Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…ses was doing was what everybody in the United States was doing, just not as big and not as ruthless and not as quick. It was not like Moses built a different kind of world than exists in Kansas City. That's exactly what they did in Kansas City or every other city. Blow the damn roads to the black neighborhoods, build the expressway interchanges, my hometown of Memphis criss crossed with big streets, those neighborhoods gone. They're even more extensive in places like Memphis and Kansas City and New Orleans than they are in New York because New York builds relatively fewer of them. Still huge what he built. You would not know from the power broker that Los Angeles was building freeways too. Or he says that New York had more federal money. Well, not true. I've had students work in Chicago and Chicago is getting more money per person than New York for some of these projects. Some of the claims, no doubt he got those from Moses' own records. If you're going to write a book like this, you have got to know what's going on in other places. Anyway, let's go back to your questions. No, no. That was one of the things I was actually going to ask you about, so I was glad to get your opinion on that. I've been preparing for this interview and trying to learn more about the impact of these different projects. I was trying to find the economic literature on the value of these highways. There was a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Morgan Foy, or at least a digest by Morgan Foy, where he's talking about the economic gains from highways. He says, “The gains tend to be largest in areas where roads connect large economic hubs where few alternative routes exist. Two segments near New York City have welfare benefits exceeding $500 million a year. Expanding the Long Island Expressway had an estimated economic value of $719 million”, which I think was Moses. He says, “Of the top 10 segments with the highest rate of return, 7 are in the New York City area.” It turns out that 7 of the top 10 most valuable highway segments in America are in New York. The way Caro paints Moses' planning process, is that it's just very impulsive and feelings-based and in some cases, almost out of malice towards poor people. Given that a century later, it seems that many of the most valuable tracks of highways were planned and built exactly how Moses envisioned, it makes you think that there was some sort of actual intelligent deliberation and thought that was put into where they were placed. I think that's true. I'm not saying that the automobile didn't have an economic impact. That's what Moses was building for. He would probably endorse that idea. I think that what we're looking at now in the 21st century is the high value put on places that Moses literally thought were something. He was going to run an expressway from Brooklyn through lower Manhattan to New Jersey and knock down all these buildings in Greenwich Village that people now love. People and even movie stars crowd into those neighborhoods to live and he saw it as a slum. Well, Moses was simply wrong and Caro puts him to task for that. I think that's true.…

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