Latest news with #Abundance
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
"What it means to be a partisan centrist": At WelcomeFest, a billionaire-backed vision for Democrats
Centrist Democrats are trying to replicate the movement politics that drive the progressive wing of the party, but it's not clear that the party's moderates — boosted by billionaire donors — can build the same sort of grassroots support that has driven more left-wing campaigns. A political consultant and co-founder of the Welcome Party, Lauren Harper Pope, told Salon that 'WelcomeFest,' kicking off Wednesday in Washington, D.C., is the 'largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.' The goal, she said, is to seek 'advice from Democrats who overperformed this cycle' and discuss "what it means to be a partisan centrist." 'We respect the very robust and multifaceted effort on the progressive faction of the party over the last few years. They had a lot of clear coherency behind it, and there was a lot of action,' Harper Pope told Salon. 'We are essentially just trying to emulate that faction of the party.' The 2025 event, the theme of which is 'responsibility to win,' features elected Democrats such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash. The event also includes some notable figures from the party, like Adam Jentleson, Sen. John Fetterman's, D-Penn., former chief of staff; Derek Thompson, a columnist at The Atlantic and co-author of 'Abundance'; and Matt Yglesias, proprietor of 'Slow Boring' on Substack. Harper Pope described the Welcome Party and an associated PAC as an attempt to organize and support centrists in the Democratic Party, mirroring efforts by those on the more left-leaning side of the party. In terms of strategy, Harper Pope described a formation similar to that of the Justice Democrats, except instead of supporting progressives, the Welcome Party would support centrists. And, instead of putting up primary challengers against incumbents in deep blue districts, the Welcome Party would support candidates in purple districts where they think a more liberal candidate, who might prevail in a Democratic primary, would be at a disadvantage in a general election and might also be a mismatch for the district. Another key point of comparison is the funding behind the groups. While the Justice Democrats PAC received over 25,000 donations in 2024, a cycle when they were not even supporting new candidates, the Welcome PAC received just a few bulk of the PAC's money came from a handful of donors with familiar names, like James Murdoch, the liberal-leaning son of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Combined, James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, donated $2.5 million to the Welcome PAC in 2024, according to FEC filings. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and critic of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, donated $671,000 to Welcome PAC in 2024. Samuel Walton, the grandson of Walmart founder Samuel Walton, donated $825,000 to Welcome PAC. Joshua Bekenstein, a co-chairman of Bain Capital, alongside his wife, Anita Bekenstein, donated a collective $375,000. Harper Pope said the goal, shared by centrist think tanks like Third Way, is to win by meeting voters where they are. A recent Gallup poll found that 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning moderates want the party to move toward the center. 'We want to be representative of the party overall, and I think the majority of those voters are people who are less progressive,' Harper Pope told Salon. 'If the centrist faction of the Democratic party can be strong, robust and vibrant, it can help us not only win more elections but also help us have the liberal democracy we aspire to.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)
In the months since Kamala Harris's defeat, Democrats have debated the party's political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don't provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism. Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers' power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and 'populist' ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed. A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter. The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that America's 'big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.' The candidate goes on to note, 'Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down.' It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that 'The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.' By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat. This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress's mission is to 'fight corporate power' and 'break up monopolies.' It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey's wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its 'abundance' message (signaling that the candidate would give people less 'voice' and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey's hypothetical populist promised to fight 'well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,' their message might have fared less well. This said, I think it's almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side 'bottlenecks.' According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris's best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to 'crack down' on 'price gougers' and 'landlords who are charging too much.' But that doesn't have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don't actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by 'populism,' one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many. The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory 'bottlenecks' will outperform those who vow to fight 'corporations.' And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that. Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve. The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party's governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several: Big blue states suffer from perennial housing shortages and exceptionally high homelessness rates. In 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were all governed by Democrats. Democrat-run states and cities also struggle to build public infrastructure on time and budget. Seventeen years ago, California allocated $33 billion to a high-speed rail system. It still has not opened a single line. San Francisco has struggled to build a single public toilet for less than $1.7 million. New York City's transit construction costs are the highest in the world. At the federal level, similar difficulties have plagued Democrats' infrastructural ambitions. For example, the Biden administration invested $7.5 billion into electric vehicle charging stations in 2021. Analysts expected that funding to yield 5,000 stations. Four years later, it had built only 58. Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America's residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits. Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party's conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector's inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that's about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency. Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party's reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector's efficacy, and increasing blue states' populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College). Therefore, you can't refute the political argument for 'abundance' policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that 'abundance' reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won't actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing. For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I'm confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I'm less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don't want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn't the argument that Demand Progress is making. The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an 'abundance' agenda and a 'populist' one. But this is mostly false. There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there's arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.) More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people's living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you'll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state. This isn't to say that there are no tradeoffs between 'abundance' reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term. More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America's supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one. Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It's useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party's governance failures is politically appealing. But it's more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people. Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress's poll, by contrast, only obscures them.
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Democrats should debate messaging less (and policy more)
is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. In the months since Kamala Harris's defeat, Democrats have debated the party's political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don't provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism. Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers' power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and 'populist' ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed. A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter. The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that America's 'big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.' The candidate goes on to note, 'Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down.' The Rebuild The lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that 'The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.' By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat. This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress's mission is to 'fight corporate power' and 'break up monopolies.' It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey's wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its 'abundance' message (signaling that the candidate would give people less 'voice' and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey's hypothetical populist promised to fight 'well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,' their message might have fared less well. This said, I think it's almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side 'bottlenecks.' According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris's best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to 'crack down' on 'price gougers' and 'landlords who are charging too much.' But that doesn't have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don't actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by 'populism,' one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many. The political case for 'abundance' policies is rooted in their real world effects, not their rhetorical appeal The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory 'bottlenecks' will outperform those who vow to fight 'corporations.' And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that. Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve. The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party's governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several: Big blue states suffer from perennial housing shortages and exceptionally high homelessness rates . In 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness — California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were all governed by Democrats. At the federal level, similar difficulties have plagued Democrats' infrastructural ambitions. For example, the Biden administration invested $7.5 billion into electric vehicle charging stations in 2021. Analysts expected that funding to yield 5,000 stations. Four years later, it had built only 58 Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America's residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits. Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party's conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector's inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that's about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency. Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party's reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector's efficacy, and increasing blue states' populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College). Therefore, you can't refute the political argument for 'abundance' policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that 'abundance' reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won't actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing. For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I'm confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I'm less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don't want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn't the argument that Demand Progress is making. There is no actual trade-off between soaking the rich and making it easier to build stuff The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an 'abundance' agenda and a 'populist' one. But this is mostly false. There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there's arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.) More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people's living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you'll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state. This isn't to say that there are no tradeoffs between 'abundance' reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term. More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America's supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one. The 'abundance' debate is primarily about policy, not politics Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It's useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party's governance failures is politically appealing. But it's more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people. Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress's poll, by contrast, only obscures them.
New Statesman
3 days ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Labour needs an abundance mindset
Photo byIt once looked like Keir Starmer was going to be a pro-growth prime minister. Alas. It seems increasingly obvious that the government isn't committed enough to the reforms that are needed. The problems run deep. Growth and productivity have been slow, nearly flat, since 2008. The housing shortage in London and the south-east is getting worse. Cambridge is an economic powerhouse thanks to scientific research. But planning rules means there is no spare laboratory space. We cannot build any. We produce far less energy than France, and it costs a lot more. Cities like Manchester ought to be flourishing, but productivity is far lower in British cities than in other countries. Outside London, we are sluggish. A hundred years ago, Birmingham was a rival power to the capitol; today it is bankrupt and wretched. The reason is simple. We have too many rules that make everything too complicated and too slow. The tallest building outside of London was going to be built in Manchester but the process has been stalled because of an administrative error. An application to build a mansard roof on a house in Lambeth was rejected by the council because the house would 'dominate' the local area which is of 'low-scale character.' Imagine the horror of a discrete third floor in a two-floor neighbourhood! To get planning permission for a twenty-home development, developers must provide things like an Aviation Impact Assessment and a Public Art Strategy, among many others. Remember, this is before planning permission. In 2013 there was a proposal to build three nuclear reactors in Wales. Four of these exact reactors are already working in Japan, where they have been proven safe during significant earthquakes. Works in Progress reported that the Office for Nuclear Regulation demanded design changes for four and a half years. The aim was to reduce the amount of radiation being discharged. And they succeeded. The radiation was reduced by the amount that 'a human ingests when they consume a banana.' The planning permission alone for the Lower Thames Crossing was twice as expensive as an actual tunnel in Norway. If the government is going to fix this, it needs to get radical. In the USA, the need for similar reforms have become much more prominent recently thanks to Abundance, written by the journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They argue that the American left is too concerned with blocking development. Worried that even something simple like building a toilet in a public park has become expensive and complicated, they argue for deregulation. This is a major shift on the American left from writers at the New York Times and the Atlantic. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As Klein points out, what matters is the default. France is doing better than the UK on this because the default is that it is easier to build. Klein and Thompson have started the important work of reframing what seem like neo-liberal economic concerns into political reality. If Britain wants to be a country with a generous welfare system, it needs to be a country that actually builds enough decent homes for people. If we want to be a country that has excellent hospitals, we need cheap energy to run them. If we want Britain to thrive outside of London, we need the trains, roads, and laboratories to enable that thriving. If we want to have good jobs for working people, we need to have enough homes for them to live where they need to work. If we want our provincial cities to flourish, they need to be able to build transport infrastructure without spending an expensive decade in regulatory review. If we want energy bills to be cheaper for working families, we need to spend less than four years reducing the amount of radiation from a nuclear reactor by a literal banana's worth. We need this attitude shift in Britain. And fast. Apparently a lot of people in Labour are reading Abundance. And yet the government is planning to control where pensions are invested 'for the benefit of the economy.' America has the abundance movement. We have central planning for pension schemes. It will lead to lower returns, disincentivising savings. It's also deeply illiberal. Instead of building roads the government thinks it can plan my pension from Whitehall. Get real! And yet, as the economist Sam Bowman says, Britain is fixable. We don't need to invent anything. We simply need to build trams, homes, and energy plants like they do in other countries. The Democrats are waking up to the importance of this across the Atlantic. It is time for Labour to make the same shift. As well as Bowman, people like Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, Tim Leunig, Sam Dumitriu and Britain Remade, Stian Westlake, and many others are all working to raise these issues to the attention of policy makers and the public. But progress is slow. The government probably isn't going to do what is necessary. Ambitious talk of planning reform has become the petty chorus of telling developers to 'get on with it.' Rachel Reeves has promised more than a hundred billion of capital spending. This is as much as the government spends on debt repayment every year, which now costs more than Universal Credit. And spending all of that money is not much use if it all goes down the perpetual sink-hole of regulation and approvals. Despite the extent of the problems, the government is more interested in adjusting the ISA rules. This is destructive in itself, but while there is so much that needs doing, it is truly fiddling while Rome burns. There's another reason for the left to become more like Ezra Klein. Soon there won't be another option. If Starmer doesn't start ripping up the rule book, someone else will do it. Sooner or later, reform will come. Taxes and spending can only rise for so long while growth remains stagnant. And another decade of low productivity, low GDP-per-capita growth, not enough houses, energy infrastructure, roads, or reservoirs, and an over burdensome tax-and-spend regime to cap it all, will leave us requiring more and more radical reform. The longer the government runs a deficit (while already spending so much on debt repayments) without improving the economy, the more unavoidable the solution will become. Left long enough, that will mean another Margaret Thatcher. Sooner or later, there really will be no alternative. If Starmer wants to avoid empowering a new Thatcher as his eventual successor, he should take a lead from Klein and Thompson and act now. [See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain] Related
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The overhaul of L.A. County government begins now
In November, Los Angeles County voters approved Measure G, which promised to transform county governance. The process that will implement its reforms begins now with the creation of the Governance Reform Task Force, and L.A. County leaders, residents and media need to be engaged because, as the saying goes, 'The devil is in the details.' For too long, the county has underserved the people of Los Angeles. With nearly 10 million residents, our county is more populous than 40 U.S. states, yet it is governed by only five supervisors, each overseeing about 2 million people. The result has been reactionary leadership that maintains the status quo when the challenges we face require speed and innovation. Read more: Editorial: Voters just passed L.A. County's most important government reform in decades At its core, Measure G is about ensuring that the county can meet our greatest challenges. After all, the design of a government shapes the behaviors of those who govern us. The Board of Supervisors will be expanded, over time, to nine members from five. And an elected county executive will provide for the separation of executive and legislative powers, and a more accountable county government. Take for example the devastating January fires. The Palisades and Eaton fires tore through the cities of Los Angeles, Malibu, Pasadena and Sierra Madre. The largest devastation in terms of deaths, homes lost and residents displaced was in the unincorporated neighborhood of Altadena. Instead of having one voice and one plan leading fire response and recovery at the county level, residents must navigate a maze of district by district bureaucracy to put the pieces of their life back together. Imagine if there was just one elected county executive guiding one regional strategy — this is the future we can create. Read more: Your guide to Measure G: Expanding the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, electing a county executive Now let's consider homelessness — the most pressing issue facing the county year after year. Despite spending billions of dollars each year, the county has yet to move the needle far enough in addressing the issue. When an audit was mandated by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, the county learned of eye-popping inefficiencies and nepotism, leading it to pull its funding from the city-county Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, and leading to the resignation of the agency's chief executive. Is this effective governance? Is this the best we can do? In their recent book 'Abundance,' Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point to the need for proactive government in fostering innovation and breaking stagnation that places such as Los Angeles face. But ending the status quo won't be easy. So many entities will resist change — agencies that have been allowed to underperform, vendors who overcharge, nonprofit organizations whose million-dollar contracts with the county may change — because an opaque county system is working for them. Read more: Two workers fired from LAHSA had accused top executive of improper behavior Right now, the vision and continuity of the county change on an annual basis along with the rotating chair structure of the five-member board. Most actions get decided based on district preferences instead of the regional greater good. But as the founding fathers noted, government works best with checks and balances. The county supervisors, as the legislative branch, should have a healthy level of friction with an executive to keep them accountable to the people. Measure G's addition of an elected county executive establishes those checks and balances. This change is critical to the leadership needed to tackle major crises such as homelessness and emergency response. The new task force will also define the scope of a new independent ethics commission mandated by the measure. Read more: Los Angeles homeless chief to resign after the county guts her agency Measure G is not just governance reform — it's also democratic renewal. Los Angeles County's form of government hasn't changed since 1912, when our population was just 500,000 and women didn't have the right to vote. To have world class transportation countywide, to transition to a green economy, to lessen disparities between rich and poor requires innovation. As the task force begins the process to implement the voter-approved Measure G, we need the voices of all 88 cities and our hundreds of neighborhoods to help define the future of county government. Tune in for our livestreamed meetings, email your ideas to the task force and be sure to get involved as the task force develops and rolls out a community engagement strategy in the coming months. We can't afford to waste this opportunity. As a member of the task force, I welcome your participation in shaping the county we all deserve. This thrilling process starts Friday — join us. Sara Sadhwani is a politics professor at Pomona College and was appointed by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, co-author of Measure G, to serve on the Governance Reform Task Force. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
