have, how that just self perpetuates know in and out in and out and that they had been given a chance. even the people that have been exonerated when they come out, they have nothing and that if we give people a chance to to become better at restorative justice and dealing with their own individual needs is different from person to person that it would be safer for everyone. and it is a safety a public safety issue. so thank you for coming out you. thankhello everyone.

welcome to the keto institute and welcome to those watching at home and on television on peter goettler. it's my honor privilege to be the president and ceo of the cato institute. and i'm really pleased today to have bryan caplan megan mcardle with us for a book forum on the first graph novel. i'm even though it's graphic nonfiction. i'm told brian. it's still supposed to be called a graphic, but the first graphic novel that cato has ever published and the second graphic novel written by brian and this one is called build baby, build the science and ethics of housing regulation. i grew up in a lower middle class town, working class town, and we all pretty happy. we thought were fortunate and in fact when i hear politician always talking about how tough things are for the middle class,

i kind of remember my child and remember that the american middle class in the history of the planet and, even in the context of the planet today, is one of the one of the most fortunate demographics, but yet i've become more sympathetic some of the challenges faced by the middle class in particular. if think of the things that many people would consider elements of a good life, it would be to be healthy to see your kids educated and to be able to live in a home of your own and. i think it's ironic that in all three of these areas we seem to be the same policy mistakes. we restrict supply and then we subsidize demand. and predictably, that causes to go up. and the policy response to rising prices is to subsidize demand more. and i think we're in a situation now where you can see all three of these.

you important components to our lives health care, higher education and housing are being priced out of the reach of many middle class people, at least in the area of. housing, there seems to be a growing consensus across. the political spectrum that recognizes the impact that zoning and land regulations are having in restricting and therefore the the challenge is with the high and increasing cost of housing. and i'm really delighted that the first graphic novel, a graph of graphic nonfiction we're publishing, has been so masterfully designed and written by brian in order to address this issue impact that that government has on restricting the supply of housing and therefore increasing the cost faced by, you know, american and would be homeowners.

you and i get together with young people, particularly some of the young people on staff here really drives home. i'm old and i've lived in the same house for a long time so i haven't been on the market in the market for a home in a long time. but if you're a young person, even if you're doing well, it really is challenging to think about about buying buying your own home. so i'm really delighted at at this this book especially because brian in his first piece of graphic nonfiction borders the science and ethics of immigration. and now in this piece, i think it's really a remarkable vehicle for for delivering these ideas. this is a serious book, you know, a serious person, even someone knowledgeable about these issues. i think we get a lot out of this. and yet i think it would accessible to even a precocious middle schooler. so i think that maybe one of the things i'll save for the q&a,

how brian feels the open both borders and in this volume effective in getting these ideas out to the broadest, broadest possible audience. but you didn't come here, hear me talk, so i'm going to turn things over. brian. but first, i'd like to remind who he is. brian is an economics professor at george mason university. he's the new york times selling author of the aforementioned open borders, the myths and rational the science and ethics of immigration. he's author of the myth of the rational, selfish reasons to have more kids and the case against. this is the bio that brian wrote for himself. he says he's mindful of the stereotype of the boring professor, so he strives to make abstract ideas thrilling and he's openly nerdy man who loves graphic novels and roleplaying games. i also think it would be too strong to say that you're a provocateur. brian but, i did hear you once

say that what you like to do is put an idea that seems crazy out there and get people thinking that, hey, perhaps this isn't so crazy after all. and we're delighted to have as a discuss megan mcardle megan, i think most of you or, all of you know, as one of your original superstar our bloggers and also a i think it was david weigel who you made the transition from blogging to become an msn journalist. she's not tebowing as we used to say. janelle, a columnist for the for the washington post, where i'm sure many of you read her. she also worked for bloomberg, the economist the atlantic and newsweek and the daily beast and has been published all over the place. new york times, wall street journal, the guardian, reason, among other places. she's also the author of the book the upside of down why failing. well, is key to success and that

megan and brian tend to be philosophic aligned. i'm going to be very curious where the points of disagreement will be on the book, although david boaz once mentioned to me that he, he, david, both would score about 60 on brian kaplan's libertarian purity tests. so maybe there actually will be some points of points of disagreement, but without more delay. brian, take it away. all right thank you very much. it is wonderful to be back here at the cato institute. i was an intern here back in 1991. in the other building a really appreciate how peter's been supportive of this project. the dream is to have an entire library of libertarian nonfiction, graphic novels on a wide range of important issues. so we'll whether this one works out all all right so why a graphic novel on housing i get lunch with my friends almost every day, which is the best

thing about my job. and there are two recurring questions that we our lunch guests. first of all, what are the biggest in your field? secondly, why aren't you working on any of them? there seems to be a bit of a puzzle because people will generally say they don't work on the things that actually important right now. i will confess i too occasionally work a guilty pleasure issue that i recognize not very important. it just happens to be fun. but i do strive to on what i see as the biggest issues when i write a book. it's not just to entertain me, it's to take ideas that i think are very important on issues, that are under examined and bring them to a much wider audience. all right. now, how can you an issue as big? big by what? well, i say, look, in economic policy, the absolute metric, which is the the obvious metric, is this how much would moving the status quo to the free market actually change the economy? so you look at the world and

say, here's where we are. if we move from there to a free market, how much would change? the reason why i decided write a book on housing regulation is because there have been decades of research that at least convinced me that a radical free market approach would transform the economy and for the better. it's not hard to transform economies for the worse by transforming for the better. that's the real challenge right now. the problem when you actually go and the articles that i'm relying on, you can go into the section references, you can read them all say the problem is this while the implication portions of housing research are thrilling, you can sit there and imagine in this vastly better world. but the research itself is by now standards boring. right. as a professor, my standards are boring are different from most people's. and so i go and read a table numbers and say, wow, this quite amazing numbers, but nor emily, when i step back and imagine the things that i'm reading to

someone who is curious about the world but is not an academic, i realize are going to be falling asleep, which then makes think what is the best way to bring the science to life? to a broad audience without sacrificing intellectual integrity? the last part's hard. if you just turn on the tv, you can see sorts of ways where people are bringing ideas to, but with great sacrifice of integrity. so in the words of rod serling, i submitted for your approval. my bill, baby bill, the and ethics of housing regulation illustrate it by audie brand say who is in romania right now. but that's him there. if you can take a look. yes, that's one of my favorite characters. that is the super cute baby lion. that will grow up to be something extremely dangerous and down there, that's me giving high five to you, audie. all right. so what is wrong with the housing market over the last 50 years, u.s. housing prices have

increased a lot more than inflation, and especially what we call the most desirable areas of the country, the trendy areas, the places where people say, oh, i really want to move that place. i'm an economist. and even if you aren't, there's a really obvious story about what's going on in the housing markets. supply and demand. yes, of course it's supply and demand like demand is high supply is low. of course, prices are astronomical as usual. supply and demand wrong. it is correct to say the supply and demand gives us insight on what's going on in housing prices. but it's still in particular case, deeply misleading because normally when we say supply and demand, it very sounds like we're talking about natural. why are court side seats a basketball game so expensive. well there's naturally a great scarcity of courtside seats to basketball games. everyone can't be sitting in the courtside side. by definition.

watch the research that i build this book on says is that it is not the case that natural scarcity is a big problem. instead, housing prices have largely because regulation is artificially reducing supply and by a lot right? right. so what's wrong with the housing market? this is what's wrong with the housing market. one of the main issues in the book is is the best symbol for government right now outside of the us uncle sam isn't a symbol for government at all it's a symbol of the u.s. but since i was thinking, we largely use audience. i figure it uncle sam is about the best we have it is true and i totally on board with most of housing is actually state and local but there wasn't any good symbol for it. so i said, well, uncle sam is symbol of government in america. and i think is the best that we can do for communicating this idea in one image. all right. so let me give you a quick tour of top housing.

almost every country that i've looked at has a lot of regulation, even places like india, where you might say, why would you go and stop construction in india when so many people are sleeping in the streets. and the answer is, well we got our reasons. we're going to go and strangle housing even here. so what are some of the top housing regulations, ones that wind up making a big difference? so one is height restrictions. we have the technology to build very tall buildings in desirable locations. we've had technology for over 100 years. if you go and look at the skyline of, new york city, you'll see a bunch of buildings that are very tall and are ancient. no one alive or almost no one alive remembers them being built any longer. but getting permission build new ones is super hard. the ordeal to go through the number of layers of, bureaucracy, the number of rules you have to follow so much that very of them get built compared to the number that would be profitable. if it was just a matter i own

the land i want to build this out of my way. something is particularly important to the united states is multiple in the restrictions. a large majority of residential land is set aside for single family homes exclusively. you can't do anything else minimum lot size, even when are building a single family home. very to say you have to waste most of your land and i do mean waste because normally builders would realize that while people like having extra land, they don't like it enough to actually pay anything close to the market price in less. obviously, the government says you are not allowed to go and build on anything less than an acre. that's case they are stuck meeting minimum parking requirements also wind up mattering a lot. seems like a picky point, but when look at the numbers it's very common. say that builders have to build two or three parking spaces per resident which means or per unit, which means that you have to go and again, waste enormous amount of land just to go and build anything much more. but a start.

how much does regulation actually raise prices? we've got data going back, but not 100 years. we're going to look at how housing prices used to work around most of the first world and we can see is that historically, even rises in demand didn't produce long term rises in housing prices back when popular was growing much more rapidly than is now, we didn't see long run rises in. instead, when there was a shock demand, prices would go up and then as a result of this, prices would be above cost and then markets would do the normal thing that do when prices are above cost, which produce more to make piles money. this is how things worked once prices got above cost would lead to a lot more construction. the construction would continue until prices fell back to what we call the break even level the long run competitive level rough estimate of how high got now is that prices now at about double

the break even level over the entire country. so for the entire country worried about double the cost of production the physical cost the actual physical cost of doing it. how do we now write standard method here, which goes back to economists glaeser and gyourko is to take a look at very similar that have different amounts of land and then use the extra price of the house, the extra land measure. what is the value land that does not have the actual permission to build anything on go for what is that price right and. what they find is that the extra will pay to have 100 square feet of vacant unusable land for anything other than walking around or playing volleyball is real. well then you got this pure value of land. next step is go to a big manual of construction cost used by people who actually industry and figure out what is the physical construction cost to actually make the home right. then finally you sum the cost of the unimproved land with the

cost of construction to price and that gap is the measure the effect of regulation which is often somewhat confusingly called the zoning tax. sometimes perhaps some are knows about zoning says well, it isn't really a tax. yes, the researchers know this. they just want to have a name for what regulation is adding to the price. so earlier work on this found enormous zoning taxes in your most desirable area so bay area new york l.a. right places like a downtown downtown chicago right didn't find much elsewhere and then the ideas are severe problem some places but for most of the country it's not very important. but then later on got better data on vacant lots and rebuilt vacant lots at distances from downtown areas. and what they found is that actually in almost all major population centers in the u.s., there are large zoning. government regulation is adding a lot almost everywhere.

a lot of people live like so if people are there, they probably are paying a lot extra because of government. now why write a whole book on housing in particular? doesn't government prices of other stuff? sure. but here's the key thing. people spend way more on housing than they're doing on gasoline or chewing gum. so when you double this cost, it is a huge deal. you're doubling the cost of something that is a large share of the budget, which means there's a large effect on living standards. so a rough estimate that housing costs are about 20% of your budget. so we could have that cut cut to cut the cost of living by 10% and then raise standard of living across the whole u.s. by an average of 11%, which is a ton right now. this brings me to my very favorite chapter of the book, the panacea policy, who is heard of heard the word panacea before? yes. all right, good. i talked to few people said they never heard of it. and like, you know, this is a common word. all right. anyway, all of the evidence that i talked about points to a

really straightforward braindead way, dramatically increase living standards, which is housing deregulation. we got regulation. the problem, get rid of the regulation can go back to normal as. they used to be all right but what really motivated motivated me to write this book is when i realized there's a lot of other problems that seem unrelated but are in fact closely connected to housing regulation. many these problems, people think of them as they're so intractable what could possibly handle any one of them? and i was at the evidence saying that not only do i know i handle one of them, i know one policy it simultaneously a big dent in a long list of problems. right. so deregulation promises mitigate many other social ills, including inequality social mobility, poor prospects for working class males homelessness, environmental issues, low fertility, and also crime. all right. so let's see. all right. so let me just go through some

of the main arguments here, inequality, this really easy, the share of people's budgets they spend on housing falls with income rich people spend a smaller share their income on shelter than poor people. that means if you reduce the price across the board you are doing more to help poor people than rich people, that by definition reduces inequality. and so this is again is a large share of the budget. this makes a noticeable difference. similarly, it's also true that homeowners are higher incomes and renters on average are for landlords, as we're going to see rather for for homeowners, housing deregulation is a mixed bag there are a bunch of good things for homeowners, which definitely be pointed out. but at least for homeowners you can say. yeah, but also my primary asset is going to fall in value for tenants. it is a clear cut gain because. they don't own the property that is losing value and, so they just pay a lower price without a loss in asset value. social. there used to be a really clear

cut way in the united states. very simple. were a person that was motivated could raise their standard of living just meant say a feels unless you live in the richest highest wages parts of the country leave you are go to high wage area and pocket that extra race right in the past it was true the housing were a little bit higher in high wage areas, but it was a small difference. so that anyone who wanted to go and could just pack their bags, get their car, drive to a high wage area, pay a little bit more in housing costs, have a lot more income, and enjoy the difference. what is going to show up showed is that it is no longer true that this works in modern united states because now you move to the highest wage areas the country. housing costs are so much higher that the housing cost increase eats up more than 100% of the wage gain. on average. and therefore, what's going on is that people tending to leave high wage areas of the country,

which is almost it's like i'm going to go to area. wages are lower. it's like, why would you ever do that? because the housing cost is so much lower that i actually get again, when you go and read work, they have even more interesting details like high skilled workers can get a gain by going to high wage areas because for them the housing cost is a smaller share of the budget and the wage gains larger. but for a journal, for a for a janitor to go and move to new york city to pay mississippi as a way to get poor not richer, another big gain, poor prospects for working class males. you probably heard of the books decius bare by nobel prize winner angus deaton, my dissertation advisor and case. one of the main things they show is that non-college males have done very poorly by a lot of measures in recent years, and their favorite story is that non-college males have a lack of work that at least feels meaningful for them. right. and what kind of work feels meaning for them meaningful? well, the classic one is

manufacturing jobs. and this is classic employment. this is one where, despite all sorts of efforts to go and revive manufacturing, it is pretty much hopeless because for the simple reason that we are close to satiated on manufacturing, who here wants to go and own five televisions on the other hand, there is another classic of manly employment, which is construction, which is still high wage and we're still most people would like to get a lot more if the price were right. most people today would like have a much bigger place if if they could. if this price were reasonable, whereas they don't want to get a whole bunch of televisions. right. and again, what is this specifically do for working class males? well, the a majority of people work in construction are, first of all, non-college workers, second of all male. so not only are you making it affordable for them to have a home of their own, but also you are creating a lot of extra jobs, in particular. this is something where if we were to go and say double employment in construction, it

makes a huge and transformative difference because it's a large industry now, if you were a double it from 10 million to 20 million, this would be a transformation of what it is like to be a non-college male in america. homelessness. this is one that i was skeptical of when first started going and working on, but because i was thinking of homelessness as living on the street. but actual statistics are more like not having a permanent a permanent address. and for this it makes a of sense that if you go and make housing more affordable, people going to stop sleeping on their friends or brothers couch or stop couch surfing. and again, this is what the evidence says, is that a very predictor of actual measured homelessness rates is just the cost of a cheap place, right. our environmental issues, this is one where, again, ed glaeser together, matt kohn has done some very cool work showing that actually new construction has a lower carbon footprint than old because even though it's bigger, it's better insulated.

furthermore, are the areas of the country that are nicest in terms of weather conditions? southern california most notably these are places at very low and cooling costs, and yet perversely, they have regulated prices in that area. so high that people flee. and when they flee california, do they go? they go to places where they will have a larger environmental footprint, environmental footprint, low fertility. this one, it's a bit more controversial. but the papers that are on this are on my side. and again, common sense just one of the main reasons why you keep living in your parents basement is because housing is expensive as long as you're living in your parents basement, you are highly unlikely to get married and even less likely to start having kids. so i think when you put that together, it really is hard to believe anything else other than this going to make a dent in it and this crime. why don't we go talk about that in the q&a, but very cool experiment there. right. so why not? why haven't deregulated right?

i've got a real simple story for my all of our policies exist. the policies that we have exist. most people think life would be much worse without the policy. people housing regulation because when you tell about not having it, they get scared and say, my god, what could go wrong? there's a standard list of complaints that almost has when you bring this up. what's bad about building stuff? it's going to give us more traffic is going to give us more parking problems. bad for the environment. we got to protect the character of the neighborhood. and that, of course is a classic preventing uses. i don't want a pig farm next door. so let's make sure you can't do that now in the book i go over some key rebuttals. why these arguments just aren't that good, or why at least if they are true, they are still misleading. our first principle guarantee is not great. giving stuff for free is though super popular. a terrible idea, especially if it is a good subject to

congestion. when you road driving free during rush, you don't mean this doesn't mean that everybody gets to enjoy a pleasant drive. it means that everyone is stuck in traffic when you that we are going to make all parking cheap even on a very popular day park. it doesn't mean everyone gets free parking. it means that you have to drive around for half an hour to find parking. economists are talking about this for a long time, saying why, don't we go and charge a price greater zero for driving during peak time and for parking during peak times and solve a problem that way. right now, the standard thing is it's not fair. what about poor people? so instead go and double the price of housing. that's that's really fair for poor people. it's like it makes a lot more sense to go and raise the price of these narrow, specific goods that are some that are vaguely connected housing to housing that to raise the price, housing, which is a much larger hit. right.

obviously, right now. i know that a lot of people still resist it. and my dad watching, he'd be saying, brian, people to drive, you can't charge them for this. it's like it's a lot better to do this than to have a house cost $1,000,000. a second point, just like i was saying, glaeser and khan letting people live in temperate cities. is green if you were a real environmentalist, care about the planet, you would want to go and make it super to build a ton of housing right in california what's going on, right now is parochial environmentalism. like, i don't want the planet harmed right next. me it's like it's planet. so that doesn't make any sense. all right. and then just ripping off bernanke seagen, who i think kato published some of the stuff back in the seventies, he wrote the classic study of land use in houston. and here's what he said. while people get really about urban pig farms ruining, the neighborhood, that kind of thing, market forces lead to a natural separation of uses, even

when it is legal to go and build things next to other things where people wouldn't want them. it rarely happens. there's a reason why most manufac turing is right next to harbors and train stations. that's because you want to get low transportation. there's a reason why most commercial construction is on main roads because you want to get dry by traffic. there's a reason why when you build, when you have a nice you want to build another nice house to it, which that you get a bigger premium from someone who wants a nice house them or someone who wants a lower quality house. of course, this doesn't mean that you would have a guarantee, but a lot. what's gone wrong with regulation is this is this hunt for the guarantee? i wanted absolute assurance nothing bad will ever happen. well, the only way we can do that is to prevent of really good stuff from happening. that's what happens when you say i wanted guarantee because to get even somewhat absolute guarantees like, well, what if, there was a 1% chance of something go wrong then. no, because that's messing my absolute guarantee.

all right. so really, why why do we actually housing? what is the real problem overcome and what is ultimately the goal of? this entire book, what a start. i just want to go and argue with almost all felt. and say it's not primarily about protecting values. it's not. it is convenient. go and point fingers that people disagree. you say you're just a selfish jerk. that to protect your property values, it's not completely wrong. there are some people that want to protect their property values, but it's really overrated. how do we know? first of all, this story were true? existing property owners would not be saying absolutely not. no way, never, no matter what they be saying, let's make a deal. how much are you willing to pay for it? how much you're willing to pay to rip rip down 100 historic homes in san francisco and five skyscrapers and said that's what an actual salvage person when you make them an offer not no way. i don't care how much money you offer a salvage person. what kind of money are we

talking? right. so if existing owners would happily development emily, how can you do it? well, one thing would be to say, how about we give a property discount? property tax discount to all the existing owners and we pay and charge extra property taxes to the new developers. how about that? so let's make a deal. right now. another reason now to go back i was mentioning there are selfish for owners to want to go and protect their property values. but on the other hand, there are some selfish interests going the other way. like what if your new owner wants to upgrade? if you own an historic home in san francisco, wouldn't you like to be able to sell out a developer who will tear it down and, put a modern building? why to make piles of money, to make piles of money, right? or suppose you want to subdivide your land. suppose he wanted go and expand it. these are all areas regulation is in fact in the real often bad for owners. we tend to forget about the ways that regulation is harming the existing occupants, but it often does. furthermore, suppose you want

your adult kids to live within 100 miles of you. that's important, right? you might say, well, i'm going to be really selfish here. i don't want any additional housing built. i want to keep prices high. do you want your kid to be able to live near you? well, yeah, i want him to be able to live near me. well, how do you propose to make that happen? if prices are on the price of a house, a million bucks, i suppose i could go. and get a giant home equity loan against the inflated value. my home value, my house, give it to my kid. so can make the down payment. or we could have deregulation or housing just lower and we don't have to worry about right. furthermore, as i discussed in the book, there's actually a lot of evidence that renters support regulation. which fits with the idea that just think it's bad for society, rather that they are out for themselves is of course a renter in terms of basic economics, well, what do you care whether the price of housing comes down is actually good for you? so what are the good stories about why we have regulation? save the good stories are as follows. first of all, just status quo

bias. things are true, are great. the way they are. they shouldn't change ever in the book i've got a picture of the old waldorf-astoria hotel which is a gorgeous building, was torn down in 1929 to allow the construction of the state building, which is even better. why assume that people tear down old buildings? they're going to build something worse. but why? well, we've got a lot of psychological evidence. this is how people are and great news is if you just let people do what they want, change happens and then people get used to the change and then pretty soon they can't even believe that they ever thought otherwise. or they've just. so a lot of the problem is just status quo by just getting people to think about how beautiful the world could be but isn't yet and that's really the whole point of chapter five. bastiat buildings, where everyone knows great french economist frederick bastiat in the book, i resurrect him and we travel around the world and see world as it might be, but is not economic illiteracy right?

this is one of my favorite root causes for a lot of bad government policies. i economists tend to think everybody knows that if we go and deregulate will come down. but the problem is that hurt some people. well, we've actually done pretty good surveys, even experimental surveys, where we ask people, what do you think happen if we allow people to build a lot more housing and the rough breakdown of the public is a third of people think that would raise a third thinks no difference a third think it would bring them down. so roughly speaking, the public a random view on this issue we're almost all economists would agree. of course allowing more construction brings prices down. so if people are in two thirds, the public is in total denial. the main benefit of housing. it's not surprising that hardly anyone supports it. so what want to do in the book is change people's minds overcome the economic illiteracy. another problem sheer innumeracy. all right, so this everybody knows the approximate approximately equals mass sign.

it's that squiggly one. it's not the straight bars. all right. so 1 trillion -1 billion approx simply equals not exactly approximately equals 1 trillion. yes. but try using this argument in a debate i've been in a bunch of debates where i had $1 trillion argument that was completely solid. and the opponents. yeah, but what about these $10 billion complaints and what i want to say is look, even if all your complaints were true i'm still i still deserved to win because those are $10 billion complaints. and i got trillion dollar benefit. so the benefits vastly outweigh costs. and you're just being petty about this. but they beat me in the debates because. ten particular vivid, whiny complaints are a lot more persuasive than giant overwhelming. what? what overwhelming argument in favor. so i think this is a big part of the problem. i illustrated this in the debates, this debate between the bear and the mouse, where the mouse crushes bear. but the other bear much cheaper housing. that's the story. right.

and last one, kind of inspired by my dad's paranoia. you mentioned building new things and many people's minds do go to worst possible case, which does happen once in a long while. but the reasonable thing that you do when you're evaluating something is, well, what normally happens? what typically happens? i still remember what a major new development when i was in high school and i was just learning economics. my dad was very upset about. it he came down and complained about all the -- city councilman that approved this horrible thing. and i sat there trying to argue with him. no, no, no. this is actually really good if you don't know anything. all right. so 30 years later, he doesn't even remember he was ever against it. but i remember i remember him saying the sky would fall if it was built. nothing has happened. he hasn't even read. he's not even aware that this this development even exists anymore. but i think this is a major problem. it's worst case thinking and the weaponization of this in politics. all right. so yeah so to conclude, here's my two page audio book.

i'll see the text is actually too small for me to read it. yes, i do remember to say if i turn around, i can see it. yes. as bentham put it. and there i've got the auto icon of jeremy bentham. remember how bentham was actually was literally mummified all right. so but as a mummy he can speak in a graphic novel and yes so what he said is the request of industry to government is is modest is that of diogenes to alexander jr. get out of my light and that is my solution for america's housing problems and the world's thank you very much. i guess that means i'm up so as i read this book. i thought multiple times about dorothy famous review of a book. so is not a book that should be read and tossed lightly aside. should be with great force.

and i want to take this book and i want to go to every state legislature and city council in the country. just start throwing it, just hopefully it will them in the heads and knock some sense into them. so i, i already knew before i reading it that i was to agree with the book. i did. so it was a little bit of a struggle to be a respondent rather than just to like bring my pompoms and go. brian bright bill baby belt. so yes, exactly. no so i came up with, i came up with the questions that i had as i went through with the first of which are empirical right. some things, you know, for example, we are definitely seeing people out of high productivity cities towards lower productivity, places where it's easier to build. and i think that that is obviously being driven by

housing prices. i don't know that all it's being driven by housing prices. i think there are other issues here in terms of quality of life, in terms of if so, if you think about an american city, the cities they're leaving these these big coastal cities. right. which is where most of the problem is by no means all to be clear. you know, as brian talks, miami, dallas, there are lots of places where especially in the center city, there are still issues. but the big issues are along the coasts. those are where for a variety of reasons. it's become there's just a strangle hold on the ability to build in densest and most productive areas. but i tell the story of those cities, right? there's a bunch of technological that make the city what it is right. so those cities tend to be they were all architected around railroads basically. right now there have been many of them rebuilt and changed with highways and so forth that they are less oriented around center

transit hub. but if you look at all of these cities, you're ultimately going to find the same pattern, which is they were originally built around one or many rail stations and the design of the city is is around that there's transit links, there's roads and so forth. and then what happens in the fifties is, is that we enable people to live further rather than walking distance a railroad station. and that is transforming. and then we essentially open up a bunch of land to development that had not been feasible to develop as commuter housing before. you could work downtown while living in a single family, detached home farther from the rail station, you could walk and say half an hour. and that's just a major technological that allows people to live and work in different places, people who could previously before did it to have a house and they all move right. so i think that some of what you're seeing are people moving away from those cities is just that places there was another technologic air conditioning which has enabled places like

phenix to just be a place that you would desire to live. and so by no means all of it is. i think obviously brian is correct about that, but i do have questions about if we could massively upswing in new york and san francisco, how many people would want to move or would we still see some outmigration for other reasons, for other policy reasons as well? right. it's not all housing. it's it's other things, taxes and so forth. and second, again small empirical quibble because are nowhere near the limit, whatever it is. but high. can we really build? you know, i love brian talks about these giant skyscrapers on central park that take advantage of the view those actually turn out to not be very good buildings and they relate to a well-known problem building which is that elevators are actually huge constraint on how high you can build. so after about 30 floors, residential, this sheer amount of elevator that you need to get to people's their apartments, eating into the apartment value,

you get less and less value out of each successive floor. which is why if you know some of the ultra tall buildings, the empire state building, not the empire state building build, world trade center building, they actually had staged elevators where you take one elevator to, a mezzanine on like this. i think it a 78th floor and then you take another elevator. so these super tall buildings are only being built abroad because. they're not actually very practical office buildings. so there is some of that with residential as well. those tall buildings on central park are now one of those now mired in lawsuits because the residents don't like it. and we're only really feasible because there's one apartment per floor. if you had less than that, if you had more than if you tried to have a more normal building that tall, you wouldn't be able to get enough people and down to make it a practical place to live again. however, this is quibble. you know, if you look at some place, new york city, you could definitely make a lot of buildings than they are. third question i have i think is a bigger question. this goes back to that technological revolution of the fifties. also the technological revolution rail, which allowed streetcars which first for the first time allowed people to be more than walking from work.

there's another technological change which is remote work. i think it's still an open question how much this is going to change american life. and i think it's going to take a couple of decades, really work through it. but how when brian talks about the productivity that you can get by moving into cities. right. and this has been a steep all of this literature how is is that most of the data we have on that is still really pre-pandemic so is that productivity game is as big as it used to be and if if not what does that imply about economic benefits of deregulating housing? i then the last question would have i think the my biggest empirical it really is a question i am not a demographer. i don't know the answer, but lyman stone and some other people have been making what me is a credible argument that really dense living is.

bad for fertility. for a couple of reasons. there may actually be some deep evolutionary that we don't know about that just when the population gets dense, you just have less urge reproduce. we don't like, right? we see that. we see of this in nature rate that the reproduction rate slow down as the population gets more and definitely changed. but there's also look, i grew up in manhattan and my mom had two kids because i grew up in manhattan. she wanted for the grand we had like a pretty much ideal situation and for growing up in an apartment, aside from having like eight full time nannies or something, right we lived in a building where there was a playroom where there were four other little girls my age that i could run around the building with. we basically in the seventies it was like a little small town. my had no idea where i was on weekends like 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. i came home for dinner, i might be in an apartment but i might

be at any one of other apartments. and she didn't know she would just call around if she needed me. we were a couple of blocks from riverside park, which had excellent playgrounds, but the fact if you're raising a kid in an apartment and i can also say this as someone who has had a dog on the 15th floor and now then on the first floor and then in a house, it's just like the need to get another creature up and down in the elevators and oh, my gosh, i forgot the diaper bag back up it like that little it's it seems like a tiny transaction costs some minute, right maybe another minute of waiting for the elevator. but psychologically it's such a huge transaction cost and it makes it way more unpleasant. also makes more unpleasant that like you can't go to greenery unless you physically escort your child and stay there and watch, it just increases the intensity of parenting it when they get in the middle school, or at least it didn't. my era when they would not when your parents were not hovering you all the time and i was allowed to go around the city on the subway by myself.

but that i think might be like, i think housing on obviously impact. but i sort of ask whether push it whether if we build all these super dense buildings downtown at least whether we're actually the fertility boost from that i understand look there's filtering you know people move people without kids moving to the other people get their single family but do have questions. so then i have some policy questions and. one of them is does this densification of all levels, right? that was mostly about tall buildings, but density, densification, it isn't just tall buildings as brian ably out. right. it's also townhomes and it is putting single family homes on quarter acre lot instead of a full acre lot. it's all of those things, right. but in a lot of cases, both were

tall buildings and with other kinds of development. this densification is going to require a bunch of complementary goods. right? it's going to require better sewer systems. it's going to require, at a minimum, better roads. if we're talking about more dense kinds, living, especially if we're talking about doing something that brian recommends and which i endorse which is getting rid of minimum parking requirements. it might require public. and i have a couple of questions about that. one is that many of those things have the same veto points as housing right. it is harder to build infrastructure here than it used to be. we have given this community control, created environmental systems up to the building codes of the things that are making it harder to build housing. we have also are also making it harder to build infrastructure. los a bunch of interest group and special regulations ones that have made american infrastructure costs, some of

the highest in the world. and so how does that figure in do can we densify if we fix that problem doesn't require other extremely unpopular policies congestion pricing one that brian mentioned it's really like i love congestion pricing with passion seldom found. i love the market. i love free pricing of water. here is another question for building in the west. in california, arizona, in colorado. um, i love pricing fully pricing water. why are we giving this away for free? why are we giving parking spots away for free? i love all of these things. you know, who hates them like every other voter. so every time you pull these, they pull badly. and so a question i have is if we need to do these things to to make the densification without so congesting traffic, so creating externalities,

pollution from congestion traffic how you know, like what do do about that problem? does it require political that are actually popular but which are for a variety of reasons hard to do so things i think about when i think about densify and schools i don't want to call it having kids school to go down crime. it's not exactly true. urban areas have higher crime necessarily than rural areas, but the crime is stranger. crime is a lot likely in a city than in a rural area. domestic violence is not more likely, but stranger crime is. and that's a real cost that people really care about. and that will make your densification harder because for it to be, it needs to be economically integrated. how do you get affluent to move in if you don't have better crime control? how do we think about providing those goods and you know, are some restrictions enhancing? so examples one is people don't like to live next to tanneries.

right. should we have some? no. you cannot build your super polluting next to my 100 year old daycare. but also, should we do think about things like one that i think about a lot is that when you have a major thoroughfare and you build a building that doesn't have storefronts in it, it creates dead space on the street, that makes it really unpleasant, actually makes the neighborhood worse and less vibrant and actually less function as a again, this is more of a tall problem than lower density problem, but it is a problem that i think about because something that i've seen happen in my neighborhood where like just built a lot of dead space on the street because developers, again for somewhat, you know, because developers basically didn't want to deal with their bankers on retail leases, which are more complicated in some ways than retail and then i want to talk about the political constraints a little bit, because i disagree with brands somewhat about the rationality of the political constraints. i do think that there's a

selfish to it that's quite strong. and i think that some of the data on data on renters tends to be confounded by the fact that like cities have, a lot of renters are also tend be cities that have a lot of rent control. and so, look, if you survey renters in san francisco or new york, it is true that they don't the same kind of property. right. as a homeowner in those cities and therefore it seems a little weird that they are in favor of restrictions but a significant number of them and especially the older voters who are easiest to poll do have rent control conditions. and they basically and this is actually one reason that i really fight with the people who are like homeownership is bad we need mass renting and then rent control to solve the political problem. homeownership that does not solve the problem the renters will act just like homeowners because. you've given them a property right in their apartment and will then fight to protect it. and i you know, i think that the irrationality is broad. it's not just about property values, which is where this to

focus people tend to be. although i think that is a huge problem, rightly or wrongly. and i think wrongly policy has created a situation where you have a lot of people who have got a lot home equity and that's their biggest asset and they are going to quite rationally fight to protect that home equity. and i see this in my neighborhood, which is extremely progressive. then there's me, the libertarian and my husband the libertarian, and we get into hilarious discussions. we're like the libertarian is explaining why we should allow social services come in and build something that's going to serve more poor? to all of my super progressive neighbors because i'm a crazy ideologue. but most people are not crazy ideologues and they they think this is going to be bad for my property values, which is objectively true. it is going to be bad for property values. and that is something that you see over and over again late, right? yes, it is silly to to well, we can't ever build taller because it's going to wreck someone's

life. but actually, having lived on a subterranean first floor apartment where i you know, sunlight was, something i had read about once, it's actually when i finally got an apartment that had light, i could not believe how much how big a difference it made in my quality of life. so if i had apartment already, would i want someone to take my light away? absolutely not. i would be extremely upset. luckily, a crazy ideologue. unfortunately, most people are not. neighbors matter, right? i mean, it is not irrational to try to keep people who have problems out of your neighborhood. that's completely rational. and i you know, i'm brian. you live in a single family home in what i assume a nice, fairly crime free neighborhood. and you have to do that, right? and you would not be happy if someone opened, say, halfway house across the street from you. you would you might be like, yay, i am theoretic happy for america. i am not personally for me. and again we are crazy ideologues. most people are not so.

so i think that all of these facts combined with the fact that as brian says, people are economically. but i also think there's a kind of a death by a cuts problem, which is that, you know, we talk about zoning restrictions or building it's not or the building code or it's not one thing it's so many teeny, teeny, tiny things, all of which individually make very little difference and sound great. who could be against requiring that, you know, toilets have lost lots of clearance in case someone because someone once got stuck in a toilet? the actual situation i dealt with, with home where we were not allowed to make the walls, we wanted our bathroom to be smaller and we were not allowed to because someone might get stuck in the toilet. and my husband, you know, my husband and i are not going to get stuck in our toilet. we had plenty of space but someone could so no one was allowed to have this bathroom. but if you if you see rate some

disability is going to say well if you do that, it makes it harder for me to buy that house. and that means that i have a restricted availability because of something that's beyond my control and that's fair. and that is every single restriction they all alone all have good explanations, sound good, and you have to fight on a thousand fronts. and how is that? i would point out that like poor people and renters don't have necessarily this kind of clause property rent, right in a rent controlled apartment. they also have their they don't have a lot of financial, but often they have quite a bit of social capital embedded in a low density neighborhood that's hard to replicate in a high density neighborhood. right. so if you live in a neighborhood of townhomes up, you know, old rowhouses and you know all the people in that street and you know the person you know you can send your kid to if he you need to go out or whatever. if that's torn down, all of that capital just vanishes because as people move but also it's

actually that kind of capital is much harder to build in a denser neighborhood because they just tend to be more. it's just kind of inherent in the form. and that suits the upper middle class, the middle class pretty well can be a harder form factor for people who have less financial and more need to rely on social capital capital. and then you add in the fact that most people can't, won't, never will think through the second and third order effects. i think it's a big challenge. i, i would also say that the the let's make a deal thing which i love, i want to do, it's really hard to make a credible commitment, right? because your new residents are voters. so you start off by saying, okay you're worried about x, y and z here's what we're going to do. we're going to make their top property taxes high. you get to keep yours. we're going to deny them parking and you get to keep yours. problem is, now those people live there and they vote there and they resent it and eventually, if there's enough of them, they're going to say that that deal is undone and so i

think that's a you know, again, these are political challenges, not intellectual challenges. and then the last thing i would say is on that whole subject of a lot of the let's make a deal keyhole policy that brian calls them, how are they different from a slippery slope? aren't they just you talk about the dangers, the slippery slope where we allowed zoning and euclid v ohio is right or yeah we allow zoning and that just we're now on the the slope pedaling downwards towards our current situation but making those compromises to try to get something done is that just opening us up to the slippery slope. but look ultimately these are small questions relative to the big question, which is how do we solve a bunch of social problems while making us all richer? and i think brian obviously has the right answer to the big question, which is big build, maybe and a really really hope that this book will get into the

hands of as many people as possible and make sure that as many people as possible know how right that answer is. i think, brian, we're going to want lots of time for from the audience, but i see you writing battle against megan's criticisms and questions so why don't you spend some time responding? yeah. thank you very much megan and yeah, i mean if someone actually just like the book is a criticism with they have all right but. i'm just going through some of the highlights you're absolutely right that housing is not the only reason that people move, although it's important to remember that when you add in other factors, it could be amplifying effects rather than mitigating it. so for example, like what would be happening? relocation the population if california same housing prices everywhere else california actually has a bunch of non advantages in terms of weather and so when you see well like

there might be some reasons yeah but it actually is compounding because that's an especially nice area and people still moving away from it and the same goes for a lot of the country are some places where you say, well, people moving more to the south because of air conditioning. all right, fine. but there's other areas that are nicer than ever, especially when you remember that our country has gotten richer overall. and when you're and when people get richer, they put value on amenities like nice weather. right. so you would think that actually. the the south know saying that we're saying well you can move the south is fine because the air conditioning like well i want to move to place where i don't have air don't need air conditioning and that would be more like southern california. we'll see. on the question of how high on writing this book, i did go and read a bunch papers estimating the cost of construction is a function of the number of stories and realizing, wow, there's a lot of disagreement here about exactly what the key break points are, but a very view is that 40 stories is crucial and that value up to the like basically from like seven stories to 40, it's constant

cost per floor and if you guys go and take a look at an aerial view of, either central park or san francisco, you'll see there's almost no buildings anywhere close to 40 stories. probably the only you're seeing any super tall construction is because if you can get permission, do one, then it's worth super tall. but if you can get permission to do 100, then it's like, yeah we're not going to go and do it that high. but i did say it was a quibble. yes yes. so on telework. i mean, one thing that is great about free markets is that when there are large social changes, this opens up opportunities. take advantage of those large social changes. so one thing you can see with telework is, well, i no longer need to live in a place where i like the working. so then where should live? how about i should live in a place where i like to play environments and that is a lot of the problem with regulation is that rather than going and crashing one thing, it's crushing another thing, although it is worth pointing out that we do have some good evidence how important it is an email is

what's the right way of putting it? there's some good evidence on how immigration restrictions go and reduce even when it seems like telework should be totally fine solution. so when i was writing open borders, there like four comparable indian programmers, they were making triple the wage in the u.s. versus in india. you say, well like what's the difference? emailing your work assignments from india versus emailing them from the u.s.? but it did seem like the market consider there to be some very differences in being physically as to what they are. it might just be team building or something like that. so hard to say. but what we do know is that that's a even stronger experiment and it does seem like telework is not even for which would seem like the ideal case is nowhere near enough on density fertility thing, the correlation is undeniable. question is the causation? yeah. all right. here's the thing. we need to go and find a place where you've got where it's really dense.

but cheap that doesn't exist. that would be the real test in terms of the sense test. it's like, well, you sure i don't want to have a lot of kids if i'm living in a 200 square foot apartment. but what if you could live in new york city in a 5000 square foot apartment? what that how do you feel about having kids then? that's something where we could look at the the super rich right now. and they probably are actually having large families when they able to afford that large of a at the very the very high. i think if you looked at those people would actually more likely see that the people large families have decamped for like palatial suburban, right. like in any case, we really do want to do this experiment. the obvious story is precisely that it's prices rather than density per say and. if you were to cut prices, people would then have lower have large amounts of living space in a dense area. now furthermore, notice that this complaint really only holds specifically for high rises anyway. and when you're about seeing

about allowing people to go and build more homes on single family, lots kind of thing, that i'd say that the effect on fertility is totally clear. let's see. on the complimentary goods, you know, it is worth pointing. they do charge property taxes on this construction and they use this property taxes to go and build stuff since it's at local level, it does usually roughly pay for itself, but there are some somehow implications on congestion. i totally know. it's really and that's why i'm trying with everything i've got all the way down to getting a romanian artist to change minds and make them realize that they're being very silly about this, it is a bizarre fetish to say that parking should be free driving, should be free when it is causing so harm. you know, i think the real problem is economic illiteracy, just convincing people there is some connection between the price and the congestion hard as it may be to believe. i do have my my my favorite

argument actually is to take a five minute walk from my place and there is a bridge over route 66. and to show people count the cars and the for toll lanes count the cars and the six free lanes. do you notice the difference. are you convinced that the total change congestion not like events are this come back 20 more times until you're convinced because it's so clear how could deny it let's see on the question of the political motivations. my first book is the myth of rational voter, and i have done a lot of public opinion. i will say that i think that the idea that people are voting their objective is so popular and yet so fundamentally wrong. it's one where people are desperate to. go and find some connection between objective self-interest and voting on this. people said, well, it's just so obvious that your home price is to you financially. is it more obvious than that? you're the income is important. you financially. and yet, as we know people's

income is a terrible predictor of which political party they support. clearly, right. there are so many high income democrat, so many low income republicans. the causation is really clear of which party favors higher taxes and yet people seem to pay that much attention. it what's going on? i think that actually i'll say is that i think that most people are a lot more like me and megan than she says. i think almost everyone is a crazy ideologue. it's whether or not your ideology is especially insipid or not. so that's the real problem almost everyone is forming their political views not from any observation of the world not from calculation of self-interest but rather it's a philosophy. the philosophies are usually so half baked, quarter baked. it's like your philosophy is that pakis should be free. that's what philosophy says. and yet that is the kind of philosophy that a lot of people have. it's not fair to charge a nickel for parking. it goes against the laws of

nature. it's like, why that? why is that the thing that ought to be free rather than a million other stuff that you pay for barely any answer either. you know the story that with rent control. it makes it especially at least it reduces a lot of the reason for tenants to be to be supportive of building more housing. i think at least one of the papers they have is a national sample. most cities in america do not have rent control, but it's very normal for tenants to be favor of regulation. for the same reason i say that almost everyone favors almost everything in politics. they think that it's good for the country. they haven't put a lot of time into this. they are not reasonable. it it's hard to bargain with them, but that is the reason so that's really what i'm focusing on to get a change in people's philosophy. if you say that's really hard. brian, i know i've been working on this stuff for 30 years, really book is my latest efforts like to persuade someone that doesn't agree with me.

you were mentioning how the young even middle school kids might might appreciate it. i've had kids are in elementary school. enjoy it. so and this is actually when my daughter was reading my first graphic novel over my shoulder. so i've got something here. i've got something describing academic research that five year old is voluntarily reading. so that is my best solution is get them all their young self. hopefully we can do it now thanks to by the power of cato, we shall not write. all right. i might suggest that your children are perhaps not representative sample, but they're still so. they she was still five. yeah. we're going to go to questions and we're going to take questions both from the audience here at the institute and, our online audience, the online audience can join the conversation and submit questions directly on the event page, facebook, youtube and on x using the hashtag cato books. i'm actually going to take the first question from the online audience because it basically relates to what you just said

right now. the question is, how successful do you think? first, the first book and then now this book will be reaching a very broad audience compared to your other work? hmm. well, let's see the open borders. my first graphic novel was a new york times bestseller, so that's better than any of my other books have. will i make the base bestseller list? that's out to you? people in media land to decide whether makes the list bye. bye bye bye. many copies see in terms of its likelihood actually changing policy. yeah like here i'm just going be brutally realistic and say odds. one book has a big change. it's really rare, right? and generally the books that have had a really big effect have been bad books that have made the world worse. so communist manifesto, little book, they were really popular, changed the world, but they made it worse. so for a book to make things better. yeah, so maybe capitalism.

milton friedman free to choose, maybe hikes road to serfdom may have pushed things a bit in the better direction and and even that is kind of speculative don't really get to see the world without those books written. i mean what i'll say is, i mean, i'm doing the best i can my honest assessment is probably only i get tens of thousands of readers. unfortunately i need tens of millions of readers. and that's life. i mean, i just do the best i can. let's a question here. we have microphones, please, for the microphone, so that the rest of the folks in the auditorium and the people online can hear you. and please give your name and your affiliation and please a question not a speech or filibuster served back here. my name is tim houston. i am active. very active. the nimbys of northern virginia. thank you, jim. bless you for arguments to convince the many, many people

who believe that building more housing will increase prices. because i know so many smart who actually don't think of supply demand so i'm read your book yet so perhaps you have ways to say that to convince people. yeah so main argument that economists are made is called housing filtering and it says even if i go build some new luxury apartments that no one with an income below the 99th percentile is going to be occupying first. still, where do you get those tenants? you get them from people that are currently in some other nice units. and what happens there? well, they move some people there, they meet some people there in a giant chain reaction. so most people are unlikely to be persuaded by the actual research. i think probably the best argument here is just to go and say, look, take a look at the of the homes that low income people are living in now. how often low income people live in stuff that was built to last three years, almost ever. they're almost all they're almost always living in older stuff. and it's like, what would have

happened if 20 years ago? we stopped them from going and that thing, which was nicer, higher end when it was first built, the answer is that the place that is now being occupied by low income people wouldn't have been built 20 years ago. and then where would be? so in that point of remaining people look where look at the housing that is currently housing the people you care about. when was it built and what did it look like? that and the answer is when it was built, it was nicer. it was you know, you don't generally something at first to go and sell it to low income occupants but filtering not a theory, it's just something that you can go and check in the basic property tax records when you just see when was that thing built and realized that that's how people with low income get places that they get places that were not originally built for them and then they filter down to other people in. this very natural process i think when i have this argument and there are two things. one is i think you do have to acknowledge that there are isolated cases where it increases property prices in an immediate area.

right. so lake union market i, i happen to live near. it was not there was nothing there was not developed at all. when i moved. and it is it has massively my property values for those who don't know. it's a neighborhood in washington, d.c., the northeast. and it it really increased my property values. now, there's all these nice amenities there weren't there when i moved in. now see wide the fact that there are now, i don't know a thousand maybe more units built in and around union market has lowered the citywide cost of housing relative to but if you just tell people this never happens i think they don't trust you and so you say like look this can happen locally but our job is not just to preserve like these five houses here. the here our job is make sure that everyone in the city has houses and thing. i mean, it's an analogy that brian uses in his but i find the

musical chairs analogy really helpful because that's that just cuts through like i think we often because we're so in it we find it hard to think how hard people find to think abstractly about these questions. right. they tend to think extremely contextual and locally and so they will they will say like, you're going to displace this tenant, you're going to do this. and you you have to say, look, it's unless you build housing, it's a game of musical chairs. you know, i did a talk on housing. it at chautauqua a few years ago, and it was so hard to convince people that there is no way to make housing affordable other than building more housing. and finally, i was like, look, there are, you know, some of people you need to house if, you do not build enough housing for them. there is no other policies solution that solves that problem other than having housing for them to live in. and that was when they finally got it, was to stop thinking about prices actually, and to

just start thinking about like there needs to be a unit for every family to live in. and one other quick point. you can also start with the regulations where you really have to twist your mind to see any other effect. then it being good for lower income buyers like get rid of minimum lot requirements. how could it possibly be good for the poor to? say every house has to have an acre. i think it's just really hard. say like, yeah, i don't say so. and that's a big regulation. so you just get people on board with that one. you're already doing a lot better than one could reasonably hope. the second row here, like. hello, my name is off by about. hello, my name's austin, a first year economics student. george washington. i have two questions. my first question is about fertility. so melissa kearney at the brookings institute has said there's no relationship between the cost of living in an area and fertility. and it's also been that women

report having less kids now than in the past. so those findings in mind, do you think that housing deregulation would really noticeably significantly increase fertility? and my other question links together, your two graphic novel novels, i agree that getting rid of immigration restrictions would be immensely positive, but it seems that downside is that increase immigration increase, housing costs and with the zoning have in place, those housing costs are going back down. so given the immense benefits of, both zoning liberalization and immigration liberalization, do you have a preference for which we should do first? thank you. hmm. okay. same all right. so first of all, on the fertility point, i'm pretty convinced. here's the thing, right? so the total number of papers, the connection between housing prices, housing regulation and fertility, i think i able to find four papers ever written. so that's just truth in advertising. i'm not hiding papers. that said something else. i'm just saying that's all the papers that i can find right

now. i would say just in terms of common sense, the point of one of the main reasons people keep leaving their parents is housing prices are high. i think that's just really clear. and i think you got to pretty crazy to say that's not an important reason why keep living with their families well into adulthood. the idea that living with their parents doesn't depress marriage, hard to believe the idea of leaving their parents doesn't depress your fertility while you're still living. also hard to believe. so i say in common sense. i think that it's really clear that i did a blog post called basement fertility where i just had a map of europe. and whether you're living with your parents and what fertility is and not a perfect correlation, but yeah, it's what you'd expect down in southern europe. they keep living with their moms until they're 40. they have hardly any kids. and you move up north where moving out and having independent lives and they don't have fertility of three or even two. but it's a lot higher than down in spain or greece or italy where you just basically your mom do your laundry your whole life. so that and again, is it just culture? it's not just culture as they are squeezed in there.

they don't have privacy. it's just so to go and get your own place there that it's at least a big part of what's going on. yeah, i'd say that it seems really clear to me i but again to be honest, not just based upon those for, but also common sense and basic. let's see on the question of should you prioritize housing over immigration the other one around like i am very much in the school of whatever you can get as soon as you can get it like it's so hard to get any deregulation if you start going well i'm not going to favor this until i get everything else that i want. wow, that's it. there's going to be any deregulation of anything on this story. in the case of the effect of immigration, housing prices, i think it is clear that it does raise housing prices. when you get a lot more people from from an area they're in a highly regulated area. but by the magic of federalism, a lot of what happens in the united states is that is that population growth happens in the low regulation. and by and so even the immigrants themselves go to the high regulation areas. this is the end of the ultimate

result is that population doesn't grow in the areas the immigrants went to. it grows in the other places. and obviously a lot of immigrants just cut out the middle stage and they immediately go to the place where prices low. so yeah, that's so much of what's going on in the u.s. is someone says, well, the whole country and like prices high, but they're not equally high everywhere. i could always go to texas and be able to afford a home while working at dairy queen. not something you're going to be able to do in new york, the bay area. so yeah, don't prioritize and take whatever you can get the second you can get it. could that possibly cause some problems? yeah, but that's the least concerns. the real problem is ever, which is what normally i think brian thinks more like an economist and less like a politician. i might as a journalist have, i think, a little more like a politician. so what i would say this is that building more housing undercuts one of the reasons to oppose immigration, whereas having more immigrants come and driving up

the price of housing actually make it harder to deregulate as. people panic about the about influx. and therefore, i would say probably try to do housing first. if you had to choose. but again, right, politics has a lot of determinants, not just one like in a, you know, philosophy seminar, housing first, but in a real world political world, there's a lot of moving parts. whichever one comes up first. yeah. and i think that people's understanding of their objective self-interest is so weak and they're political and their political concern. most of the politically effective on political views are so weak. i it's true that people definitely complain immigration. where are immigrants raising housing prices? but i think it's better to think this as which complain about immigrants. am i going to make now rather this people have that it's not like otherwise i think they're great but they just said this one problem instead. normally getting partly based upon talking with my dad there is a four day in conclusion and then there's whatever seems like it's going to work right now.

best is the one that i'm going to break up, but you kind of are in a sisyphean ordeal where, however you try, you're not going to change people's minds on that except with the power graphic novels course. but here's here's an author and great journalism and online we like empirical evidence. are there good examples or what's the best example of housing deregulation? how's it worked out? you know, honestly, i'd say the best examples are of just continuing low regulation, which i think a fair measure. so best examples, continuing low regulation. texas is one of the crown jewels of the when you actually go to texas, start arguing, saying, no, we have terrible regulation. and the price of a house in 30 minutes outside of austin is up to $3,000 here, and it's only got four bedrooms and it's like. do you realize how good that sounds? most people around the country not it's perfect here, but it's really how how things are working here to how they are in the rest of the country in terms of explicit deregulation, where

you start at high regulated and then you go down by a noticeable in the last rapture. i talk i talk about gibraltar facts. one depressing fact is that out of all the high regulation metropolitan areas in the us, none became noticeably deregulated between 2026 and 2018 zero. so their workplaces got less regulated. but these are places with hardly people. all right, so that's oh, man, this is a tough situation it's true that in recent years there have been some deregulatory policies, especially a child going after single family zoning in places like california, minnesota. there's a bit i wish them well. i hope that it works out, at least for california. i did read the fine print and i was very depressed when i read the fine because part of the fine print says, yes, you can take your single family home and, turn it up into a quadruple x, up to four homes, but the owner is not allowed to sell. developer you must occupy your home while it gets turned into four homes, which california

said. this is to make sure that you get payoff from the development only if you continue, stay there will you get the money. you've got to manage it yourself. this is like saying if oil someone finds oil on your land, you should have to drill the oil yourself to make sure you get the money out that you can't sell to someone who knows what they're doing. all right. so obviously, the real purpose of this is to gut the original deregulation, because you go and make it a pain in the neck to go and actually more homes there figuring out that many people do it. so that's where we are. like, it's all it is a tough in like the main point that i make in the book is all we need to do is change people's minds about this being good for society and then it will happen. all the other complaints are not a big this one thing is hard that now course that's like saying if you just break through a ten foot brick wall with your head, that would be fine. that would solve the problem. all right. true as far as it goes. but still like we got to start

chipping like the count of monte cristo, seven years or 70 years of chipping away. kate has been chipping away for now 45, 45 years, all there's like persistence wins the day, like a bulldog hang on and no one else will have our attention span and we will do it. yeah, for sure one day. never give up. well, just think how crazy it would seemed in 1965 to say like, we should deregulate trucking. we're you know, and we're going to we should deregulate which we did it it took a long time. and i think that the consensus on this has only really started to emerge in the last 20 years, in part because the problem has only become so bad in the last 20 years. i actually want to ask you, when i when i got the book and, looked at the blurbs on the back, i was thinking to myself, oh, you should have asked paul krugman for a blurb. and then i saw he was in the book. yes. because i know he's you know, he's written columns about this. did you ask him for a blurb?

i believe we did. i'm not 100%. i believe we did. obviously is a busy guy and he's great on housing. so if you're watching this paul thank you for being great on housing and i hope you like my representation of you in the book and if you want give a blurb now even better this is a question that's not really directly related to housing but you mentioned it as being a component of this problem. so brian, you've written a lot about economic. of course, starting with you daily paper. how do you think we should best deal with that issue? you write, economic illiteracy, the scourge of humanity, right? of course, we could all become economics professors and but there is so truth in the idea that economics professors are boring and waste a lot of time on irrelevant details and failed to get big point across probably most you here have seen young ben stein or only middle aged ben stein doing the economics teacher in ferris bueller's off liberty and said to think that if we could just get a better

argument, then people would have to change their minds immediately. like, no, we don't. i think we already got some really good arguments the problem delivery. so rather than going and trying to reinvent the econ textbook, i recommend we dust off our copy of dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. this is a book about how you actually win people over. how do you do it? by really friendly. don't call them stupid, don't call them evil. instead win them over on human level. step one is just seem like a decent person and i say all this not because i'm so great at it. i say all this because i know that i improvement and i've improved from where i was in high school anyway because i was terrible back then. all right. so just smiling, right? you get a lot out of that. you have a sense of humor. i know you get a lot of this. this is why i do the graphic is because in the graphic novel, i can always be the best version of me in real life. i'm just not. but the cartoon of me always the

friendliest, happiest me with the correct emotional reaction to every situation down, to the percentage. it is very friendly. yes, you will even say they'll tell the artist. make me 3% sadder here and i'll do it. so that's what i'm going for. i've got the right emotional palate. but yeah, like you could go and beating people over the head. i think it's just much more productive to have a sense of humor, a sense of humor about yourself. i hope that comes through in the book. it's my sense of humor. anyway, i have done standup comedy and that is, again, i'm i'm not going to say i'm great. i don't get paid to do it or anything. but to put yourself the frame of mind where you could do it is, i think, a good thing for to do. i think what we really don't need is the the classic what you foolish moochers fail to see. it's like that'll work with like five people but we've already got those five people. so now think about something. another way to say the same thing. i think matt iglesias suggested that we need have a reality show

which instead of flipping a house. it's like you just watch a developer attempt to get through environmental review. it gets sent back 90 times and i think, yeah, we need more. it is sad to me that conservatives and libertarians are so bad at making movies. i don't know if anyone has seen. i'm sorry this is mean, but like the atlas shrugged movie, it was not good and it was like this is a general problem with like christian books. i'm a christian. they're good, many of them, some of them are. a few of them are good. most of them are not good. they're sermons with a cast. and like one reason that this is hard honestly is that it is so easy for progressive hollywood to make movies where developers are the villain. how about meek? why is there no conservative movie studio that's just going make a normal movie? no preaching, no other. it just like casually the villain is the environmental group that's stopping them from building a beautiful 200 unit

house that could house all these people who are living in substandard right now. and that doesn't get made there because the syndicate is fair. yes, actually, that is that is true. i will say you cannot help but sympathize with the landlords. right. but there's performance from michael keaton playing the most tenant ever lived there. there should be more things like that where conservatives and libertarians, rather than trying to make a sermon with a cast. just make a story about places where these constraints are wrecking lives because they do wreck people's. it's as the hard thing is that it's and i think that is one reason you can see the house tearing down and the little lady in it where you can't see is all of the people who are living, you know, 50 minutes from work in a floor walk up because they can't get a place closer to work because you didn't the building and that is i think actually so i should say that even as i am slamming conservative and libertarian people are trying to

do this kind of thing and i think one problem is that donors to want to fund something that's explicit that's more like i'm going to tell you exactly what you should think. but another problem is that actually dramatizing the unseen is really difficult. and one reason i really like this is that brian's a good job of showing something. and also i might point out if there's anyone in hollywood just normal, regular hollywood people watching this, if you read this book that has a great i think it's actually a lot easier to win over people who are already making good movies. fair enough to. the cause of housing, that is to go and turn someone who agrees with this into a into a great housing or a great hollywood producer, which sounds like a stretch, although, like, again, i'll always take what i can get. we have time for one more quick question and brief answer front. front row. so. quickly, mark lerner, it seems to me that building codes would have a much more bit more

impact. the house price of housing. and if do you know how much and if that's true, how do we scale them back? yeah, so that's a great question. similar answer as short. his answer is the researchers have barely looked at building codes. so possible that's adding a lot more but what we're doing now essentially is just comparing the physical cost, which includes everything the building code makes you do with the land cost you where you don't information and comparing that to price and we've got a huge gap there building codes may very well be adding an additional amount there's what economists name escapes me who is insistent that? there's also a bunch of very potent regulations against prefabricated homes, which he says do not confuse trailers. and that that's really important. he's the only person who thinks this. and i couldn't find anyone else who is weighing in. so i didn't want to talk about it too much. but the guy may be right. actually. so it may be that i am understating the severity of the regulation, but the key thing is

the regulations that i mentioned seem to be doubling the cost. and it may well be that building codes are actually amplifying even with very little gain. yeah, i had, i had the same thought it was that robert heinlein, a science fiction writer, wrote in the fifties that if you thought about what it would cost to build a car, the way we build houses where, they haul all of the materials, the site, and then physically construct a car. the car would cost $200,000 and be terrible. and why were still building housing that way and there are some for example, you know, want to contour a house to the landscape and to oriented towards light and so forth and the weather in a way that you don't with cars, but that said, we should be just building a lot more prefab modular housing should be using industrial production techniques and we're just not and it is so are some regulations that are relevant. what wasn't what at least wasn't convinced of that they were so binding that they were crushing the industry in the way that these other regulations, i am convinced they are crushing the summit. i think the one thing that is clear is that the financing of

homes which has gone on to manufactured housing really is a problem, that the way the fha loans, i think it's fha, but the way that some of these government loan programs work make it very, very difficult to finance these these things and therefore, they appreciate more. they depreciate it faster than normal housing and they harder for people to buy. and that's a big and shouldn't happen. i want to thank everyone for coming. i want to thank the online audience and thank you for sending questions. and megan, thanks for doing a great job finding things to criticize. love the the bryant i don't know what i thought i was being critical and ryan thanks for all. hug it out but bryant thanks for creating a great book. we're really proud to have published it and now please join us in the winter garden for a reception. i'm sorry. our online audience can't but go to your fridge, a beer or the liquor liquor cabinet, mix a drink and.