Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

City Arts & Lectures

Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host at The New York Times and the author of Why We’re Polarized. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the podcast Plain English and a news analyst with NPR. Klein and Thompson’s new book Abundance is a call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic scarcity: from climate change to housing, education to healthcare. The history of the twenty-first century in America is one of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.

On March 26, 2025, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Manny Yekutiel, a Bay Area restaurant owner and political organizer.