Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think there’s something here that is almost at a deeper cultural or almost spiritual level. We live in a world full of things that are radically improvable, and yet we’ve learned to live with most of the problems. The one that drives me the craziest is actually traffic. We sit literally more than a working month per year, the average American has been sitting in traffic. We all just accept it. We don’t really build more roads because we give away road access for no variable cost. They’re always flooded. The traffic engineers have this concept they call induced demand, which is basically like if we build more roads, people just drive more, so we guess we shouldn’t build more roads. I think this is ridiculous. The real problem is a lack of a price system. I get flamed on Twitter for this view because I think every road should be a toll road, and then we could actually solve traffic. The meta point is we are surrounded by things that we’ve accepted that could actually be made way better. That’s one of the things I hope that this movement can teach the culture is that we should not be satisfied with where we are today, that virtually everything can be made better, and that we should challenge it. Say for traffic, and I agree with you, but the United States is not Singapore. We have New Jersey. There are all sorts of people who have cars with no electronic transponder or whatever device you want to hook to the car, the car is illegal, the car is not registered, the person is in the country illegally, whatever. You pile on a bunch of things where there’s no accountability for actually getting the toll paid. We just let those people through and tag who it is we can, or how’s it going to work? This seems like a very solvable problem. You can read license plates, you can mail tickets.…

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