Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m a NIMBY for central Paris. Are you? Probably for central Paris, but I’d want to be very careful about which places I became a NIMBY for. I’m a NIMBY for Big Sur, and I’ve been thinking about, how do I resolve something like that? The chapter on housing — which I’d be very curious for your thoughts about — the chapter on housing, I try to make this argument that the cities are the frontier of the modern economy, that the frontier is not the edge of the landmass, but the places where ideas happen. Cities are broadly the places where ideas happen, and around those ideas are a lot of engines of mobility, and we’ve thrown that process into reverse. I have this great research in there from Peter Ganong and Shoag, who show that over decades, it used to be that we had income convergence across states. That was driven by people moving from poor areas to richer areas. But now that is actually thrown into reverse as people leave richer areas for poorer areas because the cost of living is so high. We used to have this driver of mobility, which is, people moved to the high-productivity, high-income area, even if they themselves were poor. Now it’s so hard to build a house there or buy a house there that they can’t do that. The reason I bring that up is that I think you should have very different intuitions about places that are highly economically important compared to places that aren’t. My view is not that every patch of land on earth needs a high rise. My view is that there are a number of high-density cities that play huge roles in idea generation, and in economic mobility, and you should need to have an extremely good reason to make it very hard to build in them. I’m not as familiar with Paris as you are, I’m a little bit familiar with Paris — But you know it’s lovely. That’s all you need to know.…

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