The left’s new rallying cry: move fast and build things | Two new books (“Abundance” and “Why Nothing Works”) prescribe supply-side solutions for the US economy

> In October 2008, with financial markets in free fall, Kenan Thompson debuted a new character on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, a financial expert named Oscar Rogers. Asked about the meltdown, Rogers knew exactly what to do: “FIX IT!” he yelled. Asked to elaborate, he expanded on his plan: “Take it one step at a time: Identify the problem… FIX IT! Identify another problem… FIX IT!! Repeat as necessary until it’s all FIXED!!!”

> The bit worked because shouting “FIX IT” in 2008 seemed simultaneously completely reasonable and obviously insufficient. Citizens didn’t want to become overnight experts in credit default swaps; they just wanted the problem solved. But presumably someone needed a more sophisticated plan. The people in charge can’t just go around shouting FIX IT.

> Or can they?

> I thought of the Oscar Rogers character while reading *Why Nothing Works* (PublicAffairs, February 2025) by Marc Dunkelman and *Abundance* (Avid Reader Press, March 2025) by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, no relation to Kenan. Both books are about America’s failure to build things like housing, trains and solar farms, as well as the country’s inability to repair the infrastructure it already has. Those failures have complex causes and in some cases no straightforward remedy. But both books hope to reorient progressive politics around building, growth and an ethos of getting things done quickly. They are considered and footnoted demands to just hurry up and FIX IT!

> The books’ shared critique of the contemporary US begins with housing. The median home sold in San Francisco goes for $1.3 million; Manhattan, Los Angeles and Seattle all hover just above or below the seven-figure mark. About 30% of US adults spend at least 30% of their income on housing, Klein and Thompson report; for renters, almost half of households do.

> The primary way to bring these numbers down is to increase housing supply, but as home prices skyrocketed in blue states like California, the Democrats in charge proved unable to make that happen. “Everyone wanted more housing,” Dunkelman writes, “but they wanted it built somewhere else.”

> That not-in-my-backyard attitude is universal, but made worse in California because of a plethora of rules, many of them put in place by liberals, designed to check government power. In general, the bluer the state or city, the more checks there. The more checks, the fewer new houses — with the result, says Dunkelman, that “it was simply too easy for opponents to block development.”

> The same dynamics that prevent homes from being built make it hard to build high-speed rail in California, or subways in New York. These projects are subject to what Klein and Thompson call “democracy by lawsuit,” where a thicket of rules and procedures slow things down and raise costs in part by allowing an infinite number of legal challenges. The result is that, despite the wonders of new technology, productivity in the US construction sector has stagnated and perhaps even fallen over time.

!ping READING&YIMBY