Raghuram Rajan: belief

Transcript context

…If we had stronger local communities, do you think we would have stronger restrictions on building in, say, Manhattan, San Francisco, the American suburbs? I think you have to worry about that. We might, if the local communities’ abilities to enact sort of zoning laws were not tempered in some way by the other two pillars that I talk about in the book, the state and markets. To some extent, we need to keep the borders of the community low and porous while giving the community greater decision-making power. The decision-making power is not about the borders per se, but about how it will encourage economic activity, in some sense attuned to the needs and the capabilities of the community. If I think, say, about China, which has done pretty well in terms of economic growth — didn’t they, in some sense, trash localism? They said, “We’re going to do the state really well. We’re going to do the market somewhat well. We’re not going to try for balance.” United States has a somewhat dysfunctional government, but we have great markets. We’re not trying for balance. Isn’t it better to have a cultural specialization in either state or market than to try to balance all three of the things?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.