Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…e share, there’s a 30% decline in the number of houses that are permitted. For some reason, it does tend to be these areas that are more populated by progressives that have more of these choke points. Some of this is just historical quirk, but some of it is, I think maybe the character of a certain kind of liberal, maybe often an older liberal, who believes that preserving the physical environment is the good, that the best thing you can do for the planet is to stop things from changing around you, stop things from being built. And that’s an old-fashioned version of environmentalism that we’re trying to turn the liberals against because really, we see the challenge with climate change is not how do we get everybody to stop using electricity? How do we get people to stop using any power or electrons that come from natural gas and oil? We want people to recognize that if the people want to lead modern lives and they’re going to continue to demand modern lives, and so we have to use clean energy technology to allow them to live those lives. That means you have to build an absolute shit ton of new clean energy, solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear, and maybe in the near future, even fusion. It requires an attitude of being excited about building new things, rather than a liberalism that seeks always to block changes to the physical environment around them. So I think that what we’re trying to do is to allow people in a way to meet processes and outcomes. I think liberals want housing abundance in some part of their brains, in some part of their hearts. I think they want the price of housing to go down, but there hasn’t quite been a really clean articulation of a mindset or paradigm-shifting argument that gets them to see how the processes that we’ve created go so dramatically against the outcomes that liberals want. And we’re trying to say, “Here’s a new process. Here’s a new question you can ask yourself. How can we solve the housing problem on the supply side?” And also, solving the housing problem is one of the mechanisms to lift people out of poverty. So there’s a lot of goals that align well with the liberals. You write about cities, “Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” So the housing problem we’re talking about specifically, or most importantly is in urban areas. Yeah. This is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about for the book. There’s a lot of land in the United States, and sometimes you’ll hear people say something like, I’ve heard this a lot, “Well, not everybody can live in San Francisco or Venice and Los Angeles or Manhattan or Brooklyn or whatever.” And fine, right? Not everybody can. That’s true. The problem is that cities are engines of opportunity and economic dynamism. As you know better than we do, the frontier AI labs in the US, basically all of them outside of China exist in 50 square miles in the Bay Area. There’s not one in New York, there’s not one in Dallas, there’s not one in Chicago, there’s not one in Austin. There’s not one anywhere but in the Bay Area, but the key thing is that there is huge spillover from these hyper-dynamic industries, be it finance in New York, be it tech in San Francisco, be it culture in Los Angeles. You make a lot more money being a barber near Google than you do being a barber in rural Arkansas, and this is the ancient pathway to mobility. People who are poor and work in the service sector, they move to richer areas where the productivity is higher, and thus the money spreads around. And if you look at American mobility and opportunity over the 20th century, about a third, roughly on some calculation, just comes from this people moving to richer areas. And if you look in the last 20-ish years, 30-ish years, you see this extremely steady process of income convergence as people move towards richer areas begin to throw itself into reverse because it used to make sense for the janitor and the lawyer to move to New York City, but now it only makes sense for the lawyer to and the janitor leaves because you can’t support yourself and your family and live in a home and have a reasonable commute being a janitor working in Manhattan. Now, obviously some people do it and it’s often very tough and they live very far. It’s very hard in San Francisco. You can’t look at cities as, “Well, that’s just where the rich people are,” and that’s a problem that many Democrats now have. Michael Bloomberg famously described New York City as a luxury good and luxury goods cost luxury prices, and that’s true in the sense that New York became a luxury good, but that’s a problem. That is a terrible problem and an inversion of what the city is. There’s this famous advice, possibly Apocryphally from Horace Greeley who’s a early American newspaper publisher and political candidate, but he says, “Go west, young man, go west.” Right? The opportunity is out in the west where the lands are open. It’s never been true, including for him. That guy moved from a rural area to New York City, and that’s how he became famous, and he ran a newspaper and he ran against Ulysses S Grant in a presidential election.…

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