Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Suburbs mostly. I would say that’s the most boring category of American life is my view. Yet you love visiting these vibrant cities of Asia, these ancient museum-like cities of Europe. Things are highly walkable. Very few people have cars there. Nice twisting roads, as well as excellent rail, subway, high-speed rail. Why don’t we live a little bit more nicely like those Europeans as well as the Asians? I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all. If the idea of your country is to have the best suburbs, which is where the people are happiest, European suburbs, they’re pretty ugly. They’re generally okay, but they don’t have the charm of Europe. You go to inner cities of Europe, maybe Copenhagen is an exception, but so many of them are somewhat emptying out. People are living outside of the main central old town or business district, which is becoming increasingly touristic. Suburbs are the future. America just seems like the big winner, and Canada, too. Yes. This is where I believe it was a couple of months ago, where Peter Thiel accused you on your podcast, Tyler, of being a boomer optimist. Let me echo Peter’s wisdom here of accusing you of being a boomer optimist. You grew up in the age of highways. I think among younger people, among all sorts of people now, there is a much better sense that American cities have been deeply broken for a while. They used to be quite walkable places about 100 years ago, before they demolished it, all in favor of highways. Now, I’m not a big fanatic in terms of walkable cities. I’m not a big fanatic in terms of bikeable lanes, but I think there are things that we can do to at least reduce how difficult it is to get around in places like New York City, especially, where going to JFK is an ordeal, and leaving JFK is an even worse idea.…

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