Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t think there’s anything normative about Zipf’s law. I think, in general, we should fight against the tendency to distribute extra rents to particular localities. That is certainly right. It was almost surely a good thing that Rio stopped being the capital of Brazil about 60 years ago, and that those rents went to Brasilia, which is now, currently, too large, relative to its economic functioning because it’s a political hub. I don’t think that you can leap from saying, “Oh, we want to restrict Washington’s tendency to pour rents on Washington, DC” — you shouldn’t then move from there to saying, “Oh, I’m going to have a national spatial policy. New York, you’re slightly too big. Chicago, you could be 30 percent larger.” How are we going to know this? We don’t have any way, as social scientists, to actually know this exactly, and we should resist any urge to try and micromanage the locations of firms and individuals. If we think of the United States — as you know, in 1910, there’s a high degree of immigrant segregation. People from the same country living next to each other — lower East Side, wherever. That declines throughout most of the 20th century, and now it’s come back. Why is that? Why the change? Immigration has come back . . .…

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