Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…No, that’s a good point. I mean, Google’s offices in San Francisco are probably generating more value than you would surmise just from the quantity of land they have there. Do American cities need more great builders like Robert Moses? Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the great biographies of the past 100 years, unquestionably. The only biography that I think is clearly better is Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, right? I mean, it’s Caro is truly amazing. That being said, I would not exactly call it a fair and balanced view of Robert. I mean, it is true that Robert Moses was high handed, and it is true that there are things that he did that were terrible, that you never want to do again. But on the other hand, the man got stuff built. I mean, I think of myself as a child growing up in New York City, and whether or not it was the public pool that I swam in or the parks that I played in, or the roads that I traveled on, they were all delivered by Robert Moses. There’s got to be a middle ground, which is, no, we’re not going to run roughshod over the neighborhood as Robert Moses did, but we’re still going to build stuff. We’re still going to deliver new infrastructure and we’re not going to do it for 10 times more than every other country in the world does it. We’re actually going to have sensible procurement policies that bring in things at a reasonable cost, and I think we need to balance a little bit back towards Robert Moses in order to have slightly more empowered builders who actually are able to deliver American cities the infrastructure they need at an affordable cost. Do we have too much democracy at the local level? You wrote a paper in 2017 titled The Political Economy of Transportation Investments and one of the points you make there is that the local costs are much more salient to people for new construction than the public benefits, and the benefits to newcomers would be. Does that mean we have too much federalism? Should we just have far less power at the city level and not universally? There are lots of good things that local control does.…

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