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Notes -
Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
Focusing on just the cars & suburbs bit:
This doesn't necessarily mean that suburbs & cars are the best way to do things. First, there may be selection bias -- people who don't want suburbs and cars probably have a higher tendency to stay in the urban environments in their home countries, and not migrate to the US at all. Secondly, we do have somewhat of a subsidy on this kind of lifestyle, with a lot of tax money going to roads rather than public transit, and cars have substantial unpriced externalities, compared to other kinds of transit. So it's not surprising that with the incentives in place, a lot of people will choose this lifestyle. A supermarket with a loss-leader of roast chicken is going to sell a lot of roast chickens.
Cowen says:
Not every European city used to be the way that it is now. Some of them bought part-way into car culture, then changed plans after realizing the enormous cost (Amsterdam, for example). And there are American cities that have made some great changes in this direction too. It doesn't have to happen overnight.
And as for "just get [almost] everyone a car"... There are adolescents, elderly, visually impaired or otherwise disabled people who can't drive, and are often mostly locked out of participation in society if they don't have someone who can drive them around. To be fair, telecommuting has partially alleviated this for some people.
For everyone who can drive, cars are really not cheap to own or run, even discounting all the aforementioned externalities. While Americans tend to have higher income, I think a big part of why life is decent in many European countries for the average person is that you don't have this essentially mandated cost of car ownership.
Well, having just visited Amsterdam, I was super impressed - until I realized that the population of Amsterdam is less than a million people. That's shockingly tiny! I'm not sure that the bike culture scales beyond that.
But overall I agree that IF you pair more mass transit with infill higher-density housing, you can definitely make portions of American cities into European-like ones. And then you can connect higher-density areas with something like, I dunno, BART or something. Critically, you still need to do the infill housing bit to make it work, though.
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