A very popular book this year that has gotten mixed reviews in different circles; I liked it a lot. Ezra has long been a good example of how to maintain intellectual humility in political conversations, and this book is a great demonstration both of that skill and why it's necessary.

This book sits alongside other well-respected critiques of what people have begun to popularly call liberalism (again): "Why Liberalism Failed" by Patrick Deneen and "Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber. "Things are broken, and we need to get creative about how to fix them" is basically the theme.

Seeing not one, not two, but a whole genre of these books -- and seeing them written not (just) by crazies but by thoughtful, articulate voices -- does make me stop to ponder the uniqueness of the time we are living in. That people can draw any sort of consensus around the fact that we are living through a sort of political interregnum is worth noting on its own.

The book is full of ideas that I'll be sitting with for a long time. I think the one I found most compelling is that technological progress comes not through "Eureka" moments, but through a) tinkering around with one or multiple recent discoveries in order to find combinations that make for practical applications, and b) deploying it efficiently and at scale to a society. This is something I feel deeply in my work: on my team, we celebrate our successes not when we've figured out how to do something, but once we've seen it working well for a while.

This was a good book, but also boring. It's very policy-oriented, and rehashes much very recent US history. If you are interested in political science, you'll love it. But more than the book, I would recommend Ezra Klein's podcast and Derek Thompson's Substack.