Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…—I’d end up buying 100 Mennonite quilts. Obviously, you live in Britain. If you think about the physical environment of Britain, there are so many wonderful towns. Bath is famous. Somewhere like Bradford can be stunning, not every part of it. If I think about more recent neighborhoods, I understand King Charles may be trying, but it’s hard for me to think of a single place in America also that I consider highly attractive in the same way that British-built neighborhoods might have been knockouts, say before World War II, whatever the cutoff date may be. Why has that happened? Why do we not build beautiful neighborhoods anymore? Maybe you challenge the premise, but where is it really? You could say maybe Copenhagen, maybe parts of Helsinki, but the Western world seems to be failing at that. Yes. Generally speaking, we appear to be living through a crisis of confidence in our own ability to make the world a better place. We talk about it a lot. We agonize over things like the environment and issues like that, but there’s very little of that. I made a TV series years ago about the art of Scandinavia. There was that amazing project in Scandinavia where they decided they were just going to build 5 million houses, and they did it. They were beautiful houses. They were made for ordinary people to live in. Even actually in America in the 1950s, there were not dissimilar projects to that, utopian schemes of that kind, which produced very beautiful neighborhoods.…

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