a at the institute for international economics in washington who kind of wanted to try to understand the middle east and he ran an analysis of the whole world now not at the city level but at the national level and in this analysis he said i want to look at the role of openness to to gay and lesbian people in relation to things how globalized that economy was and how productive and how well it performed economically and he was shocked he was literally shocked to find that the openness to the gay and lesbian population had a lot to say about how globally oriented that economy was and how economically productive i assume i suppose there would be another correlation to how well that country's relations with the united states because the united states stands to export its countries its values rather on its allies so that would be a currency i just don't know but i think look i i have no agenda i truly interesting you know i grew up in a working class blue collar family in a very racist and homophobic environment so for me the discovery of these things

was not about any kind of agenda but simply trying to look at the market and on market factors that are associated and the point of view is that it wasn't a gay and lesbian population nor was it a bohemian artistic population places that are open to men and women boys and girls people of ethnic and racial differences tend to benefit because different kinds of people combining in recombining lead to better and stronger accommodation and what i'm particularly interested in is what you define as open is because many societies in the middle east as well as here in russia have different ways of expressing that openness for example. beirut is a gay capital of the middle east at nine but it is a fairly conservative muslim society during the day i wonder what do you define this openness. is very culturally specific i can only tell you what my my data tell me look i'm a repressed a recovering catholic by the sisters of a very lady of st joseph. when to our lady queen of peace taught by the christian

brothers by the way my wife's arabic she's christian arabic but her family's from jordan i've taught in abu dhabi so i know i know kind of the world pretty well what my data tell me is that places that are open to difference places that open new ideas are more innovative kennelly push every society at the same pace you know every society has its own rules its own norms but the point is that the places that tend to be the most open minded end up with a kind of innovation like san francisco or the bay area the places that aren't what has been which is quite tragic then if you're gay or you're a lesbian or you woman and you feel oppressed or a member of an ethnic or racial minority if you have ability you leave and you migrate to one of those places so look i'm the last one trying to impose my norms on anyone but i'm just saying that these things from an empirical point you seem to matter i think we are living in a very interesting time when part of our culture is a culture and values are globalized especially in big cities but some part of it is

very very local and there we are seeing tensions between those sets of valleys in your own country and around the world you travel the globe along have you seen a place a country where those sad some values integrate harmoniously when you can tolerate difference without necessarily becoming somebody else retaining a core part of your national identity canada is the closest canada where i live part of the year is the closest but we even see the backlash there we invented populism with this crazy mayor ford and now his brother is the premier of the largest province ontario but here's what i think we are going through a dramatic economic and social and cultural transformation parts of our society are winning and parts of these cosmopolitan urban centers have new values but women want to participate gay lesbian people want immigrants want rights in many cities are saying that's my way but there are more. traditional parts of society that are

saying no i don't want that i live in a more rural community in the united states a signal issue is gun ownership here's where i get in trouble as a as a person of the left here's where i get in trouble with my colleagues on the left i believe we should have one national policy i believe in a country that's divided probably as much as any in the world we actually have to localise our government we have to say we can't get into other's face if i want to live in a cosmopolitan city with incredible women's rights and gay rights and no guns and whatever i should be able to live there if you want to live in a city that has a different approach and that's what you like you should be able there startling facts for your viewers in the united states less than twenty percent of americans have trust in faith and confidence in the federal government were divided fifty fifty on our states about seventy five to eighty five percent of us have trust and faith and confidence in our local government that's because we get to pick where we live and elect the leaders we want i actually think this is i call it mutual mutual deterrent to retool coexistence with the u.s. and russia i think mutual coexistence is the way and localized governance that i

can live in my area you live in your ear we share some basic underlying principles but i'm not going to get in your faces the way you say your version of the left allowed but do you think that kind of philosophy is acceptable to many of the leftists in the united states because they seem to be a very sad on seeing the kind of cold they want to see in without recognizing that on me and i mean you know the united states is divided in a way i would have never anticipated and it's become in the words of my colleague jonathan mann why you a tribal fight the new religion in the united states is really i have my left where you have your right way though in the my friends on the left get mad at me but i don't see any other way out and not just for the united states i see this is a global phenomenon there are in this kind of wrenching economic time where you're transitioning sexual norms cultural norms economic conditions there are a lot of people are saying no no no no it's too fast for me i just think there's got to be a way to allow people to lived. and the only way i can see that happening is by

localizing government by taking the power out of the the the national levels and giving it to the local levels i think we need a society that can be more of a federation of localities than is a one way my way or the highway i mentioned before that there are many people in russia who know your work and our view about it if actually even produced a special word in the russian language it's pronounced as. a pejorative for tranda looking man and women who put that comfort above their country and i think that captures that here on the part of certain traditionalist in this country and that cosmopolitanism and patriotism are incompatible i wonder if you actually agree with them on some level i think i put my finger on something unwittingly you know living in pittsburgh in a very kind of bad place not in new york or london writing about the creative class i think i put my finger on something that i didn't fully understand so you know i

didn't propagate this debate in russia or sweden or the united kingdom and have this heated argument what i think what what you're saying is the conflict of our time and because we're so geographically not only class divided we're geographically divided the urban cosmopolitans in one place the traditionalists in another place that's what's causing this so i think this divide. i line up personally more on the cosmopolitan side but i come from a place that is much more on the traditional side i travel the world i go to the american south i talk to people and people are good you know i don't i don't know whether your people are good they want what's best for their community so i guess what i'm saying is we cannot i can impose my values on them they can impose their values on me we have to learn to have people who think like they do have a command of the media they usually have this stage and they do seem that bad values are more or less universal or ought to be unit. well they should wake up

because donald trump really is the president. of the united states and if i look at the national level in my country it's not there's been this general liberal awakening in terms of national level politics i mean i was born when eisenhower was president kennedy but you know it's gone reagan and then bush and then a little blip with clinton and then george w. bush and then obama now trump our country maybe in a way trending more right and so this idea that everyone can live in the world i would like liberal called the policy in utopia that's not happening so i think what we can do is tolerate difference now my friends on the left will say oh my god that's what now he's a neo liberal shill for conservatives block and writes the twist of the opposite way but i don't see a way out when we get to discussion of economic and social and cultural divide we can't keep imposing my cosmopolitan creative way your traditional working way it just won't work and by the way you know i have a i haven't a guy who used to be

a big opponent of mine joel kotkin and he's written about the suburban traditional communities i've read about the urban cosmopolitan community when trump was elected i sent him a note and said joe we've been arguing past one another we've become best friends because we simply agree that we will deal with each other as argument and accept each other and watch us as the me who's actually very cosmopolitan guy in his own outlook he says richard people in suburbs are good people people in rural areas are good people they don't want what your creative class in the urban areas want let's deal with the local let's let people choose what they want but if i want to choose a cosmopolitan way and you want to choose a traditional way let's find a way to coexist and that's what makes a great nation a great collection of people well professor ploy that we have to take a very short break now but people will be back in just a few moments. i'm

still. able to still. do it. even though it is really and i am sure you. know it's only about the looking on the other. columns on the.

cover. i. see idea of spending money to acquire region to acquire territory to acquire wealth is an oxymoron there is no more wealth to acquire the ecosystem is collapsing the economy is flooded with worthless paper and the species is migrating over to the digital sphere feasibly these networks and platforms people are uploading their minds into cyberspace and hope to be come in more people so every dollar spent on defense every dollar spent by the pentagon is a wasted dollar that's a nineteenth eighteenth seventeenth sixteenth century mindset it's completely antiquated and it's utterly worthless. four men are sitting in a car. when the fifth gets shot in the head. for

a different version of what. one of them is on the death row there's no way he could have done it there's no possible way because the list did not shoot around a corner. welcome back to worlds apart with every church floor there professor at the university of toronto and the bestselling author professor for that just before the break we were talking about this conflict between the environment there are been environment and the land at least that's how i conceptualize it that some people enjoy the environment and the feel of this again some people have a deeper connection to that land and i think what we have in both backs it and the

election of don't want is the commitment on the part of the. electorate so you are going to develop land from the land that has been ignored or they feel has been ignored because they obviously vs. the old the resources as an economist do you think there is any truth to that or is it just the anger though i actually see too much has been made of economic inequality in both brics it and the election of trump and actually it wasn't the least advantaged people saying they were very. hot the most advantage but the people who are voted for bricks that are trying tended to have some level of economic advantage they weren't the poorest what really is behind it is geographic inequality that people who voted for mrs clinton tended to live in the largest the most diverse the most innovative metropolitan areas i forget the number but it's not a lot of people who voted for donald trump. we would prices came from smaller

metropolitan areas suburban areas in rural areas so i think it is where people live and it reflects the shift in both economic opportunity and in values and look it's leading to the seesawing in politics you know one one time you get a more liberal one time you get a more conservative one time you get an opening when the next time you get a break so now i know that you were traumatized by both bracks events and of donald trump but. what you're saying here is essentially that we leave in day in age when it is easier for people to change the country or to change in location where they live rather than to change things within the application and it is easier to both if you have to move out of the neighborhood that you don't like don't you think that. mr trump has not as much as you detest him represented in a different kind of philosophy you know let's face here and let's do something about those rundown communities i wish but i think everything in his public policy

perspective is hurting those communities whether it's high tariffs whether it's elimination of the safety and whether it's. really deregulating labor laws so i think what's really interesting is he still gets votes from those places even after he's acting against their interests what i find really fascinating when we think about all of this you know i read the social media i'm on twitter i'm sitting here in moscow with you what i hear trump and putin this and that the u.s. and russia and this and that when i come to moscow it's amazing city and at this conference no one's talking about that they're talking about how do you build a great city what are best practices how do you build better open space how do you deal with mobility how do you deal with inclusion affordable housing in a way maybe i was traumatized by the election of but it was my biggest wake up call to say just forget about that stuff i mean it's just you can't change it but what i can do is help to make places like moscow or new york or los angeles or. paris or

whatever better more interesting city i think that's a ways you know if you listen to the mayor of moscow you will find many similarities here it makes many of the same points that mr trump was making during his campaign you know invest in the. roads and bridges and the infrastructure that cannot be. nice not necessarily i mean i've heard you say that he is the sort of most egregious and urban president but do you think you're being fair to him because he even he's on very weird way but he is talking about some of the issues that i'm sure you care about deeply and i hope. the mayor of moscow is actually doing the investing because donald trump is a lost cause by just for investment is twenty five percent so i'm not going to do if i understand the populist reason for donald trump. i think any reasonable reading of the evidence is not pursuing a policy agenda which is benefiting those communities that said i wish someone

would i think one of the big issues in the united states is the how do we move from what i call winner take all where because we're superstar cities and large metropolitan areas game in small or medium sized places fall behind but i don't think the federal government can do that when i maybe i would like you to do it but i don't think it can i think that will only come from taking the power from the national level and handing it to the cities to use the way they want if you're a big city and want to do certain things and invested transit and be more open minded fine if you're a smaller place and you want to build more roads and bridges and that's what people get around following but i think we can't do it it's not one way there has to be many different ways and a competition that's that's what i think and i would like to see real investment in u.s. infrastructure between be taken lightly transit and high speed rail but our federal government. and the congress is not the littering it let me ask you about. fourth when you mentioned earlier the former. of taronga and also

a kind of character that is not the most intuitive social model of former drug user . in some respects he pre-dated. what do you think makes people respond to characters like that because you say in some of the other interview when rob ford was elected the city economy was generally good you know the investment in social infrastructure was increasing the schools were good the roads were improving and yet people often play that kind of character what was driving them is that. i guess it's not all about the economy stupid right so the fords both rob ford who was the mayor of toronto and his brother doug who's now premier of ontario so this is a position like being governor of new york or california or best. there are coalitions very different. tribes coalition was mainly white predominately men but also white women in a male dominated families very low votes from immigrants and hispanic latino black people but the forwards in contrast not only took white working class voters but

took a whole range of what in canada we called new canadians caribbean indian chinese what i think in that case i think it's true is that people were tired of governments that don't deliver that it was a sense that these government city governments provincial governments national governments don't deliver and they want more economic opportunity one they don't want to pay as much taxes in two they want less government control of their lives and more economic opportunity that seems to me that something all of us have to deal with i may be more in the west i may believe in it a bigger role for government but a large part of the population is saying something else we want more economic opportunity we want lower taxes we want more effective government and we don't care if we burn the temple down that's giving me a wake up call and honestly as hard and wrenching as has been for me it's been my biggest growth experience because i realize what we're talking about my way is one way there are other ways and when i talk to my friends and family who voted for

donald trump or voted for doug ford or rob ford i'd like them i don't hate them you know we may have a big argument but i love love them so they're not bad people they just think of different ways possible and i think we have to accommodate that and understand that all of us you may be an exception because i actually have friends in the united states who stopped talking to each other. after the election of dylan time because one voted for him and another would have for clinton and they still don't talk and i think if you know it's not just my individual. experience that i think it's a broader phenomenon when you know certain parts of the society don't want to do so this is telling me something that we have to when this happens when people stop talking to one of the. we have to reduce the stakes there is something wrong with the nationalisation of politics that otherwise sensible people stop talking to one of them or reduce the stakes transfer the power to the local level when i go to a city honestly i can generally not tell if somebody is

a democrat or republican and these fights don't exist it's only when it comes to trump or clinton or this one and that one so let's reduce the darn stakes let's localize now it's going to take a long time to localize these things and where things get done pragmatically and less ideologically is i also wonder whether you think it would be helpful for those . urban communities swallow for urban communities to support more investment into those empowers communities that elected downtown one that one hundred percent i think many of us miss the boat when we think somehow the federal government is going to do that maybe in some other planet utopia it will what my friend ben barber the late ben barber who wrote a magnificent book. called if mayors ruled the world was working to was a was a global parliament of mayors like the u.n. were ben says these cities could actually work together to do redistribution show if new york and moscow and london were prospering these mayors could get together and create

a fund and begin to redistribute money if they had money coming back from the federal government so i think we have to think about this in new ways but this whole idea that's a legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth century that the strong national governments will somehow fix fix this problem it will happen well it may not happen for you i think really in russia. i have a different opinion at least in this country the government is still the state is still the main driver of. change including urban change. decenter where we're sitting right now is in a is an example of that because they still make very large scale investments in big projects while also trying to you. you know encourage investment on a career for a do you think that could actually work to you in a. benefits of both centralization and decentralized sure and i think in europe generally there's more of a tradition of having a federal and regional redistribution so the e.u. and its attempt to do smart specialisation by focusing on the quality regions one

of my friends in the united kingdom said well in the united kingdom we're small we could just build high speed rail but here's a fact for you. in russia moscow. accounts for a third or more of g.d.p. in canada toronto accounts for twenty percent of g.d.p. in the united states new york is only ten percent of g.d.p. so in many ways and i'm not trying to make this is a criticism. russia is a more spatially an equal opportunity the top sided lopsided economy so even state led redistribution can't solve this that's telling me something that maybe the way to deal with this is certainly you could use federal redistribution but instead of doing that from the top let the localities keep more money because they are the ones that know how to spend it so is moscow needs more bike lanes i'm making is you know i don't know the situation but if moscow needs more bike lanes and. subway and high speed rail spend it there is an hour wind community needs better roads and bridges better high speed internet speed that there i think this decentralized

model could be a way of one being more economically effective into overcoming the cultural and social divides that pit us against one another in your say in your latest book. near urban crisis here. you know approach what's happening in many urban communities as a crisis but it's only a crisis when you define success in terms of investment and material gains and so on and so why don't you think that perhaps that's just the natural correction that the system has run because in a. bestselling book you eat what you described a success was essentially you know five big cities essentially getting it all while everybody here else was. left on the sidelines isn't that a natural progression from. very scant system to something more balanced so i really think we're going through the greatest economic transformation of human history for all of human history before us we got our our productivity and our

economic growth from physical labor and raw materials now the mind is become the means of production any kind of economic transformation like this but especially discipline concentrates talent and ideas and knowledge in a very small handful of places so really the challenge ahead of us is how do we make everyone have a meaningful life and meaningful opportunity that's really the question there's no way we can go counter to this trend all we can do is is make sure that the disconnected places have more opportunity and are more connected to the fast growing places really that's the challenge of our time it's hard to stew can't say how is this really a challenge because if you look at beer world value service especially in developed countries you can see that one more people though you balance between work and family to make money to be creative but also to live your life to raise your children and so on and so forth and i would suppose that this kind of life would be believed not only in big cities but it pretty much believed anywhere and doesn't

that give your so i want a whole book on this called who's your city that's it pay attention to does realize what you want to take location seriously you spend a lot of time picking an education and career you spend a lot of time picking a bait and dating and to do the same thing with location unfortunately the most ambitious people tend to be moving to the superstar cities that still occurring but yes there are lots of fantastic places you can live and spend a lot less on housing and have a lot more work life balance than running the urban rat race and you need to make that choice depending on your family certainly i think it's the most work in my book i say it's the single most important decision you can make from a concert and make it wisely about professional and they have to live in there it's been. great pleasure talking to you thank you very much for your time and encourage our viewers to keep this conversation going in our social media pages and called this year again the same place same time here in the wilds of march.

it's a very rough terrain so it's rough climates and you have to win fights to be able to the flank. it was gunshots going top them and so very fresh to what happened in the morning and i may even not i. don't think anything will back up for me you know i don't want to see it but a body in this room is rigid two punches great in the good. old two new good wouldn't. you don't think about these three of these so good on no you got three

team play and you know i do and the other patients. there is the most noble political deciders to have more clean energy but if implemented in the wrong commercial way. it will over the next few years say within the timeframe of three four five years you will have such a melanson of subsidized projects paid cetera that unlikely to be able to stand on their own two feet. exists is hotter than kentucky the. only goal of this group boyce's is you can go very fanny's leave.

a co money since he was almost no coal mines left. the jobs are gone all the coal mines are said. that it was a drive to see these people a survivor was disappearing before their eyes. i remember. thinking when i was younger that is anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in the million years i would see that and it's how it's happened. to. be the police oh. oh. oh. oh oh.

oh. in the stories it shake the way care not he don't trump and try to be putin seek to strike us russian relations is the american president says he's ready to accept an invite to moscow but that is amid claims from trump that russia willing to face the upcoming midterm elections to help his rivals the democrats russian meddling is still a very divisive issue this weekend nights. it's meddling in the way that osama bin ladin meddled with the world trade center. and a symbol of palestinian resistance teenager had to mean he has been released after eight months in this right. to come home as a closed society east asian country cambodia and the general.