Lawfare Daily: Chris Hughes on His New Book, ‘Marketcrafters’

[Intro]

Chris Hughes: Marketcraft in and of itself is not normative. It is a method for using private sector forces to achieve a political end, and we will disagree about those political ends.

Kevin Frazier: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and a contributing editor at Lawfare, joined by Chris Hughes, author of “Marketcrafters” and co-founder of the Economic Security Project.

Chris Hughes: I think you really do need all three of these things for marketcraft to be effective. You need the clear mission, you need the discretion and power to move forward and, and to do that confidently, and you need accountability to ensure that the mission is being met.

Kevin Frazier: Today we're talking about his book, which features several case studies of marketcrafting, from Lina Khan's FTC to Jesse Jones's Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It's a walkthrough history and potentially a guide through our current economically volatile times.

[Main podcast]

Alright Chris, we are speaking just a few days after the steepest stock plunge since 2020, incited by the administration's aggressive and far reaching trade policies. “Marketcrafters,” your forthcoming book dedicates hundreds of pages and dozens of case studies to instances in which government intervention in the markets can not only stabilize the economy, but actually increase and spread prosperity.

Admittedly, that all sounds a bit rosy, but you've certainly done your homework. The book covers institutions that readers have likely never heard of, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and uncovers facts about well-known institutions like the Federal Reserve that listeners probably didn't know beforehand.

So I think this is a great moment for your book, but let's start with just the definition of marketcrafting itself because it's a new phrase—it's catchy, I love it—but I imagine it's capable of a lot of different definitions, so it'd be great to get a more precise take from you.

Chris Hughes: So marketcraft is when a state entrepreneur or a policymaker harnesses market forces to achieve some kind of public good. It could be national security, it could be financial stability, it could be building semiconductors, but it is about using the private sector, the dynamism of capitalism to make the country work in a way that you wanna see it.

So that's the opposite of what is happening right now in the White House where Trump and co. are bludgeoning the economy, trying their hardest to tear it apart, to raise prices, and push us into a recession.

Marketcraft is something much more precise. It is in, you know, in the, in, in the book, I have a collection of different moments throughout history where individuals have had a mandate—many of whom are Republicans, many of whom are Democrats—and they organize and manage markets to meet that specific goal. Sometimes they succeed, often they fail, but we can learn from those experiences to create some kind of framework which we're gonna need on the other side of the chaos that we're in today.

Kevin Frazier: Yeah. And you've seen the economy and especially the tech driven economy from a lot of different perspectives, obviously playing a role, very central role in the founding of Facebook, now working with the Economic Security Project. And you have this really nuanced perspective that comes through in the book, seeing both the positives and negatives of the private sector's work and the public sector's work.

Why did you choose this moment to write “Marketcrafters?” What's the hope in identifying these instances of that careful government intervention into markets before all calamity breaks loose, but also not being too overbearing? What, what's your goal in publishing this book?

Chris Hughes: I think for a lot of books, at least for this one, for me, they stem from an underlying frustration or anger, and this one was this dichotomy between markets over here and government over here that we seem to just be unable to get rid of. We're constantly talking about markets as if they are some natural phenomenon, and we use a language of intervening. Even like progressive folks will say, well, government needs to intervene in the market to do X, Y, or Z.

That is conceptually wrong. That doesn't describe how markets work in the United States. And so instead, I often go to the metaphor of a vegetable garden. When I was growing up, my dad had a vegetable garden in the backyard. I didn't love working in it, but I spent a lot of time there, particularly on summer evenings. And I use that example because markets are organic forces that do turn through a logic that is part of them as institutions, but they also need to be cared for. They need to be cultivated, and that is a dynamic interaction between markets and government to make sure that they're working the way that we want them to work.

And so, it took me time to come to that outlook. And then once I did, you can look back at the past, and see example after example of how institutions have been built to try to cultivate markets in a direction. You can start to see opportunities for how to do it successfully in the, in the future.

I'll give you one example. I start the book, about a hundred years ago in the midst of the Great Depression, and there's so many different parts of the New Deal that we could focus on, but the story that really landed the most with me was of this Texas entrepreneur named Jesse Jones. This guy grew up in Tennessee, moved to Texas, made millions of dollars at a relatively young age. He's an up and coming guy. He ends up in Washington running a national investment bank called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and this institution has a marketcrafting mandate that evolves over time. First it's stability; later it's about housing; later it's about the war and aviation.

But my point is, is like they weren't waiting to intervene in any particular. market. They were creating institutions which said, hey, we need markets to be stable, and so we're gonna engineer them to be that way. We need a housing market so that we can have jobs and cheap housing. We need planes to fight a war. That's not intervening. That's crafting.

Kevin Frazier: And what I particularly like about this is how thorough you are in pointing out these instances of marketcrafting. Because I'll tell you, I'm an econ major. I sat through Econ 201 and 202.

Chris Hughes: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kevin Frazier: And you don't hear, oh and then we welcome the government into the market when. Whenever you're talking about a free market in particular, you will struggle to find—at least a decade ago or whenever I was in college, you did not find an econ textbook that then had the chapter on here's when the government comes in.

Chris Hughes: It's always the externalities, right?

Kevin Frazier: Right.

Chris Hughes: They're always the afterthought. They have to take the air of the side effects.

Kevin Frazier: Yes. And as you point out in in great detail is when you're talking about marketcrafting, it's not just solving quote market failures. Right, that's the, that's the conception of government intervention that seemingly everyone agrees on. Yes, we want the government to come in after all hell has broken loose.

Sure, that makes sense. We want them to address these negative externalities. We want them to—to push the garden metaphor too far, yes, the government should do the weeding. We are great with that, you know, they should take care of the slugs.

But to stretch this again even further, is it a good way of thinking about marketcrafting as essentially setting up that planter's box? 'Cause to me that that's what kind of came through for my read of a lot of these case studies was you need the government to actually set the parameters of what this market may look like. In particular, taking steps like—just to pick one of your case studies that I think we can dive into—the Federal Energy Office–

Chris Hughes: Yes.

Kevin Frazier: –which I'm guessing no one has heard of. And as you point out, we all just decided to forget it. Again, you can pick up an AP U.S. History book, and I'm guessing you will never read about this. But can you lean into this case study in particular as something that we should all know about but have collectively forgotten?

Chris Hughes: I like your, your metaphor. I think it's useful.

So, if we plop down in history in the, in the early 1970s, I think most people know that we experienced two pretty radical energy crises, first in 1973 and then in 1979, when the price of oil skyrocketed initially from embargo in the Middle East and then later after the revolution in Iran and some complicating geopolitical factors.

So the question coming out of those crises is how are we never going to have to face a world where the price of gasoline can double in the course of weeks? And the mandate that was favored by Republicans—libertarian Treasury secretary, who ran that FEO that you're talking about, named Bill Simon and Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger and others—was to do something called price buffering by building reserve stocks.

So this is an old idea in political economy, goes back actually millennia to rice and other commodities where a central organizing force—in this case, the state—can say hey, we want stable prices in energy markets. So when the prices are high, we're gonna buy. And when the prices are low, we're gonna sell. In other words, creating a band that keeps the prices stable, and you need to build stockpiles in many cases to do that. Not always; you can use future contracts and other kinds of financial tools to do that.

But in the case of oil and gas, we built the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which now has the capacity to hold 700 million barrels of oil a day, and that is well over a hundred days supply at current import levels. And we use the reserve, we, you know, when prices skyrocket, sometimes you'll hear a press release from the White House that the president has released so many gallons from the strategic reserve, and it works quite well.

In fact, the Biden administration did on some other energy futures contracts because it provides stability not just to consumers, but also to investors who can know that they're gonna get a certain, a certain return.

So that kind of approach is actually something that we've done in other moments in history. I talk in the book about where we did it with wheat and corn and agricultural commodities, and it could be applied to things like eggs and coffee and groceries, because right now we have such a pronounced cost of living crisis.

It's only gonna get worse as these tariffs, the effects of the tariffs come through, and so we need to have some framework on the other side of this, which isn't gonna say that everything is always gonna be cheap, but it is gonna say, hey, the government can craft a market to ensure that commodities that are important to all of us. The prices of them are more stable than they've been in the past.

Kevin Frazier: I think what's great about so many of these case studies as well is distinguishing between just a purely free market where we often don't see the attributes that people are hoping for from a free market in terms of fair competition, robust competition, and meaningful predictability and stability. Those are all the things that people want out of a market but aren't always associated with just an open, free market. Laissez-faire, whatever will be, will be.

In many ways, what I think you often tee up is the notion of a sort of fair market, right, where we do wanna set the stage for that meaningful competition for free entry and exit in a way that left unregulated or left without that sort of marketcrafting wouldn't come about.

And you, you raise some really interesting attributes of marketcrafting that I think are worth helping the listener get a better sense of how these case studies are all connected, and that's these ideas that particularly—and please correct me if I'm wrong, but the, the glean I got here was particularly in these kind of dynamic markets or new markets or new situations, you need new institutions and those institutions need to have a mixture of centralization, right. They need to have a clear role and a broad mandate.

And then the other critical factor that comes through in your various case studies is some really bold individuals, some leaders who are willing to make the most of that experience. Are those the kind of core attributes of marketcrafting you would identify? Or what would you add to that list?

Chris Hughes: Yeah, they are, and I find that sometimes it can help to talk about it specifically to just prevent getting to too abstract a place.

So you're right that I think that marketcraft works best when policymakers create an institution or charge an existing institution with a clear mission. What is our goal? And then they give it power and discretion to get it done. Of course, there's accountability; you need to make sure that, that they're connecting the dots in a way that meets the, the mandate, but it's that those are sort of the magic ingredients for, for success.

So, let's take the CHIPS Act, which was just recently passed in 2022. Of course, it's a Biden administration victory, but the idea was a Republican idea. It first emerged in the first Trump administration. Keith Krach at the State Department was particularly a big leader on it. And for years, a lot of Republicans on the Hill had talked about how are we going to ensure that we have semiconductors made in the United States from a national security perspective. We cannot have them all on this island off the coast of China, be where this happens and we need to have some kind of what we would call an industrial policy to bring semiconductor production back to the United States from a national security perspective.

So it's because of all of that groundwork on the right that had been laid, that there was this opportunity for a bipartisan agreement in the Biden administration that Republicans, Democrats both supported to create a new institution inside the Commerce Department. Clear goal: let's make semiconductors in the United States.

They gave it $50 billion and they even said, you know what? We're gonna let the, the Commerce secretary herself decide how to divvy that up. She decided to put $40 billion into public investment and roughly $10 billion into R&D. And then she hired a couple really talented people, Mike Schmidt and Todd Fisher, some from the public sector, some from private sector, and said bring semiconductor manufacturing back here to the United States.

So you fast forward a few years later and all five major firms are constructing plants or have plants already open. TSMC just announced another a hundred billion dollars investment. TSMC’s facilities are making the cutting-edge chips that are in our iPhones here in the United States in Arizona. And the $50 billion of public funds has attracted $300 plus billion of private funds.

And so there are issues here, which we can talk about in the CHIPS Act, it’s not all coming up roses, but directionally, this is what successful marketcraft can look like, and it does have those attributes of clear mission and an empowered institution with the discretion to attract smart experts and get it done.

Kevin Frazier: So now, now I've gotta flip the tables on you and say, okay, clear mission centralization of power, use of discretion, and bold leadership. You just described DOGE, right? You just told me that we've got this institution with a broad mandate, but clear authority or to some clear authority.

Distinguish between marketcrafting in the context you’re thinking about—how you ensure that degree of accountability—versus marketcrafting just to pursue whatever political ends you may have. Because you do, in your case, studies point out some positive use cases of marketcrafting, and then instances, for example, in the “Volcker Shock” where institutions suddenly constrain themselves–

Chris Hughes: Yeah

Kevin Frazier: –rid themselves of discretion and nakedly pursue certain ends without that sort of policy North Star. So whether you focus on DOGE, whether you focus on Volcker, walk through, what are, what are the potential downsides of marketcrafting or the misapplication of marketcrafting?

Chris Hughes: Yeah, so, let's be really clear: DOGE is not marketcraft. And why is it not? Because it is not trying to harness market forces to achieve a public good. DOGE at least, you know, ostensibly claims to be making government more efficient. They're just really running through the administrative state willynilly laying folks off and trying to dismantle as much of government as possible. So that's a sort of what do we, what do we even categorize that, is it a government reform initiative, something along those lines. But it's not about harnessing the private sector to help us achieve something in the common good.

But there are some signs of that in the, in the Trump administration. For instance the crypto reserve fund that the president has talked about. You know, the idea is that, oh, well potentially Treasury could buy crypto assets, pool them, and this would work as a way of legitimizing that market, of providing significant demand and sort of bring it into the financial perimeter based on a belief that for the definition of the common good in that case is a crypto market that is robust.

Now, I obviously, I disagree with the ends, and I think that's an important point. Marketcraft in and of itself is not normative. It is a method for using private sector forces to achieve a political end. And we will disagree about those political ends. Like I disagree with the crypto reserve fund, but you know, there are a lot of people who might disagree on national security grounds with chips or on Federal Reserve interest rate policy, which we can get to soon, I hope. So my, my point is, is that marketcraft is a, is a method and not a value system. It can be a very, it can be a very useful one.

So the second half of your question, I think, was around when does marketcraft go wrong or go bad? And there are many examples. You know, the one I learned the most about in writing the book was about healthcare markets in the 1960s when the real allergy to creating any kind of coordinating institution at the federal level meant that we chose a structure for healthcare markets that is incredibly piecemeal and that enables private sector investors and actors to disproportionately profit from, from the market arrangement.

So in the 1960s when we created Medicare and Medicaid, we effectively agreed to a system that had no central coordinating force in the, in the United States government. That was gonna be a private based system for insurance, for working age folks that would not cover everyone. And even the public programs, even the Medicare and Medicaid at the time didn't have caps or limits on reimbursement rates, which it took well over a decade to fix.

So it was klugy—it was, it was, they were trying to make healthcare accessible and keep market forces and yet have some government. But because they didn't have that coordinating institution with the, with the power and discretion, we got the Balkanizatio of that, and of course continues today.  So marketcraft can, can often go wrong and we have to, I think, be clear-eyed about that if we're gonna do it well in the future.

Kevin Frazier: Something that's telling about a number of your case studies as well is you track specific individuals who assumed leadership roles of these either nascent or relatively young institutions, and gave them a more clear mandate and made use of, of their discretion in question.

And so what I'd love to get a sense of is looking at folks like Bob Noyce, looking at folks like Brian Deese, looking at folks like Lina Khan. I think you categorize them frequently as either outsiders or young guns, for lack of a better phrase. Obviously Bob Noyce may be the exception.

How important is it for marketcrafting—when it works well—how important is it to have that sort of visionary, fresh perspective of how the government can help shape that market? Because a lot of the issues that seem to demand marketcrafting seemingly are the result of path dependence, of the government just operating the way it's operated and not asking a bigger question of what are we missing here about this market?

Chris Hughes: Yeah. I think that the most successful marketcrafters have a vision for how they want to use market forces for a public good. So, you know, the three folks mentioned, I think, very much all go in the success category in my view.

So let's take someone that I think people don't know quite as much about. So Bob Noyce was—at least these days, they don't. Bob Noyce was the founder, well, he was the inventor of the transistor and a fundamental building block, the semiconductor, and then later the founder of Intel. Massively successful guy. Made millions of dollars, built an empire, was called the Mayor of Silicon Valley—he was, he was everywhere. And he was also an avowed libertarian. He really didn't like government.

He'd grown up in Iowa and had briefly come to the East Coast to do some PhD work, to do his PhD at MIT, and was in Philadelphia before he moved to California in the early days of Silicon Valley. And he thought that government really just needed to get outta the way. Now, it didn't bother him that government was like the primary buyer of the semiconductors that he was helping build at Fairchild and later, at Intel, early on. But that was his approach.

Now in the 1980s, the semiconductor industry in the United States came under intense pressure from Japan. In that period, just as there's like this generalized concern about China, these days in economic competition, Japan was the thing that everyone was worried about. And in the semiconductor, for good reason, Intel lost money for the first time. And the share of semiconductors that the United States was producing was declining.

So Noyce, this avowed libertarian shows up in Washington and says, wait a second. We need to craft this market to hold off on Japanese imports and imports from foreign governments and to ensure that we as a industry are actually on the cutting edge of semiconductor production. And so he works with the Reagan administration, with a lot of Republicans, to pursue an industrial policy to retake the lead in semiconductor manufacturer.

They do a few things with export controls from Japan, and then importantly, they invest about a billion dollars in something called SEMATECH. That's a new institution that has a clear mandate. It gets set up in Austin. The mandate is bring us back to the global leader of semiconductor production. They can't find anybody to run it, so Noyce ends up running it. They do a lot of work coordinating the supply chain for semiconductor production, in addition to several other methods of public investment that move the industry forward. And Noyce dies in, in a few years later, somewhat suddenly, but right after his death, the United States retakes the lead.

And so he has a clear vision. And by the end, by the way, he like agrees that we need an industrial policy, and he believes that we need a marketcraft. And he says, you know, that I was wrong. And so it's a, it's a clear example of when someone has that kind of vision, they can organize folks in government and achieve a, achieve a goal. That was certainly good for–let's be clear, it was good for Noyce and good for the industry, but you know, the Defense Department and everyone in Washington believed it was very good for the United States from a security perspective. So it was overall a success.

Kevin Frazier: And I want come back to SEMATECH in, in a second, but first, for folks who haven't, haven't yet picked up a copy, surely they will. But you distinguish in the book between industrial policy and marketcrafting. Can you outline the, the difference here? How, how can we think about the two of those?

Chris Hughes: Industrial policy is a, a big example of how we do marketcraft. You know, I, I prefer talking about marketcraft because it's more encompassing. Industrial policy tends to conjure up this idea of factories and, you know, blue collar labor, and like a lot of people will call it picking winners and losers, a kind of surgical, masculine thing that the state does.

And there are some places where that, you know, applies, but there are many other institutions in the American government who also harness market forces to achieve a public that we wouldn't call industrial policy. So Federal Reserve is, I think, an excellent example. Institution was chartered over a century ago. It's gone through multiple revisions, but it has a clear mission: keep prices stable, maximum employment. And then financial stability is not in the law, but it's interpreted its mandate as being responsible for that as well.

And so it crafts money markets through both setting the price of short-term credit and through its regulatory and supervisory functions to ensure that they're stable and to ensure that the price of money is exactly the price that we want it to be.

And so, you know, we, we live in a, a society that I think is profoundly uncomfortable with ideas around price controls or price setting and thinks it should always be about supply and demand. And yet overtime we’ve learned we as a, as a country want a central bank who sets the price in short term credit markets and who manages that to guarantee a certain, a certain outcome. So I think few would call that, I would not call that industrial policy, but I would certainly call it marketcraft.

Kevin Frazier: Thanks for distinguishing the two because I, I think it's useful to get that flavor of industrial policy may be a subset of sorts of marketcrafting but isn't encapsulate or doesn't define it entirely.

So my hunch is that folks, when they start picking up the book, they'll see, alright, great. We're starting off about a hundred years ago with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, this is great, digging this, digging all these case studies. And they'll see that a preponderance of the case studies are before the 2000s. We're looking a lot to the past.

And I wonder what's your pushback to: great Chris, you identified marketcrafting. It used to be a thing. There was a lot of good faith people coming into the government saying, what is the public good that I want to direct the market to? Cool, it's 2025, that's not a thing anymore. What is your response to this is great, but it's a thing of the past, this isn't possible in the sort of polarized environment we seemingly are stuck in?

Chris Hughes: I don't think that lines up with what's happened over the past 15 years. So I think starting with the great financial crisis and then leading into the climate crisis, the rise of China, in the pandemic, the narrative that markets are self-regulating and just work on their own has faded both amongst voters and Americans. You can see that in public polling research and amongst policy makers, on the left and the right. Okay.

So I think, you know, the initial Trump administration with its tariff policies and trade policies in particular began to steer in a direction that was more statist in orientation. The Biden administration's economic approach to things like climate did not say, oh, well, we're just gonna trust the markets to figure out; instead it, you know, leveraged public investment. We can talk a little bit about that, we can talk a little bit about competition policy, but I think it was very clear that the Biden folks believe that markets can be crafted.

And now, you know, Trump’s chaos is just chaos. But underneath that, if you look at what Marco Rubio has been saying for years, what Vice President JD Vance has been saying for years and others, like even Josh Hawley and Todd Young, et cetera, they're consistently dropping a rhetoric of, well, we just need to let markets do their thing and government get outta the way. And instead, you know, talking about things like a national investment bank.

Again, like JD Vance in particular, was a leader on a bill that, to introduce that idea to point a potential national investment bank towards critical mineral production or drone production or potentially in other industries like AI and elsewhere.

Now that's different than what folks on the left would like, which tends to be around climate change and other kinds of things. But there's a, a general agreement, I think conceptually, that markets need to be cared for. They need to be cultivated and pointed towards public facing goals, that just letting them go their own way is not really how they actually work and it's not useful.

So I see that as a, as an across the board kind of evolution, but I think that the crispest examples of how that's actually working did happen in the Biden administration with the IRA, with CHIPS, and with the competition policy that Lina Khan led at the Federal Trade Commission. And so that's why I spend so much time—you know, the book, as you, as you mentioned, does spend a lot of time in the past, but the final third of the book is very much in the present tracing the kind of genealogy, the ideological growth of the return of marketcraft, which I think we're seeing right now.

Kevin Frazier: One other devil's advocate argument that I'll throw out there is you identify a lot of folks like Jesse Jones, like in some people's opinion, Lina Khan, who come into the government take positions of incredible authority, but according to their opponent certainly lack accountability.

How do you weigh that notion of Jesse Jones, for example, with the RFC, was one of the most powerful folks to ever show up on the Hill. When he went to the Hill, given the centrality of the RFC and its role in starting a lot of projects, you mentioned that congressmen would just flock to him. And he was kind of a man about town that everyone wanted to have an audience with Jesse Jones.

Certain people I'm sure would say that Lina Khan had too much authority and not enough accountability to the general public. How do you weigh that tension of accountability and dynamic marketcrafting?

Chris Hughes: I think the institutions of accountability that we have are, are congress, the courts, the media, and then eventually, you know, most powerfully, public opinion in the long term.

And so I think Lina Khan's FTC actually serves as a, a very good example of an institution that was charged with a mission to ensure that markets are open, fair, and competitive. And Lina came in with an amazing amount of energy to get that done. She made a lot of people angry because of that, particularly in the business world because she was so successful.

I mean, from the very beginning, the first year of her tenure, she stopped the Nvidia-Arm merger—this was before the explosion of AI, which would've created even more consolidation in the semiconductor market—through the end, when Kroger's and Albertson’s deal was blocked. She ended up winning 90% of the cases they brought, and in the same process, in the same moment actually, creating new merger guidelines that actually the current Trump FTC has decided to hold onto.

However, there were some things where accountability slowed her down. So, the FTC promulgated rules around non-competes. These are agreements that certain bosses can have laborers sign that say that they cannot compete, they cannot go to a competing firm for a certain length of time after they finish their employment relationship. And there was a lot of accountability in the development of the rules. There's a long public dialogue to figure out what the rules should actually be.

And then after, after it was announced, there's a case in the courts. The FTC got sued. And that case will now develop and we'll see where it goes, but some people think that's overstepping the FTCs bounds. Obviously the Lina Khan FTC did not believe that to be the case, but there's a debate there, and this is why we have those institutions of accountability in the first place.

So I think you really do need all three of these things for marketcraft to be effective. You need the clear mission, you need the discretion and power to do that and to do that confidently. And you need accountability to ensure that the mission is being met.

Kevin Frazier: Wearing your hat as the chair of the Economic Security Project and thinking about your book “Marketcrafters,” thinking about the book “Abundance” from Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, thinking about state capacity and Jen Pahlka crew and essays—how do you situate marketcrafters in this broader conversation of sort of reimagining or perhaps restoring a certain view of government or purpose of government?

Chris Hughes: This is the how. So Ezra and Derek have written the “Abundance” book. I think directionally there is a lot to be said for that perspective. I do think that Americans want, want abundance. They, they want growth, but they also want security and stability. So I think there's, there's a whole conversation to be had about that, but my point is, is how, how, how do we get there?

Let's just assume that abundance is the goal, you know, or, and in housing, you know, which is one of their most prominent example.  So you know, how are we gonna get from point A to point B? I think most of the time you're gonna need to craft markets to get to a place of housing abundance. And so zoning reforms seem critically important, they talk about that at length in their, their book and elsewhere.

But I would argue you also need an institution that's charged with bringing down the cost of developing housing, particularly multifamily development. So I would argue for having a housing construction fund, which several scholars have looked at. For an investment of roughly $50 billion, you can get 1.5 million homes built by making it cheaper for developers to create the kind of dense housing that we need.

Similarly, I would talk about a marketcraft that would look at an industrial policy for modular. So that housing where the components can be built offsite and then be brought in and assembled can make it cheaper and faster to build. Just one of my friends has a amazing time-lapse video on Twitter from Denver about six weeks ago, where an apartment building with something like 80 different units in it went up in a week. And it's just really stuck in my mind because you can watch, watch what it means to build abundant housing quickly and effectively.

So what I’m trying to get across is whether the goals are cheaper housing or some of the other things that we've talked about, we, we have to answer the question of the how. We have to develop the conceptual framework to get that done, particularly on the other side of the chaos of the Trump administration.

Now, I think we need that as a community of people who care about public policy, but also voters expect it. I don't, I don't think any politician needs to be running on marketcraft; that's like a wonky term that I love and wanna use, however, it is, I didn't, I never wrote this to be stump ready. It instead, it, it is a way to explain the how. How are we gonna bring down the prices of these core goods? How are we gonna restore stability to the economy? And I think marketcraft has to be part of the story for how.

Kevin Frazier: Well before we let you go, I'm eager to know is there any other big takeaway you want readers to get from “Marketcrafters?”

Chris Hughes: I hope this is a hopeful story. I hope that readers can come away feeling like, wait a second, I shouldn't think markets and governments are like two opposing teams that are dueling it out; I should think of them more as dance partners who need one another to make the, the kind of economy that's prosperous and fair work, and that there are templates.

Sometimes when you're doing this kind of public policy work, you feel like, oh my gosh, well Bidenomics didn't work 'cause prices went up so much, and Trump's tariff policies are tanking the market. Like, what, what, what are we, what can we actually do? Do we just have to go back to Obama era policies of sort of stagnant wages and corporate consolidation? No. There's an opportunity here. There's work to be done to figure out how to do it, but we can learn from the people who've come before to develop marketcrafting agendas to, to make the country better.

So I think that's, at least for me, in a period where there are so many headlines that are depressing and difficult, I hope that is a hopeful message that people can take away.

Kevin Frazier: Well, we'll have to leave it there. Chris, thanks again for coming on the Lawfare Podcast. I really enjoyed talking about “Marketcrafters” with you, and I hope everyone discovers their new favorite craft—marketcrafting, that is. Anyways, bad jokes aside, looking forward to our next conversation, Chris.

Chris Hughes: Yeah, thanks for having me.

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