Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s one of the things I’ve come to have to deal with in my project is, I walk to learn, but some places that’s not actually the right approach. In both cases, the analogy I use — because I walked 15 miles in Beijing and 15 miles in Shanghai — I kept on saying that it felt like I was in one of those cheap cartoons where the background kept repeating. It was frustrating to me in the sense of, I didn’t feel like I got a sense of either place, at least, at the granular level like I usually do when I do what I do. I don’t know if that was intentional, that’s how the cities are designed to be uniform, to remove any differences. I think parts of Beijing are designed to discourage protests and demonstrations, and that correlates with being hard to walk. It doesn’t explain the whole pattern. I was thinking in particular of that approach. I’ve been reading James C. Scott who writes a lot about the idea of regulation as control, or top-down regulation as control. That’s certainly the case in Beijing, where gone are the small winding dens of small neighborhoods because those are hard to control. They’re much easier if you replace them by 50-story towers with a mall next to it.…

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