Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…And it's important to realize that Moses did try public office once. I think it's true that he lost by more than anybody in the history of New York. He was not an effective public speaker. He was not soft and friendly and warm and cuddly. That's not Robert Moses. The voters rejected him. But the people who had power and also Wall Street, because you had to issue bonds. One of the ways that Moses had power was he created this thing called the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the Triborough Bridge. Now, if in Portland, Oregon, you want to build a bridge or a road, you issue a couple hundred million dollars worth of bonds to the public and assign a value to it. Interest rate is paid off by the revenue that comes in from the bridge or the road or whatever it is. Normally you would build a public works and pay for it itself on a user fees. And when the user fees paid it off, it ended. But what Moses, who was called the best bill drafter in Albany, which was a Moses term, he said he was somewhere down in paragraph 13, Section G, say, “And the chairman can only be removed for cause.” What that meant was when you buy a bond for the Traverse Bridge or something else, you're in a contract, supported by the Supreme Court. This is a financial deal you're making with somebody. And part of the contract was the chairman gets to stay unless he does something wrong. Moses was careful not to do anything wrong. And it also would continue. You would get the bond for the Traverse Bridge, but rather than pay off the Traverse Bridge, he would build another project. It would give him the right to continually build this chain of events. So he had this massive pot of money from all these initially nickels and dimes. He made a lot of money, the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s, to spend more money and build more bridges and build more roads. And that's where he had his power. The Wall Street, the big business loved him because they're issuing the bonds. The unions loved him because they're paying the investors. Now what Caro says is that Moses allowed the investors an extra quarter or half percent on bonds, but they all sold out. So everybody was happy. Was that crooked? It wasn't really illegal. But it's the way people do that today. If you're issuing a bond, you have to figure out what interest am I going to pay on this that will attract investors now. And the crucial thing about these tales of graft is that it never was about Moses trying to get rich. It was always him trying to push through a project. Obviously that can be disturbing, but it is a completely different category of thing, especially when you remember that this was a corrupt time in New York history. It was like after Tammany Hall and so on. So it's completely different from somebody using their projects to get themselves rich. I do want to actually talk in more detail about the impact of these roads. Obviously the current system we have today where we just kind of treat cities as living museums with NIMBYism and historical preservation, that's not optimal. But there are examples, at least of Caro's in that chapter on the one mile, about Moses just throwing out thousands of people carelessly and how he could have diverted the cross Bronx expressway one mile and prevented thousands of people from getting needlessly evicted. I'm just going to list off a few criticisms of his highway building and then you can respond to them in any order you want. One of the main criticisms that Caro makes is that Moses refused to add mass transit to his highways, which would have helped deal with the traffic problem and the car problem and all these other problems at a time when getting the right of way and doing the construction would have been much cheaper. He just refused to do that because of his dislike for mass transit. And also the prolific building of highways contributed to urban sprawl, it contributed to congestion, it contributed to neighborhoods getting torn apart if a highway would cross them. So a whole list of criticisms of these highways. I'll let you take it in any order you want. Well first of all, Moses' response was, I wasn't in charge of subways. So if you think the subways deteriorated or didn't build enough, find out who was in charge of them and blame that person. I was in charge of highways and I built those. So that's the first thing.…

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