Daniel Carpenter: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is state and local level. If you look at, say, freedom to build, many more cities are putting restrictions on building than are liberalizing. You might expect, over time, the entire Southeast will become a bit like, say, the California cities or Cambridge, Mass., for that matter, where they just don’t want that much new to be built. Isn’t that a one-way street, in essence? I think this gets to some of the differences between an economist and a political scientist. I see what you’re talking about as a kind of regulation, although to me, I see it much more as a kind of housing policy. There are folks who say, “Well, let’s try to construct a unified theory” that puts the EPA installing smokestack scrubbers, mergers and acquisitions regulation, zoning regulations — because it’s called a regulation — and, say, some set of price constraints, and puts them into a unified theory. The point that you’re talking to right now — there’s a development in local-level valuation of housing in American culture that is leading many governments, I agree, to crack down on building. It happens in my own town to make building new construction harder. I could see that as ratcheting one-way, except, of course, now let’s talk about some of those very rural areas that we just mentioned a few minutes ago that are depopulating. It would be interesting — I don’t know the answer to this question — to see whether there’s more freedom to build in areas like that. My guess is, where you’re going to see less freedom to build — if you want to use that metaphor — is in precisely the kinds of places on the coasts and maybe in certain aspects of the Southeast, places that are driven, in part, by racial and ethnic discrimination, but also by wealth discrimination, that are going to crack down much more heavily upon new building, especially new residential building. Which are the most and least captured federal agencies in the technical use of that term?…

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