Bryan Caplan — The Economics of Housing Abundance

I travel to Fairfax, Virginia, to speak with Bryan Caplan about the economics of housing abundance.

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. A bestselling author, his books include The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Deregulation.

Please note: I had a camera problem, so only one shot was recorded. Fortunately, that shot was Bryan's.

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TIMESTAMPS
(00:00:00) - Introduction.
(00:00:24) - Why Bryan prefers being a fox to a hedgehog.
(00:01:44) - The unifying theme of Bryan's work.
(00:02:34) - What would America look like, physically, if housing was fully deregulated?
(00:04:56) - Glaeser and Gyourko’s approach to measuring zoning’s impact on prices.
(00:08:19) - Does land indivisibility invalidate Glaeser and Gyourko’s approach?
(00:10:45) - Immigration and housing affordability.
(00:12:48) - Would open borders necessitate full housing deregulation?
(00:15:14) - Bryan's response to Angus Deaton's view on low-skilled immigration.
(00:18:57) - Why bloggers are more interdisciplinary than academics.
(00:22:40) - How housing deregulation (and immigration) boost productivity.
(00:30:15) - The prevalence of crucial errors in influential economics papers.
(00:36:22) - Does the heterogeneity of workers mean productivity gains from deregulation are overstated?
(00:40:00) - Does zoning preserve the Bay Area's tech community weirdness?
(00:42:06) - Doesn’t enabling more building in major cities intensify economies of scale and raise, rather than lower, prices?
(00:45:10) - Does Hsieh and Moretti's approach miss gains from entrepreneurship?
(00:54:40) - Doesn’t population density lower fertility?
(00:59:01) - If wealth and fertility are inversely correlated, how would reducing housing costs raise fertility?
(01:02:15) - If population scale is crucial for innovation, what explains the innovativeness of small cities like Athens, Florence and Manchester?
(01:07:56) - Japanese urbanism – what did Bryan learn on his recent trip to Japan?
(01:14:27) - How does Bryan think about trade-offs between beauty and housing supply, at the margin?
(01:20:14) - If supply scepticism is real, why aren’t more homeowners YIMBYs?
(01:26:38) - State and federal politicians have realised that housing deregulation is necessary.
(01:31:40) - How likely is it that YIMBYism becomes left-coded or right-coded, and which is more likely?
(01:36:25) - Could Robert Moses succeed in today’s regulatory environment?
(01:38:03) - The feasibility of a court case to overturn Euclid v. Ambler
(01:42:29) - Will we inevitably densify all of Earth’s available landmass, like Coruscant in Star Wars?