🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #7

Building a Silicon Valley city-cryptostate; helping gloomy Gen-Z; Elon Musk and Twitter; 5 Quick Questions for M. Nolan Gray and Alan Cole

Apr 16, 2022

My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. No paywall! Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)

So much Substack goodness this week. Where to begin. I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Thursday (as well as a paywall-free issue on Wednesday). Spectacular stuff. Enjoy the summaries, recaps, as well as the new content!

Melior Mundus

In This Issue

Essay Highlights:
— Two entrepreneurs want to build a futuristic city-cryptostate in Silicon Valley. Here's why the idea isn't totally ridiculous. (April 11, 2022)
— Our culture is creating a generation of doomsters and gloomsters (April 13, 2022)
— Even if Elon Musk can fix Twitter, he shouldn't buy Twitter (April 14, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions:
— M. Nolan Gray, a professional city planner and a housing researcher at UCLA
— Alan Cole, economist and co-author of the Full Stack Economics newsletter
⭐ Bonus: A few more intriguing questions with economist Alan Cole

Best of the Essays

🏙 Two entrepreneurs want to build a futuristic city-cryptostate in Silicon Valley. Here's why the idea isn't totally ridiculous. | Silicon Valley gets compared to Renaissance Florence for its creative dynamism. Florence produced breathtaking art and architecture, however, not deep-learning software and social media platforms. As Gawker described the tech hub back in 2014: “It's Phoenix with milder weather, Orlando minus the mosquitos.” But two entrepreneurs want to change that. There’s an embryonic effort to build a futuristic city-state, to be called Praxis, in Silicon Valley worthy of being described as Florentine. From the Praxis website: “With 2020 technology, we can build a city around shared values with talent and vitality exceeding that of Ancient Athens or Renaissance Florence. … Modular construction. Innovative governance. Decentralized currency.” It’s a long way from a website and a $15 million investment to a Crypto-Florence. But if uberbillionaires can devote their fortunes to giving humanity a permanent and growing presence in space, something like Praxis hardly seems like pure science fiction.

☹ Our culture is creating a generation of doomsters and gloomsters | Do we have an education system supportive of an optimistic, techno-solutionist Up Wing society? Some worrisome public opinion numbers: 68 percent of young Americans agree that the “future is frightening” because of climate change, with 46 percent also agreeing that “humanity is doomed.” Before his death in 1983, Herman Kahn — the Cold War nuclear theorist turned sunny futurist and advocate for supercharged techno-capitalism — was devising an education program that would, in Kahn’s words, address “the imbalance of unrelenting negativism” about the future of the world being taught in public schools with “more accurate and therefore more optimistic data.” Good news: Doing that is so much easier than 40 years ago. I would love to see a class or an entire curriculum infused with the work of Max Roser and the folks at Our World in Data, who create charts like this:

Extreme poverty projection by the world bank to 2030

📱 Even if Elon Musk can fix Twitter, he shouldn't buy Twitter | I don’t want Elon Musk to buy Twitter. But not for the reasons being espoused by many who are against the possible takeover.

Max Boot 🇺🇦 @MaxBoot

I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.

I hope American democracy isn’t so brittle that its continued existence might hinge on who owns a microblogging platform that maybe a quarter of US adults use and has a market cap of less than $50 billion. That said, it would be perfectly fine if some uber-rich businessperson possessing Muskian-level innovativeness got their hands on Twitter to, using Musk’s phrase, “unlock” its potential. But Musk spending his time puzzling over content moderation is time poorly spent. I want Musk building autonomous electric cars and reusable rockets. Helping electrify the American economy and turning humanity into a multi-planetary civilization is how Musk becomes a world-historical figure, not improving social media.

Best of 5 Quick Questions

This viral tweet by M. Nolan Gray, a professional city planner and a housing researcher at UCLA (he also has a book coming out in June, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It), really grabbed my attention:

M. Nolan Gray @mnolangray

There should really be two, maybe three million-plus cities on this stretch of coast. Instead, it's a NIMBY paradise anchored by a city whose tallest building is a parking garage. https://t.co/PHUdbor7x4

And one of the great things about this newsletter is that when I see a smart person saying interesting things, I can do a Q&A with them. My assumption is that you subscribers will be interested, too:

Pethokoukis: Is it possible one day new cities might emerge along that stretch of coast? Paul Romer has talked about charter cities.
Gray: It's hard to say. If there is a solution here, it'll probably be found in Sacramento. It's clear that most local governments in California have no interest whatsoever in allowing the housing that the state so desperately needs. To the extent that Sacramento can set up guardrails around often abused zoning rules — like minimum parking requirements or single-family zoning — or change the financial incentives facing cities, I think it will help. But an incumbent population that's intent on excluding newcomers can be hard to overcome. And that's a shame — California is an unbelievably prosperous and beautiful state. Americans used to come here in droves to claim their little slice of the California dream. Now Americans are moving in the opposite direction, such that for the first time in the state's history, our population is stagnant.

Alan Cole, along with Timothy B. Lee, writes the Full Stack Economics newsletter, which focuses on economics, technology, and public policy. Alan's recent post for Full Stack, “Why America can't build quickly anymore,” caught my eye, so I reached out to him for a 5QQ chat.

Pethokoukis: You point to California and its CEQA as an example of NIMBY-empowering analysis paralysis. Is there a state that does an especially good job at limiting the harms of review processes? What are they doing right?
Cole: State and local governments have latitude on smaller projects, like housing, to make building processes easier or harder. Since there are so many different levels of government, and so many different ways that construction can be restricted, there’s no one way to compare them. But you can look at aggregate numbers and see that states like Texas and Florida have more than pulled their weight on housing.
For bigger projects that trigger NEPA review, there actually aren’t any state-level solutions, even if they wanted them. Consider Vineyard Wind: that’s a project that the state government commissioned. It’s not just that they want to allow it, they actively solicited it. But because there’s a federal permitting process, it’s subject to NEPA lawsuits anyway.

⭐ Bonus: A few more intriguing questions with economist Alan Cole

Has the global pandemic changed your economic thinking in some way?

In terms of the built environment, the advantages of city centers have attenuated relative to suburbs and exurbs. I didn’t really think this was possible before 2020; I assumed we’d be stuck schlepping into city centers forever, with more and more people stuck with California-style 90-minute commutes. Remote work⁠—even partial remote work, even just among a subset of people⁠—has changed the game.

Most people will still want to live in metropolitan areas; you need choice and variety in consumer services, and those are only supported if other people live near you. But the dramatic premium for real estate close to city centers is becoming less dramatic, and as my colleague Tim Lee showed, you can even pick out this effect visually on maps.

Looking back at the 2020s from the year 2030, do you think economic/productivity growth will show a marked acceleration from the 2000s and 2010s, the same, or slower?

I’d bet faster. While I’m pessimistic about our ability to modify the physical world, we’re still free enough to make big advances in things like computing and biology. Growth is a little bit like a punctuated equilibrium; things stay mostly the same for a while, and then you get a key advance and many big applications spring from it.

Computers are getting better and better at understanding (and creating) both speech and pictures. We’re much faster at genome sequencing. I imagine those advances will end up having many applications.

What does an America that "builds" effectively and efficiently look like?

The simplest and most general way to put this: there are things we can do that are beneficial to many people and also costly to a few, but with benefits greatly exceeding the cost. We need to be able to do more of them.

Economists might call these Kaldor-Hicks improvements. There are valid critiques of Kaldor-Hicks, especially at the formal level⁠. Technically, you can’t really quantify benefits in a cardinal way, so it’s hard to prove formally that benefits exceed cost.

But I wouldn’t mistake the world of formal microeconomic proofs for real life. In real life, there are renters desperate for places to live, and busybodies who oppose homes on the grounds that they don’t like the architectural style. We should be able to say which of those concerns is more important, at least for the applied purposes of public policy.

Faster, Please!