Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedTyler Cowen: belief
3 Dec 2025 Conversations with Tyler Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other
“Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Tyler Cowen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 3 Dec 2025
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine. If we are taking a look at the broader set of suburban living, maybe it is more possible for people to take light rail into the city of Columbus, where they might expect to work. Maybe they should have a little bit better high-speed rail access between not necessarily everywhere, but what we call the Acela corridor from Boston down to DC. Maybe we should have better high-speed rail between the Triangle in Texas, as well as a few select locations. Probably not between San Francisco as well as Los Angeles. I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports. Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher? I believe that it might be higher, but I think that what is much more important is that quality of life will be substantially higher. We’re not going to do all of this better transit stuff, but why not? Why don’t we do it?…
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