this is not just your ideas you're based on a certain statistical data and i one day and again if that data is more specific to the united states than let's say you know the middle east or if you are you know for sure our data was born in the united states but there was a guy forget his name 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 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 here 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 and recombining lead to better and stronger accommodation and what i'm particularly interested in is what you define as openness because many societies in the middle east as well as here in russia have different ways of expressing that openness for example. beirut isn't. gay capital of the middle east

at nine but it is a fairly conservative muslim society during the day i wonder what 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 went 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 different places that open new ideas are more innovative and if you 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 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. 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 that women want to participate gay and 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 to live 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 to call it mutual to terence or ritual 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 you're here we share some basic underlying principles but i'm not going to get in your faces the way you say if you're president of the left glove 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 world they want to see in without recognizing that on me the different 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 at n.y.u. a tribal fight the new religion in the united states is really i have my left where you have your right way though in. 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 they're all 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 live differently 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 and your bio and it is actually even produced a special word in the russian language it's pronounced as. a pejorative for a trendy looking man and women who put that comfort above their country and i think that captures the fear on the part of certain traditionalist in this country 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 back 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 traditionalist in another place that's what's causing this so i think this divide. and i line up personally more in the cosmopolitan side but i come from a place that is much more in the traditional side i travel the world i go to the american south i talk to people in people are good you know i don't i don't know whether your people are good they want what's best for their commune. so i guess

what i'm saying is we can i can impose my values on them they can impose their values on me we have to learn to coexist people who think like they did 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 universal 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 in an 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 a now he's

a neo liberal shill for conservatives mocking writes the twist at 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. mation

a great collective of people professor for the rich have to take a very short break now but we will be back in just a few moments. there is the most noble political deciders to have more green energy but if implemented in the wrong commercial way. it will over the next few years say with enough of the time to move three full five years you will have such a melanson all subsidized projects cetera that all unlikely to be able to stand on their own two feet. zia's says harlan kentucky. we've moved them

poised to the world rich very funny using. 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 lot of to see these people the survivors of disappearing before their eyes. i remember thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's happening it's happened. the idea of spending money to acquire region to acquire territory to acquire wealth is an oxymoron there no there is no more wealth to acquire the ecosystem is collapsing the economy is flooded with worthless feel paper and the species is migrating over. so the digital sphere these are these networks and

platforms people are uploading their minds into cyberspace and hope to become immortal so every dollar spent on defense every dollar spent by the pentagon is a wasted dollar it's a one thousand eight hundred seventeen sixteenth century mindset it's completely antiquated and it's utterly worthless. camera. roughly once the show and some of the. videos with the broken string out. down on string don't roughly don't t.v. . welcome back to worlds apart with richard lower their 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 the city and some people have a deeper connection to that land and i think what we have seen in both. the election and the long term is the commitment on the part of the. electorate. in a developed land and the land that has been there from the word or they feel has been ignored because they obviously vs. 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 b. of economic inequality in both the election of trial and actually it wasn't the least advantaged people saying they were very. hot the. most advantage but the

people who voted for bricks that are trump tended to have some level of economic advantage they weren't the poorest what really is behind it is geographic inequality the 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 the people who voted for donald trump similarly with rex's 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 breath now i know that you were traumatized by both brax events that really have been able action of donald trump but. what you're saying here is essentially that we leave in a day and age when it is easier for people to change the country or to change in location where they live rather than change things within the case and then 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 as not as much as you detest him represents in a different kind of philosophy you know let's face here and let's do something about those rundown communities i wish and 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 must go 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. this is 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 trump 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 cities i think that's in ways you know if you listen to the mayor of moscow you will find many similarities here and 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 connect. cities not necessarily i mean i've heard you say that he is the sort of most egregious and urban president 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 investment

because donald trump isn't it must be as bad as for investment is twenty five percent so i'm not i'm 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 create move from what i call winner take all where because we're superstar cities and large metropolitan areas game and smaller and 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 in a vested 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 you get around falling but i think. we can't do it it's not one way there has to be

many different ways in a competition that's what i think and i would like to see investment in u.s. infrastructure between transit and high speed rail but our federal government. and the congress is not the way for it let me ask you about forth when you mentioned earlier the former mayor of toronto and also 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 in africa you say in some of the other interviews 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 massachusetts. there are coalitions very different. tribes coalition was mainly white predominately men but also white women male dominated families very low votes from immigrants and spanish 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 and 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 maybe 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 yeah we may have a big argument but i love love them so they're not bad people they just think a different way is 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 chung 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 their. 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 assails i 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 and won that one hundred percent i think many of us miss the boat when we think somehow a 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 so said he called the 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 here that's a legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth century that the strong national governments will somehow fix fix this problem it won't 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 and. this center where we are 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 the correct

thing that could actually work to you you know. 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 specialization 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 rob sided lopsided the economy so even study 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 if 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 now in your latest book on being the urban crisis here is. your 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. laughed 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 see you can't say how is this really a challenge because if you look at beer world value service especially in the

developed countries you can see that one more people value a balance between work and family to make money to be creative but also to live your life to raise your children and song 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 do is realize what you want 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 in to do the same thing with location unfortunately the most ambitious people tend to be moving to be a 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 with in my book i say it's the single most important decision you can make from

a concert and make it wisely about present when they have to live in there it's been. great pleasure talking to you thank you very much for your time and encourage our readers 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. close. some people come

on. indigenous people as you know we that. paid in. the treaty. most politicians say that's the only thing i do but the other team. out of a sudden man just. simple be gentle with time. i said i when entering the bin if they would not allow and. if they will shoot me. at all i'll. meet you and indeed i'm just i'm not picking on you need to be indicted beachhead didn't don't want to go human on mankind i think i made it look good on tommy because i used.

there is the most noble political deciders to have more green energy but if implemented in the wrong commercial way. it will over the next few years save within the timeframe of three full five years you will have such a melanson all subsidized projects etc that are unlikely to be able to stand on their own two feet.

donald trump i'm glad to see him look ahead to a second summers as they seek to mend their country's troubled relations. but meanwhile the u.s. president claims the kremlin might try to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections to help the democrats as allegations of meddling when made a fiercely contested issue. meddling in the way that osama bin ladin meddled with the world trade center. all. palestinian teenage girls seen as a symbol of the resistance against israel is released after eight months behind bars. and cambodia's.