How can we build new cities in America? Which historical president is Trump most like? Why did immigration policy go so wrong? Sam and Pieter sit down with Congressman Jake Auchincloss to discuss the politics of the Abundance movement. They talk about Auchincloss’s fight against free parking, regulating big tech, the success of YIMBYs, and why curing Alzheimers should be the next American moonshot project.
You can watch and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
To read more about some of the things they talked about:
How Madrid built its metro cheaply
How France achieved the world’s fastest nuclear buildout
The Housing Theory of Everything
Transcript
Sam Bowman (00:00):
Hello, welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. My name’s Sam Bowman. I’m an editor at Works in Progress.
Pieter Garicano (00:05):
And I’m Pieter Garicano, another editor with Works in Progress.
Sam Bowman (00:09):
You might’ve seen that we’ve got a new print edition. The print edition is coming in November, but you can subscribe to it now. It’s $100 in the US, £80 in the UK, and subscriptions will soon be available in Europe, Canada, Australia, and some more countries as well go to worksinprogress.co/print to subscribe. Our guest today is Congressman Jake Auchincloss. Congressman Auchincloss is one of the most thoughtful congressmen working on issues like economic growth and speeding up technological and scientific progress. And he joins us today to talk about a whole manner of issues. But I wanted to start Congressman by asking you, is there value in building new cities? I know this is something you’ve talked about. I tend to think of the value of new homes as being that they’re close to existing cities that are close to existing economic activity. So what’s the case for building a new city?
Jake Auchincloss (00:58):
Thanks for having me on. Yes, there’s value in building new cities and Americans used to build new cities all the time. Much of the story of the 19th century was that Americans would go south or west and they would bump into a river and they would found a new city wherever they hit a river. And that is a major part of the dynamism and economic development of the United States over the last 200 years. We stopped doing it, we should do it again for at least three reasons. One is affordability. When you build new energy, when you build new housing, when you build new transit, you are unlocking production and you’re putting downward pressure on the price of those social goods. Number two is agglomeration. When you are clustering people, you’re going to get more innovation and more economic activity. It’s a super linear phenomenon so new cities are not just adding production, but they are actually increasing the pace of economic output, which has tremendous returns for standards of living. And then finally, as experimentation, there are new modes of living that we should be embracing as Americans. Again, in US cultural history, how many different ways have we tried to do things and how many different ways have we tried to live together?
There has been a stultification and homogeneity that has fallen over our society since World War II with the domination of car-centric infrastructure and in how we congregate. I think it’s been much to the detriment of civic cohesion, of small business development, of the climate of public health. So it would be fun to experiment with car-free cities and with cities that are centred around the human, not around the vehicle. And you’re starting to see some of those experiments at places like Edge Esmeralda or California Forever or cul-de-sac, which is a firm that’s developed in Tucson and we want to propel that work.
Pieter Garicano (03:07):
So historically the way in America you got built was through local government and low governments were in favour of expanding. And you have the commissioner’s plan for New York where they set a huge grid and there’s huge buy-in from residents towards building new and more houses. And nowadays American YIMBYs seem to have given up on that. It’s either a strategy of preemption where the state government’s going to impose housing targets or, in your case, we’re assuming we start from scratch and we have to go somewhere else and build a new city, a new institution. I’m wondering why isn’t it possible to build more housing through local politics? What changed about local politics that people used to be in favour of building houses nearby and now they seem to be against it?
Jake Auchincloss (03:49):
We need to do both. They’re complimentary. I’ll use Massachusetts as an example. It’s the state I’m most familiar with. Obviously I was a city councilor here in Massachusetts and on the land use committee I’m now a congressman, so I see it from all angles. Massachusetts is roughly 250,000 units of housing short over the next decade. We will suffocate our middle class here if we don’t build about a quarter of a million units of housing. And our governor, much to her credit, is going after NIMBYism at the local level through a bill called the MBTA Communities Act, which basically says to localities, which in New England have a tremendous amount of autonomy over zoning, “If you’re next to public transit, you’d better make it possible to build that missing middle housing.”
For the workforce’s affordability, that’s adding 2 to 20 units. We’ve got to make ADUs much more accessible.
I think we should be making changes to building permitting, particularly single staircase for up to six stories because modern apartments are very fire safe, don’t need two staircases, but it takes away a lot of the livable space and adds a lot of costs. Parking minimums are anathema to affordability and to walkability. So we have to do a lot of work on our existing built environment, but I think that is conducive to and complimentary to also developing new sites. I’ll use Massachusetts as an example. We’ve got two state owned properties within a 45 minute commute of Boston. Both are decommissioned military bases. One is a former naval air station, the other is a former army base, and they both have a tremendous amount of horizontal infrastructure. They’re both reasonably well connected to the city of Boston, though they would need more transit connectivity and they don’t have any local zoning and the state has the potential to step in and zone at the state level for a lot of density and issue basically an advanced market commitment to private sector housing development.
Sam Bowman (05:34):
So I can understand what you have in mind. It sounds like what you’re saying is we should be building new cities but building them adjacent to existing economic centres of gravity. The big concern I have, so we hear about new towns in the UK and one of the big mistakes that was made with most of the new towns that were built after the war in the UK was that they were built with no anchoring to any local economic geography. They thought if we set up a new town somewhere we could magic an economy out of thin air. And more often than not, that didn’t happen. And the few places that it did succeed was when they built these new towns along existing railway lines. So it was really easy to get from somewhere like Stevenage to London or Milton Keynes to London. Is that what you’re talking about? You’re saying we should be building adjacent to existing cities but outside the city boundaries so that we’re not constrained by the local zoning laws that stop house building within those rules?
Jake Auchincloss (06:30):
Yes, although I think in the United States we probably have the ability to do both. The short answer is: I think we should be leaning more into the agglomeration economies, so near existing hubs. And my co-author on the paper about starting new cities, John Gruber – who’s the chair of the MIT economics department – I think he would be a hundred percent in agreement with what you are saying, which is that this is only going to work if you do it within the 30 minute transit envelope of existing labour centres. I think in the United States though, as part of a federal infrastructure project, there could be discrete opportunities to do new developments in less developed areas if they were done in synchrony with a ship building enterprise or other bootstrapped enterprises where the federal government was able to issue really strong demand signals for a certain type of good. I think that’s more ambitious. I think that would require more federal muscle, but I don’t think I would take it off the table directly just because in the United States we have a lot of land and we shouldn’t ignore that land any more than in the 19th century. The railroad should have ignored that land.
Sam Bowman (07:42):
That was going to be my next question. Is this a uniquely American proposal or maybe Australia and Canada could do this as well in the English speaking world, but I’m struggling to imagine building a new city in England or in the Netherlands where Pieter’s from. But, I mean, there is still a lot of space in those places, but I wonder if you need that frontier idea, the idea that really land isn’t scarce in any way in large parts of America for this kind of idea to have resonance.
Jake Auchincloss (08:12):
No, I would actually push back pretty hard on the idea that this is about a scarcity issue with land.
There is actually no more efficient way to get human beings to live together than with a city. It’s by far the most efficient way – from an energy and land perspective – for humans to live. And there’s not a shortage of land anywhere in any country, I would posit, for municipal development. What there is a shortage of is political viability. What actually strangles this concept is not capital, it’s not developable land, it is vetocracy – the number of veto points webbed throughout the network of operations. And the UK has struggled with this as much as the United States has.
Pieter Garicano (09:06):
How have the voters responded to the new city’s idea? Do you talk about it on the campaign trail? What do they think? Do they think it’s exciting? Do you think it’s plausible? Are there hesitations? What’s the response?
Jake Auchincloss (09:17):
It’s the single idea that I get the most unsolicited warm responses to. I’ll put it that way along with probably the other one would be my thoughts on social media.
But this idea, building new cities is probably the one where I most get people coming up to me unsolicited and saying, “Hey, I heard you talk about this. I thought this was really exciting.”
It’s clearly the one that sticks with people. Now there’s probably a lot of people who think it’s a silly idea and don’t come up to me and say that, so I’m a biased instrument here, but it is definitely something that when people hear it, it sticks in their paw a little bit.
Sam Bowman (09:54):
Could you get into the details? Could you talk us through, let’s say congressman, you are president for the day or in this domain you are given the powers that you want or the bill that you want to pass or whatever or project gets passed that you want to see happen. What does the next year look like? What does the next five years look like? What do the next 10 years look like for a given city that you imagine could be built?
Jake Auchincloss (10:20):
I don’t think you’d have to be president. I think it’s more of a governor thing actually here in the United States. And what I would say is it’s a public private dance and it’s a question of how you crowd in private capital. Because again, there’s not a shortage of capital to build housing and infrastructure. Actually in the United States there’s a lot of capital that wants to go to work. What there is is a shortage of a political envelope in which it can do that. So I think the number one thing you do is you zone. You take that state on site and you pick a couple of the righteous fights and they are fights. Let’s be clear, I’m not sugarcoating this. You are going to anger a bunch of NIMBYs and various municipalities around this site and you’re going to get a lot of objections.
(11:03):
So it takes somebody at the corner office to do this. This has not happened organically, I think at a town level and you zone it. And then what you do is you de-risk some of the initial capital for infrastructure, whether that’s done through a state infrastructure bank or whether that’s done just through low cost loans or securitizing private sector loans. Basically you are taking away some of the risk from that first capital in for infrastructure and then you are opening it up to private sector mixed use development. But what I would do is not just have it be a traditional free market mixed use development where every developer is focused solely on their own plot. I would want to have a vision for the entirety of the site and that vision to me would be centred on car-free zones. I often talk to people here in America. As you guys know, we absolutely adore our automobiles.
(12:09):
And I personally think every politician should have at least one unpopular opinion to keep ourselves honest. And my unpopular opinion is America’s way too car-centric in terms of our urban design. And it’s actually been much to our detriment over the last 70 years on a host of different sectors, how much we rely on the car. I often talk to people when I’m trying to make this case, I say, close your eyes and imagine where you would want to go on your vacation and picture yourself in the sweetest moment of your vacation. Now open your eyes and tell me whether there are any vehicles around you. And people are always picturing themselves hiking with their friends or eating at some Parisian cafe and it’s always a pedestrian or a car-free scene. And I think humans don’t realise this because we are so used to and inured to the reality of vehicles in our life, we don’t realise how delightful it is to actually have a pedestrian only or a cycling only landscape. And I would deliberately and politically make that the case.
Sam Bowman (13:15):
So I completely agree that something like this would need to be or want to be well planned. I was just at a place outside Austin, Texas called The Domain and it was really built about, I think about 10 or 12 years ago as an attempt to build a second downtown. It’s about 12 miles outside of central Austin. And it’s not bad, it’s a bit like an outdoor strip mall, but it’s got housing, it’s quite dense, it was pretty busy, it was reasonably well planned and you wouldn’t get anything like that if it was a free for all, if you had no rules about what could be built. But it does strike me that there’s a bit of a tension between agreeing that a new city should be quite well planned and a master plan in this way.
Jake Auchincloss (13:55):
We should be trying to fix those functions for local government, which is what a lot of states and cities throughout the United States are doing. Massachusetts, California, Wyoming, Montana, Texas. And, not to veer into politics immediately, but I would argue, the most successful grassroots element of the Democratic Party in the last decade has been the YIMBY movement. The Yes in My Back Yard movement where in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts that went 85, 15 for Harris over Trump in 24, they just passed a hundred page zoning bill where 90 of those pages were cutting regulations. It’s a progressive Democratic city that is deregulatory, right? So it is at the vanguard of the reinvention of the Democratic Party has been getting localities to deregulate in order to unlock production of housing and thereby lower the price and improve walkability. But I am glad that you raised this question of planning and what the right area of focus is for it,
Sam Bowman (14:53):
But also the fact that they had to walk everywhere. They didn’t have the technology or they couldn’t afford horses obviously. I do wonder though, I mean, maybe this requires road pricing, which I think would be really great and would solve a lot of problems and might get us to that happy medium between road use and walkability.
Jake Auchincloss (15:13):
So what I would do instead would be yes, I’m a supporter of congestion pricing. I’m a supporter of it in New York and I would be a supporter of it in Massachusetts and obviously it’s worked very well in London as you know better than me in America. The politics of that are incredibly challenging and probably a better and more politically feasible way is to go after the parking, the minimum parking requirements, the subsidised price of parking are really their backdoor ways of subsidising driving. And if you go after the parking, I think what you do is you simultaneously address the congestion pricing problems and you also I think open the door towards pairing autonomous vehicles with walkable developments in a way that can be really beneficial. And you’re seeing cul-de-sac, the developer in the United States do that.
Sam Bowman (16:08):
What’s a politically viable way to go after free parking?
Jake Auchincloss (16:15):
So I was a city counsellor in Newton, Massachusetts and I used to rail against the overabundance of parking. And I will tell you, there is nothing that unites the American public more than their love of free parking. It is political kryptonite. It is the social security of local politics.
Sam Bowman (16:32):
I was going to say, I bet that made you really popular. Yeah,
Jake Auchincloss (16:36):
So the short answer is you don’t talk about the price of parking, you talk about the availability of parking. I am a Shoup-ista, I’m a – may he rest in peace – a big disciple of Donald Shoup. And what Donald Shoup would always say is, it’s not actually that parking is too expensive or too cheap, sometimes too cheap actually and sometimes it may be too expensive actually, and sometimes it may be too cheap. What you want is on any given block for there to be two open spots at any given time. And so the key is to find the price that clears the market at two open spots on a given block. And when I frame it that way to people they say, “yeah, that sounds nice. I want to be able to find a spot anytime I’m looking for one.”
And then I’ll say, “okay, so the way to do that is for that spot right in front of CVS on Saturday morning not to be a dollar an hour, probably needs to be more expensive in Newton, Massachusetts, but that 12 hour long-term parking that’s a five minute walk away that employees of these businesses are going to use, probably that should be free actually.”
(17:44):
You actually want to reduce the price of that. It’s about clearing the market for two open spots on any given curb. And there’s some pretty cool curb management companies like Automotives and others that are trying to work with cities to actually effectuate this.
Sam Bowman (17:59):
There’s an idea that I’ve heard that I think is quite intriguing that says that we should attach congestion pricing and maybe also some parking rules to autonomous vehicles and assume that the overwhelming technological and economic logic that autonomous vehicles eventually will just become everything will overwhelm the cost of doing this. But right now there might be a political window available that says most people don’t care if you do taxes on autonomous vehicles. They might even like that because they’re a little bit scared of them or a little bit suspicious of them. I wonder if that might be a way of graduating some of this stuff in such that in 10 years it applies to almost all vehicles.
Jake Auchincloss (18:40):
I think that is a hundred percent right in general moments of policy opportunity happen at tech shifts because a new coalition and a new interest hasn’t yet been formed and cohered. And so that is the moment to strike. I a hundred percent agree with that and I think you could widen that argument a little bit to make it about curb management more broadly. That’s why I brought up some of these curb management companies. We have a couple of things happening. We’ve got the rise of micro mobility, right? The scooters and the e-bikes. You’ve got the radical increase in e-commerce and thereby e-commerce deliveries. You’ve got the radical increase in ride share and also the use of delivery apps. And then of course you’ve got autonomous vehicles. And the common feature across all those things is that they’re competing for curb space But they’re new entrants into the mobility marketplace. They don’t have the incredible political lobby behind them that single car storage otherwise known as parking does. And so as all of these new entrants compete for curb space, now is the time to start doing curb management proactively and doing it fairly because none of them yet have cleared the decks or stacked the decks in their favour.
Pieter Garicano (19:57):
What happens if we go back to a world of very high economic growth and there’s different ways you can see this happening. I think AI is perhaps the most obvious one. And when you want to think about what are examples of the United States going through such a period of extremely high 3/4%+ per capita GDP growth every year, through back 130 years to the late 19th century. It’s a period in America’s history, which is I think commonly much maligned, right? The Gilded Age is what some people call it. It’s seen as a very bad time in a way. But I think from our perspective, it’s also a time when America’s incomes per head tripled in 30 years. And so I’m wondering whether you think, are there any lessons we can draw from the periods when America did grow a lot and was very dynamic and what are the things you think we should be actually copying and perhaps revisiting?
Jake Auchincloss (20:46):
I agree with your point of view on that and the way I’ve tried to frame this is cost disease. This is what I think the Democratic economic agenda should be, is treating cost disease, cost disease otherwise known as the Baumol effect, describes industries that because of low productivity growth and labour intensivity, inflate faster than the overall economy. And a lot of times when people today talk about the problems in the American economy, they look at those sectors that have gotten very expensive housing, healthcare, utilities and they say, oh my goodness, they’re so expensive. What are we going to do about it? Much more interesting to me actually much more illuminating is to look at those sectors that have gotten very cheap and ask, what happened to those sectors that got very cheap? How did that happen? And the answer is they did three things.
(21:37):
They cut regulations that were holding back production, they adopted technology and they took on special interests. And in particular that technology was technology that automated human labour. And so you see the 19th century story that you’re describing to a large extent is a story of the automation of agriculture. Food was cured of cost disease, right? Food used to be really expensive and then it got pretty cheap. And a big part of that was the automation of agriculture. And the question now is how do we do that same thing in healthcare, in housing, in utilities, in these sectors that now consume huge chunks of the middle class family’s budget.
Pieter Garicano (22:23):
You might think that part of what causes cost disease is actually surplus being transferred from sectors which are seeing very large productivity growth to sectors where you don’t see very high productivity growth. You might think of it as the actual mechanism, classic Baumol mechanism is that workers in low productivity growth sectors – hospitality, healthcare, education – you might say have better bargaining power because wages rise elsewhere and that maybe cost disease if driven by regulation is a bad thing, but cost disease, if it’s just that people in the sector without productivity growth can charge more because their outside option is better. Is that a problem? Is that also something that’s an issue?
Jake Auchincloss (23:01):
So you’re raising an excellent point. Let me try to frame it a little bit differently, but you tell me if I’m still addressing what you’re talking about is the Baumol effect is always going to exist in the United States economy by definition there will always be sectors that have experienced less productivity growth than other sectors and thereby will have a higher degree of inflation than other sectors. And so it’s not actually, you don’t wave a magic wand and you’re like “I cured the Baumol effect across the United States economy”. It doesn’t work like that. What happens is you are systematically squeezing each sector of cost disease and then naturally it moves into another sector. So a hundred years from now, some politician will be on a podcast complaining about how haircuts suffer from cost disease because they’re non-automateable, labour intensive, low productivity growth and haircuts will consume 50% of the middle class family’s budget.
(23:51):
That is the economic trend line that we’re heading to. And so the question is from a policymaker’s perspective, how do you rank the social goods that should be cured first of the Baumol effect, and my answer would be you broadly want to look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You want to start the bottom – physiological needs, social needs – and move your way up. So it’s a problem that healthcare and housing suffer from cost disease. That’s a problem because those are pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But if where we ended up was that personal grooming became the sector most afflicted by the boma effect, then that is progress as a society, right? Then we have gone higher up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the next politicians can complain about that.
Sam Bowman (24:38):
Yeah, and also the other factor is that we’re often talking about two very different phenomena when we talk about cost disease. The classic example is the string quartet where as we get richer, the number of people performing in string quartets does not rise or can’t scale with our wealth. So we spend more and more and more on string quartets, but really the sectors of the economy that we spend the most money on via this effect are things like education and healthcare. And it’s not really because they’re inherently resistant to automation. The way arguably string quartets are, I mean I know Spotify exists, but string quartets in person might be a bit different. Really Education and healthcare, they’re so labour intensive and they’re so resistant to automation often for regulatory reasons. It’s often because especially in something like healthcare, there are lots and lots of rules and the market structure of these sectors is such that it’s almost impossible to move away from heavy reliance on people.
Jake Auchincloss (25:36):
That’s right. And this is where I think democratic deliberation and judgement is so critical is deciding which are the sectors that we think benefit inherently from human connection and thereby we are making the decision that we do not want to try to cure them of cost disease. Whereas which are the sectors where we want the cost benefits, we want price deflation, and we’re willing to sacrifice the human connection. My argument, and I think this should be a debate, is that in housing and healthcare, I think the American public would be fine to see a lot more automation and a lot lower prices. I think in education they would not. I think the idea that somehow we’re going to do agentic education for all of our children and we’re going to just sync them up to AI chatbots to learn is really going to rub parents the wrong way. And if in fact, 50 years from now you looked at American GDP and, because we had automated so many elements of our economy, our standards of living were much higher, but we were spending 60% of gross domestic product just on educating the next generation, that sounds super civilised to me. That actually sounds like a really civilised society, one that dedicates much of its discretionary income towards the cultivation of the next generation. Right?
Sam Bowman (26:55):
Interesting though, because I would think almost the opposite that even if parents didn’t want that, the runaway competitive arms race that can take place in education means that you may be much, much more happy for your children to be taught by a human educator, whereas I am a ruthless cold-hearted guy and I’m putting my kid in front of an AI instructor and presumably he’s getting some gains from this. If not, then maybe I wouldn’t do it. But if he does, then you have no choice but to keep up even if you don’t want that. So maybe what you’re describing is only achievable via regulation and in that case that might be a problem because we may be leaving really, really valuable gains on the table.
Jake Auchincloss (27:42):
I mean that’s what happened to China, right? They ended up with a massive arms race and they basically had to cancel the entire edtech sector to prevent it. I would also say we’re even presuming now that the actual arbitrage opportunity for your children is education. Whereas my biggest concern is that it’s going to be in utero genetic engineering. That is where we are heading, right? Is where you’re going to start to see parents with the means and the intention to try to genetically engineer children that they think are going to have higher fitness to succeed. And that is going to be a major issue for us to grapple with as a society.
Sam Bowman (28:23):
So going back to the 19th century, you made this point about the automation of food production being one of the really big factors here. Do you think that people get this era wrong? The Gilded Age is seen as being a very unfair age and it’s seen as being one where the term, the Gilded age is used quite ironically as far as I know. But at the same time we were in fact looking at gigantic improvements in living standards. Huge numbers of people were being able to leave basically serfdom in Europe for the United States for much better lives. And obviously economic growth was very, very high over this period. Do you think that the modern interpretation of this period is wrong or are there things we can learn from it that we’re not learning at the moment?
Jake Auchincloss (29:10):
I think the modern interpretation of it, and tell me if you agree, is that the price of rapid economic development in the Gilded Age was inequality. That inequality became antithetical to the American sense of democracy and the reaction to it was the progressive era under Theodore Roosevelt and really culminating ultimately in FDR and the New Deal. And to me that is actually probably overall a hopeful message in that this system of government is able to digest that type of economic development and ultimately make it work better for the American people because we’ve seen a tremendous amount of inequality growth in the last 50 years. I think it is antithetical to the health of our democracy and we are going to have to address it with new modes of governance. It is interesting that you’re focused on the Gilded Age right now. I actually don’t think politically that’s the best analogue to the moment that we’re in right now. I would actually go back another 40 years and talk more about the 1830s and 1840s, which is actually where I see probably the best map for our political moment. Even though economically things were very different.
Pieter Garicano (30:24):
Why is that? Sorry, what about that period makes it a relevant example rather than 40 years later?
Jake Auchincloss (30:30):
What was going on in the 1830s and forties was that Andrew Jackson had created the second political system in the United States along with Martin Van Buren. Andrew Jackson was a demagogue, a tribune of the common man, who railed against economic elites and mocked elitism, who claimed and grieved a stolen election, who tapped into evangelical fervour, who managed to pair the working class with the extreme wealth and property interests in the country, and who made immigration – they didn’t call it immigration at the time. It was more about Indian removal – who basically made the demographics of the country a major political issue. And all of this should rhyme with what we’re seeing now with the MAGA movement. There’s a reason that Donald Trump had the portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office in his first term. There are really a lot of ways that Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party was the forerunner of the MAGA movement. And what’s fascinating to watch about that era, the 1830s and the 1840s is how politicians tried to figure out how to counter Andrew Jackson and all the mistakes that they made and the Whig party ultimately figured out how to do it in the 1840 election, but it required them experimenting it and losing, frankly, a lot of times I think the modern Democratic Party would be wise to take those lessons.
Sam Bowman (31:57):
What do you think those lessons are?
Jake Auchincloss (31:59):
There’s a lot of them. I’ll give you one in particular, which is, and I raise it only because it’s I think a little bit contrarian. There’s a big vibe in the Democratic Party these days that we should avoid cultural issues and let everyone do their own thing on cultural issues, but instead unite under the banner of some version of economic populism. And what’s interesting is that the Whig party, when they finally won and when they actually had electoral success, they did the exact opposite actually. They were insistent that at the national level defining the Whig party nationally, they had a couple of cultural through lines. It was the importance of public morality, basically the way that the American public should expect people to carry themselves. They were always saying Andrew Jackson was a disgrace to the office. It was about the rule of law. It was about the primacy of the constitutional system over the prerogatives of an executive power. And in fact, they let many different modes of economic governance run right across the country. Whigs were not prescriptive in one way or the other about the right format of economic development, but they did try to have some level of cultural alignment with their national party, the exact opposite of what I think many Democratic strategists would advise today.
Sam Bowman (33:14):
What do you think? I always think it’s interesting how ignored American history is by the rest of the world. American history is a huge, huge field in America, understandably. But what do you think say a European listening or somebody in India listening can learn from this period of American history
Jake Auchincloss (33:32):
For people who don’t live in the United States? I think a really important takeaway about the American form of government and American history is that we’re a union, not a nation. People think about America I think from overseas and they think of the president and they think of like, “oh yeah, Americans in America”. And the truth is we’re at least 10 to 15 different ethnolinguistic subgroups and federalism runs very strong in the United States. And actually this rise of a very strong federal government is a very modern phenomenon and a big part of our democratic resilience has been how fractured and balkanized political power is throughout the United States.
Pieter Garicano (34:14):
So I guess one of the responses you hear to the current political challenges is that you need to go back to America’s federal roots and the people should be free to choose how they live and politics has become too nationalised. But it seems to be in tension with the fact that everyone consumes the same media and watches the same TV channels and is on the same Twitter timeline. And when I meet people in San Francisco and people in London, we’ve all seen the same six tweets. And so it seems that it is perhaps this very federal devolved system just a function of the technology you have available at the time very narrow span of control and it’s actually inevitable that as we get technology more advanced, we’re going to have increasing large political units and much as we’d like to go back to more federal system, we’re just restricted by the technology we have today.
Jake Auchincloss (35:03):
I think that is absolutely a trend line. And it’s one that I think is an emerging cultural fault line – not just a trend line. On one side, mass technology platforms that in various versions and formats are merchants and miners of digital dopamine and are creating tribes at the national and even international level, versus the virtue of localism and in-real-life community. I think this is a really big emerging cultural fault line I think democrats should choose. I think we should make clear that we are on the in real life side of that and in fact become a party of localism and become a party of in real life effort and over an economy of endless scrolling online because it makes us more democratically resilient, but two, because it’s really important for our epistemological wellness as a country and because it’s really important for our civic cohesion. People are angry and isolated and lonely and that requires an in-real-life connection. There is no substitute for it.
Sam Bowman (36:09):
I’d quite like to talk about the capital A: Abundance Agenda, and I’d quite like to talk about whether you see that as being a kind of electoral, in a mass politics environment, as being something that can win on its own merits or whether you see that as something that within the party debates of the Democratic Party about what it should try to do when it’s in government. If it’s more something like that inter-elite debate or if it’s something that you think has a pull with normal voters and resonates with them.
Jake Auchincloss (36:47):
There’s an old joke that a robot is what you call something that doesn’t work yet and when it starts working it’s just like a dishwasher. And abundance is like that to me. And I joked about this with Ezra and Derek in that, the great service that they have performed and it’s a magnificent book and truly important service, they explain supply and demand graphs to the Democratic Party. And I’m not going to go out there and campaign on supply and demand graphs, right? I’m going to campaign on how we make your rent cheaper. How do we make your health insurance premium cheaper? Does abundance and that book and do supply and demand graphs have really important things to say about those problems? Absolutely. Do voters want to hear the premise as well as the conclusion? They absolutely do. And by the way, it’s very condescending when politicians think that all voters care about is talking points or quippy conclusions and they don’t care about your thought process or how you got there. That’s not true. Voters do care about that, but I’m going to do it on issues that are specific to what a middle class family cares about. I’m not going to try to campaign on an economics textbook.
Sam Bowman (37:58):
One of my favourite politicians of the 20th century is a guy called Roger Douglas who was kind of the Margret Thatcher in New Zealand, but he came from the Labour Party. So he’s quite an interesting figure and he always used to say, you have to let the dogs see the rabbit, which is a dog racing analogy which says, yes, voters do want to hear what you’re going to do, but you also need to show them they also need to feel economic growth and growth begets growth because voters, once they can see it, they can say, okay, fine. What you’re saying actually makes sense and it isn’t just the empty promises that they’re quite used to. And that makes me think, and – I am building up to a question here – I think that that argues for very, very targeted, almost stealthy. I don’t mean that in a clandestine way, but just try to find boring ways to do big reforms, try to beget a bit of growth. And when you have that growth, use that to create more political momentum and a bigger political constituency in favour of the bigger reforms that are harder to do in a stealthy way. Does that ring true to you? Do you think that that makes sense in America, which has had much more economic growth than Europe where I am? Or do you think that there’s some merit or no merit to it?
Jake Auchincloss (39:14):
I think there’s merit to it, and in fact, I think you’ve seen that with the YIMBY movement on building more housing and how its successes beget more momentum. I think you’re seeing it increasingly with energy, which to me is the second great project for this type of thinking, which is to say if we want to have a 1.7 Celsius increase by 2050, if we want to have clean energy dominance as a country, right? If we want these big, bold, ambitious goals, we’d better build a heck of a lot more clean energy generation and transmission than we’ve been able to do to date. And that requires a lot of permitting and process reform and that can beget its own momentum as well. But yes, you’ve got to paint the end state for folks, and I think you also have to tap into some righteous populism as well.
(40:00):
I think a big part of this is being a productive disruptor of the status quo. The American public doesn’t like the status quo. Democrats too often find ourselves defensive of the status quo. And what we need to say is, whereas MAGA was asking some of the right questions and giving very empty and self-dealing answers, we’re going to try to ask the right questions and actually deliver on the answers. We’re the party that you can trust to actually deliver on good governance, and we haven’t been doing a good enough job of that. To me, one of the great episodes that demonstrates that was the school closures during COVID in too many blue cities and blue states, the schools were closed well past when the social and epidemiological evidence was clear that they should be reopened. I think we lost a lot of trust with voters. I think that we have yet to grapple with that failure and we have yet to offer a solution to the tremendous academic and socio-emotional detritus that’s been left behind.
Sam Bowman (40:58):
And why was that? Because teacher unions wanted it?
Jake Auchincloss (41:01):
A big part of it was the interest groups, not just teachers unions, but I would say very narrow slices of the electorate that had outsized voices at that time. And also I think candidly, it was a fixation on process, an interest group process over the outcomes that mattered to families, but also it was a condescension and this is something that Democrats have to scrub clean from how we engage with the electorate or else we will lose elections. People hate being lectured, people hate being patronised. And there was an element of that in the school closures of, oh, we know what’s best and you don’t.
Pieter Garicano (41:40):
So let me ask a question. Coming back to the abundance thing – I too enjoyed the book. I thought it was very interesting and it was great that it got such good traction. One thing I found quite surprising about it, I found quite surprising in general, when I speak to my neighbours and friends about abundance in America, the explanation for what went wrong is a very national explanation. To put it very glibly, the story you have is the backlash against Bob Moses and very bad car-centric urbanism and a backlash against the Cuyahoga river being on fire and environmental damages. And basically a very specific set of things happened in the United States 1960s that led in the 1970s to huge proliferation of laws that engender paralysis and sclerosis. That’s the story you hear here. What I find surprising about that is that it seems that the same problems we’re having in the United States we’re having everywhere else in the developed world. We can’t build houses in Canada. We can build houses in America, in Britain, in France and Spain. The same sclerosis story that you could tell about the United States, you could tell about every other developed country. And so I’m wondering, first of all, what is the explanation that allows us to say why everything broke everywhere all at once and second of all, what does it imply for the kinds of solutions that seem viable, that the story isn’t actually a national one, it’s an international one.
Jake Auchincloss (42:57):
Yeah, I don’t think everything broke everywhere all at once. In fact, I think the way through this is in fact rather than to bemoan the failures of OECD countries is to look at the success spots and try to replicate and port them over to others. So why is it that Madrid can build public transit at one seventh the cost of the United States, right? It’s not because they don’t have public sector unions, it’s not because they have fewer environmental regulations. They’ve just got much better project management than we do here in the United States. Alright, let’s do it that way, right? Why is it that France was able to build, what is it? I think they do like 70/80% of their energy grid is nuclear power. Let’s build a lot more nuclear power here in America and figure out what are the things that made it possible for the French to do it.
(43:39):
And the actual answer when you dig into it is in fact it was really more of like a decade of good governance in France that allowed them to do it, and we should try to have that same decade of good governance here in America to do it on housing. There are some places that have done a really good job on housing cities here in the United States. Austin, Texas comes to mind and see what they’re doing. Tokyo Japan has done a great job with housing and the short answer with housing is stop prescribing to people how they have to live and instead provide them tons of options and people will self sort for what makes sense to them.
Sam Bowman (44:15):
A partial answer to, I agree with that model. I mean that’s very much the kind of thing that we’re interested in at works in progress and learning from and copying models that work feels to me like a wildly underused model of doing things. It happens all the time in the private sector, but for whatever reason in government and in public policy, people could be very parochial and very focused on their own country. But it is interesting that I think that American cultural dominance also can be American political or policy dominance. I think around the environmental movement, a lot of what happened in Europe to me is actually directly influenced by what was going on in the United States and I toy with the idea of making the case in Brussels that basically we’ve imported these crazy American laws, this crazy American approach to building things and it’s completely European.
(45:15):
It’s all about hard laws and hard rules rather than consensus and the consensus-based approach to doing things that Europeans tend to prefer and want, but actually isn’t how things work in getting things built. But thinking more recently, something we haven’t really talked about at all in this conversation is immigration, and I am very interested in your thoughts about how the Democratic Party and how the abundance movement should think about and talk about and should act on immigration, but I’m also really interested in whether you have any thoughts on why things seem to have gone wrong. At least as many voters would see it in the United States and in Europe and in some other countries outside of those two places roughly at the same time, post COVID. All of these countries in the developed world seem to have very similar problems at a very similar time and a very similar response as well, which I find very, very puzzling and I haven’t been able to figure out why there was this sort of collective decision that many, many voters have judged to have been a big mistake.
Jake Auchincloss (46:25):
Yeah, I agree that immigration in the West, both for Europe and America has been probably the defining political issue of the last 20 years. I don’t fully agree that it’s been the same in both areas or at the same time. I think Europe is actually five years ahead with its immigration politics because of immigration from both North Africa and the Middle East following the Arab Spring and other events. Whereas in the United States, we actually have a much stronger track record than Europe does of both assimilation of immigrants and of public support for immigration. This is a very easily elided fact these days given the politics, but in fact, Americans like immigration and what they don’t like is when 5 million people cross the border in the space of 12 months with no process or documentation. What happened with immigration in America, at least I’m speaking about America, is a failure of the Biden administration.
(47:22):
It’s not a failure of the American public. People don’t like it when there’s no plan and just literally caravans of hundreds of thousands of individuals that just come in and start costing – here in Massachusetts – taxpayers billions of dollars for emergency shelter. Here’s what people do like. I criticised the Biden administration but I’ll give them credit here. They like programmes like Uniting for Ukraine or programmes like what we had for Haitians and Venezuelans where there was sponsorship ahead of time, from both a housing and employment perspective, and these individuals. They had housing. They had a job. And they were able to immediately start to contribute to the economy and assimilate with them and their family. Obviously we have significant pockets of xenophobia, but overall Americans are quite welcoming of immigrants. But what happened was the American public got very rattled by the open borders of 2021 and there’s been significant backlash that Donald Trump has demagogue off of and taken advantage of, but he is now. He is now dangerously close politically to going way overboard. The American public does not like mass ICE raids. They do not like the performative cruelty that they are seeing. They do not want to see an internal police force commanded by the president that seems to be divorced from due process and he’s going to be punished for it politically just as Joe Biden was.
Sam Bowman (48:46):
So then, okay, rather than asking you what went wrong in every country, what went wrong in America, why did the Biden administration allow the border to become so porous?
Jake Auchincloss (48:56):
It got captured by a bunch of hard left groups that convinced them to do it. I mean, it was some misplaced sense of compassion during COVID maybe, I don’t know, but it was patently bad policy.
Sam Bowman (49:10):
So then given that there is a lot of public anger about immigration and yes, I take your point, polling says Americans are broadly pro-immigration but just very unhappy with uncontrolled borders and very high rates of immigration. Is there a best-of-both-worlds position for an abundance-pilled Democratic Party or even for moderate Republicans on immigration where you get to keep the immigration that’s really valuable to America but you still allay people’s concerns?
Jake Auchincloss (49:52):
Yeah, and I mean I’m a co-sponsor of bipartisan legislation to do this. I think it starts with secure borders, right? You’ve got to demonstrate to the American public that we control our southern border and our northern border. I think it is a pathway to citizenship for those 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants who are in this country. They pay back taxes, they pay a fine, they demonstrate that they have learned English, and then they get a pathway to citizenship. They don’t cut the line, but they are able to provide themselves and their families with stability. And then I think it is a visa and asylum system going forward that is much more streamlined. It is clear, for example, that the asylum system is not fit for purpose anymore. The standard probably needs to be raised and the enforcement mechanisms need to be rationalised. The thing I would push back on though is the concept that Americans only like one type of immigration, high-skilled immigration versus low-skilled immigration.
(50:54):
I think it’s really important actually as Americans that we be clear that the circumstances of your birth should not determine the condition of your life. There are many brilliant, hardworking people who did not have the opportunity for education in the places that they were born, but they should absolutely have a chance to come here and build new lives. They got to do it the lawful and orderly way, but they should be able to come here and build new lives as my great grandparents did, because only allowing high-skilled people deprives American culture and the American story of its next chapter,
Pieter Garicano (51:26):
There has been a divide between how the Americans and how the Europeans have viewed tech. The Europeans for a long time have been very interested in breaking up the tech companies that they’re too large, they’re too concentrated, too powerful. The American approach would be more or less fair. We let Google have a 95% market share and such. And now in 2025, it seems like the American approach has actually led to huge amounts of investment in new R&D right? We see that yes, Facebook’s making huge amounts of rents selling advertising space through short form video to all kinds of Americans, but in exchange they’re investing all of that into what’s the biggest R&D in CapEx boom the world has ever seen. So I’m wondering whether you think that that level of concentration in profits, the same way that we think the pharma industry is great because it can make money reinvest into R&D, whether we think that the tech industry and the American approach has been vindicated and is good, they have made this money which they can reinvest in R&D and in data centres.
Jake Auchincloss (52:18):
So I’m a market Democrat, right? I believe in the market’s ability to allocate resources. I believe in free enterprise, and I would not want to adopt the European system of tech regulation. What I would say though is that the American system of regulation is not fit for purpose either because it is focused on antitrust fundamentally, which is to say, is your scale preventing you or rather giving you the ability to raise prices on consumers? That is wholly inadequate to questions about social media corporations because in fact, their scale is enabling them to radically increase the amount of consumer utility that they’re offering, the amount of consumer surplus that an individual receives because again, a network affects business where the more people that are on the more people enjoy that service. So antitrust is just the wrong question. None of my constituents care about this recent court case where Google has to offer some information to Bing.
(53:19):
I can’t even keep track of it. What we should be doing is talking about what we actually care about and what I actually care about, and I’m very confident that my generation of parents are with me. I care about the integrity of the developing brain, and I want Meta and Google to invest in R&D. I want to beat China on the tech frontiers. They do not need to attention-frack my children to do that, and I want to see strong labelling, regulations, guidance, science informed laws that give our kids the freedom to be with one another and not be productized by these corporations.
Sam Bowman (54:07):
I agree with your point about antitrust. So many of the complaints people have about the internet are much better thought of as consumer protection problems – counterfeit goods, fraud – things like that. If anything, scale reduces those problems because there are huge reputational costs. And it seems to me to be a really bad diagnosis of the problem – there are many problems on the internet, there are many, many things that people would like to see fixed – but assessing this is a problem that gets bigger as companies get large is just working backwards, either from an outcome you want or from a tool you have and really badly suited to most of the problems normal people seem to have with the internet.
Jake Auchincloss (54:54):
I think that’s exactly right. And it also, by the way, could create a bunch of case law that could come back to bite us when a bunch of relatively small and nimble AI chatbot startups start doing a bunch of stuff that we don’t like. And then they’re going to say “wait a minute. We’re the competitors to all the companies you said had gotten too big and didn’t have enough competition.”
You’re going to be like “we don’t like what you’re doing either.”
And what we should actually do is just say what we want these companies to do. How do we want them to behave? It’s analogous to, in the biotech industry, where I want things that are safe and effective, and sometimes that’s going to come from a big company. Sometimes it’s going to come from a small company. But if a small biotech creates a cure for ovarian cancer, I’m happy. But also, if a big company creates a cure for ovarian cancer, I’m not any less happy. I just want it to be safe and effective. The scale is not what’s important. What’s important is that the product meets the standards established by the American public.
Sam Bowman (55:50):
Are there any policy areas or are things that you would like to get over the goal line that you think are really underrated compared to how important they are?
Jake Auchincloss (56:02):
There are a few. I will stay in the science theme for one of them, which is changing the way the Congressional budget office scores biomedical R&D right now. They score it on a 10 year timeline and they score it relatively small c conservatively. They don’t take into account a lot of the positive spillovers, I think exist changing how the CBO scores that would have massive leverage improving R&D. But I think that’s probably going to be pretty standard fare for this audience. I think people will agree with that. I’ve long advocated for doubling R&D to 6% of GDP and making curing Alzheimer’s our nation’s flagship scientific endeavour. Towards that end, any amount of government work on creating a biobank for the brain, for neurology, and for learning how the brain works, and mapping the brain, would have tremendous impact.
Pieter Garicano (56:49):
Why Alzheimer’s?
Jake Auchincloss (56:50):
A few reasons. One 15 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s by 2050. Each one requires three caregivers. So you’re talking about something like 60 million Americans sidelined either medically or as a caregiver by this disease with just a staggering emotional and financial toll. And number two is because it’s so hard that it’s a little bit, and this is such an overused analogy, I know, but we got semiconductors in part because NASA was like, “we want to go to the moon. It’s so hard. We’re just going to, and because we’re taking on the absolute hardest challenge, we’re going to ratchet up a bunch of other associated technology and science with us”. And by trying to cure Alzheimer’s, I think we would be astounded by the number of other really smart and cool things that happen along the way. “Oh my goodness, we accidentally cured ALS too. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you take on the absolute hardest problem.”
Sam Bowman (57:47):
Congressman Jake Auchincloss, thank you very much for joining us and if people want to get more from you, they can go to your substack. Simple but Not Easy. If you want to hear more from us, go to worksinprogress.co. And if you’d like to subscribe to the print magazine, go to worksinprogress.co/print. Thanks for listening.
