EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

yeah thats his exact flaw, i mean he supported the iraq war via absurd over thinking, still i have to admit he has influenced my thinking on such topics as urban planning and destroying the senate

i dumped yg from my read a while ago. i guess that's sort of 'mcnabb off my madden team' but there u go. mainstream dem-liberal technocrats aren't thin on the ground and he's a shitty writer imo. i still 'like' him i guess but i stopped enjoying his writing like at all.

however i do get into quasi-arguments about urban planning fairly frequently (and no not just on ilx) and i find myself mimicking yglesian points

who has better trolls?

i feel like yglesias is still sort of confused by irl

"from my reader" i mean

i must admit the truly sad number of typos were a big part of me ignoring his blog.

plus i figure the shit he talks about is so everywhere that other ppl will link to him if it's really worth it (see also: andrew sullivan)

both of these guys are nearly worthless on culture

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

haa i find the typos charming because a. its p 'internet' b. i am myself as you all know a masterful typo maker

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

shouldnt this be in ILM

they used to live in a house with dave weigel and spencer ackerman, bet it was a terrible place to hang out

― max, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:55 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that there is an offline culture of young dc bloggers and i know abt it is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, although i was unaware of this particular amazing roommates based nugget, would love to run into these guys at a bbq and get into a drunken political argument

see i figured you as an accomplished and rigorous stylist whereas our think tank opinion leader is just fucking lazy and/or dyslexic

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 12:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ty 4 yr support

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

i dont really read attackerman, his shtick grates

he's done with FDL if that helps

i dunno if i've come clean about this but i have a war-nerd streak so

ackerman talks about that time the most; i did not know weigel was one of them. feel a little weird for knowing about this crap tbh.

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 1:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too but on the other hand did u know that ezra klein became a health care reform expert to impress simon schamas daughter chloe

no i was unaware. she must be pretty fine.

i think i find the stuff he covers interesting, but i guess i dont really, i read him occasionally at wired xp re ackerman

lol max whatre u talkin abt

haha i have been under the impression that i knew a lot of gossip abt these ppl but now that i am thinking about it the thing about chloe schama is the only gossip-y nugget i know, kind of disappointed in myself

http://grab.by/8b5N

anyway when i saw ezra klein on tv i was surprised his persona seemed more journalistic glory days upstart young reporter than coddled nerdface technocratic blogger - i liked him

he has an early 80s newspaper look and feel to him

Yglesias has been wrong many times.

Klein meanwhile is a duller writer but his steady crunching of numbers is ultimately educational.

yglesiases willingness to be ambitious and wrong is imo what makes him compelling - like i understand theres danger in utopian thinking but still reimagining the world and its institutions is def one of my hobbies

who has better trolls?

― goole, Monday, January 3, 2011 11:51 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

to answer my own q, i don't really know. klein's comments are pretty boring but i have noticed yglesias' "community" to be especially vicious and repetitive. neither of them seem to really care much but i think both have made gestures to get more involved. terrible drudgery, sounds like, to me.

as far as blogger gossip goes, can anyone verify that there are, in fact, paid trolls out there? i'd hate to think it was mere dedication causing the same people to say the same things in the same place every day

theres only one blog i can think of that has good comments, really feel like 'comments off' should be the default

TNC i assume?

your bløg has good comments joe

yah tnc and lol of course goes w/o saying my blog

btw how much does this trolling gig pay, who do i contact

i know, right

i saw an interview w/yglesias where he was like all my readers really hate me i have no idea why they come to my blog

he was k funny tbh

eh i've watched a few of his bloggingheads's and he comes off like a jerk imo, interrupting, going on and on

ha yeah ive never been able to bring myself to watch a blogginghead and in general id much rather read than watch any news type thing but for some reason i saw this it was a friendly interview at a like blogg convention where they we just joking around

anyway my head says klein but my heart goes yglesias, not sure what to do, prob follow my heart

yglesias is good on urban issues - not that he says anything new, but at least he's talking to relatively wide audience. but still...super annoying on a personal level. I like klein.

Yglesias is a philosophy major in every word he writes and this is awesome about him.

ugh this is gonna be like that week i read glenn greenwald isnt it

neither of these guys is much like glenn greenwald

unless you have some sort of distaste for american journalists, then yes it'll be like that lol

these guys are on the sensible/technocratic side of the great progressive blogger divide - greenwald exists on the polemic/activist shore - which is not to say hes any more or less otm, just that hes harder to take

nah, that was what i liked abt greenwald its just that in the end i was like "wtf this is not my country i dont care"

haha

yeah but usa is in charge of the rest of the countries iirc

when krugman is updating regularly i don't have much of a reason to follow klein too closely - i don't hate him or anything though

Correct.

xp Alfred, you're not disagreeing with me. You're disagreeing with Klein. I personally think that motivation is strongly misguided.

Tbc, I am by no means defending the Rufo interview. I agree with everyone in this thread that it is counterproductive and worth criticizing Klein over. I'm merely trying to show that platforming Rufo does not necessarily mean that Klein is sympathetic to Rufo's political project; Klein has plenty of other motivations having to do with his self-image and ambitions as a public figure that I think better explain why he does stuff like this.

I don't really know why I care so much, but I have read and listened to a lot of Ezra Klein over the past decade and feel like I have a decent understanding of him, so it just chafes at me when I see people make assumptions about him that feel really off-base to me.

cant go wrong with any of these guys assuming that whatever theyre doing is good for their careers

nytimes does what rufo says

They really do, they quote him all the damn time in their news stories and op-ed pieces — essentially granting him Respectable Man of the Right status, which I gather is sort of how Klein is treating him? I haven't brought myself to even look at the transcript of that interview because one thing I know for sure is I don't need more Chris Rufo in my life. The only conceivable value of interviewing Rufo is to do a Chotiner on him, but Rufo's probably slick enough to avoid Chotiner, and Klein is no Chotiner.

That's fair -- sorry.

times does more than quote rufo theyve run a bunch of big stories that he brought them, guy clearly had juice with someone high up there

He’s at the Manhattan Institute and newspapers love think tanks.

theres a lot of people who work at think tanks not all of them get to place their trans panic stories in the paper of record

At a time when a lot of Republican pols and operatives won't give the mainstream media the time of day, a guy who can represent and give voice to the right in an articulate, thoughtful-seeming manner is catnip to outlets desperate to present a semblance of balance.

desperate to launder the fascist politics of the bosses

I'm not arguing with what you wrote jaymc, but like just for the record (lol) part of presenting that semblance of balance entails distorting (lying about) what Rufo has done and said, e.g., speaking of cats. I can sympathize with being annoyed at people reducing EK down to a caricature you don't recognize as someone who's spent time with his work, but it's also hard to have confidence in a stable understanding of who EK is and what he stands for when he engages in or collaborates with lying and distorting

i think klein is like a lot of people he considers himself aligned with some political ideology in his case technocratic liberalism theyre happy to talk about what they believe in but really their actions have very little alignment with their reported politics ultimately they dont really care about that shit theyre happy to entertain ideas that are anathema to their supposed politics school vouchers or tariffs on chinese goods what they really care about is getting a new riding mower or a pat on the head from their editor

part of presenting that semblance of balance entails distorting (lying about) what Rufo has done and said

I agree with this. And for the record, I have become considerably less enamored with Klein over the years because of tendencies like these.

I just get kind of annoyed with what seem to me like misconceptions about what motivates him.

― jaymc, Tuesday, June 30, 2026 7:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I feel like a lot of Klein's shtick is that he doesn't ask people outright about what their beliefs are or dig in that deeply. He's done his research and presents their views back to them in what he feels is a fair, even-handed manner but in doing so often sanitizes their views, or at the least sands the rough edges off

I may be projecting some projection here, but jaymc: you are doing the exact same thing to Klein, and turning him into an avatar of what you think he should be!

imo the best way to discover what someone's about, or what their movement is about, is to figure out what they've said and done and dig in

the one time weve seen klein emerge from his dispassionate analytical shell is when he said that charlie kirk did politics the right way, the reason for that is hes a careerist, thats what he believes in

social scientists will be having takes on why the hell he said that for decades

did he really know so little about what the guy was about? did he believe it with no caveats? did he feel the need to comment on it within the 24 hours news cycle when he's supposed to be giving reasoned takes and that one hit the floor like a sack of potatoes? no one will ever know

I think that is a fair criticism of Klein, mh.

I would disagree that I am presenting him as an avatar of what I think he should be; I don't think the qualities and tendencies of his that I have described are entirely virtuous.

The debate between Ezra Klein and Sam Seder about abundance was kind of informative about his brain. Klein kept waving away critiques of power, sticking very much in mode of "things are the way they are and we have work within the structure" and micro-focusing on specific cases where a regulation made it hard to build something, actually saying "I'm trying to get fucking granular here."

hate it when im trying to get granular and someone keeps pointing out to me a political pundit that politics exist

technocrat in a nutshell

Feel like when he was coming up as a young political writer/pundit in the 2000s, his whole thing was being obsessively wonky about policy in a way that set him apart from older writers who were focused more on politics as a horse race or a game of interpersonal relationships. I think he's carried that into his abundance project, though I'd argue that he's gotten much more into big-picture vibes-based analysis as he's gotten older and wants to present himself as a thought leader, not just a legislative savant.

more-than-grudging respect for rufo's ability as a fellow thought leader and communicator to set political messaging

do you think that giving him double the time of other interviewees to set political messaging is because Klein respects him as a thought leader more than Ta-Nahesi Coates or AOC’s foreign policy adviser?

Well, I have not actually listened to the Rufo interview, nor do I plan to. So I have no idea whether Klein a) respects him more than Coates or Matt Duss, or b) whether that would influence the length of the episode. My general inclination, however, is that episode length is probably less determined by the respect that Klein has for the interviewee and more by a judgment by Klein and his team of how long the conversation would engage the audience. (FWIW, the Duss episode is 1:33, and Rufo is 2:04, so Rufo is not quite double the time.)

Klein kept waving away critiques of power, sticking very much in mode of "things are the way they are and we have work within the structure" and micro-focusing on specific cases where a regulation made it hard to build something

The way Abundance perverts and yimby urbanists really truly (actually probably not really) think the way to prosperity for the masses is building more shitty pressboard buildings is so wild. Like I’m sure there are specific (Granular, even!!) cases in blue states/ cities where maybe an archaic onerous regulation is keeping someone’s rich developer friend from minting millions. But I living in Nashville in 2014-2016 I could look out of my back window and see some two dozen massive cranes in the downtown/ gulch/ surrounding areas and I’m fairly certain that it has not become more affordable or abundant in any way for a non-rich person.

Rufo is not quite double the time

(for anyone who can’t be arsed isn’t granular enough to check, there are many episodes under an hour. Though tbf Klein did dedicate nearly as long to reviewing his own book as to Rufo’s ideas: What We Got Right — And Wrong — In ‘Abundance.’ What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics?)

that sounds like a shitty performance review

the thing about abundance is that it's rebadging multiple things.

there are goofy regulations that create a keyhole-sized window that only entrenched interests can ever break into certain markets that need to be figured out. if you're, for example, trying to start a solar panel business and you need to navigate differing regulations in a dozen states, federal incentives that constantly shift, etc. then it discourages people from getting into that space. republicans will paint this as big government but are up to play the game when they can graft incentives for specific businesses in their districts on to the byzantine structure. efficient government doesn't necessarily mean smaller government!

that's the first part where they claim they're unlocking resources that are already there. the second part of abundance is attempting to rephrase the fact that we have sufficient resources available for everyone, they're just unevenly distributed or underutilized. any attempt to describe this honestly will always sound too much like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" and you can understand why dancing around that is the norm. we need. more studies and means testing to make sure the wrong people don't get things

i just need to reiterate that Ezra Klein is about as much of a thought leader as a smart toilet.

https://i.postimg.cc/rsW-nJrkT/bafkreibk7geqjmwkxewrfzatak7hjkbw3n22fbmk5plmvbt746l4pvlbu4.jpg

I wish I could say they're stoned, but I have a feeling MattY don't toke.

For my part, I’ll say that my name is Matthew Yglesias. I have smoked marijuana in the past, and enjoyed it on occasion, but mostly I haven’t really liked it so I don’t expect I’ll smoke any more in the future.

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/i-have-smoked-pot-and-dont-really-care-for-it-b9e6bb4cbdaf/

Literal-minded guy.

I just get kind of annoyed with what seem to me like misconceptions about what motivates him.

Stan culture’s most gruesome mutation, centrist pundit Swifties.

Have I not criticized him enough?

I mean, accuse me of being a Jamelle Bouie stan, and I'll plead guilty. But Klein, not for a while.

I can certainly withstand criticisms of Klein (I have my own) -- I just wish a lot of them were sharper and less caricatured.

The way Abundance perverts and yimby urbanists really truly (actually probably not really) think the way to prosperity for the masses is building more shitty pressboard buildings is so wild. Like I’m sure there are specific (Granular, even!!) cases in blue states/ cities where maybe an archaic onerous regulation is keeping someone’s rich developer friend from minting millions.

Lol at “an archaic onerous regulation,” as if there is just one. There are many…speaking as a blue city/state person who deals with some of these things for work. (Berkeley and San Francisco are exaggerated versions btw, but if you really want to read some specific cases—- look up Berkeley and SF. )

I also like vacancy taxes in theory, but I know too much about rental real estate so I overthink how it wouldn’t work in practice.

What has happened imo is that there has been a hollowing out of middle class housing on top of the K-shaped economy. Expensive new housing doesn’t do much for those in the middle class on down. But it does make housing more affordable for the upper middle, which hey, they are overpaying as well, if you use HUD affordability metrics.

The persistent problem is affordable housing for households below 80% AMI. In many places, the cost to build ends up making it “not pencil” to build in cities, which is partly what has led to so much exurban sprawl.

Some of it is “greed” on the developer’s part, but it’s really “greed” all the way along the line: the big construction companies who inflate costs, the landowners who want to make a big profit from selling to developers, the architects, engineers, lawyers who do the pre-development work, then there are the banks and the investors! Everyone gets points on the package, including the cities which often charge fees that are literally percentages of construction value.

So the shitty pressboard buildings often get built because there’s a template (e.g. development standards) that has already been approved by the regulatory entities (planning, building, fire), so developers can save on the architects, engineers and lawyers, and probably the construction companies as well. Basically if you are building new construction, things that are nicer than shitty pressboard will be really expensive if done the standard way.

Then you get into subsidized low-income housing as an alternative… but the “greed” is still there, and in some cases, the tax credits and block grants just bring in a new layer of consultants who each get their points on the package….

Lol at “an archaic onerous regulation,” as if there is just one. There are many…speaking as a blue city/state person who deals with some of these things for work.

Well sure. I won’t pretend to know about SF or Berkeley. I can say that urban/ exurban areas in the southeast have been a shitty building bonanza and rents certainly have not gotten cheaper or even plateaued afaict. Even after being assured by the smartest and best boys that this would happen.

I mean we can blame greedy developers and everyone along the line getting a taste. But who’s going to actually do something about it?

i will

You got the Mamdani Method and the Mangionne Method and I suppose both have their pluses and minuses. Maybe there’s a secret third thing but I never see it clearly articulated

one issue is its a complicated problem another is a lot of powerful interests dont want to solve it

don't forget the Chuck Mangione Method

Smooth.

flugelbundance