# Ezra Klein is an anti-intellectual (Part 2 of 3)
Date: 2025-06-06
Next Part: https://disrael.github.io/blogs/raw/ezra-klein-is-an-anti-intellectual.part3.md
Previous Part: https://disrael.github.io/blogs/raw/ezra-klein-is-an-anti-intellectual.part1.md

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> How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.” The logic of this is inescapable, and the politics it creates predictable. “[A] home’s value is directly tied to the scarcity of housing for other people,” Demsas says. “This system by its nature pits incumbents against newcomers.”

Except that:

* Rich people don’t need housing to suppress upward mobility — there are stocks, health care, expensive education, the cost of even having children, and as many other wealth inequality, rentier type schemes as they can devise.
* The easiest way to fix the situation is to prevent wealth inequality as FDR did with highly progressive tax rates. Any scheme that leaves wealth inequality in place is insincere and anti-intellectual.

But okay one would imagine that *Abundance* believers would contend that growth is the solution to all problems — even the ones caused by growth.

Page 49:

> The toxicity of growth triggered a reaction among intellectuals and, later, within government. In 1962, Rachel Carson, a marine biologist suffering from breast cancer, published Silent Spring, which argued that chemical pesticides were devastating our ecosystems and destabilizing the biosphere. The book is broadly credited with founding the environmental movement, but like any founding document, it hit a nerve because it concretized anxieties that already existed.

Page 54:

> Anti-growth politics could, and often did, tip into a kind of misanthropy aimed at newcomers. Those who already lived in a place were its stewards, its guardians, its voice. Those who wanted to move to that place were recast as a consumptive horde.

Because America or its big cities don’t allow enough immigration?!?!?!

![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/ezra-klein-is-an-anti-intellectual-0459f7837b.png)

This is the problem with neoliberal thought and the *Abundance* repackage of it — it’s all been tried before unsuccessfully. The only real fix for wealth inequality is policies or events that directly reduce wealth inequality.

Page 77:

> Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $609 million to build a kilometer (about 0.6 miles) of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $384 million. Canada gets it done for $295 million. Japan clocks in at $267 million. Portugal is the cheapest country in the database, at $96 million.

Yes and it’s the same for health care, education, and now, likely, [the cost to build a drone](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-chinese-drones-could-defeat-america). But okay fine how does Portugal build the cheapest rail? — [here](https://www.railwaygazette.com/high-speed/first-porto-lisboa-high-speed-line-concession-package-awarded/67610.article) is a notice of the award of a new high speed rail 30 year contract — more on this later.

Page 90:

> The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism. “It is only a slight oversimplification to say that in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe,” he writes.

The reason our decisions are no longer made by bureaucracies is because neoliberal deregulation and “third way” governance have destroyed those bureaucracies. So now, this year, after 16 years trying Texas high speed rail [fails](https://texasfarmbureau.org/trump-administration-cuts-grant-for-texas-high-speed-rail) with

> “The Texas Central Railway project was proposed as a private venture,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said. “If the private sector believes this project is feasible, they should carry the pre-construction work forward, rather than relying on Amtrak and the American taxpayer to bail them out.”

Obviously that’s not what’s happening in Portugal where the EU is helping to foot the bill for construction and the Portuguese rail system was nationalized in 1975.

Back to housing page 106:

> The reality of housing development doesn’t track along such neat ideological lines. Kuttner says that eliminating zoning restrictions and making it easier to build multifamily housing would make only a modest difference in our problems. He does not provide any evidence for this claim, but there is evidence against it. Houston has no zoning rules at all, though it does have some land use regulations.10 As a result, it is dramatically easier to build in Houston than to build in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle or Boston.

…

> This divergence is decades old, and its consequences are clear. Houston has the lowest homelessness rate of any major US city.

So we start with MAGA bullshit comparisons between the 2020s and the 1950s and now we move on to MAGA like bullshit comparisons between San Francisco and Houston.

It’s the same idea, San Francisco has a poverty rate half of [Houston’s insane 20%](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/houstoncitytexas/PST040223). [Plus](https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/report-houston-second-worst-affordable-housing-options)

> National report: Houston metro is second-worst for providing affordable housing options

> According to the [National Low Income Housing Coalition](https://nlihc.org/), no state has enough affordable housing for its lowest-income renters. Texas is tied for third-worst for number of affordable homes for extremely low-income households. The [report](https://nlihc.org/gap), released March 4, also indicates that Houston has the second-most severe shortage of rental homes that are affordable to extremely low-income households. The coalition used the 2022 American Community Survey to compile its data.

> Only the Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, Nevada, area ranks worse in the nation, with 13 affordable and available rental homes. Claiming the №3 worst metro area is Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington with 17. The Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown area ranks 10th-worst with 21.

Oh and [on San Francisco homelessness](https://www.kqed.org/news/11986620/san-francisco-homelessness-up-7-despite-decline-in-street-camping):

> In 2024, San Francisco counted just over 8,300 people experiencing homelessness, including both sheltered and unsheltered individuals.

Absolutely San Francisco should do better for those 8,300 people and it’s a disgrace they don’t. But don’t forget this is about a “vision of the future” and fucking shit hole Houston is not it.

But now on page 112 the knives finally come out:

> Call this “everything-bagel liberalism.” The everything bagel is, of course, the best bagel. But that is because it adds just enough to the bagel and no more. It does not, actually, pile everything atop the bagel. In the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is an attempt to create a true everything bagel, and it becomes a black hole from which nothing can escape. The same is true for public projects. When the government adds the right number of goals, standards, and rules, much can be accomplished. When it adds too many, the project can collapse under its own weight, as has happened to high-speed rail in California.

As if our democracy hadn’t been long since captured by big business, oligarchs, and racist / xenophobic voters! No it’s just that we weren’t smart enough to choose that middle bowl of porridge.

But fine since Klein keeps coming back to it, let’s discuss what happened to California high-speed rail. Yesterday, the Federal Railroad Administration released [an over 300 page report](https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2025-06/FRA%20Letter%20%20Enclosure%20to%20Mr.%20Ian%20Choudri%206.4.25.pdf):

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**[Continue reading Part 3 of 3](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/raw/ezra-klein-is-an-anti-intellectual.part3.md)**