YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Glaeser

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-11-28
most recent: 2022-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Going to say the largest unsolved problem in cities is what the heck we're going to do about climate change and the cities of the developing world This is the thing I do not feel like I have any answer for in terms of how it is that we're going to stop Manila or Mumbai from being leveled by some water related climate event that we haven't yet foreseen, right? We sort of think that we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars to protect New York and Miami and that's going to happen. But I am, you know, the thing I don't understand and the thing that I think we really need to invest in in terms of knowledge creation is what are we going to do with the low-lying cities of the developing world to make them safe?”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I will just say that when I was in graduate school, I spent a few hours playing something called Sim City, and I did think that was very fun. But I'm not going to claim that I think that it got it right. But that was probably my largest engagement with city building video games.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I too have been in Deravi and felt perfectly safe. It's, you know, like walking around Belgravia in London in terms of it. I think my model of Daravi is the same model as Jane Jacobs' model of Greenwich Village in 1960, which is this is just a well-functioning community. People have eyes on the street. If you're a stranger in these areas, they're going to be looking at you, and it's a community that just functions. And there are lots of low-income communities throughout the world that have this. It requires a certain amount of permanence. So if the community is too much in flux, it becomes hard to enforce these norms, hard to enforce these sort of community rules. And it's really helpful if there aren't either a massive number of guns floating around or an unbelievably lucrative narcotics trade, which is in the area. Those are both things that make things incredibly hard. And of course, partially U.S. drug policy has, you know,”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, lower population growth, much tougher zoning, much tougher historic preservation. All three of these things are going on. So it's very difficult to build in European cities. There's a lot of attention to caring about history.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My friend Eric Kleinenberg has written a great book about, I think it's called Palaces for the People, about all the different functions that libraries have played. I've never seen anything systematically about this, but you're not going to get a scholar to speak against books. It's not a possible thing.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A billion people in a decade. I love the vision. I'm certainly among those who, you know, I basically in my heart I'm an open borders person, right, in the sense that I don't, I mean, it's a moral thing, right? I don't really like the idea that I get to enjoy the privileges of being an American and think that I'm going to deny that opportunity to anyone else. So I love this vision. A billion people over 10 years is sort of an unimaginably large amount of people over a relatively short period of time. I'd love to give it a shot. I mean, it's certainly not as if there's any long-term reason why you couldn't do it. I mean, goodness knows we've got more than enough space in this country. It would be exciting to try to see if we could build enough infrastructure and structures to do that. But it would require a lot of reform in the housing space and require a fair amount of reform in the infrastructure space as well to be able to do this at some kind of large.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're so confident that they're all that more interesting, though I don't want to be particularly disparaging any one city. So I'm not going to choose that, but I'm not sure that there's actually a bunch that's pretty interesting in Houston. And I'm not sure that I wouldn't, you know, I would say that it's any less interesting than any comparably aged city in the country.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have. I have, in fact, gone to a YouTube tourism. Although part of it, I admit, was to look at the housing and to go to the woodlands and look at that. Interesting has a lot to do with age. In this country. So, the more that a city has, you know, Boston is good for tourism just because it's been around for a long time. And it hasn't changed all that much. So it has this sort of historic thing. Houston's a new place in the sense that not just in the sense that it's like chronological age is lower, but also in the sense that it's just grown so much. It's dominated by new stuff, right? And that new stuff tends to be more homogeneous. It tends to have less history on it. I think those are things which make new cities typically sort of less interesting than older cities. I mean, has witnessed by the fact that, you know, Rome, Jerusalem, London, these are great tourist capitals of the world because they've just accreted all this interesting stuff over the millennium. So I think that's part of it. I'm not sure that if we look at more highly zoned new cities,”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a big human capital determinant. So I tend to believe that individuals, cities, and nations rise and fall based on their skill levels. And certainly if you look over the last 40 or 50 years, skills are very predictive of which cities, particularly colder cities, managed to do well versus poorly. And if you ask yourself, why Detroit and Seattle look different? More than 50% of Seattle's adults have college degrees, maybe 14, 15% of Detroit's adults do, right? That's just a huge, huge gap. And certainly when we're thinking about your putative startup, you're going to be looking for talent, right? You're going to be looking to hire talent and having lots of educated people around you is going to be helpful for them.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massachusetts and California are certainly much less pro business, but they're pretty well educated and other parts of the country may be more pro-business, but they're less so. But the sort of real secret sauce is finding those places that are both highly educated and pro-business. So those are places like Charlotte and Austin and even Atlanta, places in the Sun Belt that have attracted lots of skilled people. They've done very, very well during COVID. I mean, Austin by most dimensions is the superstar of the COVID era in terms of just attracting people. So I think you had wait for the real estate prices to come down a bit in Austin. But those are the places that I would be looking at.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there's a lot to like about in person, certainly. I mean, I think relying too much on remote feels quite dangerous if you're a scrappy startup. Look, I like a lot the Sunbelt smart cities. I like a lot the places that sort of combine. I sort of have a two-factor model of economic growth, which is it's about education and it's about having governments that are pro-business, right? And if you think about sort of, you know, the US, There's a lot of heterogeneity in this. And if you think about the US versus other countries. So the U.S. has historically been better on being pro-business than, let's say, the Northern European social democracies. But the Northern Social Democracies are great on the education front. And so, you know, places like Sweden and the Netherlands and Germany are also very successful places because they have enough education to counter the fact that they may not necessarily be as pro-business as the US is. Within the US, you also have this balance, whereas places like”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He studies. Engineering there and then comes back to become dean of Stanford's engineering program. And he really plays an outsized role in setting up the Stanford Industrial Park, attracting Fairchild Semiconductor. And then this is sort of random thing that Fairchild Semiconductor attracts these people and then repels them because you have this brilliant guy, Shockley, right? He's both brilliant and sort of personally abhorrent who manages to attract brilliant people and then repel all of them. And so they all end up dispersing themselves into different companies and they create this incredibly creative ecosystem that is the heart of Silicon Valley that in its day sort of had this combination of really smart people and really entrepreneurial ethos, which just made it very, very healthy. I think the thing that many of us worry about in terms of Silicon Valley more recently is it feels much more like it's a one industry town, which is dangerous, and it feels more like it's a bunch of industrial.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Head this radio company. So there had been this local genius. The story was, as I remember it, there had been this local genius in San Francisco who had attracted all these investors and was going to do this wireless telegraphy company. And he died in a freak carriage accident. His investors wanted to find someone else, and they went to Stanford's the nearby faculty and asked who should we hire? And it was this guy, Elwell, who founded Federal Telegraph. Federal Telegraph then licensed, I think, Danish technology. It was originally the Poulsen telegraph company. They then hired some fairly bright people like Lee DeForest. And they did incredibly well in World War I off of federal Navy contracts, off of Navy contracts. And they then did things like provided jobs for people like the young Fred Terman, whose father was a Stanford scientist. Now, Fred Turman then plays an outsized role in this story because he goes to MIT.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we take it as being earlier. It is Stanford. So I trace through this, I think in triumph. Yeah, it was a company called Federal Telegraph Company that was founded by a guy called Cyril Frank Elwell, who was a radio pioneer. And he was tapped by his teacher to”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Studies found the same thing, which is in these call centers. They are plenty productive when they're remote, but the probability of being promoted drops by 50%. And so the entrepreneur may make it very efficient to do things in the short run remotely, but they're going to turn off this tendency that we have to be able to learn things from people around us, which is just much harder to duplicate remotely.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And free snacks, and whatever else they had in these giant campuses in the Google Plex. So they were certainly betting on the power of face-to-face and creativity rather than on the ability of sort of remote work to make everything work. I mean, I think the most reasonable views, let's say that of Nick Bloom of Stanford, is that for those types of workers, you know, 20% of your week being hybrid, maybe 40%, seems quite possible. That seems like a thing, particularly for workers who have families who really value that degree of flexibility. But fully remote, I guess that's a pretty niche thing. And there's some jobs like Call Center workers where you could imagine it being the norm, but in part because it's just hard to learn the same amount remotely that you do face-to-face. And this came out both in the earlier Bloom study on remote call center workers in China and on more recent work by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington that both”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, it's entirely possible. I never like betting against the ingenuity of humanity. On the other hand, you need a lot of technology to override 5 million years of evolution. And we have evolved to be an in-person species, not just because we're productive and learn a lot face to face, but also because we just like it. I mean, like a world of hyperefficient remote work where you basically are puttering around your apartment doing things very quickly and getting things done, that doesn't sound particularly joyful to me. And, you know, workplaces are not just places of productivity, they're also places of pleasure, particularly at the high end. And remember, I mean, in 2019 and earlier, you know, Google, Yahoo, the companies that should have been doing had the biggest capacity to do remote stuff general weren't sending their workers home. They were building these paradises for high-skilled workers, stuffed with foosball tape.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area before we start getting things right, right? I mean, we went through a lot of pain in the 1970s as cities first tried to deal with their progressive goals and rich people and companies ran away. And it wasn't until the 1980s that sort of people started realizing this was the path to local bankruptcy and that we had real city limits on what the locality could do.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, that collides with this very fervent desire to deal with festering social inequities to the local level, be this limited upward mobility for poor people, be this high housing cost, be this the rise of Mass incarceration and police brutality towards particularly minority groups. And so there's this progressive urge which runs up against the fact that the rich guys can run away and they've, and if your model, which says, oh, the local governments are going to realize the rich guys can run away so they will seem seamlessly lower tax rates in order to make sure that they attract those people. That's running up against the fact that there's a whole lot of energy on the progressive side, which says, no, we want to, Massachusetts just passed a millionaire's tax, right? So for the first time ever, we have the possibility to have a progressive tax, which feels extraordinarily dangerous given this time period. So I think we may need to see a bunch of errors in this.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I see this as being a central, it's a great question, it's a central issue of our day. So, here's how I think about it. And in part, it's why I wrote my recent book, Survival of the City, is because I was so worried about this. Okay, two things have happened simultaneously. One, as you correctly say, Zoom has made it easier to connect from anywhere. I don't think that Zoom is going to cause our tech startup currently in Silicon Valley to say, oh, you know what? We're just going to go home to our Orange County suburban homes and never meet live again. I think that's a low probability event.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single person that I've seen of that cohort who, when you allow them to interact with real members of their group live, like left at the opportunity, right? Left at the opportunity of meeting, actually hanging out with real people until three o'clock in the morning and arguing over whatever it is, whether or not it's football or Kant. But I think particularly for the young, the Living life live just beats the alternative.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So valuable. No, I do not think the metaverse is going to change very much. I do think that there will be a lot of hours spent on various forms of gaming over the next 20 years that I'm very confident about, but I don't think it ultimately poses much of a threat to real world interactions. And, you know, in some sense, we saw this with the teenage world over the last three years, right? We saw a lot of America spend an awful lot of time, you know, 15, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds gaming and connecting entirely virtually during the whole time of the pandemic lockdowns.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would take the same stance. I would say that they're likely to have just skills that are somewhat idiosyncratic and are valued in the U.S. context.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the one guy who's down the hall who knows exactly what you're looking for. And so that guy gets much higher wages, even though, you know, just because he can offer you something that no one else can exactly reproduce.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. I don't fully know the answer to that question. I would suspect some of it just has to do with the nature of supply and demand. So there are some things that are just very hard to be done remotely, right? So either because you have sort of very precise informational needs that's easier to communicate to people who are nearby, or the person who's nearby has evolved in ways in terms of their mind that they actually know exactly what you want and they have exactly the product that you need. And so even though the remote call center worker and the local one may be totally equivalent on raw programming talent, you may still end up in equilibrium be willing to pay a lot more to the local one just because, right, so there's a slightly differentiated skill that the local one has. And look, there's just a lot of competition from the remote ones. And so the price is going to be pretty low. And there's not that much supply.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets, my guess is in the long run, it's probably going to be likely to be neutral at worst for face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the first one is the book, right? It's hard to imagine the book with movable type, Gutenberg, right? It's hard to imagine an innovation that did more to flatten distance than the book, right? Now you can read stuff that people are saying hundreds of miles away. And yet there's not a shred of evidence that the book led to less urbanization in Europe or to less connection. It helped create a totally different world in which people were passionate about ideas and wanted to talk to each other and they wanted to talk to each other about their books. And then, you know, flash forward 350 years when we have the telephone. And again, telephones started being used more in cities and they started being, they were used mostly by people who were going to meet face to face. And again, no evidence that this is created a decline in the demand for face-to-face contact or a decline in the demand for cities. So I think if we look at Zoom, which unquestionably has allowed a certain amount of long distance contact, that's very, very useful. And in the short run is certainly poses a threat to urban offices.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interactions. But you know, it's not just that cities did well over the past 40 years, business travel went through the roof over the past 40 years, and you'd think that that would have been made unnecessary by all these electronic interactions. And I think what just happened was that these new technologies and globalization created a more interconnected world, created a world in which knowledge was more important, and we become smart by interacting with people face to face. And this world that became more knowledge and information intensive and more complicated. As things get more complicated, it's easier for ideas to get lost in translation. And we have these wonderful cues for communicating comprehension and confusion that are lost when we're not in the same room with one another. So I think over the longer time, they tend to be compliments, and over the shorter term, they tend to be substitutes. One of the things I think that was helpful in my earlier work on this was looking at the history of information technology innovations.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's not a universal. Was really motivated by a lot of anxiety in the 1970s that the information technology of their day, the fax machine, the personal computer, was going to make face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact obsolete. That discussion has reappeared amazingly in the past two and a half years because of Zoom, right? And all of those questions still resonate. I think in the short run, typically these things are substitutes, right? Typically you don't, you know, you don't necessarily need to meet some person who's your long-term contact. You can actually just telephone them or you can connect with them electronically. In the long run, they seem to be much more likely to be compliments, part because these technologies change our world. I mean, the story that I tell over the last 40 years is that, yes, there were some face-to-face contacts that were made unnecessary because of electronic”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deviate and some of the UBI advocates have brought together UBI in the US and UBI in the developing world. So UBI in the developing world, which means basically you give poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa fairly modest amounts of money, this is a totally sensible strategy. These people are not about to live life permanently not working. They're darn poor. It's very efficient relative to other ways of giving, right? And so I am in no sense pushing back on UBI with modest amounts of money in the poorest parts of the world. By all means, it's been deemed to be effective. It's just a very different thing if you're saying I'm going to give $100 to a poor Congolese farmer or I'm going to give $10,000 to a long-term jobless person in eastern Kentucky.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enormously, misery spikes enormously. Family breakup spike enormously. And so things like universal basic income, which the negative income tax experiments in the 1970s, which are the closest thing we have towards large-scale experiments in this area, which had very large effects of joblessness of just giving people money. They feel quite dangerous to me because they feel like they're going to play into rising joblessness in America, which feels like a path towards misery. I want to, though, just short quickly.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I basically do believe that things that create joblessness are pretty terrible and are actually much worse than income inequality. I push back against the universal basic income advocates who I think are basically engaging in a materialist fallacy of thinking that a human being's life is shaped by their take-home pay or their unearned pay. I think for most people a job is much more than that. A job is a sense of purpose, a job is a sense of social connection. And when you look at human misery and opioid use, right, you look at the difference between high income earners, mid-income earners, there are differences, but they're small. You then look at the difference between low-income earners and the jobless, then unhappiness.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of a sudden comes along this innovator and says, you know what? I've got a new opioid. And you know what? It's safe. You don't have to worry about getting addicted from this one. It's magical. It won't work. And, you know, a hundred years ago, that thing was called heroin. 200 years ago, that thing was called morphine. 300 years ago, that thing was called laudenum, right? We have these new drugs which have come in, and they've never been safe. But, you know, in our case, it was oxycontin. And, you know, the magic of the time relief was supposed to make it safe, and it wasn't safe. And there's a lot of great work that just shows that the patterns of opioid use was related to the places that just had a lot of pain 30 years ago. So just those places with a lot of prescribing various things for pain when opioids came in, when oxycontinent came in, those were the places that got addicted most. Now, it's also true that there are links with these economic issues. There are links with joblessness.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we are actually, I would have phrased it slightly differently, which is as opposed to the work of, and there are two amazing economists, Anne Case Angus Eaton, who really emphasize the role of deaths of despair, we are much more focused on the supply side. So that doesn't mean that the demand side, meaning just the way that we handled the distribution of large-scale pain-relieving medicines, right? So we tell a story where every 30 to 50 years someone comes up with the same sort of idea, which is we know that human beings love opioids in different forms, right? We also know they're highly addicting and lead to sort of a terrible cycle.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You shouldn't short, it's those places, it's places that used to, yes, okay, so here's the real estate strategy, which I have heard that actually there are buyers who do this. Take an area that has historically been very pro housing. And so it's got lots of housing. It's affordable right now because supply is good, but it's lots of educated people have moved in, which means that going forward, they're going to build much less, which means that going forward, they're likely to become much more expensive. So in fact, you should, in fact, buy that stuff or buy options on that stuff rather than shorting it. You should short, if you have a security that is related to the population level in that community, yeah, you should short that because the population growth is going to go down. But the prices are likely to go up.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On local power that I think are fine. I mean, basically, this is not, I would prefer to call this not a limitation on local democracy, but an increase in the protection of individual rights or the individual rights of landowners to do what they want with their land, so, I mean, which in effect is a limit on democracy. But, you know, the Bill of Rights is a limit on democracy, right? The Bill of Rights says that, in fact, they don't care if 51% of your voters want to take away your right to free assembly. They're not allowed to do that. And so in some sense, what I'm just arguing for is more property owners' rights so that they can actually allow more housing on their building. In terms of transportation projects, it's a little bit dicier because here the builder is the government itself. And there, again, I think the question is, like, you want everyone to have a voice. You don't want every neighborhood to have a veto over every potential housing project or potential transportation project. And so you need something that is done more at the state level with representation from the locality.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So not universally, there are lots of good things that local control does. I do think we have too much local ability to say no to new housing projects. So that's a particular case that I'm focused on, and I think it's exactly right that the near neighbors to a project internalize all of the extra noise and perhaps extra traffic that they're going to have due to this project. They probably overestimate it because they are engaging in a bit of sort of status quo bias and they sort of think the present is great and can't imagine any change. By contrast, none of the people who would benefit from the new project are able to vote, right? All of the families that would love to move.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not exactly call it a fair and balanced view of Robert Burton. I mean, it is true that Robert Moses was high-handed, and it is true that there are things that he did that were, you know, were terrible, that you never want to do again. But on the other hand, the man got stuff built. I mean, I think of myself as a child growing up in New York City. And, you know, whether or not there's the public pool that I swum in or the parks that I played in or the roads that I traveled on, they were all delivered by Robert Moses. And there's got to be a middle ground, which is, no, we're not going to run roughshod over the neighborhood like Robert Moses did, but we're still going to build stuff. We're still going to deliver new infrastructure. And you know what? We're going to do it not for 10 times more than every other country in the world does it. We're actually going to have sensible procurement policies that bring in things at a reasonable cost. And I think we need to balance a little bit back towards Robert Moses in order to have slightly more empowered builders who actually are able to”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Moses, Robert Carrolls, the power broker, is one of the great biographies of the past hundred years, unquestionably. The only biography that I think is clearly better is Robert Carroll's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, right? It's Carrow is truly amazing. That being said,”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enlarged, that's a perfectly sensible idea. I'd like to see more places using land value taxes or using land value taxes in exchange for property taxes. Where George got it wrong is the idea that a land value tax is going to solve all the problems of society or all the problems of cities is ludicrously not true, right? One could make an argument that in those places that just have a property tax that you could replace it with land value tax with little loss. But at the national level, it's not a particularly progressive tax in lots of ways. It would be hard to figure out how to fund all the things you want to fund, especially since there are lots of things that we do that are not very land intensive. And I think George was imagining a world in which pretty much all value creating enterprises had a lot of land engage.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Henry George, I don't know any economist who doesn't think that a land value tax is an attractive idea, right? And one of the reasons, so the basic idea is we're going to tax land, let's say, rather than taxing real estate values. And you would probably implement this in practice by evaluating the real estate and then subtracting the cost of construction, at least for anything that was built up, meaning you'd form some value of the structures and you just attract it. The attractive thing is from most of our perspective is it doesn't create the same disincentive to build that a real estate tax does. A real estate tax says, oh, you know what? I might want to keep this thing as a parking lot for a couple of years so I don't have to pay taxes on it. If it were a lad value tax, you know, you're going to pay the same tax whether or not it's a parking lot or whether or not you're going to put a high rise on it. So you might as well put the high rise on it. And we could use the space. So I think buying...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disparate parents, many of whom have lots of challenges to face, and it becomes much harder for them to sort of organize effectively on the other side. So, for those reasons, our big urban schools are, you know, they can do great things in many individual teachers can be fantastic, but it's an ongoing challenge.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in the case of a suburban school district, the teachers union is no more empowered on the management side than they would be in the private sector. So a normal private sector, you've got a large company, you've got a union, they're arguing with each other. It's kind of a level playing field. It's all kind of reasonable. I mean, I'm not saying management has done awful things. Unions have done foolish things. I'm not saying either are perfect, but it's kind of a well-matched thing. It's kind of matched that way in the suburbs as well. You've got highly empowered parents who are highly focused on their kids. And, you know, they're not dominated. It's not like the teachers union dominates elections in Westchester County. Whereas if you go into a big city school district, you have two things going on, one of which is the teachers tend to be highly involved politically and quite capable of influencing management, essentially, because they are an electoral force to be reckoned with, not just by the direct votes, but also with their campaign spending. And on top of this, you're talking about a larger group of...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's much more competition in suburban schools. So, in terms of the suburban schools, typically there are lots of suburbs where, you know, people are competing amongst them. The other thing that's actually important. And I don't want to overexaggerate this, but I think it is something that we need to think a little bit about, which is the role of public sector unions and particularly teachers' unions in these cases.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great urban food, leisure, and hospitality and food industries, just take urban restaurants. And instead of having in New York City like a hyper-competitive world where you constantly have entry, you say, you know what, we're going to have one publicly managed canteen, and it's going to provide all the food in New York City, and we're not going to allow any competitors or the competitors are going to have to pay a totally different thing. That canteen is probably going to serve pretty crappy food. And that's in some sense what happens when you have a large scale public monopoly that replaces private competition.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we are constantly aware of what we need to do to make ourselves felt better. It doesn't mean that we're great along every dimension, but at least we're trying. K through 12 education has a local monopoly. And so it's like you take...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting. It's not as if I don't think there's ever been an Englishman who felt like they had to leave London to get better schools for the kids or a Frenchman who thought they needed to leave Paris. It's not like there's something that's intrinsic to cities. But I've always thought it's a reflection of the fact that instead of allowing all of the competition and entrepreneurship that thrives in cities and that makes cities great, in the case of K through 12 public education, that's vanished. And your example of colleges is exactly right, right? I'm in this industry, right? I'm a participant in this industry. And let me tell you, this industry is pretty competitive. Whether or not we're competing for the best students at our level, we go through an annual exercise of trying to make sure we get PhD students to come to our program instead of our competitors, whether or not it's hiring faculty members, whether or not it's attracting undergraduates. We occupy a highly competitive industry.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that continues to draw people in. So I would have thought that going forward, I would have continued to expect the barbell dimension to persist until we actually get around to solving our urban schools and the declining population levels If anything, I would have felt that COVID skews you a bit younger because the older people are more anxious about, they remember that cities can also bring pandemics. They remember that it can be a nice thing to have a suburban home if you have to shelter in place. And so that might lead some people who would have otherwise relocated to a dense urban core to move out. Stay”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a really interesting question. The basic age fact on cities is that the sort of high income or middle income prime aged parents Cities tend to be relatively bad for them. So once you're in the sort of high end of the upper middle class, the distrust of our public school systems, merited or not, have means that that group tends to leave. You have plenty of parents with kids who are lower income. And then you have groups who are part of a barbell, a demographic barbell who like cities. So this is partially about people who don't feel like they need the extra space, partially because if they're young, they're looking to find prospective mates of various forms. Cities are good for that. Urban proximity works well in the dating market. And they've got time on their hands to enjoy the tremendous amenities, the consumption advantages that cities have. Older people are, you know, it's less about finding a mate typically, but the urban consumption amenities are still valued. The ability to go to museums, the ability to go to concerts.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Non employed is a third of non employed prime age men. So that's 25 to 54. There are a lot of 45-year-olds who are living on their parents' couches or in their old bedroom. I mean, it's a fairly remarkable thing.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source