| https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/patrick-collison... is a great take on this. From the transcript, and yes, this is a long quote, but I really love Tyler, and what he says always is considered and interesting, and the full quote is deserved: COLLISON: Restrictive urban construction and land use regulations. COWEN: They’re terrible. We should allow much more building. Much more of this country should be like Houston and parts of Texas. But that said, I’ve become a slight contrarian on this lately. I wonder if the Bay Area isn’t the one place in the world where building restrictions might make some sense because most of you want the restrictions. Even if not you in the room, you out there in this area. So removing the restrictions would be a tax. It would be great for the people who moved in. But if you’re all producing these amazing global public goods, and the federal government is going to raise taxes on you anyway, I promise this. I don’t care who wins the next five elections, your taxes are going up. State, city, local, whatever. And then we put this new tax on you and you all are the Atlases out there. I don’t know if loosening building here would tax your productivity or increase it. But I’d at least consider the notion. This is the one place in the world where we shouldn’t loosen building restrictions. COLLISON: Can you apply that argument in reverse? Do you think Silicon Valley would be better off if it had half the population? COWEN: I don’t live here. I don’t know how bad the traffic is, and I suspect the people who are the most productive have workarounds. They can afford to live where they want, for instance. COLLISON: I think a lot of us spend a lot of time in traffic. COWEN: But it seems to me, it’s a pretty finely honed structure. It’s evolved the way it has and to cut it in half or shrink it, it’s probably a big mistake. COLLISON: Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying the tax would be the other people around us? Our personal experiences of the area would somehow be diminished? COWEN: The general culture would change; it would be less intense. It would be like taking Florentine Renaissance and injecting into it 50,000 people from Naples. Nothing against Naples. I love Naples, in fact, more than Florence. But I suspect that would have been a mistake back then. So I worry, if you have too many people move into this uniquely weird, diverse monoculture, you could wreck it. Just a cautionary note, I’m agnostic, but I’ve started having this worry lately. |
I particularly can't get over his outright xenophobia at the end: "Keep the dirty foreigners out, but I still hate Trump!" He can't have it both ways; either live with immigration and learn how to make it work well (which is probably the better idea), or allow everyone else to be raging xenophobes just like he is.