Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…Now we’re almost out of time, but two closing questions, and this one I asked David also. If you take your book with him, Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, I’m not necessarily looking for a disagreement, though that would be okay, but an area where you and he still see things differently — in the book, from the book. What would that be? He has still not convinced me on single payer healthcare. We do not say anything about that, deliberately, so that’s an area we certainly had not yet come eye to eye. I should say he’s a great expert on this, and I’m not, so I’m not trying to convince anyone that he’s wrong. I’m just saying that in 30 years of friendship, he has not yet persuaded me on this. I don’t know if we actually differ on the weight that we would put on security versus respect of the policing. I’m not totally sure about that. I’m not sure that he’s onboard for a bit of my gung-ho “let’s permit every new business that we can.” Let me take this — in our work on obesity and our work on opioids, I am still less comfortable with the view that you’re going to have paternalistic policies that really push people to be thinner than they currently are. I am never going to be as comfortable with that, despite the fact that I agree strongly that America and obesity is one of the health problems that made COVID so difficult here. Last question — what will you be doing next?…

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