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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they
are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing
costs in Tokyo are actually not that high, and people are pretty liberal
about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost
like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like
rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood.
00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins.
I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest
Devon Zugal, hey. And Devin, not too long ago, I would have said, of
GitHub, but I believe as of a few months ago, you are now a free agent.
00:00:54 - Speaker 1: It’s been great. I left GitHub about 2 months
ago, and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco,
and so I’ve been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number
of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like
housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that’s what I
do in my free time is learn about cities. So it’s been really fun to
00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the
first thing they think of is speaking with members from government
agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works.
So it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And can you tell us what your
background is, how you came to GitHub, what came before that, and what
00:01:39 - Speaker 1: For sure. My background is computer science, which
is probably not a big surprise.
I studied that in school and then I worked as a software engineer at a
number of San Francisco startups.
And then most recently, I was a product manager at GitHub for the last
2.5+ years. I was leading the communities department where we built
tools for open source. Communities.
And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and
economics, because they’re both about sort of what can you do to create
an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it
all in advance? How do you create those building blocks so people can
live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things
that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so
that they can put those plans together themselves.
00:02:28 - Speaker 2: It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between
communities of different types, which includes open source, and then
cities as well, which is you can’t really do a top down thing.
I’m sure we’ll get into that a bit here, but unlike, for example, me,
my experience in designing products or building software products is
often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make, and you
make that thing, and it may or may not work out the way you want it in
practice and you need to iterate on it and you need to get. Back, but
it’s a very highly controlled experience, whereas something like a
community can only be grown. It’s incredibly organic and I think at
best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because
that’s why we get some communities that thrive and others that don’t,
but it’s just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I’m used
00:03:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I moved over to product management from
software because I really enjoy what I call social technology.
I think that that’s really a sweet spot for me where it’s thinking
about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior
that’s healthy, but also without mandating it, like, sort of more of a
carrot than a stick perhaps, I’m not sure if even that’s like the
right metaphor, but I think that cities are a really interesting lens to
look at certain types of software because things like social networks,
which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and
certainly Twitter’s Facebook’s Instagrams of the world, they really
are communities of people where you as the designer or the software
engineer or whoever’s building it.
Don’t really control what ends up actually on the screen completely, so
you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide? What
does the design language say about what you’re supposed to do here?
Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you
walk into a really quiet classy restaurant with like piano playing in
Everything about the space is telling you like, don’t start yelling and
like dancing and screaming and whatever. Like this is a place where
you’re gonna have like a nice steak, you’re gonna sit down, you’re
gonna listen to classical music, but then if you walk into, you know, a
Miami club, it’s a very different vibe and it says like, you’re here
to kind of go wild and have fun.
So I think that cities do the same of like, how does this Encourage you
to live your life and different cities do that very differently. And I
would love for more software teams who are building places for people to
congregate online to think about it in those terms because I think it’s
been a little bit lacking in the past, and I think it can lead to
problems for both the creators and the people who are trying to
00:05:12 - Speaker 2: I think that pretty naturally points to our topic
today, which is Order without Design, which in fact is a book about
urban economics and urban planning, and you didn’t write the book, but
you do have a podcast by the very same name in which you interview the
author of the book. Certainly this is not necessarily about the book
itself, although I think there’s lots to discuss there, but also about
this larger question of exactly what you said, how do cities become the
way that they are? Each city has its own different character, and some
of that evolved organically, but some of it was active choices made by
people governing and living in those cities, and this is a topic that
Mark and I talked about more in the, let’s call it the user perspective
in a Previous episode, I’ll link in the show notes where we talked
about our respective decisions to depart San Francisco and why he landed
in Seattle and I landed in Berlin, and when you’re in the position of
working on an all remote team or a distributed team, and you can
basically choose to live anywhere where you have the ability to think in
terms of not just I’m going to the city because my employer, my school
is there, but you’re thinking, what are the qualities of the city that
I like, what would make it a good Place to live that would be creatively
inspiring for me at least, that was the experience that got me
interested in urban design as a topic, which is seeing the unique
character of Berlin and what it was that spoke to me, spoke to my soul
about that and then thinking, OK, well, how did it get to be that way?
What were the series of decisions and who are the people, and I know how
digital products come to be, but how does the city come to be? So maybe
you can illuminate that for us a little bit.
00:06:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite books, and I
read it several years ago when it first came out, and instantly just had
to become friends with the author.
His name is Alan Berto. And he and his wife Marie Agnes, they’re in, I
believe their 80s now, and they’ve spent their life living in a bunch
of different cities around the world, creating their master plans.
They worked for the World Bank for sanitation systems, transportation
They’ve been in places really far flung, such like all over the world,
really. They’ve lived in Bangkok, they lived in Sana’a. Yemen,
they’ve lived in New York City. I’m missing another dozen or so places
Some of these cities I hadn’t even heard of, to be honest. And so
they’ve seen cities from a lot of different dimensions.
They’ve experienced lots of different types of people who have
different goals for their cities, and they’ve done their best to shape
their work to fit those goals of the residents of those different
They’ve been in Port au Prince, Haiti, where they have a lot of really
interesting stories. And what you’re talking about here about remote
work and how the way we think about cities differently now that more and
more people are working remotely, really an interesting lens to think
about this book, because one of Alan Berto’s main points is that
historically, cities have been labor markets. That’s what brings them
together. It’s what sort of is the sinew that holds it all together.
And what he means by cities are labor markets is that people come to
cities to find opportunities to make their life better. And certainly
they come for a lot of other reasons too, but finding work and finding a
way to pay for their life and to better their life is one of the biggest
00:08:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, at least the way I understood that argument
of his was being a labor market is the root of everything else. If you
don’t have that, the rest of it won’t come. The population density now
leads into culture and, you know, art museums and Interesting cultural
scenes emerging, but all of those are secondary effects. You have to
start with the labor market.
00:08:45 - Speaker 1: Right. And I think he would point to places that
are, let’s say, retirement towns and that sort of thing is somewhat
exceptions to the rule, but those will never become massive cities.
Those will never become engines for economic growth, for helping
people’s lives get a lot better, pulling people out of. poverty.
They serve a role, but they’re not really what he’s talking about.
But I think it’s really interesting because we’re now going into a new
era where more and more work can be done remotely. The labor market is
So if cities no longer have to be the labor market, what does that look
like? How do we now think about the places that we live? How does that
change the decisions that we make? And so that change hasn’t completely
The vast majority of people still work in person, but there’s been a
real inflection point, I’d say in the last 10 years and certainly with
COVID that has made people really start to think about this new
00:09:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s sort of two dimensions of
effects here. There’s the people are free to potentially move to
different cities, so one can move from San Francisco to Seattle or
Berlin or Miami, or you can move to not a city and participate in a sort
of distributed labor market, and so there’s competition along both
00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Totally, for a really long time choosing to live
in a rural place dramatically reduced your opportunities, and some might
argue that that’s still true.
I personally think that face to face has a lot of really important
things that you just can’t get via Zoom, but at the same time, there’s
a whole new frontier opening up here, and people from all different
countries can now. in labor markets that used to be centered in the
United States primarily in the case of tech.
For example, my boyfriend is from Argentina and he moved to the United
States several years ago, but many of his friends and family were not
able to get visas or weren’t interested in moving. They wanted to stay
with their families. And so they’re now able to participate in Things
that are happening in the United States and and vice versa in a way that
they just couldn’t 10 years ago. So, in a really weird way, there’s
people who are sitting in Buenos Aires but behind a microphone, who I
feel are a closer part of my community than some people who are my
neighbors, and that’s just a very different world and will really
change the way that cities develop, I think, in the future.
00:11:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And perhaps the most exciting
piece for me as you mentioned this idea of social technologies, I think
we’re gonna see some of the benefits and consequences of cities move
out to the cloud, if you will, things like aggregation effects, quote
unquote population density, self sorting. These are all things that you
really needed to have a city in a physical space until very recently to
get, but now people can, you know, whatever, join the right Discord or
something, it’ll be very interesting to see that all play out.
00:11:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m tentatively excited about it. I have
For example, I was talking to a friend who’s a venture capitalist a few
days ago, and he was telling me about how in 2020, during COVID, roughly
the same number of dollars went to venture capital investments in that
year as the previous year, but it went to half as many companies.
And his interpretation of this was that the business that VCs are in is
to find people that they trust and that they think will take that money
and do something amazing with it. And his theory here was that because
they couldn’t meet people face to face, they couldn’t build that trust
with new people on the network, and so all of the money was going to
people who are already in network and already trusted. And he was a
little sad about this because he was thinking like there’s all these
people who would probably be amazing entrepreneurs, but because they
didn’t have that access that they would have had an in-person world,
they didn’t have that. So I’m not sure if that’s completely the right
interpretation, to be honest, I think there’s a lot of ways to look at
that data, but it did give me pause and think like, oh, that’s like not
great if that is the right interpretation.
00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s still very early. You
know, the world doesn’t owe it to us.
There’s no particular reason this couldn’t become very messy and weird
for the next 10 or 50 years as it all shakes out.
We talk often on this podcast about how it takes some time to metabolize
these big society level changes.
I’d say that our technology and our social technology is still very
early, like the communication bandwidth over Zoom as nice as it is
versus what we had 5 years ago, it’s very poor compared to being in
person and likewise our social technologies are mostly transliterations
of stuff from our previous physical world.
So I think we solve a lot in front of us to see how it all shakes out.
00:13:09 - Speaker 1: But I’m optimistic. I’m definitely optimistic,
but it’s not a done deal for sure.
00:13:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So how would you answer the question that I
sort of posed earlier or the question I posed myself, I suppose, on
discovering a city that I liked really well and wanted to settle in just
because I liked it rather than because an employer was there, which is
how do cities become the way that they are and in particular who are the
people that make that happen.
00:13:34 - Speaker 1: There’s a lot of components that go into that.
I think of cities as an ecosystem, and so a lot of different pieces have
to be in place for them to be the way they are, but like geography makes
actually a really big difference in the way that people interact, and
that’s not human made usually. But it has a huge difference. Like, for
example, I live in Miami Beach, which is separated from mainland Miami,
it’s on an island, and so I’m much more likely to spend time with
people who are like on the island with me than I am to like drive into
mainland just because there’s a body of water between us. And so that
really shapes the way life and culture work in Miami and similar
geographical features make a big difference in other cities as well.
00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one I noted in my own city exploration is
San Francisco and Amsterdam, two places I’d spent time, were both on
these kind of fairly smallish peninsulas, and so they’re necessarily
constrained on 3, I guess an island is 4 sides, but here you’re
constrained on three sides. And so, there’s sort of a limit to how much
they can grow or things get denser, they get more expensive, and by
comparison to other places, Berlin is one example, but probably most
places don’t have as much constraint and as the city grows, they can
spread outward and in that way kind of create more relief for just more
space for more people to be there.
00:14:53 - Speaker 1: Totally, and other factors can have a similar
effect, so London and Paris are interesting to contrast to each other,
where both of them are in England, they’re not on the peninsulas or
Well, I guess Britain is a very large island, but Paris is much denser
than London, and a big part of that is because Paris was basically
conquered and like overrun again and again, so they built these like
city walls to protect it.
And they wanted to keep as much of the buildings inside of those walls
as possible, and the denser it is, the easier it is to defend.
Whereas London being in Great Britain, which is separated by the
channel, they just didn’t have those problems. They were much harder,
much easier to defend, much harder to attack.
And so London is much more sprawling than is Paris, and that’s sort of
a I don’t know if it was a conscious decision by any person, but just
the factors that they had to deal with resulted in a very different city
form. So I guess those are two answers, geography and like sort of
exogenous factors that just kind of force you into this shape for
I think another pieces, decisions that are made early on in a city’s
history, there’s an immense path dependence in cities because it’s
painful to tear things down, unlike in software where it’s like not.
That costly and this kind of infinite space, you can always write more
software for the most part.
00:16:16 - Speaker 2: Developers get excited when they see a huge number
of red dashes in their pot, right?
00:16:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, they love it because it simplifies things.
Whereas in cities, you know, someone like Creative destruction, yeah,
00:16:27 - Speaker 1: they put up a bunch of bricks and like they paid
money for them to go up and it’s a more zero-sum game in cities than it
is in software because anytime you build something, that means someone
else can’t build something there until they tear your thing down.
And so it leads to very different dynamics and you get much more
Like a concrete example of that is here in Miami Beach, there’s a lot
of beautiful art deco buildings. Miami Beach is really famous for this.
And so there are rules protecting the art deco because it’s a national
treasure and, you know, I really love them. But what that means is that
you can’t build something else there, and this is a beautiful place to
live. It would be awesome if more people could live here, but because
the art deco is there, we can’t do that. And it forces you to make
different types of trade-offs. Do you value this architectural heritage,
or do you value having many more people be able to live in a place and
every community is going to make different choices there.
00:17:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think an important thread through
everything you just described is that ultimately it’s individuals
making personal choices in this sort of organic chaotic mess that
ultimately bubbles up to the emergent order, if you will, that you see
in cities. And I think it’s so easy, especially as software people to
think about, you know, that the city does this or we should do that, but
really it’s just a bunch of individual human beings ultimately have to
make the decisions and take the actions.
00:17:47 - Speaker 2: Well, and this, the, I don’t know, subtitle or
the part that goes after the colon in the order without design book
title is how markets shape cities, and of course markets are very much,
yeah, decentralized, you know, individual actors pursuing their own
means, but then that forms into a larger, something that is uh greater
than the sum of its parts.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, one of the interesting things about the
author’s experience is he had actually worked for a centrally planned
economies, including, I believe, some Soviet work in the 1980s before
the USSR ended, and then also for the Chinese government.
And so he had the chance to even compare a situation where there is no
kind of classic market forces like rent to figure out, you know,
efficient land use. Instead, there is urban planners that do just sit
there and say we should put houses over here and restaurants over here.
00:18:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and he also worked in China during the
period where they were liberalizing economically and moving from a
completely communist planned centrally planned government to trying to
make things a little bit more free market from the economic side.
And one of the things that he pointed out was that like, there are a lot
of very strict rules that the Chinese government adhered to. So, for
example, there was a rule imposed by the government said, Every single
room in every building has to have at least one hour of sunlight
throughout the whole year.
Now, that sounds like a good idea, like, I wanna have sunlight in my
house, sunlight is a nice thing, and even one hour almost seems kind of
But the issue is that China is a really large country and goes very,
very far north, where there’s actually just not that much sunlight at
all during much of the year. And so there’s some cities in northern
China that were forced to build the buildings extremely far apart, so
that the angle of the sun would like properly hit the inside of the
buildings for like the minimum number of hours a day.
And what this meant was that cities in the north are much less densely
populated and much more spread out than the ones in the south, and it
correlates almost perfectly with this angle to the sun.
And what it means is like, this has a lot of other implications for the
cost of infrastructure and all these trickle down effects that, like,
weren’t really conceived of before, you know, when they put this rule
in place, they weren’t trying to say infrastructure in the north has to
be extraordinarily expensive. They’re just trying to get everyone to
have sunlight. And so he came in and sort of noted some of the rules and
said like, this is actually hindering development in these places
because this is a limit that is not gonna work out.
00:20:20 - Speaker 2: So in more market-based economies that probably
most people nowadays are more likely to live in or be familiar with,
what is the role of an urban planner? What do they actually do?
00:20:31 - Speaker 1: Well, I think Alan would say that historically
urban planners in non centrally planned economies still think of
themselves as central planners, even if they don’t explicitly say so.
They still think that if they put a rule in place, it will be followed,
and it’ll work out the way they’re imagining, as opposed to thinking
of it as a dynamic system that will react to the rules and sort of mold
itself in a way that has a lot of unintended consequences.
So, I guess there are a lot of urban planners still that think of
themselves as architects who can like shape a city in exactly The form
they want something like a Disneyland, but I think Alan would say, and I
would strongly agree that urban planners should think of themselves more
as like protocol creators in the way that a software engineer might
design a protocol, but not say everything on top. So TCP IP is a
brilliant design because it’s not that opinionated. It’s only
opinionated about the things that need to happen to help people
coordinate. So, a city that I think has done this really well is New
York City. And I believe it was 1811, the city put together a master
plan that laid out the grid that we all know today of, you know, streets
and avenues, and you can actually see which parts of the city were
created before that plan was in place in the southern tip of Manhattan.
They’re all this warren of streets that is, I think, beautiful, but
also quite messy and like hard to get around. But then everything north
of that is a grid, very, very precise, and something that the New York
City plan did really well, I think, is make it very clear from the
get-go what was public land and what was private land. So instead of
saying we’re gonna control everything, or instead of saying we’re
gonna let everyone just like be anarchists and do whatever they want.
They said we needed to find rights of way because people need to be able
to get around. We need to keep space for like sewage and other
sanitation systems that we all need. Like no one wants poop in the
streets, and we’re going to define spaces for public parks. That’s why
Central Park is so big. They just carved it out before anyone actually
started developing there. And then they left everything else to the
market to decide. And I think this works really well because it enabled
the key methods of coordination that people needed, while also leaving
space for people to be creative and to make their own idea of what the
00:22:55 - Speaker 2: In New York, I think many would feel is the city,
a cultural powerhouse, a place people love to visit, and many people
love to live. Maybe it’s also incredibly dense and incredibly expensive
and dirty, and all those negative things you associate with the
collection of people, that is cities, but nevertheless, truly the
prototype city in some ways.
00:23:16 - Speaker 1: And it’s been an engine to pull people out of
poverty for hundreds of years. Like immigrants have landed in New York
and poor Americans have ended up in New York. Black people ended up in
New York after the Reconstruction, and they found this place where they
had more opportunities and they were able to like build themselves up
and like it has a lot of flaws, but it’s something that enabled both
the coordination while also remain keeping space for people to make
their own lives what they wanted it to be. And I think it’s just been
one of like The greatest engines of progress in America, and I know that
sounds really melodramatic, but I stand by it.
00:23:53 - Speaker 2: Absolutely.
00:23:54 - Speaker 3: No, for sure, all the more significant than that
we’ve conducted this sort of quiet experiment on rolling back market
dynamics in American cities over the past, I call it 60 or 70 years, you
know, like you said, it used to be that you basically do whatever you
want. If you had private property. Now the model is like in San
Francisco, which we’re both familiar with, that you basically can’t do
anything to a first approximation. Everything is set forever, don’t
change it. And I think we’re only now starting to see the consequences
of that experiment and to evaluate how well it did or didn’t work.
00:24:25 - Speaker 1: Totally, and it’s a very complicated issue. So,
one of the reasons I left San Francisco was this growing feeling that
you’re just like not allowed to do things there anymore.
And for me, what that meant concretely was like, I was very active in
housing policy because I wanted San Francisco to build more housing, so
more people could move there and have access to the awesome
opportunities that the tech industry has offered, and other industries
as well, but tech being the primary one. And after several years of it,
I just kind of got a little down about it and didn’t feel like we’re
making much progress because San Francisco has very strict zoning laws.
It has a very granular local control where neighbors can stop projects
in their tracks that are near them or really anywhere in the city, but
it has a really complex history because the place that it comes from.
It’s actually a place I agree with, and then I think it’s just gone
So the place that that’s come from is in the 50s and 60s, American
cities all over the country built many highways and the way they built
these highways was they primarily tore down African American
communities, other communities of color as well, but primarily African
American communities. And they just did it without really asking. They
would just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.
00:25:37 - Speaker 2: this eminent domain or?
00:25:39 - Speaker 1: It was through a variety of different methods.
Some of it was eminent domain, yeah, and there were a number of
different ways that they could do this and like each city had a slightly
The effect was that like these highways would just cut through these
communities and destroy them. So, there were these things called the
highway revolts that started happening in the 60s, where people were
saying, hey, you’re destroying my life. That’s not OK, you can’t do
that. And one of the ways that San Francisco reacted was putting rules
in place to make it easier for locals to defend their neighborhoods and
to have a voice in the process, which I think is a very good goal to
But where that has ended up is that today, one of the specific tools
that was put in place is something called discretionary review.
And discretionary review basically says that if you have an issue with a
project as a resident of the city, you can like file a complaint and
stop it, or at least force it to pause and like have a hearing about the
project and In theory, that was supposed to be used by, you know, people
who were getting their houses bulldozed so that a highway could go
through or whatever, or, you know, someone’s putting up like a really
loud factory next to you or something like that.
But practically the way it’s used today is that like, really wealthy
people who live in Pack Heights, Pacific Heights, which is a
neighborhood in San Francisco, will like complain about how their
neighbor who’s building a two-story house, is putting a shadow in their
vegetable garden. And, you know, like, you don’t want a shadow in your
vegetable garden, I get it, but my personal opinion is that making it
possible for a family to move in next to you is like way more important
than if your squash gets sunlight.
So it’s this tool that ended up going so far as to give people local
control that like completely blocked the system. And as a result, San
Francisco has added far more jobs than it has housing for the last like
10 years straight. And the housing prices just have completely shot up.
Anyway, I shouldn’t rant about that way too much, but the point is that
it’s a really complex issue where it’s always a balance between local
control and also maximizing sort of for the greater good, and for the
greater good is like a really complicated concept to define.
00:27:47 - Speaker 2: Or as you mentioned earlier with the art deco
buildings where there’s heritage to protect, you want to protect the
character of a place that makes it unique and special and not just tear
it all down and replace it with highways and strip malls, which maybe
sometimes pure economic forces would take you in this homogenizing
direction, which I think is also part of the argument against
gentrification which There is a big, big talk back here in Berlin these
days. A lot of demonstrations and things. There was a 5 year rent cap
law that had been passed and then was struck down by the German Supreme
Court. It’s a real huge point of debate between the people who are here
already and want things to basically stay the way they are.
They want to preserve the character of the city, which I agree is very
special, but then Life has changed and the city should grow, just like
all things, grow and change to be healthy. In addition to just the
simple fact that we’re adding more humans to the planet, and if we’re
gonna have more humans, then we also need more houses for those humans
to be in, and just because you were there first doesn’t necessarily
give you a special privileges for housing as opposed to the needs of
00:28:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the rent controls issues is a really
interesting one, because I understand where it comes from, which is we
don’t want people to get displaced when the place around them becomes
more expensive, but at the same time, when you have rent control, I
think it’s akin to aristocracy in the sense of saying like, you got
here first, this is like your land, you have some special privilege over
it. And newcomers who may also want to make their life better and may
also want to have access to what that beautiful city has to offer, now
don’t have access, and like sympathetic to the goal of locals, locals
being in a position where they can stay in their home, and I think that
is a problem to solve, but rent controls are a very blunt instrument
that don’t actually quite do the thing that people say that it should
Rent control is a tricky situation because it encourages things like
landlords neglecting to actually take care of the building. I think
there’s other ways to achieve the same results that are also not
perfect, but result in fewer issues.
One final thought on that is like, rent control also increases the price
for other people who weren’t lucky enough to be in a rent controlled
building. So, Berlin, for instance, has a lot of immigrants who are
coming in, who I think they should have a home and should be welcomed,
but because they weren’t in a building at the time of rent control,
they’re now forced to the outskirts of the city, or they’re forced to
pay a lot more for the remaining buildings that are not rent controlled
because it’s rent controlled effectively removing supply from the
market. It just sort of puts everything in stasis and people don’t want
to move from places even if they need to upgrade and I’m sympathetic to
the goal, but we have to look at like the outcome of what actually
happens when you put something in place, not just say what you wish it
00:30:42 - Speaker 2: Some of that sounds like sort of understanding
market dynamics or economics, and that reminds me of another thrust of
order without design, which is, he’s basically talking about urban
economists, which is essentially the academic study of cities. And then
urban planners, which in fact was what his job is, which is people whose
work for governments in some form to figure out things like zoning laws
in an attempt to shepherd the city in whatever direction.
The government would like it to go, and he talks about that at least at
the time this book was written, they didn’t have good communication
with each other. So planners might be not that aware of economics and
kind of market dynamics generally, but then also the very specific
dynamics of the role of markets in cities and of course vice versa as
well. The academics are a little disconnected from the reality of the
decisions that the planners need to make every day.
00:31:39 - Speaker 1: Totally, and some of those realities are political
realities, like what we’re just talking about with rent control, people
do not feel good when they see what they consider gentrification
happening, or when they feel like they’re being priced out of the
neighborhood that they’ve lived for their whole life, and so they get
angry and they want something to be done. And the problem is that doing
something doesn’t always make the problem better. Doing something
sometimes actually makes the problem worse if you don’t understand the
causal model of what’s gonna go on. And so there’s been a lot of
actions that people take that I think actually worsen the situation to
their own goals because they don’t appreciate the level of dynamicism
that’s happening. So like a similar example, it’s not about cities,
but is sort of a similar dynamic economic system is like taxes. Since
moving to Florida, I’ve met a lot of people who have moved to Florida
from New York to California because New York and California have been
hiking up taxes for companies and for themselves individually. And I
will not make any judgment about whether I agree or disagree with that,
but just to make the point that like, when you increase taxes, people
will find ways to not pay them often, not always, but it is a reality
that you have to deal with, and you can’t just like moralize it. And
say, oh well, they’re bad people for not paying the taxes that the
society around them agreed upon. You have to actually deal with the
problem. And so I think a lot of governments will raise taxes and then
be shocked that like, they get a lot less revenue than they expect
because people just move away. And so, cities often have similar issues.
Like, for instance, there’s something called a privately owned public
open space in San Francisco, and I believe New York and a number of
other cities have this too. And the concept is, you’re a big developer,
you’re building like an office building or a bunch of condos or
apartments or something, and the privately owned public open spaces is
POOS is the acronym. It’s a rule that says like if you build a
development of a certain size, you have to build at least this much
public space for people to enjoy in the building.
Sounds like a really nice idea, and some of them actually are really
nice. Like, there’s this really beautiful cafe in the LinkedIn building
in San Francisco that is a popo, but there’s a lot of other popos that
are sort of hidden because the developer sees the letter of the law and
they say, ah, but they didn’t say like where it needs to be. And so
sometimes they’ll put these popos on like the rooftop of the building
and put like no signage. Whatsoever for people to find it. And so it’s
effectively just a private space for the building. And, you know, it’s
a nice amenity. Maybe the people who live in that building like it,
whatever, but it’s not solving the problem that the government wanted
to solve when they put that rule in place. And so something that
complexifies this is that politicians and bureaucrats usually get points
for starting something, but not for the actual. And so they say we did
something to create more public space in San Francisco, people clap and
But then 5 years down the line, you realize like, oh, there is no extra
public space really. These are really hard to get to and people have to
put together like special maps. There’s all these like lists online
that you can find, and there are all these like secret little nooks,
which is, you know, fun in its own right, but really not what the city
00:34:53 - Speaker 2: I think accountability loops is one of the biggest
things missing in public policy debate or politics, and I don’t
necessarily think anyone’s quite to blame there. It’s a systematic
thing, but it’s something where when a project like that is set up, we
don’t even define what success is necessarily. We say we’re going to
do a project to change our spaces somehow, more public space, more
greenery, different transit options, but what will success be and how we
measure that 5 years down the road and if it’s not working, we’ll
pivot or transition or sunset the program, but that’s rarely the way
00:35:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I think it’s
doable. A lot of organizations do this all the time, and I’m sure that
some government organizations do as well, but It doesn’t usually loop
back to the voters, and I still don’t have a clear model of why that
is, but I think it’s a really important problem to solve because in the
situation that we’re in now, Without that accountability loop,
politicians who even want to do the right thing will have a hard time
doing it because they’ll spend all their time doing the right thing and
not like doing the flashy things, and then they won’t get re-elected.
And so they’ll only have their what, 2 or 4 year stints or whatever it
is before they’re booted out, and you can only have so much impact in
that time. So, building those loops is really important, and I think
I’ve seen some cities like Singapore, for example, have like dashboards
with certain statistics, which I think are An interesting start, but
it’s definitely not normal, like a normal practice and not something
that more people are aware of.
And like, no person wants to create a system where they now have to be
accountable cause now it only increases the chance that they won’t
succeed at the goal. So something that has to be imposed. And actually,
before that, even, it’s even hard to even agree what the goals should
be, right? So like, in the instance of historical preservation, we are
talking about different cities have made very different trade-offs, uh,
but individuals within those cities all disagree really strongly. So
like Paris, for example, has Effectively decided to be kind of like a
living museum. There’s rules like you’re not allowed to build
buildings that go above a particular line relative to sea level, so that
you can have a good view of, can’t remember which church, but like a
particular church on a hill that’s just gorgeous.
00:37:12 - Speaker 3: Is that Notre Dame or am I imagining that?
00:37:14 - Speaker 1: No, I don’t think it’s Notre Dame. I think it’s
the one on the hill with a really beautiful view of like, uh, has like
this like, I can picture in my head, but it’s not coming to me.
But it’s gorgeous and you’re supposed to have a view of it from
roughly everywhere in the city, and that’s a choice to make, you know,
but the result is that Paris is extremely expensive, especially for
Parisians, and a lot of people end up having to move to the outskirts,
or similarly like, it’s tough to have a large headquarters for a
business in Paris because there just aren’t that many big buildings.
So they’ve created this whole new business district called La Defense,
which is like way off. In the outskirts and like nowhere near the core
of the city, which has big skyscrapers. And like there’s a tradeoff
that Paris chose to make. And I think it has hurt their economy, but it
has like preserved this gem of a city that I’m super happy exists and
I’m like really glad that I can go and look at these beautiful views
and beautiful architecture. So every city needs to make those choices
itself and there will always be people who are benefiting and hurting
from it, and it makes it really hard.
00:38:26 - Speaker 2: One example of kind of preserving what’s there,
living museum, like you said, versus investing in the future, which
sometimes means taking risks, was the building the Eiffel Tower.
Uh, I read a great, uh, biography of Gustav Eiffel, who’s a pretty
inspiring fellow, but did quite a lot of work, um, but if the Statue of
Liberty and the, um, or the internals of the Statue of Liberty and the
Eiffel Tower being two of us.
More famous pieces, uh, but when, you know, when they put up plans to,
to build that for I think it was the World’s Fair, the outrage in the
city was, was huge and even immediately after it was built, the feeling
was, it’s this eyesore, it dominates the the the skyline, it’s this
super modern thing that doesn’t fit with our, um, you know, quaint, uh,
quaint architectural vibe, um, and it took a long time before it became
Now, which is this total icon that not only stands for Paris but in fact
for France, and you couldn’t couldn’t even imagine it without that.
But that was a bold move that a lot of people were um were against. And
so in order to in order to build that next Eiffel Tower, whatever
that’s going to be, you need to be willing to take risks, but then that
00:39:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s such a good example.
And I mean, I think I should probably express my bias here is I like
building things and I like taking risks and like seeing other people
take risks, and so I like to live in a place that allows that.
That’s one of the reasons I moved to Miami from San Francisco is it it
feels like it’s more welcome here and like, you know, Paris seems like
an even more extreme version of San Francisco. But I also respect the
idea of a community coming and making that decision to make the opposite
choice, but it becomes really challenging to decide like, what does it
mean for the community to make the decision, because it’s hard enough
to even know what one individual wants, I think, let alone to capture
the views of everyone. The most common form of voting, for instance, is
like, first past the post or whoever gets the majority rule vote, and
that works, it’s like better than a lot of things, but it has a number
of really important flaws. Like, for example, what if the majority of
people kind of like the Eiffel Tower, but a minority hates it, and I
think it’s the worst thing ever. So there’s a majority that weekly
would like it, but also they don’t care that much if you don’t have
it. And they voted in, but then there’s a minority who’s like totally
harmed by it. To me, like, if you had that distribution of preferences,
I would actually prefer not to build it because like it’s harming
people extremely in a way that no one is actually benefiting from that
much. But you know, that’s the values question and like designing these
systems is the values thing. And I think every single voting system has
like some very valid criticism that you could have. So it’s not clear
even how communities should make these choices, which brings us back to
markets, which I think is like something I really like about having
every city make decisions differently and having a little more
decentralization. Where, you know, a central government, like a
particular country isn’t making all the rules, because then every city
can come to its own decision about how to make decisions, and you can
end up like, leaving places and making choices for yourself if you
disagree with that particular place. And so it By allowing diversity,
it’s gonna create more situations that you personally disagree with,
but it also create more situations that you really love and you can go
live there. And so diversity is really crucial, I think, to solving this
problem, and then the other pieces, people have to be able to actually
move, and that’s really hard, you know, in a world with a lot of
borders, there’s actually quite limited choices for most people in the
00:42:04 - Speaker 2: I’m a huge fan of Let 1000 flowers bloom, and
then individual choice to kind of have a bottom up emergence of what’s
working or what is into a natural sorting.
The world that we live in that’s built on nation states which sort of
assume you’re born in a place and you probably live your entire life
without going more than about 100 kilometers from that place and you
have kids there and you die there. That’s what I think a lot of the
sort of national systems and immigration and customs. Systems that we
have now are kind of assuming, but I think that has not been the case
for a while, and that’s going to become even more so with a lot of mass
migration in the near future and certainly for those of us privileged
enough to be in the tech world where we have disposable income and
choice of where we want to work, perhaps because we’re on remote teams.
It is really the case just as I decided to go to another country, not
because I wanted to go to another country so specifically, but because
the city I wanted happened to be located in that other country. I ran up
against very much still do run up against all the challenges, the
significant challenges of being an immigrant, and quite a lot of it is
related to this assumption that people don’t move.
00:43:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think growing up in a country like the
United States, you have a lot of options cause it’s a really big
country, so you can move a lot of places, but honestly, even that is
very limiting to grow up without a lot of money, it’s hard to move to
San Francisco because it’s an expensive place and like, sure you might
be able to get a job with a high salary once you’re there, but it’s
gonna take time, and you don’t know, you haven’t been there, maybe you
can’t get a job, who knows, so a lot of people are stopped by that as
well. But in a smaller country, like again, Argentina is one that I know
really well, there’s one really big city, it’s Buenos Aires, and a
third of the country lives in that city. There’s a lot of other cool
places to be too, but Buenos Aires is the place you want to go if you
want to have like a really ambitious career. And, you know, if you
don’t Like Buenos Aires, tough luck. Like it’s tough, you know, it’s
a beautiful city. A lot of people do love it, but if you want something
else from your life, you want to be a Hollywood movie star, you now have
to get a visa. You have to like uproot your entire life and move to a
whole another country on a different continent. And so I think it’s
something that we’re going to have to find new models for it because
what’s happening now locks a lot of people out of opportunities, and I
think it’s honestly a moral issue. There’s people who live in places
with very little opportunity, and they themselves have a lot of
potential, but they’re stuck somewhere that has poorer systems of
coordination, and they just can’t get out. And so we’re going to need
to find new models for that, but I don’t have solutions. I’m just
criticizing at this point.
00:44:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the mobility question is really tough. To
what extent do governments have a heightened obligation to their current
citizens versus future ones who might yet be born there or might move
there? That’s a really tough question. I don’t know. I don’t think
there’s an easy answer. But looking within an existing polity, I think
our discussion of voting and markets was really circling around the crux
The reason I think cities are so hard and potentially so much more
valuable. is you have this mix of public and private impact.
So by public and private I mean a private good with something that you
kind of you yourself purely consume and the effect only touches you,
like if you consume a pencil or something, you know, by consume I mean
like you write with it. That basically only affects you. It doesn’t
really affect your neighbor. It’s a totally private good and a totally
public good, an example might be national defense. It’s like everyone
in the country gets it or no one gets it. That’s not exactly true, but
that’s a good that’s basically purely for the benefit of the group as
The thing about cities is you get this really messy mix. So to go back
to your example, Devin, of building a two-story building in a previously
one story lot. There’s a huge chunk of private benefit you get space
for the family and there’s all kinds of other secondary public impacts
like there’s shadow and there’s noise, and there’s traffic, and then
you’re consuming some of this precious lumber off the market, it’s all
this kind of stuff going on.
And I think the issue we have with cities is we only have a few
relatively primitive technologies for distributed decision making and
We We have first past the post voting, we have corresponding
representatives with that model, and we have called laissez-faire
economics, and the pure economic model works really well for private
goods, and the pure voting model can work well in cases where we have a
single public good that everyone cares equally about, but we don’t
really have the social technology to address this mess in the middle.
And that’s why I feel like we end up with so much issues with cities,
and then the flip side of that is that I think there’s enormous
potential on the upside if we have a coordination technology that
reflects that underlying reality better, we could get into a much better
spot with cities. I’m so optimistic that we’ll figure something like
00:46:49 - Speaker 1: I think that’s really well put, and that actually
clarifies a lot for me, honestly. That space in the middle is really
challenging, and I think right now we have these massive
oversimplifications where we just pretend like they’re private goods,
or we just pretend like they’re public goods, and they’re really not,
they’re a mix. And so I think one of the reasons why we haven’t had
more innovation in those sorts of coordination mechanisms for things in
the middle is that there’s a limited amount of land and it’s really
hard to Just start fresh. Like there’s kind of no frontier anymore on
earth at least. And also in combination to that for the land that does
exist, the people in power would have to agree that we should try a new
system which would probably lessen their power. And so they I want to
And like, you know, if I was in power, maybe I wouldn’t want to give it
up either. I don’t know. Like, I think I have some pretty good ideas,
so of course I should have the power, right? Like I think that a lot of
people have that view. So it doesn’t make them bad people or selfish
necessarily, but just, why would I give up control that I have? Some
concepts that I’ve been really excited about that are a bit out there,
but I think are really important for us to take seriously. the idea of
building new cities, and 3 projects in particular have come to mind. One
is seasteading, if you’ve heard of that, which is the concept of like
building floating cities in the oceans, effectively creating new land.
Where there wasn’t any before. A second one is charter cities, which is
the idea of carving out land in a place that already exists, and
creating sort of a special economic zone, much like how Shenzhen in
China was a new experimental city. That ended up dramatically changing
the way that all of China works ultimately because so some background,
Shenzhen is this part of China where several decades ago, they carved
out this place and they said, we’re going to like kind of experiment
with capitalism here. We’re gonna like see if it works. And it works,
like really well, according to the metrics that the Chinese government
cared about. And so they started adopting those across the rest of China
as well. So charter cities are kind of like taking that idea and scaling
it to more places. And the third one is, a lot of people are really
interested in the idea of going to space and going to Mars, and I don’t
actually know a ton about that. That seems really hard, but I think that
comes from this place of people saying, you know, there’s no blank
slate anymore, and it’s really hard to change these kinds of things and
systems that already exist. So, where are the places that we can create
new land or create space to run these experiments? I think all of these
are really far fetched, like, I’m not sure if any of these experiments
will work. I mean, I mean charter cities have the most potential given
that they worked in the past with places like Shenzhen or Dubai in some
senses was a special economic zone, but I think the experimentation is
where you get these new ideas and you develop confidence that they might
00:49:40 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I have some optimism that we’ll see
experimentation in those types of new cities.
I’m also very bullish on experimentation with land like places in the
non-physical world. So one example that I can kind of run through is
So electromagnetic spectrum, you need a slice of it to be able to
communicate over the airwaves, basically things like radio and Wi Fi, go
over this, and it’s kind of like land and that’s sliced up and it’s
sold or licensed currently by the relevant regulatory authority.
And that has a lot of the same challenges that we see with regular land,
whereas if for example you have naive pure private property, you could,
for example, say someone buys the slice of Spectrum for Wi Fi 100 years
ago, and then someone else develops Wi Fi, well, the person who owns
that Wi Fi slice just got massively rich by no. Work of their own,
right? That’s really wealth that doesn’t in any way belong to them.
And in fact, they could now not be a particularly good owner of it, but
perhaps for financial or tax reasons, they don’t want to sell it, so on
So there’s all kinds of proposals for managing the allocation and
taxation of land like things that we could try on something like
Spectrum first. It could be that you have rolling auction or that you do
a self-assessed value and get taxed based on that. There’s all kinds of
experiments that I think are more palatable there and perhaps once we
see their value, where value means like basically you’re unlocking a
bunch of economic surplus and distributing it out to the citizens in
some way, then there’ll be more eagerness to backport that into the
physical cities where it’s higher risk.
00:51:12 - Speaker 1: Totally. Everything you said is very exciting to
I think there have been some experiments run on things like land, like
you’re talking about, and for the audience, I think the way I would
characterize things that are like land are things that you cannot make
yourself, like you technically can fill and like create islands and
stuff, like, basically you can’t really make that much land.
Or things that when you use them, you exclude other people from using
them or you ruin their experience.
So for example, if you use a plot of land, someone cannot build on it
And so that combination of those two factors of like, you didn’t. Make
it. So anytime the value of it goes up, you’re not responsible for that
value, but you’re actually going to capture it yourself. But then also
you’re monopolizing it so that the rest of your community cannot use
it. Those are things that are like land. So anything that’s like a
natural resource basically falls in this category as opposed to
something like an idea, which is not like land, an idea that is like
00:52:12 - Speaker 3: I think land has this property furthermore, where
the pure raw land itself gets almost all of its value from the actions
So a given acre of land in the United States, the value of that is
almost entirely dependent on where it is. Therefore, the value comes
from basically the people around it and all the activity that’s
happening. So the reason that totally private ownership of land feels
kind of weird from economic sense is basically all the value is made by
other people, yet all the benefit is accruing to one individual.
Now it’s not the case for like improved structures on the land, right,
which should be treated differently. This reminds me of Georgisms, which
was the kind of policy prescription to match this worldview about land.
Devin just finally, maybe you’re familiar with this.
00:52:51 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I’m a big Henry George nerd. Go on
though, I’m very excited about this, go ahead.
00:52:56 - Speaker 3: This was basically his belief about land was that
the benefits to the pure raw land were developed by the citizens of a
given polity and therefore those benefits were sort of owed to them. So
what he advocated was basically you tax the raw value of the land. And
use that to fund the government, and you don’t have income taxes or
corporate taxes or whatever.
00:53:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, like concretely, what that can look like is,
my parents bought a house in Los Altos, about 35, 40 years ago, which is
a town in San Francisco Bay Area, which is now a very expensive place to
They bought it before, I mean, it was already kind of expensive, but now
it’s like really, really expensive, one of the most like expensive
And while I love my parents and they’re very hardworking people who
certainly contributed to the community, the vast majority of the
increase in that piece of land that they bought decades ago is because a
lot of awesome things happened around them, and people want to buy that
land from them so that they can have access to those awesome things that
Now, my parents also remodeled the house, which also increased its
value, so that’s something they did.
They put a little garden, it’s very nice. They themselves were
contributing to the community through the work that they did, the
volunteering that they did, you know, they volunteered in my schools,
but the reason that property is so darn expensive is because it’s where
And if my parents had done all of that same. and all of that same
community activity in like the middle of rural Missouri or something
like that, their house would not have gained value much at all. And so
that’s a situation where they’ve benefited from the system and, you
know, indirectly I’ve benefited too, but it’s actually not really just
like that value should actually go back to the community in the form of
00:54:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to bring it back to our discussion about
markets, the intuition here shouldn’t be that like, we should
confiscate all the land or something, right? It’s more that we want to
bring the dynamism and the distributed information processing and the
efficiency, the experimentation that you get from markets and
entrepreneurship to things that are more shaped like public goods or
things that impact many people, because we have those incredible
benefits in the pure private market. It’s, and it’s created an
enormous amount of wealth and good in the world, right? We’ve had
trouble with the more public domains, which by the way, now constitute
most of our economy, you know, healthcare, education, so forth. We’ve
had trouble with the dynamism and the efficiency in those spaces.
So if we can find some way to bring those dynamics of the market to
these more public spaces that could be really valuable. So thinking
about the land thing, if you’ve ever been a homeowner, you know. So the
incredible amount of pride and attention and care you place in your own
private residence, right? Like you pay a lot of attention to it, you’re
willing to invest in it. If we had a mechanism whereby you could get
that same sort of care and attention to detail on public goods that were
impacting others, perhaps because you got paid out a dividend or
something, think of how powerful that could be, you know, how exactly
you do it, that’s the social technology question, but I’m optimistic
that there’s a way to make that happen.
00:55:53 - Speaker 1: Two ideas I’ve played around with, which might be
terrible, I’ve, you know, no one’s ever tried them that I know of. So
one, the simpler one is, what if people in San Francisco had shares in
the city of San Francisco, like, equity, basically.
And the reason I asked that question is like, right now, if you’re a
homeowner in San Francisco and someone builds like a big condo building
next to you or an office or something, you just lose out. Like, it’s
just bad. It is actually just kind of bad for you for the most part. You
know, don’t have as nice of a view, your vegetable garden has shade,
like you have more rowdy neighbors or whatever. But if you had equity in
the city, like maybe equity in the property taxes or something like
that, your incentives would be more aligned with what’s good for the
community at large, and what will generate more opportunities for all
sorts of people, and not just yourself. And so I’ve always thought that
that would be like a really interesting thing for a city to experiment
with. And something like UBI universal basic income, might serve
something like that, though the way that people have talked about
universal basic income in the past doesn’t tie those two concepts
together very well, so I don’t think people would emotionally get that
connection. So I’m not sure if that actually solves the problem.
00:57:00 - Speaker 3: Adam, stop me for we aren’t too far off track
here, but I think it was a tragic mistake to call what we currently call
universal basic income, that instead of something like a citizen’s
dividend, it’s not like you’re entitled to a living by other people’s
work. It’s that the work that we all do to build this enormous amount
of cultural wealth in a given polity, uh, you know, that’s wealth that
we’re building for each other and so it’s plausible that you get some
dividend of that out to you on a per capita basis. I think that would
make a lot more sense like this idea of having shares in San Francisco
basically, or perhaps you have shares in the properties closest to you
on an exponentially decaying basis. So the ones right next to you, you
own a big chunk of, and the ones on the other side of the city you own
almost none of, you know, you can imagine all kinds of wild stuff, but I
think there’s something there.
00:57:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s an interesting change
on it. And I think like to put some flavor and like the idea of what are
people contributing to society, cause like, you know, some people don’t
do any volunteering, some people, you know, there’s some people who
don’t work at all or whatever, and you’re like, well, maybe they’re
not contributing, but like just by existing, maybe you’re walking
around the street and now a woman who’s walking home late at I feel
safer because you’re there. Like that’s the kind of thing where being
around other people actually has value just purely by itself. And sure,
everyone contributes slightly different amounts, but right now, that’s
not really recognized at all. Everyone gets like sort of zero in return
directly, and I think it would be interesting to like experiment with
that. I think it would have to be workshopped heavily, so cities, please
don’t take this as described, Please play with it. But I think as a
concept, there’s something there.
Another idea is like, you could put more markets into the zoning code,
so instead of saying things like, you cannot build buildings higher than
this, instead you could have like, have you heard of air rights? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, so you could have something more like air rights, which is
basically creating property rights for the air above buildings in
different cities you can like swap them.
00:58:54 - Speaker 2: When you mentioned charter cities earlier, I was
thinking of Astral Codex 10 recently did a kind of review or overview of
a charter city, and apparently the way they’re doing it is what they
call voxels, which I’m familiar with from my video game days, which are
essentially 3D pixels. So there’s 1 m by 1 m by 1 m square voxels and
property rights are not just sort of the 2D space that’s on the ground,
but actually goes up into the air.
00:59:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that’s exactly the concept. Like right
now we have a very two dimensional property rights system where people
Land and then some chunk of air above it, but like, basically it’s 2D,
but that’s actually a very massive simplification, especially in a
place like Manhattan or Hong Kong, where buildings are extremely tall.
And so if you could swap those in a more fluid market, then I think you
would end up with people internalizing more of the externalities that
they impose on people when they have a choice.
So in that example of the Pacific Heights residents vegetable garden.
They would say, you know what, it’s worth $100,000 to me for my
vegetable garden, not to be overshadowed, and I will pay you that money
And now, the person who’s not able to build really high will be
compensated for it, or vice versa, you know, maybe the person trying to
build the buildings is like, you know, it’s worth $100,000 to you, but
it’s worth a million dollars to me. So I’m going to do it and now I’m
going to compensate you for the cost that it has imposed on you.
Poor squash. Yeah, yeah, the poor squash, but it’s like very expensive
squash. And so I think the key idea that this is all trying to get at is
like, how can you make it so that when people affect each other, when
they have impacts on each other, that That person is compensated for it,
and so that people actually bear the costs of like that they’re
imposing on other people.
And if they’re willing to pay it, that’s great, but if they’re not
willing to pay it then they shouldn’t do that action. So anyway, those
are still very rough ideas, but I think this is why I want to see more
cities pop up and exist in the world like Prospera, the charter city,
because we’ll be able to run these. Experiments and see if they work
and they might be totally crackpot ideas, but they also could be great
ideas. Like democracy seemed like a terrible idea that didn’t make any
sense for a long time, but then some countries started experimenting
with it and it works pretty darn well. And so more places were able to
adopt it. And that was only possible because there was a lot of frontier
and we don’t have that much frontier anymore, so we have to make our
01:01:20 - Speaker 2: So maybe before we go, I’d love to hear from each
of you a city that you think really does a good job at being itself
perhaps, but in particular, that manages to have a unique character and
a high quality of life, and be an attractive place for some certain kind
of person or some certain industry through good governance, through
whether it’s urban planning, whether it’s general policy making, is
there something that stands out to you as a bit of a role model that
01:01:50 - Speaker 1: The first one that comes to mind for me is Tokyo.
It’s, I believe, the biggest city in the world by population, like 37
million people, something.
Totally wild, and it’s a source of roughly all of Japan’s economic
In fact, like, Japan is a very slow growth country and the population of
Japan overall is declining, but there’s still more people moving to
Tokyo, which is just an astonishing fact.
Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while
it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are
actually not that high. And it’s not entirely clear to me why this is
There’s a number of things that I think contribute to it. One is that
people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new
things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people
are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place
where an old thing stood.
And so I think they’re able to adjust as things change over time more
rapidly than cities that are more afraid to tear things down. I think it
is sort of cheating in the sense that like Japan overall is seeing
depressed population growth. It is declining, so that does make things
But as I mentioned at the top, like Tokyo is growing as a city, the
number of people are coming in should balance that out.
So, I think Tokyo is one of the few massive cities in the world that has
maintained a relatively low cost of living, and I think that there’s a
lot of lessons to be learned there and how they’ve done it, while also
being an engine for economic growth.
01:03:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, Tokyo is a great choice, and there’s lots
of interesting land use law there. We can add some stuff in the show
notes, but I think the short version is it’s one of the few big cities
where it’s legal to build housing, therefore it’s relatively
01:03:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
01:03:38 - Speaker 2: I just visited there once, a number of years ago,
but yeah, I absolutely was impressed by how clean and organized the city
was for being the world’s biggest metropolis, and just it’s a small
note, but it’s a huge one to me, and feels like something every city
should adopt. They don’t have on street parking. So, while there are
cars, each individual street you walk down feels very kind of cozy and
human scale in a way that I don’t associate with basically any other
city or I associate with more of a village vibe, and I think this is
Transit policy and how people get around cities and why it’s so
important that they be able to move conveniently and safely is something
we didn’t get into at all, and there’s a huge interest of mine, but
that’s one small example of a policy choice that just radically changes
01:04:25 - Speaker 1: And part of why that’s so important is because by
not having on street parking, they’re forcing people to internalize
externalities that they impose on other people, whereas most American
cities have on street parking and it’s free, which is basically sounds
fine, right? Like, so many cities have this, but the result is that
people don’t have to pay any of the costs of their car taking up space
And so, like in San Francisco, the square footage of renting out a
parking space on the street, it’s like, I don’t know, 50 cents an hour
It is cheaper than the rent of an actual apartment. And so there have
been like people joking, like, maybe I should just like camp on a
parking space all the time and like live there because it’ll be cheaper
than renting an apartment.
And and it’s effectively this like public space that we’ve given up to
people and said like, you can have this and do whatever you want with it
without realizing that you’re implicitly making a trade off.
And so yeah, I really love that Japan and Tokyo does that.
01:05:18 - Speaker 3: The parking topic is its whole own interesting
thing. I very highly recommend the book, the high costs of free parking.
It’s an economic and mathematical analysis of what happens when you
give away or subsidized parking, and the short version that’s every
free spot in a major city is like lighting tens of thousands of dollars
on fire. You can read the book for the details.
01:05:38 - Speaker 1: It’s a great book, it’s really good.
01:05:40 - Speaker 2: So I think for me my choice will be Dubai, which
we mentioned briefly earlier, and in fact, I’ve never been there, but
I’ve read a couple of pretty good books about it, including History of
Future Cities, which covers a few very interesting cities such as Saint
Petersburg and some others, and then another one, that’s sort of a
longer history of the ruling class there and how Dubai came to be. And
on one hand, it’s an amazing example of human achievement and what you
can do if you decide you want to, and well you have a lot of resources
to throw at it. On the other hand, there’s a lot there that’s
extremely terrible, so it is this study in contrasts, but I guess I
don’t necessarily take it as that it reflects a place I want to live or
is how we should build cities, but rather you get this sense that It is
possible we can decide as kind of societies that we want to build a city
in a particular way, and we want it to be a particular way. And coming
back to that kind of let 1000 flowers bloom, we need to experiment more.
To me, it’s sort of inspiring in its study in contrasts, and for me
it’s sort of opened my eyes to what could we do if we were willing to
think a little bit more outside the box about our cities.
01:06:52 - Speaker 3: And the ones I’ll pick are not perfect by any
means, but I think they’re very interesting and important, and those
are the major cities in Texas, like Austin and Houston.
Texan cities, perhaps more than any other in the western world, embrace
the idea of let people do things and see what happens. So if you’ve
ever visited one of these cities in Texas, it’s highly chaotic.
You know, there’s incredible amounts of cars and freeways everywhere.
There’s like houses next to commercial and next to light industrial,
it’s kind of anything goes, and they’re constantly building stuff and
tearing stuff down. But the result is that you get this incredible
dynamism and indeed people are voting with their feet to move to Texas.
So I think it’s at least a very interesting experiment and I’ll be
curious to see how it plays out over the next couple of decades.
01:07:34 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter at museAppHQ or
via email. hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review
on Apple Podcasts, and Devin, whenever you get around to starting your
charter city and implementing all of your unique ideas, please let me
know. I can’t promise I’ll move there, but at least I want to visit.
01:07:57 - Speaker 1: I’ll definitely keep you posted. Thanks so much
