Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
30 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“You can still have your own bedroom, but you can’t go anywhere else and still get that level of support. And so that’s, I think, another reason why we’re increasingly stuck in place.”
02 / belief
“I think my model of Dharavi is the same model as Jane Jacobs's model of Greenwich Village in 1960, which is this is just a well-functioning community.”
03 / belief
“I think particularly for the young, living life live just beats the alternative.”
04 / belief
“We think that we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars to protect New York and Miami, and that’s going to happen; but the thing I don’t understand and something we really need to need to invest in terms of knowledge creation is what are we going to do with the low-lying cities of the developing world to make them safe.”
05 / belief
“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.”
06 / recommendation
“I think the best strategy would be to create a fairly flexible plan, much like the 1811 grid plan in New York, that allows entrepreneurs to change land use over time and put a few bets on what’s necessary for infrastructure and then just let the city evolve organically.”
07 / evaluation
“I think we’ve been fortunate and that we’ve shown the strength of cities in terms of protecting themselves.”
08 / evaluation
“I think George was imagining a world in which pretty much all value-creating enterprises had a lot of land engaged.”
09 / prediction
“I think the answer is really twofold: one of which is the nature of how housing markets have frozen up.”
10 / prediction
“You’d think that that would have been made unnecessary by all these electronic interactions, but I think what just happened was that these new technologies and globalization created a more interconnected world, a world in which knowledge was more important, and we become smart by interacting with people face-to-face.”
11 / evaluation
“Whereas traditionally, what’s happened in these places that have been around for centuries, is that even if the capital didn’t start off as the largest city, it became the largest city because centuries of French leaders thought their business was to take wealth from elsewhere in France and make Paris great.”
12 / prediction
“” I think we may need to see a bunch of errors in this area before we start getting things right.”
13 / uncertainty
“I just didn’t know if there was some externality in the back of your mind on this that I wasn’t aware of, but given that I’m not hearing any, I don’t know why I should worry about it.”
14 / belief
“I think the optimal work-from-home strategy is a couple of partners who are in an accounting practice and have decided they know each other perfectly well and are delighted to Zoom it in from wherever they are.”
15 / belief
“Remember, I’m an economist, which means that, like you, I believe that the real desiderate is choice.”
16 / belief
“I think that the story in Honduras shows that, that it’s very, very hard for a country to say, “Oh, we’re going to have this different jurisdiction run the city, and it’s going to be much more successful than the rest of the country, and we’re going to think that that’s okay.”
17 / belief
“I would say, actually, there are parts of Glasgow which are definitely underrated, but the physical bones of Glasgow are magnificent.”
18 / belief
“I think, in many cases, that would be a great thing to do, but it’s been very hard to move that politically, partially because of the strong opposition of the teachers’ unions.”
19 / belief
“My view is the resource curse tends to be in the intermediate levels, that once you have just an unbelievable amount of it, it tends to be much less of an actual resource curse.”
20 / belief
“I am never going to be as comfortable with that, despite the fact that I agree strongly that America and obesity is one of the health problems that made COVID so difficult here.”
21 / belief
“The problem is here, we’ve had some starting point, which we think people should have the right to park anywhere they want for no cost or for some severely subsidized amount.”
22 / belief
“Unless they make sure that they’re actually providing decent schools and safe streets, and doing so in a reasonable, cost-effective way, people will just run away. And unlike you, I don’t believe that’s a good thing because I think that when our geographic movements are determined by political dysfunction instead of economic reality, that’s bad.”
23 / belief
“The one failure of Brazil’s cities is that their police have failed, and that’s the one failure that I would say.”
24 / belief
“I agree with you in terms of the cost of American infrastructure. It’s a shocking thing how expensive it is to build.”
25 / belief
“Our view was that, in general, segregation is more harmful the less educated the group is.”
26 / belief
“If you’re telling me that it’s much more expensive to deal with poor people in suburban areas — something which I’m not totally confident that it is, but certainly, I believe that access to public transit is one reason why poor people tend to live in cities, then maybe you want to lean slightly against suburbanization of poverty.”
27 / belief
“Monterrey also has a very empowered university that’s highly competitive as well, that I think partially a force for good.”
28 / commitment
“I am going to be serving as the chair of my department and enjoying all the fun of administrative meetings on end for the next three years.”
29 / prediction
“There’s a great paper by my colleagues, Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi, that shows that after there were pattern-of-practice investigations of police forces that followed a viral incident of a police shooting, that crime rates spiked enormously, apparently, because police stopped going to high-crime areas when they came under investigation.”
30 / uncertainty
“Whether or not that means ubiquitous skyscrapers everywhere or more duplexes, I don’t know.”