I’m so proud of this book club. The idea that we can get thousands of people to engage with a book, discuss it together, meet the authors, struggle with the ideas, and do so with kindness, openness, and an interest in learning — a modern miracle!
For our third meeting of the Book Club, we were joined by Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. We talked about how the ideals of the political left — such as that housing is a human right — are contradicted by the policies it enacts; about their effort to make Americans more obsessed with the future than the past; and why they believe an “abundance” agenda would help defeat authoritarianism.
And I put to them some of the criticisms our community has raised: Does Abundance evacuate power and predation from the conversation? Are the authors ignoring the almost inevitable hijacking of this revolution, too, by the same oligarchic interests that have cornered the fruits of virtually every other leap forward in our lifetime? Is the kind of progress they seek win-win, or almost certainly win-lose in the capitalist, post-Citizens United society we live in?
We had a spirited discussion, and I encourage all who couldn’t join us to tune in.
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More Live conversations this week!
Tomorrow, Thursday, May 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with author and finance expert Ramit Sethi, then at 4:00 p.m., we’ll be speaking with the journalist Jim Acosta. We hope you can make it to all of these great discussions.
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