Fast Takes: Cowen and Furman
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Fast Takes: Cowen and Furman
Two more short podcasts on *Build, Baby, Build*
Here are the next two installments of my “Fast Takes on Build, Baby, Build” series of short podcasts with cool people.
1. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution and Emergent Ventures walked down the hall to my office for a free-wheeling in-person dialogue. Is Tyler a YIMBY? A NIMBY? Or something else entirely? Why should we deregulate Oakland instead of San Francisco? Why not privatize the Grand Canyon? Very fun.
2. Former CEA head Jason Furman — and Harvard’s current Ec10 teacher — joins me to talk salesmanship. How can economists convince the world that we’re right about housing deregulation? How can Jason convince his fellow Democrats, especially after they win Nobel prizes and start “rethinking economics”? Again, very fun.
I have never met anyone who thought that strict zoning is awesome. Everyone realizes its negatives. But they still, when it comes to the property around them, support it. They think "sure, overall my city badly needs more housing. But I do not want a bunch of apartment complexes sprouting up near my single family home, increasing congestion, parking, and bringing in a lower socioeconomic group of people to lower the standards of my public school and dirty up my neighborhood. So I'm going to lobby my councilman to vote no on the relaxation of zoning." Mark Andreeson is a very public example of this. He is very smart, agrees with Bryan on the issue, yet violently opposed laxing the zoning in his upscale suburban Bay Area neighborhood.
I totally get why Bryan wrote books on voting, education, etc. Those were arguing against biases that most people hold. But the vast majority of people who think about politics agree with Bryan in the abstract.
In the talk with Tyler, that bit at the end about a new city getting stuff done in the first few years of creation and then tapering off reminded me of this post by Scott Aaronson: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762