Bryan Caplan on Housing Regulation, Fertility, and Crime

This week on Upstream, I sit down with returning guest Bryan Caplan. Bryan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the recently released graphic novel Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. Please enjoy the episode.

Brian, welcome back to Upstream. It's so great to have you back.

It is fantastic to be back.

So we are here to talk about your graphic novel titled Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. Why this book?

Here's the deal. There's a pile of amazing research on how much harm housing regulation has done to our country and the world. And yet almost no one reads the research because it's too boring. Also, a lot of the papers seem to just be about one picky issue, which makes it even less important and harder to feel like, well, why should I care about it? So what I want to do here is take all of this intrinsically fascinating research and actually make it fascinating for a broad audience. This is the second graphic novel that I've done. I found this is a really nice format. Where you take actual research, distill it down so that it can be understood by a wide range of readers, have endnotes so that your actual hard, serious researchers can verify that what you're saying is accurate, but just give people a fast-paced tour of a lot of knowledge that we've got about what government is doing to mess up the housing market and how we could get great gains just by the obvious switch of turning off what government has turned on.

Now, do you think more people should adopt the graphic novel format?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, there are, of course, there's a lot of people that just have no skill in it. And there are a few other graphic novels in economics, not mentioning any names, where they just didn't really try that hard. They should have tried harder. It is a different grammar. It's a different approach. A lot of it is just trying to come up with good visualizations. There is a big element of start being a fanboy or fangirl. Go and read the great works and steal from the best. That's what I've totally tried to do. I was able to get a great apprenticeship from Zach Wienersmith, who was my first artist. This gave me a lot of knowledge that I had when I was doing my second one with, with a different artist, Adi Bronze, who's drawn this one. So here I was giving him some guidance too, but I mean, you know, like the main issue is if you don't think visually and are not willing to learn, then yeah, it's just gonna be— look terrible. But if you're willing to go and push yourself, do something different, then it's extremely rewarding. I will say that I have zero writer's block working on graphic novels. There's never a point where I'm like, I don't know what to do. Don't know what to say. Writing a regular Universe Express book, I often have that sense of staring at a blank page and it's like, yeah. Sentence came to mind, but it's not a very good sentence.

I don't know.

I'm just— no, it's another bad one.

I don't know.

I'm just going to sit here. Right. But here I'm like, oh no, no, forward momentum the whole time. It's like, what could I do? What images would work? How could I change it? How could I improve it? Move it around. Zoom. Am I saying it right? Is there a better way of saying it? So there's this concept in psychology called flow, and writing graphic novel is flow all the way.

Yeah.

That's well stated.

Now, let's segue to the topic. Now, you're famous for taking a topic that is somewhat controversial at the time, or I would say maybe taking a contrarian view on the topic, right? Whether it's higher education in your book, A Case Against Education, whether it's your most recent book, Don't Be a Feminist, or one of your most recent works, or Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Or the myth of a rational voter. How do you think about this topic as it relates to— because it's not as obviously controversial as some of the other ones?

I mean, it comes down to if there is a view that's popular and really wrong and causing a lot of harm, that's what I want to write on. Right. So, again, like, the very fact that a view is popular means that likely almost all of the other people writing on it will share the popular view. What motivates me is, yeah, this view is really popular, but it's really wrong and really harmful. So I'm going to go and write the book that otherwise probably won't be written by anybody.

Yeah.

I think about myself as being someone who adopts orphan topics. This is when you're right. So there are a bunch of other YIMBY books making somewhat similar arguments. I'll say that I think I'm the only one that really has this giant story about all of the different problems that we can simultaneously make a big dent in with this one policy. Chapter 3 of Build, Baby, Build is called the Panacea Policy. Panacea is a cure-all, a universal remedy. Of course, housing regulation isn't— housing deregulation isn't literally a cure-all, but it is amazing to come up with a list of all of the different social ills where there is solid evidence that housing deregulation would help. I mean, there's the really simple one about how we can get high housing prices down by letting people build more housing. Sure. And then Since housing is a big part of most people's budgets, it means— that also means a big increase in living standards. But then things like housing deregulation will increase equality because housing being a necessity is one where poor people spend a larger share of their budget on it than rich people, so they gain more. Housing deregulation will raise social mobility because in the past it was pretty easy for Americans to just get into their car and move from a low-wage part of the country to a high-wage country and get a better standard of living. Now, that really doesn't work because housing prices eat up more than 100% of the wage gains if you move to a place like the Bay Area. I talk about things like fertility. A big reason why people are not so likely to have kids, start late, is they're living with their parents. One big reason why people live with their parents is housing prices are too high. If you're living with your parents, you're probably not going to get married. And if you do get married, you're probably not going to be having kids under your parents' roof. Make housing cheaper. And I think we really can. And the evidence does say that getting people forming households younger, getting married younger, having kids sooner, which probably means having more kids total. Then I go over a bunch of other ones. So, I mean, probably if all that I had was housing deregulation will make housing prices cheaper, I wouldn't have done it as a book because it would just be too thin. But saying I've got a list of 10 different seemingly unrelated problems and we can go and make a big dent in all of them simultaneously with one policy that I like. Also, like I was saying, so while there is a YIMBY movement, honestly, I think a lot of YIMBYs are still trying to— and by the way, so they're not— I understand why they're doing it, but they're still trying to go and sell things and sell to people without really acknowledging like that how wrong people are. And a lot of what I want to do here is like, people are just really wrong. Like, how are they wrong? Like, it's just like most Americans just deny that you can get housing prices down by letting people build more housing. So people are going to be that crazy, then yeah, it's going to be really hard to sell them on this stuff, right? Or just to go and say, All right.

Yeah.

There's a lot of stuff that where you have historic preservation, it's easy for regular YIMBY to say historic preservation's gone too far. We shouldn't have historic parking lots. And we literally do have historic parking lots actually. Right. But yeah, like I am much more willing to say, yeah, like historic preservation law sounds good, but it's just been a terrible mistake and it would've been better if we just didn't have it. And it doesn't mean that nothing historic would be preserved, but it means that it would have to pass the market test one way or another, or else, yeah. We're going to go and blow up a lot of San Francisco, put skyscrapers there. And that's what should be done. We shouldn't be preserving these small stork houses. We got all we'll ever need by a factor of 20, right? Let's put skyscrapers there, something that actually will serve consumer demand.

And talk about more second-order effects. Like you mentioned fertility, like that's not something someone would obviously connect to housing relations. Like give other examples, right? Okay.

This one is fun. Crime. All right, little-known fact, something like 15% of urban land is vacant. All right, that's weird. And it's totally standard for vacant land to become a den of crime. That's where the gangs go to hang out, in the vacant lot. All right, there was a cool experiment that was done in Philadelphia that made it into the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where they actually got the city of San Francisco— city of not San Francisco, city of Philadelphia— to let them randomly assign half The vacant lots in Philadelphia for beautification. Just go and clean up the trash, put some grass, put some trees, picket fence. And then they went and measured crime in the neighborhoods that had been beautified or around the vacant lots that had been beautified, the ones that hadn't. And they found that they got a noticeable crime reduction. Now, this piece then goes on to say, look, we're not talking about gentrification. We're not talking about building anything. No, no. All we want to do is plant some grass. Don't get mad at us. But I was reading this like, Yeah. If— what if— how about we do let people build things? We do let them gentrify, and that's going to probably do a lot more for crime reduction than just some grass and trees, nice as that is.

All right.

So yeah, this is— and again, this is not just a small point here about allowing building will reduce crime. It really is one based upon, like, a big problem averaging over all urban areas in the US.

All right.

Another one that I talk about is the environment. Californians are probably the worst offenders here. Yeah, that's right. You're in New York right now. You ever lived in California, Erik?

Yes, I know. I'm just visiting New York. I live in California, but feel free to talk shit about California.

Anyway, so economist Ed Glaeser, Matt Kahn, they have this really neat piece where they go and just do the arithmetic of carbon footprints from regulation. And here's the punchline. California, in its immense self-righteousness, makes it really hard to build stuff to protect the environment. And what happens? People move to other states and harm the environment more. And especially if it's for something where the global effect— why does it matter if the harm happens somewhere else if it's more harm? Right? It's just this incredible sense of, well, we're not going to allow that here. It's like, well, then it's going to be worse someplace else. Oh, well, that's not our problem. So that's one thing is, again, what's the issue? The issue is California is this great climate, which means that people don't need to spend much on heating or cooling. And if people can't live cheaply in the state, they will go someplace else which has higher heating and cooling costs, which means they're going to have a higher carbon footprint. They also go over the point of not only are urban areas greener than suburban areas, but on top of that, new construction is greener than old construction. New construction, though bigger, is better insulated and therefore greener. And the net effect is to be— give you a lower carbon footprint. So if you care about that kind of stuff, then you should be totally happy to be getting lots of new construction. That's your story. And again, it seems quite solid, actually.

Yeah. I wanted to return to the crime thing for a second. So, because you mentioned gentrification, how do you respond to the gentrification critiques? Is it that they're wrong or is it that they're right, but we just shouldn't— it's not a concern worth worrying about given the net positive?

Right. So there's a technical word for the intellectually best answer here. It's called filtering. And what filtering says is you've got to look at the whole chain reaction. So if someone goes and tears down some slums and builds luxury apartments, it's true that there's going to be less low-income housing, and then the people that were there before aren't going to be able to afford to live in the nice new stuff. But what's the full chain reaction? Chain reaction is you increase the total number of units, which means that you are going to bring people in from other units. Those that say, you know, who's going to move into the really nice stuff? It's going to be some rich people. Who's going to move into the units they were in? Some people that weren't as rich as those. Who's going to move into those places? People less rich than that, and so on. And it all works out in this big chain. And this is something where you may say, oh, that's just ideology, that's just theory. It's not. You can just go and take a look at when were different kinds of homes built, right? And what you'll see is that where do low-income people generally live? They live in older places, people, places that were built 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. If 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, those places had not been allowed to be built because people were saying, oh, well, that'll just be inhabited by rich people, then where would poor people be living now? It really does come down to that, that it's all connected. A visual analogy that I use in the book is reverse musical chairs, where usual musical chairs, you remove chairs and then it gets harder and harder to get a place. Housing deregulation is about adding chairs. It's still probably going to be that the fastest people are in the nicest chairs or the richest people in the nicest chairs. But when you add chairs, that means that people who are richer are going to go to the nicer chairs, which means that you are freeing up the other chairs ultimately. And the net effect is totally there. You just need to have a little bit of vision to see the full process rather than just focusing on, oh, these are luxury apartments and it's just going to be a bunch of rich people living there. And how does that help poor people? It helps them indirectly, which is a fine way for a person to be helped. There's lots of indirect help that people get, and it's, you just imagine trying to live without it.

Right. But it is also, if we were trying to steelman the opposition, it's like someone who's, you know, whose rent gets raised because rich, you know, rich people are getting, and now they can't afford it anymore. And they themselves don't want to move, right? Yeah.

I mean, of course, if you, if you, if you narrow it down to this one person might actually be a net loser. And that's where the honest thing is, you're right.

Yeah.

You're right. Because all progress hurts people. Like, vaccines are bad for morticians.

Okay?

It's just fact. Internet was terrible for travel agents. And the economists can go and wave their hands and say, oh, well, ultimately, you'll gain. Well, what if I'm like really old and selling my travel agency is my retirement plan? It's like, yeah, sorry, I got nothing for you other than if we let the whole world's progress be held hostage to every— if someone lost out, there would be no progress. So you really just have to go and stop obsessing about are 100% of people going to gain from this? No, never. Forget it. Not doable and not reasonable to care.

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What do you think are the strongest objections that you've come across or that you could make in favor of some regulation beyond what you think is appropriate? Yeah.

I mean, probably the strongest one is just to say, well, why not this little regulation? Why not that little one? You know, why can't we just do one little one? And, you know, so like there's this very cool book called, I think it was just Zoning, written in the '20s by an early zoning advocate. And you read this book and it's like, this guy is totally reasonable. He just has a bunch of complaints about what was going on at the time. And you read it all and it's like, yeah, like what can you even say about it? And it's like, here's what we can say. As soon as we start listening to this guy and making a few reasonable concessions, we start the ball rolling to the disaster we've got. Would have been better just to say, no, tough luck, suck it up. If it's really a problem, we'll just rely upon free markets to solve it as best they can. And if they can't do it, then we'll just live without it. But so even things like, you know, like, you know, just an ordinance saying you can't go and paint your house a colour if 100% of your neighbours hate the colour. Why not that? And it's like, all right, well, I don't have any really great argument for it. It's just like, well, it's property rights, whatever. But it's like, as soon as you go and start with these little exceptions, then they do start expanding. And pretty soon we get to this terrible system that we've got where it's really hard to do much of anything. So, I mean, I think that is just the best point of, I can come up with a long list of totally reasonable regulations, and why are you so stubborn? To refuse to go along with them. And I say, yeah, my best argument, slippery slope. Slippery slope. In terms of more specific points, I'm actually working on a piece right now. I do say that housing deregulation is good for fertility. Honestly, I've got— I tried to find all the papers on housing prices and housing regulation fertility. I was only able to dig up a grand total of 3 from anyone that have even gotten to this issue. They're all on my side, but it's like, all right, well, it's only 3 papers. All right, that's fair enough. I say, again, the best story for why we should believe in this is, I think I already mentioned this, but it's worth repeating. High housing prices make people live with their parents. Living with their parents makes you unlikely to go and get married and even less likely to have kids. So deregulate, make housing affordable, better for family formation. But there are definitely some people saying, well, like, that population density is just really bad for fertility. We're sort of like rats, and if you just put us in a really packed cage, then we don't want to breed anymore.

Right.

This is a story. I mean, and again, like, correlationally, it's like, yeah, like, really dense places, low fertility. But what I say is that is missing this connection between density and price. So, yeah, like, the reason why people are living really densely is normally going to be that it's really expensive. Imagine if we could build so much housing so cheaply that you could have 5,000 square feet in Manhattan. Then should we really expect that people are going to have low fertility in that situation? That at least should we think that wouldn't noticeably improve fertility if people could cheaply get a full floor in a luxury high-rise in Manhattan? I don't have the absolute proof, but that just seems pretty— Crazy to me to think that that wouldn't matter. And yet I think it is an easy thing to believe if you don't think in terms of prices and just say, well, obviously in cities people live in small places. Depends upon the price. Why do you think billionaires, billionaires have plenty of living space in Manhattan? Because they can afford it. What if it were affordable for almost anybody? Right. So that is one big point. You know, I definitely have a lot of friends who are getting very concerned about falling fertility. And I was ahead of the curve. I did my book on natalism back in 2011. So, like, I don't think you can say that I don't care about this issue. But again, I do think that it is totally reasonable and realistic that we can go and make a dent in the problem by getting housing prices down. I'm not saying that's the only issue. Of course it's not. Right. And then the other one, which, like, definitely as an economist is a bit concerning as well. So let's be totally— listen to you, housing prices fall 50%, and then we have a giant mortgage crisis like 2008. 6 on because of result, right? And that's like, hmm, yeah, I haven't done macro or finance in a while. So, hmm, what do I say about that? And my honest answer is the— like, we have— we do have plenty of evidence from economic history. The system is robust to large changes in prices, you know, of collateral, large falls in collateral prices that are stretched out over decades. And that's the way that would work in the best case scenario. It would take decades for to actually go and catch up with all of this pent-up demand that we've been choking off in recent decades. So yeah, so if it happened overnight, then I would say, hmm, I don't want to be associated with a terrible financial crisis. And, and maybe that actually would be enough. But yeah, stretched out over a realistic horizon, I don't think we need to worry about that either.

Yeah, it's, um, on fertility, just while we're on the topic, you know, Robin Hanson has, I believe, been predicting like a dark age that's going to happen because of that. And I talked to Tyler Cowen about it recently, and he, he says he doesn't go as far as to talk about dark age, but he does think there's nothing that can be done that can make a difference in the, in the fertility rate because no policy seems to work and And culturally, it doesn't seem like there's likely to be a movement that will work. And it just seems like there's a direct correlation between, except for Israel, like the more education and the, you know, then the more that women have, the more the rate falls. What are your, are you as hopeless as Robin or Tyler?

So first of all, Robin isn't nearly as hopeless as several of his sentences indicate. I'm, you know, he's my best friend in the world. Like, when he says grinds to a halt, he just means gets a lot slower. And, like, I think both of us would agree that if population halves, then innovation should fall by more than half because you're not just messing up, cutting supply in half, you're also cutting demand a bit. And so that means that it's going to be lower. But I think Robin is allowing hyperbole to— Here's the thing is, I'm the world's only certified Robin human translator, right? Because I understand, I know how humans talk and I know how Robin talks. And I have occasionally actually watched Robin talking to a normal person and I, all right, look, this is what Robin's saying. This is what this person is saying. And let me use the words that will allow each of you to understand each other. But anyway, when Robin says grinds to a halt, he doesn't mean we'll fall to zero.

Yeah.

Now, Tyler, as usual, is either wrong or he's changing the meaning of words in order to say something which might be true, but which is completely misleading. Here's the thing about Tyler is that he doesn't really like the distinction of something could be done but won't because people are stubborn and nothing can be done. He does not like that distinction. And on some philosophical level, he said, well, then nothing can be done. It's like, that's like saying that a vaccine doesn't work because people won't use it. Now, since he's pro-vaccine, he won't say that for vaccines. But for other stuff, he totally says it. And it's just silly and childish and in violation of English and grammar. Like, that's not how it works. There can be something that can be done if tried that will not be tried. And those are 2 separate facts about the world. And it is really important to distinguish them. Actually, my next book of essays is called Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine. How so? It works if tried. If you don't try, if you don't inject the vaccine, it won't work. But that doesn't mean the vaccine doesn't work. It means you don't work. Right. And the same thing goes here. So here's what we can say about actual experimental evidence on using baby bonuses. There are several actual bona fide experiments on fertility incentives, and they totally work in the sense of raising fertility above what it would otherwise be. A lot of people are just very quick to go and dismiss and say, well, Singaporean fertility is falling. They adopted some incentives. it didn't reverse, therefore it didn't— therefore the policy didn't work. We didn't get to see what would have happened if you hadn't had the policy. And the experimental evidence is very good reason to think that it would have been even worse than otherwise would. And once you know that, then it's like, all right, the problem is dosage. We got to ramp up the dosage. So actually, later next week, I just have a very simple proposal for How I think you could possibly get fertility up. And it just comes down to this. Just put a new line in the tax code right before you compute your final liability. You put in your number of kids. 0, then we add 50% to your taxes. 1, same taxes. 2, minus 20%. 3, minus 40%. 4, minus 60%. Or let's say, what did I say? Yeah, let's see, 220, 340, 460, 580, and 6 or more kids, you just pay no taxes for the rest of your life. I think that it is extremely likely this would lead to a very large increase in fertility. Probably part of it actually is that what happens if you have zero kids? Like, plus 50% taxes. That's a lot. All right.

Yeah.

Right. And again, what's the point? Well, part of the point of it is just to fund the other tax cuts. I do actually have a piece where I just say that the measured sensitivity of fertility with respect to financial incentive is so high that actually countries can simultaneously raise fertility and also improve their long-run fiscal situation just by going and giving a big tax break to people every time they have another kid. So, you know, like probably the country in the world right now, which sounds like it has the best fertility policy, is Hungary, where once a woman has 4 kids, she pays no more taxes. However, if you listen to that sentence again, it's like, yeah, well, how many women with 4 kids are even in high-paid jobs? My wife is, and we got 4 kids. So yeah, awesome. Yeah, let's do it.

Right.

But like, obviously the more sensible thing would be to say that it's families with 4 kids so that you actually wind up giving a good incentive to someone that actually is making money. So it matters to them that you are. Going and excusing them from taxes for the rest of their lives.

Yeah, one of our hosts and my friend Samuel Berger, he had this idea of there should be basically a hiring program where in order to get a director level and above at a certain company, you need to have you know two or more kids.

So there's I mean like in terms of the symbolism, you could say that it's great. Obviously, that's such a small number of people that.

Right.

It's just a drop in the bucket. I mean, honestly, you might even say that—

You want smart and ambitious people. You want the most important people in society having kids so that it's aspirational as opposed to welfare queens or something, which is the—

Yeah. Yeah. Like, so I can see that. I mean, again, I think it's probably way more important just to go and focus on just getting average people to have more kids versus getting one to the top. I mean, Like, honestly, like, economically, I can easily see the argument saying, let's have a few thousand people in the country who are married to their jobs and have no lives at all. And we'll pay them piles of money and other people can have the kids. Right. And if you say, no, no, we're losing all these great genes, like, it's a really tiny share of the great genes.

Yeah. Well, it depends how many people they incentivize to have kids. It's like, you know, Elon Musk having 10 kids or whatever he's got, inspiring a bunch of people to have more kids, maybe. You know, if Taylor Swift—

It is conceivable. My guess is probably not. I mean, like Taylor Swift, she might be able to pull it off.

Yeah. Well, now that she's marrying this guy or, you know, maybe that's the next chapter for her.

Is she going to marry him?

I don't know. I'm not close enough into the Taylor lore. I don't know.

The songs make me doubtful.

Yeah, exactly. Are you as well?

He's got a dump song coming his way.

Yeah. Okay.

Breakup song.

Back to, back to housing. Talk about the political economy of housing regulation. How exactly does it work? What are the bottlenecks here? Why is it so complicated? Why is it? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, let's start with what everybody thinks, almost everybody thinks, and then how wrong they are. So what almost everybody thinks, both normal people and economists, is the whole problem is that there's rich homeowners who jealously guard their property values and will vote anyone who favors anything that allows construction out of office. This is basically what economists think, but like normal people who have a little bit of knowledge think this too. Normally it's all driven by the selfishness of homeowners. Right? Sounds like a good story, but it just contradicts multiple glaring facts. All right. So first fact, we got surveys showing that tenants are strongly supportive of housing regulation too. And yet all of their economic self-interest would be against, so it would seem. All right, more generally, we actually have a giant literature on public opinion saying that in general, objective self-interest has barely any effect on political views. What drives political views is half-baked philosophy, right? It's not great philosophy, it's not thoughtful philosophy, but it is philosophical. I've had people tell me with a straight face, oh, but housing's different because it's just so blatant that your home value is really important for your self-interest. Let's see. Is it more blatant than that rich people pay higher tax rates?

No.

And yet income is a terrible predictor of partisanship. Probably now it's actually a negative predictor of partisanship where richer people have become more Democratic than poor people. So if it doesn't actually predict your party affiliation for income tax purposes, then why should we think that it works here? So then what is the right story? What is the right story? So I say that there are 4 stories, each of which fit the facts a lot better than this objective self-interest one.

All right.

So one is the status quo bias. Normal people, psychologically normal people, think the world as is is fine and just assume if you want to change it, you're going to make it worse. The grass is always browner.

All right.

And like, this is a crazy view and yet it's very widely held. Like you say, let's change. Oh no, no, we mustn't do that. And it's like, well, in experiments, usually what you do is you sort of manipulate people and you just tell them either a true or a false story about what's really going on. And whatever's going on, people just gravitate towards don't change it. Another one, which I think is huge, is just fundamental economic illiteracy. There's a really cool study where they just asked Americans what would happen if we allowed a lot more construction. And the rough breakdown is a third say prices would go up. Third say they stay the same, third say they go down. Right? So if you— if people are that economically illiterate, if they just don't admit the basic fact that deregulation will reduce prices, then of course they don't like the idea because that's all the arguments I've made are predicated upon the policy doing that. So if you really didn't think that, it's like, how could you think anything else? Normally it's just like, well, why should that— what, just because we, we're nice and we let the developers build stuff, they'll be nice in return and cut prices? Like, No, that's not the argument. The argument is you let them build stuff, they will need to cut the price to actually sell the units. If you're running a lemonade stand and people aren't buying your lemonade, what do you do? If the amount of lemonade you have to sell doubles, what are you going to do? You got to cut the price to do it. It's not about being a nice guy. It's not about gratitude. Oh, well, you're so nice, you approved my project. So now I'm going to cut the price to show society that I'm equally grateful for the way they treat. It's not that, that's not the story. I mean, it's supply and demand, which isn't about being grateful for getting decent treatment from others, right? And then, you know, combined with this bizarre antipathy for real estate developers, right? People do not hate farmers. If they hear about people growing them bananas, they'll say, God, those goddamn banana makers is trying to go and rip us off. But for housing, they've got this terrible resentment of them. My friend Michael Manville at UCLA had this very cool study where he told people about a hypothetical project and then half of them were told, now suppose the developer would make a lot of money doing this project. And that made support for approval drop by 20 or 30 percentage points. Just the very idea someone's getting rich off of a project is enough to go and turn the public against it.

Right.

So this terrible economic illiteracy. I also say just Sheer innumeracy, right? This is a page in the book, right? So, you know the mathematical operator of approximately equals? You know, it's the little squiggly lines instead of the straight lines of equals, approximately equals, right? So, a trillion minus a billion approximately equals— not exactly, but approximately equals— you know the answer, Erik.

A trillion minus a billion?

A trillion minus a billion approximately equals—

A trillion.

A trillion, yeah. And yet when you go and read arguments about housing, the kind that are actually made in land use meetings, it largely consists in, I got a bunch of really petty small complaints where if you put a price tag on them, there'd be nothing, but I've got— but I'm going to go and harp on them all day long and then we're going to kill a billion-dollar project for this stuff. It's like, you know, There's a bird's nest and the bird's named Harry. And like, we can't go and build the building because Harry wouldn't like it. Right? This is the kind of actual stuff that people have. It'll cast a shadow. Oh no. Like, it'll mess up the skyline. Like, will it? Suppose even if it didn't like the building still, like, this is a very petty complaint. The rest of the skyline's still there. You're very quickly going to get used to it. And yet you're going to use this petty complaint to go and stop progress. That's it. And lastly, to say sheer paranoia, right? Similar to status quo bias, but it adds on the worst will happen. Step 1, imagine the worst possible thing that you— that's like, what's the worst thing you can imagine? Then step 2, assume that will happen unless proven otherwise.

Yeah. Right?

This is how a lot of people are. Say, let's build it. There's going to be terrible traffic. There'll be terrible this, terrible that. Or maybe it'll be 2% worse. How about that? Isn't that the more likely scenario than it's going to be the end of the world? But politics is full of this paranoid hyperbole. And so whether people are even sincere, it's hard for me to get inside their heads when they're flipping out over something. But I tend to think they are sincere, but they're just not very emotionally stable when they're talking.

Yeah.

The— how about let's go a level deeper in terms of like, if someone were to dedicate themselves to actually trying to implement some of this deregulation, you know, how much of it is federal? How much of it is local? Like, what are the actual mechanics of—

Right. Great question. So the regular answer is, so it's most local, then a bit state, and then a little bit federal. But that's complicated by the fact that local governments are actually totally subordinate to state governments. In a way that state governments in the US system are not totally subordinate to the federal government. A state government can sue the federal government and win. On the other hand, a local government, basically their rights against the state government are the ones the state government grants them and they could be revoked. So this is how state governments have been doing things like limiting single-family zoning of local governments. So that's something that could be done. In the book, I do point out that on some level, the federal government actually Does play a big role because it was the Supreme Court that said that zoning is not a taking of private property for public use without just compensation. If local governments had to actually compensate you when they regulated you, there wouldn't be very much regulation because they would just run out of money. They wouldn't have the money to go and make people do what they want. Now, in terms of other rules, so probably the very biggest federal one. So there's environmental review, which matters for some larger projects. There's also some federal guidelines that pressure state and local governments to get community input, right? And one thing that I will say is community input is bad. That's the last thing we ever need because community input does not really mean you talk to normal people in an area. It means that you do a casting call for who wants to show up at a meeting and complain. And the people that want to go to meetings and complain are weird and defective people as a rule.

Right.

Paranoid, neurotic, way too much time on their hands. Like, just non— you know, like, everything— nothing's negotiable with them. So, yeah, like, a really nice example of this is there's a famous fact that something like over half of all the thousands of noise complaints filed against the Reagan Airport in DC were filed by one person.

Right. All right.

I think that gives you an idea of who shows up at land use meetings and so on. That's community input. It's basically just empowering a small number of self-righteous just neurotics to go and act like they speak for society and they do not. Right. And it's better to go and stop listening to them, stop empowering them, just admit that they are not, that they, you know, like these are the opposite of people that we should be listening to in the world. Right. They, they are the expression of our worst impulses, our worst personality types. No offense. If you go to meetings, you're probably, you no doubt you're the exception if you're listening, but all those other people there with you at the meetings. Good grief! Oy vey! Right, and then the last one, which is really cool, and I actually forgot to put it in the book to my shame, is that there is a crazy amount of land owned by the U.S. federal government that could be privatized very easily. State governments too often own quite a bit of land. When you look, you just take a look at a map. Something like 90% of Nevada is federal land. Right? When you drive through this federal land, it's really tempting to say, well. No private organization would even want to own this land. What's it good for? It's just a stupid desert. But if you look closer at the map, you'll realize that there is a lot of super low-quality land that is privately owned. And it comes down to, was the land actually turned over to the private sector, or was the discussion about what to do with the land held before or after the conservation movement got powerful? Before or after Teddy Roosevelt started getting on his stump talking about saving the Grand Canyon. So essentially, the East Coast plus Texas is almost totally privately owned. And then as soon as you get west of that, then it's often high levels and often a high majority owned by the federal government. And here is my point about low-quality land and private ownership. Take a look at Texas. There's almost no federal land in Texas. If you drive through West Texas, it is the most desolate, seemingly worthless land you could ever see. And yet some private owner wants it. They may just be sitting on it and waiting for better times. They may be going and using it for shooting ranges or for oil drilling. You just don't know what could be done with it or resource it, any kind of resource extraction. So yeah, if we could just go and do mass privatization of this federal land, That would be an amazing transformation. And by the way, if you're into charter cities, this would be a great chance to get charter cities happening right here in the US. I'm going to buy up 100 square miles of federal land and put a city there, see what happens.

Yeah. But on the charter city stuff, and this goes to my question around like, well, let's go back to the housing thing. Like, so let's say, okay, we were dedicated to making, to implementing some of the things that you recommend in the book. What do you think is the highest leverage point? Because you could, you should try to, you know, petition on a federal level for that thing that you just mentioned. We could try to educate people. We could try to create a charter city where we do it differently. What do you think is the highest leverage intervention? Yeah.

My current thinking, heavily influenced by what we've seen in the last 5 years, is that in a federalist system like the US, The ability of very determined, charismatic state-level people to just push something through that seemed hard to do is just higher than I would've realized anyway. You know, the way that DeSantis just got rid of almost all COVID restrictions in just a couple of months, despite the fact that he had a really close election, and he just did it and he got away with it, right? And, you know, reopening schools, or of course it could be done for bad too. You could go and keep schools closed for years.

Yeah.

It turns out that there's just a lot of policies where state governments, if they are determined to do them, can do them. And voter preferences are sufficiently flexible on a lot of things where you can just go and say, this is a great idea, I'm doing it, it's happened. And then people will generally just go along with it. Maybe it'll blow up in your face. Maybe it would've been better for DeSantis if he had been more cautious, but he totally got away with it. So I would think just try going to the top and just saying, look, I've got a very specific, great idea. and try to sell the people at the very top on the idea in states where they are inclined to do it anyway. Right. In the case of housing deregulation, there is this amazing YIMBY movement, which is generally pretty left-wing, except they're very pro-housing deregulation. And they have managed to go and convince a number of quite left-wing state governments in like California, Oregon, Minnesota to go and implement their ideas. There's, you know, even after that deregulation, those states are still way worse than Texas because they just, those states just start off in a much worse position. But yeah, in terms of getting stuff done, I think actually getting in good with sympathetic top legislators and then just steamrolling through, right, is the best bet for big change.

Yes.

And that combined, and never feel bad about working with this noble industry that puts roofs over our heads. So if someone says I'm bought and paid for by the construction industry, my honest answer is not yet. But if any of you guys are listening, I'm your man. And why? Because I sincerely believe you are awesome and that you do great stuff and that you are a victim of ridiculous libel and slander. And I'm like, I'm with you guys. You guys are heroes. Let's do it. Like, I want, you know, like, the more the better. And if you want to give me money, great. I'll take your money. Like, your money's good money as far as I'm concerned. I'm not getting any money from them so far, but yeah, no shame in that. Like, why would you be ashamed to take money from good people who you independently agree with?

Yeah.

The idea that I wouldn't think the stuff on my own is like, so Childish, but, you know, I, you know, like Gary Hart in 1984, I invite my critics to follow me around and see whether I'm getting paid off by the construction industry. I wish.

That's pretty funny. Yeah, it is interesting. Joe Lonsdale is another person who came on the podcast and he talked about, he has a policy, he's an entrepreneur, he's got a policy sort of think tank, and he, in the beginning, was trying to do more federal stuff, but realized that local is a lot easier to just make things happen. And he hopes to kind of make examples of some template policy that other local governments can copy.

Right. I mean, that's specifically— I said state because major cities are— let me put it this way. So virtually all large cities in America are blue cities. That's just a fact. So I had a friend in Austin who said it was great to live in a blue city in a red state. And like, well, we don't really know what a red city would look like because there are no red cities. Like Amarillo is, I think, the highest population red city. But all right. Anyway, so if it's something that you think you could actually sell to local, you know, to local Democratic governments, great, good for you. But there are a lot more red states than there are red cities. So, and it's also one where you just get a lot more action. At the same time, most people find state government as boring, maybe even more boring than local government. So, I would think that probably is one of the best choke points. Although I would add, look, everybody's got a comparative advantage here. Everybody's got a place where their efforts are most likely to pay off. Like, I'll just say, like, I don't see that I have demonstrated any ability to persuade Democrats of anything. Someone else should do it. Hopefully read my book and then, you know, a way to say it that Democrats will listen to you. All right. So, like, honestly, I'm happy to talk to anybody. I'm not mad at anybody. I don't have grudges against anybody, but I just take a look and I say, look, I've got a lot of left-wing friends, but there's never been a left-wing organization that's ever platformed me. And I think that's telling. It's like, there may be an individual who says, yeah, Bryan's an okay guy. You know, he does good stuff. Don't agree with everything, but no left-wing organization is going to say, oh yeah, like, he's a really interesting guy. Let's give him a chance. Like, no.

Why do you think that is?

Yeah, he isn't a, like, to be associated with it, with him, would be an embarrassment, or at least it's high— likely enough to cause some disquiet among our friends that it's easier just to go and keep him at arm's length. Like, on the other hand, I think I'm better at talking with almost everybody else. So there's that. And, and I mean, I will say that since these books are graphic novels, I am consciously going out of my way to address not just research professors. I hope that they will like the book. Some of them have. You can read them, their names on the back cover. But, and not just graduate students, not just undergraduates, not just thoughtful adults, but I am really trying to go all the way down to even precocious kindergartners, right? And like, they can read, they can go and like, they're not going to understand everything, but just to get these ideas down to kids at the youngest level. Oh my God. I think I've got that. Like, I will just say, you know, my comparative advantage, I'm good at talking to kids. Honestly, I actually like kids. Like, random kid, I get along better than a random adult because I'm immature. So, like, dinner party, if they say it's a dinner party, like, oh, dinner party. But it's like, it's a kid's birthday party. All right. I feel like I fit in there.

That's awesome.

Cake!

There's cake! There's piñatas! There's a piñata!

Let's trade the piñata!

You're like the adults bashing the piñata before the kids. Yeah. Why do you think, or has it always been that way, that it's been tough to talk to Democrats or they would wanna apply, or is it, was it after you adopted certain views? Because it does seem that if, if they haven't adopted you, it feels like they've adopted some libertarian ideas. At least it feels like the Ezra Kleins, the Noah Smiths, mm-hmm, they are become, you know, this sort of, what do you call it? Supply-side liberalism, everything bagel. Yeah. Like they're trying to be, you know, It's just less regulation, even from the left. It was interesting.

Yeah. So there were a few great left-wing individuals, almost all with a strong economics background. But they are, I mean, honestly, I think they themselves will say they were so out of step with the actual mainstream progressive left that, and again, like, I think it is telling that how many young such people are there? I think that most of the reasonable economically literate left-wing voices Got their status 10 to 30 years ago, and then they are riding on that on that legacy. But to become a hot, young, economically literate leftist who's like 20, I don't know. Maybe they exist, and I'm just overlooking them. But I just think it's really hard. Like there's a pipeline problem. If you are going to be a big, young leftist now, it's it's generally going to be part of like. general opposition to economic thinking in general. And, you know, just part of this terrible resurrection of socialism that's been happening over the last 15 years. Yeah, totally. This monstrous recanonization of a system without any reference to the fact that it actually ran many countries for many years. The times that I've debated socialists who, it's not even like, It's not even like they say, okay, well, Soviet Union wasn't real socialism. That's an improvement over we need to try socialism. It's like, you know, it was tried, at least under that name. Like, do you know anything about it? And it's like, yeah, like often they just, it's like, well, if I studied it, then I'd have to actually respond to this stuff. So I'm just going to pretend like it never happened. What a terrible attitude.

Yeah. The, and so what about the other part of the question? When, when exactly did you become not persona non grata, but Like, was there, was it always that way or was there a certain—

Yeah, so it's definitely gotten a lot worse. Let's see. I mean, like, you know, I'd say I personally, like, have always been a controversial figure insofar as I'm known at all. I mean, I will just say that the world treats me really well. And, like, you know, I know a lot of professors just say the media was bad to them. And I'm like, that's funny. They've always been great to me. I mean, some of it's obviously self-selection. It tends to be more sympathetic members of the media that would contact me. But even when I get someone who politically probably really disagrees, probably part of what's going on is that they don't need to twist anything that I say to get something controversial out of me because I'm just honest and direct, candid with them. So, you know, like, they don't need to go and pull a sentence out of context. Like, my actual position is one that's horrifying to most people. So they can just repeat what I said without editing, and it gets the jump from the readers that they are going for. I mean, I mean, obviously, like, especially I think journalists often are just so bored hearing the same thing over and over again that even if they don't agree with what you're saying, they're like, oh, wow, never heard that before. Really going to say that?

All right.

I can run that.

Yeah.

But yeah, like, I think that like the quality of— so I would say that the quality, my view is like the quality of political and economic thought in the US and the world peaked a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Probably like 1992, I would say, is like the peak in quality of political and economic thought. And then things have just been getting worse since then. To agree that, like, I will say I am surprised. I thought, you know, like, I figured that socialism was dead forever and that people might argue about more or less government, but talk about socialism would just be forever, not at least beyond the pale for my lifetime anyway.

Yeah.

You know, now I realize that these, the ideas of socialism are ones that have perennial appeal, especially if you don't know any facts. You just say the same slogans again and read the same seminal texts. And then it's like, why couldn't we do this? So it does have the same kind of appeal as the traditional religions where a new generation can reread the ancient books, knowing nothing about what was actually done with the ideas in the intervening thousands of years. And to say, oh, it's so wonderful, we've got to do this. And it's like, well, you know what happened when Catholicism actually was the ruling philosophy of Europe? It's like, look, we got to read the book and the book's saying, all right.

Do you see things getting continuously worse? Do you see them getting less worse? Or what is the trend line?

Yeah, very good question. So Tyler Cowen loves to say woke has peaked. And when I said, So it's peaked over what timeframe? A month, a year, 10 years, 100 years, a million years? And he's like, yeah, like 5 to 10 years. All right. Well, it's a lot less dramatic to say that something has peaked over the next 5 to 10 years than to say it's peaked, which makes it sound like it goes down forever from now on. I mean, what I would say is, you know, woke peaked a month after George Floyd was murdered.

Yeah.

All right. And then it went down. Because it went up to a level that I was completely astounded by when every day on the news was just how terrible the United States, how terribly the United States treats people who are Black. And like every day, and it's like, you know, Aunt Jemima's going off the shelves.

Like, what?

Aunt Jemima? Like, but every day, just like this fire hose of things. Like, we now understand how evil we've always been because we had a kind of syrup shaped like this lovely old woman. Like, don't worry, we apologize. All right. So, and then, like, as usual, like, it's just like, you can't run a society on absolute hysteria for very long because people just run out of steam. Even the fanatics get tired. So it does go down, but that's one where you're zooming in and saying, okay, it peaked in that month and then started going down. But that doesn't mean the long-run trend is actually down, which— I mean, just the basic demographic argument of the non-woke people are old and dying off. Basically, the least woke population segment is old, real old, like 70, 80, 90-year-olds. They're the least woke and they're dying at really high rates. And on the other hand, the most woke generation is barely dying at all. So they're coming into their own. So yeah, I mean, I would say that things are probably going to get worse over the next few decades? The optimists will say, no, they'll age out of it. It's generally not what we know about political philosophy. It's barely affected by facts or events or anything else. It's more of whatever views you form when you're between 15 and 25. Those are your views for the rest of your life. With certain very rare exceptions, some totally shocking, devastating event like defeat in World War II, might finally shut up your warmongers, for example. Right. And of course, you kill off a lot of the warmongers in that process, but the surviving ones, for quite a while, they stop going on the street corner and saying, our country is the greatest military power in the world. We can destroy any enemy just by blinking our eyes. Right. So that's the kind of, you know, it doesn't mean they're not thinking it at least. But yeah, like. It takes that level of abject crushing humiliation to really have much of a, much a chance of really changing the mind of a generation politically. But circling back to why a graphic novel, yeah, I'm trying to get them while they're young. I'm trying to get young people to go and read this and just say, Right. Look, this is one area where government is totally the problem. And you don't need to agree with a big philosophy to say that we need to deregulate housing to go and get these huge social gains.

Yeah, it is really interesting. It's interesting to think about what this, their kids will be. Will their kids be even more left-wing than them or will they be more right-wing as a counterbalance? Like, is it a ping pong or counterbalance or does it just keep ratcheting left?

Right. Yeah, that is a great question. There's a book called Generations, which is part of a bunch of books written by the same author, Strauss and Howe. They do push the cyclical theory of history. But ultimately, I think that they are basically wrong and that there is just a long-run tendency towards the things that we think of as the modern views. And then it just comes down to this old Herb Stein line of whatever can't go on forever won't go on forever.

Right.

It's like, well, look, we've been moving towards a higher and higher non-straight share of the population for 80 years. All right, well, it can't go over— the non-straight share can never exceed 100. So eventually it will asymptote, like maybe at 100, probably quite a bit less than that. And then there are basic evolutionary arguments of, well, every demographic with low fertility is having their genes disappear from the gene pool at a quite rapid rate. We've got good evidence that completed fertility has a strong genetic component. So yeah, like, that's another reason why I'm not worried about Robin's thing is I, like, life finds a way. Evolution will save us. We're right now in the midst of a giant die-off of all of the anti-child genes. And I don't think that can go on for more than a couple of generations before we have just the people that are left just have different attitudes. I mean, right now, like, it's very common. Oh, kids. Oh, God. All right. Well, that's the way you think. Then you're in a society where you're probably not going to have any kids, and then your genes won't happen. And you know whose genes will replace you? People who have the reaction of, oh, little wonders. That's so great. I love them so much. Right? So, yeah.

Yeah.

I got 4 kids. That's my reaction to kids. Really is. It's not an affectation. Like I said, like, you know, and I mean, I like babies. Like a lot of guys, I like kids, but not babies. Like babies are just little lumps. I say they're very lovable. And, you know, like just put them in a shopping cart and have a conversation, a one-sided conversation with them. That's really fun for me. I always enjoyed doing that with my kids. Just an excuse to talk to yourself in public and people don't act like you're crazy. So I do like that.

Yeah.

So wokeness, similarly, it can't keep increasing forever. That's clear. But still, like, to say that we've turned the corner just this week seems pretty crazy and is usually based upon one stupid story that doesn't mean a damn thing.

Going back, I want to go back to something we talked about earlier in this conversation before then you go, which is crime. Are you a, like Richard Hanania, who you agree and disagree with many things, of course, he's a Bukele maximist, not to put words in his mouth, but basically believes being tough on crime will reduces crime. Like, if you wrote a book on crime, what do you think your conclusion might be?

Yeah, look, factually, I think that's true. So when someone says that punishment doesn't deter crime, I've always thought that was crazy. Right. It's a question of how much punishment would it take? How much punishment would it take? Again, a lot of this goes back to that argument I was talking about with Tyler, where he likes to go and equivocate between Would not work even if tried and won't be tried, though it would work if tried. And in both cases, they'll say, can't be done. And I say, look, that is not grammatically correct. There is a logical distinction. There are things that aren't done, but if they were done, they would work. There's other things where if they were done, they wouldn't work. And I'd like to know the difference. I've long been of the view that you could get crime down enormously with sufficiently harsh punishments. Right. And this is like, and like, which includes things that I think should be legal. I think that you could go and get drug use and drugs and drugs selling way down with really harsh punishments. I don't, I favor legalization, but that doesn't mean that it is factually incorrect to say that it could be stopped. When someone says the drug war has failed, my reaction is, well, compared to what? Like, has the war on murder failed because we still have murder? Well, you don't know what drug use would be like if you just got rid of the laws. So that's an interesting question and we should think about it. And not just make these ridiculous arguments that don't really make a whole lot of sense. So yeah, so I think that it's very likely with sufficiently harsh punishments you get crime down enormously. Bukele did actually exceed what I thought was doable, and that's really impressive. There's just the moral question about whether it's justified, which I say it depends upon how many false positives you're getting. Right. So, which you say, well, like, is that just utilitarianism? It's not just utilitarianism. It's any view other than you have to have 100% certainty to punish someone, which again, I think is a crazy view because 100% certainty is really hard. So like, if you're willing to say, or it's fine to convict someone beyond reasonable doubt, all right, well, so what probability does that translate to? It's like 95%. Okay, well, all right, show me the guy that Bukele locked up. Based upon his tattoos, can we be 95% confident that he actually is a violent criminal? I don't know, actually. I suspect probably, but I don't know. I'd say that's the morally relevant question, is like, how many false positives are you getting? How many just innocent tattoo fans are being imprisoned without trial for life versus the number of people who are actual violent criminals?

Right.

And anyway, I don't believe— so I don't believe in any special right to a trial. Say, look, like, the point of a trial is to establish something with a certain degree of certainty. If you already have that level of certainty without a trial, then the trial does not really serve any purpose other than perhaps preventing a slippery slope where they start, you know, where eventually they start arresting lots of innocent people. That is my other concern. Will Bukele eventually start jailing a lot of innocent people? I mean, so far so good from what I've heard, but he's a really young guy. And yeah, I am mindful of that. But again, what I will say is I can totally understand why people in El Salvador are happy with this. And he's delivered a really big improvement in their quality of life so far. Right. And you can sit there and huff and puff and say that I'm an apologist for tyranny or whatever. But it's like, look, did you listen to anything of what I just said?

I didn't.

I didn't say I agreed. I said, first of all, that we have now clear evidence that it works. They have tried. Also, Tyler's wrong to say that it will never be done because somebody did it. So one guy did it. That's greater than zero times it was done. So stop saying this stuff, Tyler.

No, I hear you there. So we're at time. I want to be mindful. So let's get you out of here. The book is Build, Baby, Build. Highly recommend it. Can you leave us with a teaser at another topic you might write a book about that people are That's popular that people are wrong about?

Yeah, absolutely. So right now I'm about 2/3 done with a new University Press book, not a graphic novel, and it's called Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets. A simple slogan for the book: free markets do the good things that sound bad. Government does the bad things that sound good. All right. It begins with a greatly undervalued yet well-established idea in psychology, which is called social desirability bias. Social desirability bias says that when the truth is ugly, people lie. And often the lies get so ubiquitous that we stop being conscious of our dishonesty. All right. So for example, am I fat? There's only one socially acceptable answer to that. It was like, you're beautiful, Brian. You're just the way you are. But obviously some people are fat, some children are stupid, et cetera. Right? I mean, and what I, and like what I say there is that social desirability bias It is so embedded in our life and our thought that you really have to pay attention to realize how ubiquitous it is. Social desirability bias appears not just in things like how often you go to church, where we have great evidence that church attendance is way lower than reported church attendance. Actual voting is considerably lower than reported voting, right? But also things as mundane as Oh, want to come to my party on Friday? Oh, I'm sorry, I can't. What do you mean you can't? Will you be chained to a wall? Like, why can't you? It's like, okay, well, I don't want to because I have something better to do. That's the truth. All right. So I start with that and I say that once you really take social desirability bias seriously, you realize that a lot of what markets do is good things that sound bad. Good things like just minimizing costs. You're never going to see a protest, yay, cost minimisation. Even most economists just sort of take it for granted. And yet a big part of what people complain about is markets is precisely that they'll fire people that don't serve a purpose in their business anymore. Like, don't fire them just because they serve no useful purpose. And if you imagine a society based on this principle of no one ever gets fired, no matter how useless they are, it's a terrible world to live in. It's just one that sounds really good. And then your flip side, what does government do? Government does stuff that is ridiculous when you think about it, but it sounds wonderful. So, yeah, stuff like, if we're going to displace a bird, we stop a skyscraper. Like, I believe that this glorious bird is of more importance than all the skyscrapers in the world. Come on. It's just one stupid bird. If he just— if a rock fell on him and killed him, you wouldn't even have missed him. He's not more important than a skyscraper that provides great benefits to hundreds of thousands of people. This is just some poetry which is leading us to make the quality of life a lot lower for human beings than it otherwise could be.

Right?

And then a deeper theme is that once you really appreciate this, you realize this is why there is such a built-in tendency to underestimate markets and overestimate government, because the intellectually sound arguments For markets make you seem like a jerk saying them. And the intellectually— or intellectually sound arguments against government also make you sound like a jerk. Right? People don't want to sound like a jerk. So the truth remains unsaid. And then we have a polity based upon pretty lies. So that is the story that I'm pushing. Real happy with how it's turning out. So I hope other people do agree. But for now, you can read Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. I do talk quite a bit about housing regulation in the book that is being written because I think it is a prime example of policies that cause immense destruction to popular acclaim. Yay, we shouldn't go and spoil one single square foot of Alaska just to go and get trillions of dollars of oil. Yeah, you're not going to miss that square foot.

Yeah, well, someone has to do the dirty work of being a jerk, so to speak.

And I mean, so, you know, a lot of what I try to do in the book is to deflect or defuse the situation with humor. And, you know, that's what comedians do. Most comedians also say tons of ugly truths, but people like them because they're funny.

Yes.

So I'm trying to be funny and totally honest at the same time and see if I can get away with it.

Excellent. Well, you had a stand-up special that's on YouTube. That's true. And it's quite good. So thank you.

Well, the main thing I'll say is I shared the stage with 8 professional comedians. I was not obviously the worst one.

Yes.

So, and I got to start at the top. I got to start at the Comedy Cellar in New York City just through personal connections. That was fantastic.

Yeah, that's awesome. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you.

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