In the face of what is inarguably bad governance and fake—but spectacular!—technocracy (the list goes on and on, but we’ll stop at AI-generated tariffs), we thought we’d take a moment to join the conversation about what good governance looks like. A couple of weeks ago, one of us reviewed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, for the New York Times, and then the other one of us reviewed the review. So we figured: let’s work it out on the pod? No guests on this episode, just the two of us in a brass-tacks, brass-knuckles discussion of the abundance agenda and the goals of twenty-first century economic policy.We dive right into what the abundance agenda is and who its enemies are: innovators and builders against NIMBYs and environmentalists on David’s account; techno-utopians who discount the environment and politics on Sam’s. We agree that housing policy, at least, has helped the better-off create a cycle of entrenching their position through stymieing construction and production. We find another point of agreement on how Klein and Thomson’s abundance agenda attempts to harness the power of the state to build, and that certain left-wing critiques are off base, but disagree about whether their proposal is a break from the neoliberal era of governance and what that even was. In some ways, we end up right where we started, disagreeing about whether the abundance agenda seeks to unleash a dammed-up tide that can lift all boats, or whether the abundance agenda leaves behind everyone but a vanguard of “innovators” in the technology and finance sectors. Let us know if you’ve got a convincing answer.This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.Referenced ReadingsWhy Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back by Marc DunkelmanStuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni AppelbaumOn the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy by Jerusalem DemsasOne Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias“Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy” by Steven TelesThe Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert GordonThe Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary GerstlePublic Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin“The State Capacity Crisis” by Nicholas Bagley and David SchleicherRed State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States by Matt GrossmannThe Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles“Why has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” by Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag“Exclusionary Zoning’s Confused Defenders” by David Schleicher“Cost Disease Socialism: How Subsidizing Costs While Restricting Supply Drives America’s Fiscal Imbalance” by Steven Teles, Samuel Hammond, and Daniel Takash”On Productivism” by Dani Rodrik
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1:01:29
Allison Powers Useche
Happy February, listeners, and welcome to season ten of Digging a Hole! When we started the pod five years ago, we had our eyes on the Grammys, or maybe the Emmys, whatever award show we could finagle our way into. Turns out we have bigger fish to fry than whether or not we’re more deserving of an award than Call Her Daddy — Greenland, anyone? We’re thrilled to be kicking off this season with someone who knows a great deal about United States Empire: Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of the new book, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law.Powers Useche kicks us off with a discussion of the use of the arbitration forum as a place to hear what we now think of as international public law claims, including challenges to racial violence and Jim Crow. We dive into some case studies about how ordinary people across the Americas fought the United States in arbitration and offer competing interpretations about how to think about what happened from a legal realist perspective. Finally, we get Powers Useche’s take on how environmentalists, Indigenous groups, and others are using the tools of private economic law to contest empire today. This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.Referenced Readings Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 by Arnulf Becker Lorca The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks by Juan Pablo Scarfi Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century by Benjamin Allen Coates The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez
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1:01:38
Karen Tani
The start of a new year, the slouch towards the first days of the new semester, the last episode of yet another season of the pod: we’re feeling sentimental here at Digging a Hole HQ. As you take down your old calendars and put up the new, we’re going to take some time to engage in a tradition of ours at the pod and discuss the 2024 Harvard Law Review Supreme Court foreword, “Curation, Narration, Erasure: Power and Possibility at the U.S. Supreme Court,” with its indomitable author and the Seaman Family University Professor at Penn Carey Law, Karen M. Tani.
We begin by discussing the genre of the Harvard Law Review foreword, and how Tani’s approach differs from forewords of yore. Next, we dive deeply into each prong of Tani’s framework of curation, narration, and erasure. We turn to familiar themes of the law-politics divide and the relationship between law and history, with Tani clarifying how this past Supreme Court term adds to our understanding of these big ideas. Finally, we conclude the pod with a discussion of prophecy (and here’s one: you’re going to have a ball with this episode, so hurry up and hit play!).
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
“A Century-Old Law’s Aftershocks Are Still Felt at the Supreme Court” by Adam Liptak
“Nomos and Narrative” by Robert M. Cover
“Selling Originalism” by Jamal Greene
The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann
“Demosprudence Through Dissent” by Lani Guinier
“A Plea to Liberals on the Supreme Court: Dissent With Democracy in Mind” by Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn
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53:24
Dan Rodriguez
Now that the election is done and dusted, and we’ve had a chance to process somehow one of the least controversial presidential races of the last few decades, America’s back to business, with Congressmen threatening international institutions, the American public spending gobsmacking amounts of money for the holiday season, and California declaring a state of emergency over bird flu. Wait a second—can states even do that? Lucky for us, today’s podcast guest is an expert on state and local government law and state constitutional law who’s written a book on the very subject. We’re thrilled to welcome back the Harold Washington Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Daniel B. Rodriguez, to discuss his new (open-access!) book Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States.
Ever wondered what the terms sic utere and salus populi mean? We kick off the podcast discussing those two different approaches to the police power of the states. Rodriguez expounds on his thesis about the development of state police power by discussing all the state cases he’s read, and why legal scholars focused on the federal courts usually get things wrong. Next, we discuss the different kinds of checks that exist on state power: structural, rights-based, and democratic. We then turn to the interplay between police power on the one hand, and the state and local government relationship on the other. (Sam’s out for this one, so you know we really get into the weeds of state and local governments.) Finally, we wrap up with Rodriguez’s argument for why state capacity is a problem of state constitutional law and good governing.
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America by William J. Novak
“The Purposes of American State Constitutions” by Donald S. Lutz
How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart by Jamal Greene
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48:54
2024 Election with Benjamin Wallace-Wells
The year is 2025. Department of Government Efficiency dons Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have broken ground on their new taxpayer-funded palace, the architectural plans of which look suspiciously like a Cybertruck. HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has received a standing ovation from Congress after announcing that children will be given brain worms at birth instead of vaccines. Attorney General Matt Gaetz has just announced that people who successfully stand their ground will be mailed a sticker from DOJ.
How did we get here? To help us break down the results of last week’s elections, and to offer a sounding board to Sam and David’s hot takes, joining the pod is New Yorker staff writer and political reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells. We start off by discussing swing voters, the failures of the Democrats and the Harris campaign, and what the election results hint about the future of the Republican party. (FWIW, we recorded before the Hegseth/Gabbard/Gaetz nominations.) We work through how the election was shaped by local concerns including perceptions of crime and disorder all the way to big international topics like the Russia-Ukraine war. Putting their heads together, Sam, David, and Wallace-Wells come up with a grand unified theory of local, national, and cultural politics in America today. Listen to find out everything you need to know about the election—and let us know if we got it right.
This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.
Referenced Readings
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
“The Future Is Faction” by Steven M. Teles and Robert P. Saldin
“Trump Is About to Face the Choice That Dooms Many Presidencies” by Oren Cass
“The Improbable Rise of J. D. Vance” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
“This Is All Biden’s Fault” by Josh Barro
“The Failures of Urban Governance” by David Schleicher
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