Concrete Economics.