Matt Yglesias: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, what views do you have that are inconsistent with a strong belief in increasing returns to scale? It’s a little bit a tension with my personal preferences. People will sometimes say to me, “Well, it’s easy for you to say this stuff. You live in this big city.” Blah, blah, blah. But I happened to have grown up in Manhattan, the densest place in the United States by far. I don’t like it there that much. I’ve moved to a smaller-scale place. I like it better. Anytime I visit a small town, I think, “Eh, I like this.” I’m not personally that into big crowds and huge things like that. I remember I went to Hong Kong one time and I felt like the universe was having revenge on me for having done all these pro-density takes, as I felt incredibly overwhelmed by these huge buildings everywhere. I genuinely do sympathize with the view that there’s something nice about calm and quiet and things like that. Obviously, everybody knows that, but I do think, on an analytical level, that you see tremendous rewards, just big scale things. I was working on this book at an early time, and I was in Midtown Manhattan where even New Yorkers don’t go because it’s so terrible, and it’s full of people — I think full of people who would tell you nobody likes going to Midtown Manhattan, and there must be some reason for that. Now obviously, we’re all doing everything on Zoom right now, and those kinds of effects have gone away. But it’s not like we didn’t have telephones 18 months ago or no ability to do these kinds of things remotely. People were drawn to each other, for whatever reason. Let me put the question another way. In the book, you stress that American growth rates have been declining. You and I agree about that. But if there are increasing returns to scale at the national level, as the US does have more people and more GDP, shouldn’t growth rates be going up? Now, you might think, “Well, there’s increasing returns within a city but not within a country.” But your argument is at the country level, and you even see a lot of cities dissolving or becoming smaller. You mentioned that also. St. Louis and Detroit are the more obvious examples. But the US as a whole — the population has become more dispersed.…

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