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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“The other thing is the rising importance of the informal safety net. So if you think about most particularly primaged men, they're not receiving significant handouts from the government except if they're on disability. But they will typically have some form of income, some form of housing that's being provided for them by someone other than themselves. A third of them are living in their parent homes, right? That informal safety net is usually very place dependent. It's not like your parents, let's say you're living in eastern Kentucky. It's not like your parents were going to buy you a condo in San Francisco. You can still have your old bedroom, but you can't go anywhere else and still get that level of support. And so that's, I think, another reason why we're increasingly stuck in place.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50 years in places like coastal California or the East Coast, building has just gotten far more difficult. And so with the decline of mass-produced housing, it's become far more expensive and it becomes harder and harder for relatively low-income people to find opportunity in places that have high levels of income, high levels of opportunity. And that's, I think, partially why there's not just a general decline in mobility. There's a decline in directed mobility for the poor, meaning historically poor people moved from poor areas to rich areas.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in the labor force, who are doing anything much other than watching television, right? I mean, it's just a very different thing. So yes, there are big differences in the non-employment rate. There are some parts of America where, you know, for much of the past decade, one in four prime-age men have been jobless. I mean, it's just an enormous gap. And the question is, why don't they get out? And I think the answer are, you know, really twofold. One of which is the nature of how housing markets are frozen up. So historically, like housing in the US didn't cost that the differences weren't that huge across places. Most parts of America had some kind of affordable housing. It was relatively easy to put up new housing. You know, at the dawn of the 20th century, these were kit helms sold by Sears and Roebuck that sprung up by the thousand. You bought the kit from Sears and Roebucks and you just built it themselves after World War II. It was mass-produced homes and places like Levittown for most of the last...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to highlight one point here, which is you said unemployment rate, and I want to replace that with non-employment rate. And that's partially what we're seeing now, that in fact the huge gap, and so it looks like America is like America's labor force couldn't be better in terms of the low levels of unemployment. But what's happened over the last 50 years is a very large rise in the share of prime age men who are not in the labor force. So they've stopped looking for work. And those guys are miserable. It's not that those guys are like somehow or other, you know, productive and happy not being, you know, this is a very bad outcome for primate men. I'm separating men from women not to say that the female labor markets aren't just as important, they're just as fascinating, just as critical. But labor force participation means something different for many women than it does for men. And there are many women who are not in the labor force, who are doing things that are enormously productive socially, who are caring for their children, caring for their families. I wish it were symmetric across the genders. It just isn't true. I mean, there just are very few men who are...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth less so. So on the boom side, you have a boom over a 10-year period, that's likely to mean revert. So that's not nearly as persistent because it doesn't have this sticky housing element to it. In terms of GDP per capita, much more of a random walk there in terms of the straight income stuff. So it's the population that's really persistent, which is, in fact, the reality of persistent decline.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happens is you typically will have an economic shock that Detroit used to be the most productive place on the planet in 1950, a bunch of shocks to transportation technology that means it's no longer such a great place to make cars for the world. And it takes a century for the city to respond in terms of its population because the housing is sticky. The housing remains there. And so between 50 and 60 population declines a little bit, prices drop. They drop sufficiently far that you're not going to build a lot more of new housing, but people are going to still stay in the houses. They're not going to become vacant. And so, you know, the people.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you different answers for different outcomes. So housing prices, I can tell you exactly what we know statistically about this, which is at higher frequencies, let's say one year, housing prices show wickedly large levels of momentum. For five years or more, they show very significant levels of mean reversion. So it's a short-term cycle in housing prices followed by a decline. Population just shows enormous persistence on the downside.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Roman Empire is with Rome, maybe a little, possibly just because China is so big and Beijing is a relatively small share of the overall population of China. But it's more so certainly than Washington, D.C. is with New York, with the U.S.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, whether or not this is Canberra or Ottawa, right, you see all of these English offshoot places having their capitals very much not in the big metropoles. Whereas traditionally what's happened, particularly if these places have been around for centuries, is even if the capital didn't start off as the largest city, it became the largest city because centuries of French leaders thought their business was to take wealth from elsewhere in France and make Paris great. And I think certainly, you know, the French Empire was as synonymous with Paris as most of those ancient empires were with their capital city as well. So I think that's the main force. I guess the question I could throw back to you is the places where this is not true, Moscow, St. Peter's Moscow, Beijing. I mean, do we think that Beijing is less synonymous with China than...”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are specific things that went on with English offshoot colonies where they, in many cases, in part because they recognize the tendency of the capital city to attract lots of excess goodies that have been taken from elsewhere in the country. They located the capital city in a remote place. And this was very much part of the story of the Hamilton musical in the room where it happened. Part of the deal in the room where it happened was about moving the capital of the U.S. to a relatively remote Virginia location rather than having it be in Philadelphia, New York, although it was in Philadelphia and New York in the earlier days. Partially that was to reflect the fact that the South needed to be protected against all of the extra stuff going to New York and Philadelphia.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the same thing is playing out with cities over the past 20 years that just as New York was a target, it was also a place which in the years after 2001, the city ramped up their anti-terrorist efforts. They put together a sort of massive group, as London had previously done with the cameras everywhere in the case of London to try and, in fact, the cameras that would then implement congestion pricing in London were the same cameras that we used against the Irish terrorists. Both effects go on. I think we've been both fortunate and I think shown the strength of cities in terms of protecting themselves.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, there's also the question as to what the objectives are. I mean, even the 9-11 terrorists, their end game was not to kill Urbanites in America. It was to effect change in Saudi Arabia or in the Middle East more generally. I think that's likely to be one major thing. We've also protected our cities better. I mean, if you think about it, there are two things that go on simultaneously when you collect economic activity in one place in terms of defense. One of which is they become targets. And of course, that's what we saw in 9-11. I mean, it's hard to think of a symbol that's clearer than those twin towers. But at the same time, they're also defensible space. I mean, the origin of the urban agglomeration, the first use for cities and towns was the fact that they could be walled settlements. Those walls bringing together people collectively for defense is the ultimate reason why these towns came about. The walls were provided protection.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much like the 1811 grid plan in New York that allows entrepreneurs to sort of change land use over time, to put a few bets on what's necessary in terms of infrastructure, and then just let the city evolve sort of organically. I think that's usually the best ways to trust more to individual initiative than to trust to central planning, at least in terms of micromanaging what goes where.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I think, in fact, demand for urbanism in Mars is going to be relatively limited. Cities are always shaped by the transportation costs that are dominant in the era in which they're created. That both determines the sort of micro shape of the city and determines its macro futures. So cities on Mars are, of course, going to be limited by the likely to be prohibitive cost of traveling back and forth to the mother planet. But we also have to understand what cars are people going to be using on Mars. I assume these are all going to be Teslas. I assume that everyone is going to be driving around in some sort of appropriate Tesla on Mars. So it's going to be a very car-oriented living. I think probably the best strategy on this is to create a fairly flexible plan.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, thank you so much for having me on, especially given that lunar society pays homage to one of my favorite moments in urban innovation in Birmingham in the 18th century.”
2022-11-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source