Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…But you know it’s lovely. That’s all you need to know. Yes, I know it’s lovely. In Brooklyn and New York, we’ve made a huge swath of the land historic preservation. I think you want to have a very high bar for what you’re going to say is actually a beautiful, culturally important space worth preserving. There are some of them, and some of them are in Paris, but the question is, how do you set a limit on that? Different people have thought about that. Maybe you have only a certain number of designations, and it’s functionally a cap and trade for historic importance. I think you need something like that to protect against the creep of those designations covering, in effect, a quarter of these entire cities or half of these entire cities. What do you think about the geographic distribution of US cities? As you know, for a country of our size, our biggest cities are not actually that big. We have a Nashville, and we have an Austin, and now there’s a Chattanooga. Are the gains from that potentially high enough that it’s okay to thwart more activity in or near New York City, in or near the Bay Area? The geographic diversification of American intellectual and business life seems quite important to me.…

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