Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think about the geographic distribution of US cities? As you know, for a country of our size, our biggest cities are not actually that big. We have a Nashville, and we have an Austin, and now there’s a Chattanooga. Are the gains from that potentially high enough that it’s okay to thwart more activity in or near New York City, in or near the Bay Area? The geographic diversification of American intellectual and business life seems quite important to me. I agree it seems important. It does not seem to me that our policy to force that into happening is all that good. I don’t really know why. I think I probably am a little more skeptical than you on how well that dispersion is working. I think it is remarkable that New York does not have one significant AI company. Just remarkable. It doesn’t even really have one significant tech company. The power of these agglomerations is so overwhelming and so sticky that I think you want to be very skeptical of the idea that if you begin to gate one of them, you will have constructive and productive spillover to some other nearby secondary city. I love the secondary cities, but I don’t think that’s how you improve them. What if we think about our top three universities? Say, Harvard, MIT, Stanford — they’re incredibly gated. They take very small numbers of people. They generate ideas at a world-beating pace. Nowhere in the world comes close to them. Doesn’t that mean if you have good selection, the price is super high, gating can be just fine, and people are free to go to plenty of other schools?…

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