The New Bazaar
Through long-form interviews with economists, policymakers, and other guests, The New Bazaar explores how the economy is constantly reshaping the way we live — and how our choices in life are reflected back into the economy. Hosted by Cardiff Garcia, The New Bazaar is a production of the Economic Innovation Group.
10
A City From Scratch
<p>This episode is about an ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco.</p><p>The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It has bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County, starting in 2017. That’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one-and-a-half Miamis.</p><p>What California Forever wants the city to be is two things.</p><p>First: an urbanist, walkable city of about 400,000-500,000 people; zoned for density instead of suburban sprawl, with housing to rent or bu...
Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing Future
<p>Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU who has made important contributions on a startingly high number of topics, speaks with Cardiff about his latest contributions to the study of housing affordability, remote work, artificial intelligence, and finance. </p><br><p>Arpit is on board with the basic YIMBY project of undoing the oppressive zoning codes that limit housing construction in so many parts of the country, but he doesn’t think the housing story ends there. Other obstacles will remain even in the case of further YIMBY progress, and in the meantime he has offered a variety of ref...
The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment
<p>Stefanie Stantcheva is an economist at Harvard and the head of the Social Economics Lab, where her team has done extraordinary work investigating how people form their opinions about economic and political topics. That work was the subject of an earlier New Bazaar episode. </p><br><p>In this episode, Stefanie chats with Cardiff about the findings in her paper (with co-authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, and Sandra Sequeira), “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences,” which was just published in the American Economic Review. </p><br><p>From the paper’s abstract: </p><br><p>“We find that a...
AI and the Human Touch
<p>EIG chief economist Adam Ozimek chats with Cardiff Garcia about Adam’s new post, AI and the Economics of the Human Touch. </p><br><p>An excerpt: </p><br><p>Either AI is so useless that we are in the middle of a bubble that’s about to burst and take the economy down with it, or AI is so powerful it’s going to replace us all and devastate the labor market.</p><br><p>The pessimism in speculation about the economic effects of artificial intelligence is often so overwhelming that these opposing concerns can even come from the same...
Crime, Leniency, and the Science of Second Chances
<p>Jen Doleac is an economist and the director of the Criminal Justice program at Arnold Ventures. She joins Cardiff on the show to chat about her upcoming new book, “The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice”. </p><br><p>From the book jacket: </p><br><p>Freakonomics for criminal justice, The Science of Second Chances presents a groundbreaking approach to criminal justice reform, revealing how small-scale interventions can reduce people’s chances of reoffending and break the incarceration cycle… </p><br><p>Drawing on cutting-edge economic research and real-world experiments, the book presents a blueprint for reform that...
The Licensing Racket
<p>Nearly 30 million workers, or roughly one in five workers throughout the country, are required to have a professional license before they can do their jobs.</p><br><p>That’s more than twice the number of workers who belong to unions. And it’s almost ten times the number who earn the minimum wage. But in comparison to those other economic arrangements, curiously little attention is given to the process that governs licensing, the perverse outcomes it so often leads to, and the vulnerable workers who are affected by it. </p><br><p>Cardiff’s guest on this episode is Vand...
The surprising economics of the world’s most valuable asset
<p>Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor of The Economist, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset.</p><br><p>By one estimate, the value of land makes up roughly a third of all the wealth in the entire world. Add the houses and commercial buildings on top of the land and the total value is almost two-thirds. </p><br><p>And according to Mike, land “defies some of the usual laws of capitalism that apply to other goods and assets.” Its supply is fixed, it is immobile, and it...
Lessons of the Rare Earths Showdown
<p>How can the United States make its economy more resilient not just to future economic shocks but the threat of such shocks from its geopolitical rivals? </p><br><p>Arnab Datta has spent years working on this very question. In the immediate aftermath of the recent rare earths showdown between America and China, Datta and his colleagues at the Institute for Progress and Employ America published a new analysis titled How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths.</p><br><p>China’s global dominance in rare earths, acquired over decades, allows it to “gain leverage in trade...
Housing and the Politics of Place
<p>What accounts for the astonishing streak of YIMBY wins this year — and which concessions, if any, should they consider offering to the NIMBYs? Should the center-left Abundance faction be trying to persuade conservatives and not just progressives? </p><br><p>Do struggling places need more market-based solutions (high-skilled immigration, tax incentives for investing in low-income communities) or more straightforward redistribution and pubic investment (in infrastructure, job training, internet access)? </p><br><p>Are liberals ceding too much ground to anti-immigrant sentiment? And should the most famous museums in the world stop hoarding their artwork? </p><br><p>Live on stage...
Attention and the Possibility of Persuasion
<p>Jerusalem Demsas is one of Cardiff’s favorite econ and housing journalists, a previous New Bazaar guest, and now the founder and editor of The Argument, a new magazine dedicated to making “a positive, combative case for liberalism through sharp, well-argued opinion pieces, original reporting, and multimedia content that confronts the illiberal drift in our politics.” </p><br><p>Jerusalem and Cardiff discuss: </p><p><br></p>Her meaning of liberalismHow (if?) persuasion works The politics of immigration and why it matters for the economy Drawing lines vs reaching across themIf Twitter really is “acid on community” How to societally deal...
