THE BOOK ABUNDANCE IS ONLY possible because of the abundance of support, partnership, and provocation in our professional and personal lives.
Let’s begin with the professional. Gail Ross is a dream agent and the best kind of person to have in your corner. She was boundlessly supportive of the book—but also of us, the harried human beings who were often struggling to write it.
We couldn’t have had a better editorial partner than Ben Loehnen, whose intelligent edits and pitch-perfect balance of cheer and urgency saw the project through completion. His team at Avid Reader Press is top-notch. Many thanks to Carolyn Kelly for guiding the book through production; to Alison Forner, for spearheading the design of our beautiful jacket; and to Meredith Vilarello and Alexandra Primiani, for coordinating the marketing and book tour with such grace. The fact-checking process was overseen with painstaking expertise by Janet Byrne. Alayna Kennedy provided essential research for the project while we were putting together the outlines and core arguments for the chapters.
Behind this book lurk more conversations with more people than we can thank here. But we’ve particularly benefited from a community of thinkers and writers who’ve been chiseling away at these ideas, including Alex Tabarrok, Brink Lindsey, Henry Farrell, Heidi Williams, Jennifer Pahlka, Jesse Jenkins, Jerusalem Demsas, Marc Dunkelson, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, Patrick Collison, Rogé Karma, Saul Griffith, Steven Teles, Tyler Cowen, and the folks at the Institute for Progress. Special thanks go to Heidi, Jesse, and Jerusalem, for reading early chapters and offering generous comments; and to Steve, the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkin’s SNF Agora Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford for an early workshop that helped sharpen our ideas.
We are lucky to be employed by two institutions, the New York Times and the Atlantic, whose support for and commitment to high-quality journalism are unparalleled. Derek would like to thank Bob Cohn for hiring him when he didn’t really know what he was doing, Jeffrey Goldberg for kindly maintaining his employment, Juliet Lapidos for her relentlessly wise and efficient edits, and Don Peck for his masterly ability to shape argument in long-form. He would also like to thank the wonderful team at the Ringer for supporting his podcast, the conversations for which deepened much of the reporting for this book (and which is also just a lot of fun to do).
Ezra thanks A. G. Sulzberger, Sam Dolnick, and Kathleen Kingsbury for their remarkable support and counsel. Aaron Retica is a truly astonishing editor, mentor, and friend, and this book benefited enormously from his insight, wisdom, and esoteric historical references. And it is hard to know how to properly thank the entire Ezra Klein Show team—Aman Sahota, Annie Galvin, Claire Gordon, Jack McCordick, Elias Isquith, Jeff Geld, Kristin Lin, Michelle Harris, and Rollin Hu—for their partnership and incisiveness.
As lucky as we are in employment, we are even more so in friends and family.
For Derek: Thanks first and forever to my parents, for their undying love. To my dad, in whose lap I first learned to care about politics and journalism, and to my mom, in whose arms I learned everything else. You are both so missed and so eternally present. To Momi, danke for your love and support. To Kira, my extraordinary sister, thank you for being the rock of the family and an inspiration to me. Thanks to my friends—the Potomac crew, the Northwestern crew, and the Cult—and to Drew, for a lifetime of friendship and true brotherhood.
Thanks to the ones I call home. Laura, thank god I found you. Your wisdom, your counsel, your softness and light: you are the most extraordinary partner and the one I want to come running to when the writing is done. And then there is Isla. When I started writing this book, I was just a husband. When I finished writing this book, I was a dad. Thanks to my little one, the gift of a lifetime.
For Ezra: This is the hardest part of the book to write. All words fall short. Thank you to my friends: to the kuddelmuddel; to Charlie and Bess and Theo and Harry, for all the Blobbing; to PJ, for long hangs and much-needed lightness; to Tristan, for decades of friendship and insights and arguments; to Teresa, for the meandering voice notes, for asking the right questions, and for so much care and kindness; to Grant, for seeing me so clearly, for continually bringing me back to the reasons for this work, and for always being there.
Thank you to my family: to my mother, for reading me those 400 books and keeping me at the table while she canvassed, and for always, always seeing the best in me; to my father, who was my first and best example of taking ideas and news seriously, and for modeling an insistence that sense could be made of this world; to my brother, whose social conscience sparked my own, and whose activism made me believe that politics was a realm you could simply choose to be part of; to my sister, who makes me laugh like no one else does and who understands what no one else does; to Linda and Sara, for their thoughtfulness and compassion; and to John and Celine Lowrey, for being such wonderful grandparents.
And then there’s the family I have built. To Moses and Kieran, who light my world. I am so glad to have my weekends with them back. And to Annie. To Annie. To Annie. I have benefited so much from her brilliance—“the affordability crisis” is her coinage and concept, and so much else that lodges in my mind is rooted in the unending conversation that is our marriage. And I have benefited beyond measure from her support: When I didn’t see a path to finishing this book, she cleared one for me. As with this book, so with my life. Every day, I wake up wanting to know what she’ll say next. It is my great gift to be in partnership with her. She is my abundance.