Astral Codex Ten

Ezra Klein

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Ezra Klein

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Ezra Klein is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between February 09, 2021 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox”; “I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can’t Build”; “my review last week of Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized”. It most often appears alongside US, America, California.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: February 09, 2021
  • Last seen: January 21, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
Ezra Klein is great. I know a lot of people throw shade on him for founding Vox. But as Van Gogh said about God creating the world, "We must not hold it against Him; only a master could make such a mistake". Ezra is a master and I was happy to be able to read his Why We're Polarized.
Inline links: Why We're Polarized
(Amazon recommended it to me as "Why We're Polarized By Ezra Klein", which I would also have been happy to read.)
Klein ends by saying he cannot be entirely against polarization. But his arguments are unconvincing. I much prefer the Ezra Klein who writes things like Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People.
Inline links: Why We Can't Build: America's Inability To Act Is Killing People
Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
February 20, 2021 · Original source
In my review last week of Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, I linked to a related Vox article on vetocracy:
Inline links: Why We're Polarized, Vox article on vetocracy
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
All the famous feminist bloggers were hired by major news outlets, then the less famous ones, then any feminist with a pulse. The most famous and important men in journalism competed to see how cravenly they could surrender to Internet feminism (the universally-acknowledged winner was Ezra Klein, for Yes Means Yes Is A Terrible Law, And I Completely Support It).
Inline links: Yes Means Yes Is A Terrible Law, And I Completely Support It
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
This also reminded me of the recent Ezra Klein piece on David Shor. Shor is telling Democrats that if they took more popular positions they could get more votes; Democrats’ response has been mixed:
Inline links: Ezra Klein piece on David Shor
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He and his book What We Owe The Future have recently been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, and Boston Review. He’s been interviewed by Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, and Tyler Cowen. Tweeted about by Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, and Matt Yglesias. The publicity spike is no mystery: the effective altruist movement is well-funded and well-organized, they decided to burn “long-termism” into the collective consciousness, and they sure succeeded.
Inline links: What We Owe The Future, New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, The Atlantic, Wired, Boston Review, Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Dwarkesh Patel, Tyler Cowen, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Matt Yglesias
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
And I’m not sure either of them is as powerful as Jon Stewart, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Piketty, Martin Luther King, Greta Thunberg, George Clooney, Ezra Klein, or any of hundreds of other people. Heck, I’m not sure they’re as powerful as the average state-level teachers’ union official. I think if you weren’t already predisposed to hate billionaires because of socialism, you would freak out about the level of power held by all those people before you started freaking out about Bill Gates or someone.
Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill
April 12, 2023 · Original source
IRBs aren’t like this in a vacuum. Increasingly many areas of modern American life are like this. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported it takes 87 permits, two to three years, and $500,000 to get permission to build houses in SF; developers have to face their own “IRB” of NIMBYs, concerned with risks of their own. Teachers complain that instead of helping students, they’re forced to conform to more and more weird regulations, paperwork, and federal mandates. Infrastructure fails to materialize, unable to escape Environmental Review Hell. Ezra Klein calls this “vetocracy”, rule by safety-focused bureaucrats whose mandate is to stop anything that might cause harm, with no consideration of the harm of stopping too many things. It’s worst in medicine, but everywhere else is catching up.
Inline links: recently reported, calls this
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
27: Zan Tafakari has a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”; I think the thalidomide objections are bad (the backlash against thalidomide has harmed far more people than thalidomide itself, just like with nuclear power), but maybe there are some useful tidbits in there. Ezra Klein has a response of his own called The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas (I almost phrased that as “the chief ideologist of the Brooklyn elite has a response…”, but there’s no need to sink to their level).
Inline links: a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas
Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist
February 26, 2025 · Original source
Every bad thing that happened in the past five years is downstream of these two cartoons, sorry. In some other time, comics like these might have been accepted as friendly teasing. But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much. The working-class white people, along with everyone else caught in the crossfire (tech, religious people, etc) reoriented their entire politics around trying to humiliate and enrage the experts. If the experts like vaccines, the rest of us have to prove them wrong (so that the experts’ power is shown to be undeserved, we can be the smart ones, and it’s the experts who should feel humiliated). If the experts got caught flat-footed saying COVID couldn’t be a lab leak, when in fact they secretly knew that it could be, we’ll reorient our entire lives around arguing again and again that COVID is a lab leak with 1000% certainty, the most certain anything has ever been in all of history. If the experts and libs support Ukraine, the rest of us must at least make a favorable reference to Putin in the House of Commons. An alternate objection: sure, you can explain any position through epicycles like these. But isn’t this theory so powerful that it can explain anything? In particular, the virtue-signaling vs. vice-signaling thing alone seems to cover all possible signaling, and maybe all possible policies. I don’t think it’s realistic to ask a sociological theory like this one to be infinitely elegant with only one main driver and zero epicycles. Political positions need to be explained in historical terms. This doesn’t make such a theory disprovable - the examples above at least claim to discredit conflict theory. But debate would have to be at a similarly careful level of analysis and not just a simple predictive checklist. I hope this theory is natural enough that most people will be less interested in demanding a formal test than in discussing whether it effectively captures a position which is already widely shared but rarely put into words. Why Identity Alignment? I think this solves one of the things that confused me when reading Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. Klein talked about a fairly recent process of “identity alignment”. That is, people used to have unpredictable beliefs from all over the political spectrum - someone might support the environment but want lower taxes, or oppose abortion but support gun control. Over the past few decades, this complexity has collapsed, so that most people are pretty representative of their chosen party. Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups. So What Of Mistake Theory? If this is true, it’s at least half-unconscious. Anti-vaxxers will (usually) admit that they don’t like experts, or that they feel like the experts betrayed them, or that they get a thrill out of owning the libs. But they’ll also insist that they honestly believe vaccines don’t work. I believe them when they say this. Partly because nobody would give their child measles just to own the libs. Partly because - instead of merely talking about how many libs they’re owning - they talk about thimerosal and neuroimmunology and autism diagnosis rates, and study these things carefully, and seem very interested in defending them. And partly because when I’ve been wrong about political or scientific questions, even in cases where looking back it’s obvious that I had ulterior motives for my position, I know I wasn’t making it up - at the time, it just seemed like the arguments in favor outweighed those against. But this is normal cognitive bias - specifically, motivated reasoning. It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time. The Miller-Rootclaim debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. Some people who promised never to vote for Trump changed their minds in November, and some of them have changed their minds again after he took office. Why does this happen? Because biases can put their finger on the evidentiary scale, but sufficiently strong evidence can still break through. It would be flattering to Democrats if they had won by a landslide in 2024, but this was obviously false, and there was no way to spin it to be true, so they just accepted the humiliating defeat.
Inline links: Why We’re Polarized, motivated reasoning, Miller-Rootclaim
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
A better answer here would differentiate “facts are worse than memes” and “persuasion is worse than intelligence”. Persuasion can be fact-based! Here I think of Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, two of our most influential public intellectuals, each with a reach far greater than Adams’. Both are excellent writers and have nonzero charisma, but they are mostly respected for being knowledgable and likely to be right about things.