Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome to the 218th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization leveraging art to introduce young people to the ideas and literature of Ayn Rand in creative ways, including our AI animated trailers, our graphic novels, even our music videos. Today we are joined by Brian Kaplan. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you who are watching us on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You can ask your questions by using the comment section, and we will get to as many of them as we can. Although I have fair warning, I've been looking forward to this interview and I have a lot of questions. So our guest Brian Kaplan is author of Build Baby build the Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, which, Joy of joys, is a graphic novel. It takes the readers on a journey through what is wrong with housing regulations and what we can do about it. A professor of economics at George Mason University, Kaplan is also a New York Times best bestselling author of several books, including the myth of the rational voter, selfish reasons to have more kids, the Case against education. I'm missing a few, which we may be able to get to, including another graphic novel on immigration. While not teaching and publishing new articles and outlets like the Washington Post Wall Street Journal Time. Kaplan spends his time as editor and chief writer for BET on it Sub Stack, hosted by the Salem center for Policy at the University of Texas. Brian, thanks for joining us.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Fantastic to be here, Jag.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: So starting with our first graphic novel of Ayn Rand's anthem six years ago, and continuing with red pawn and top secret, we have found that this medium is a very effective way of encouraging young people to engage with our content. So I was thrilled to see you pursuing a similar strategy with both build baby build and your previous book.
Tell us a bit about the Genesis of the graphic novel projects.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Here's how it really started. When I was a kid, I basically never read comic books. We didn't have the money for them, and at the library they just had a few stray issues. It's only actually when I became a professor I had some money to spare. Usually can't these books at the library, so I just started reading them. And when I read them, I came across a series called the Cartoon History of the universe by Larry Gonick. And it really did get me thinking about how powerful this medium is. You really can by properly combining words and pictures. First of all, just get people's attention, in a way, and hold their interest, which would be hard to do with regular book. But also, by combining words and pictures, you can just communicate a lot more information in a shorter amount of time. So, anyway, after I just read a lot of these books, especially non fiction graphic novels, I just started thinking, well, could I do this?
And I can't actually draw. I don't have any background in that. So I was like, well, maybe not. Then I found out, look, it's actually very common to have a division of labor, and one person does the script, and another person goes and does the visuals. So maybe I can. I got some comics editing software and started playing around with it.
I did a few different just pet projects on that. And then finally, I felt like I had gotten enough practice, and I wrote the script to my first graphic novel, open the science and ethics immigration. And I managed to talk my number one choice of artist in the universe, Zach Wienersmith of Saturday morning Breakfast cereal, into being my artist for that project. That was our New York Times bestseller. Came out really well. And the way that I wound up doing it, actually, is I didn't just write a script. I actually did storyboards.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: So you did the storyboards?
[00:04:16] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I did the storyboards. I used Google images in order to just give the artist an idea of what I'm looking for. And then I would go and add different notes to the artist, make my smile 7% bigger, that kind of thing. What I found was that I just had a lot of trouble visualizing a page. If I only did a written script. I needed to go and do the storyboards to get an idea about getting right balance between words and pictures. Anyway, it was my freshman tribe, but it was really successful. Sold a ton of copies. I think it sold more copies than any other book I've ever done. And then I started thinking, all right, well, what else could I do? I started thinking about doing build baby bill, the science and ethics of housing regulations. Graphic novel. So, when I was. Started thinking about a lot of the objection to housing is really just aesthetic. So what if I could use graphic novels to fight aesthetics with aesthetics and actually say, look, you think it's gonna look so terrible if we go and develop the California coast? All right, here's a picture of a developed county, California coast. I think it looks really good.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm just sharing a couple of those photos right now. And we had a similar kind of experience with our graphic novels. I recruited Dan Parsons, in part because he had a familiarity with Rand's literature. But truth be told, because he also had a huge following. It's an Inkwell award winning graphic artist.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: And big fan of those books, by the way. So I didn't even know that you were involved, but I'm just hearing about this now. But I've read them all.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Oh, great. Great. Well, we also turned them into animated series. And then the part that I think I'm most proud of is that we leverage comic cons. So that is how we're able to get 75,000 of these out into the market. People don't know who Ayn Rand is, but they know who Dan Parsons is, and they can't wait for one of his new. So that is, again, how we're trying to introduce new audiences to Rand's ideas. And we're mindful of the fact, as I'm sure you are as well, that in the 1970s, 70% of young people were reading novels every day for fun. That percentage today is 12%.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: So rather than getting up, both numbers sound high, actually.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Well, you know, if you think about it, I mean, back in those days, what were your choices for where you're putting your attention? If you wanted to go on an.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Adventure, your kids were watching tv and maybe doing some sports, but I don't know.
[00:06:53] Speaker A: Yeah, well, not a whole novel a day, but maybe few pages. So, anyway, but the 12% is distressing, and it also swings heavily female, which is what it is. And, you know, in our effort to make sure that more young women are inoculated against the woke mind virus, maybe reading a little bit of Ayn Rand will do some good. So, speaking of those young people, you know, on our instagram, we have 140,000 followers, and every week they send in questions we choose eight to respond to with 1 minute answers. Which reminds me, I gotta do mine today. And nearly every week, one of the young followers asks, why can't I afford a home? You obviously produced an entire graphic novel to answer that question, and I'm not gonna ask you to answer it in under 1 minute, but I think that's a good place to start.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: All right.
Why can't you afford a home? For most people in this country with a job, the reason is government regulation. Government really does strangle the supply of housing, especially in desirable locations. Yeah, you can go and get someplace in the middle of nowhere, and it won't cost that much money, but you're giving up all these other good things in life in terms of what government is really doing. There's a long list. So starting with downtown cities, it is really hard to build skyscrapers. We've had the technology to build super tall buildings, which allow vast numbers of people to enjoy the most desirable locations in style. So for about 100 years, we've had this technology, but it's almost impossible to actually build skyscrapers legally in any place you would want to. You could probably build one in the middle of Alaska. You get the permits, but no one wants to do that. You want to build skyscrapers in the desirable locations, and that's where governments basically treat you like a criminal, even for asking.
Another big deal is that most land for most residential land in the United States is specifically zoned for single family homes, which means no apartments, no townhomes, nothing like that. Even when you get down to single family homes, it is standard for governments to impose a high minimum lot size. You've got to have at least an acre of land, two acres of land, five acres of land, even though consumers actually are totally not willing to pay the upcharge if they got a choice. So what government does is deny you a choice, something else that actually winds up costing a lot of money, or parking regulations. It seems like a very obscure topic, but the numbers are there. It's really expensive to require parking. You can especially see this, actually, when it's commercial regulation. So the normal regulation of parking in the United States, if you want a commercial property, is the government says you have to have enough parking spaces so that everyone who comes to shop at your store on the busiest day of the year can get a spot if you charge zero to do it. What that means is that on every day except Black Friday, almost all parking lots are full of empty spaces, spaces that could have been used to do something else.
And you could have handled that actual problem of lack of parking space by charging people money on the few days when demand is that high. But that's not what local governments want to allow business do anyway. So when you put all this together, you see that governments really are making it very hard to go and build, raising the cost dramatically.
What's very striking is economists go and try to measure how much extra is all of this regulation adding to the cost, and a good rough estimate for the whole United States, is that regulation is about double the cost of housing, and in the most desirable areas, it's raised. At the most, it might very well be that if you totally deregulated San Francisco, prices would fall 90%.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Wow. All right, well, in addition to young people being able to access housing, whether renting or buying for the first time, one of my favorite sections in build baby build, you present housing deregulation as an actual panacea. Most people don't like to use that word. I love how you just kind of went for it. And you said it would solve many challenges, ranging from falling birth rates to inequality to crime to social mobility. So let's tackle each of these in turn.
Why would a less regulated housing market lead to more people having babies?
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. There are about four papers that actually are standard social science y papers. But honestly, I'd say the best reason to believe this comes down to when housing prices are really high, people keep living with their parents. When they keep living with their parents, they are unlikely to get married and especially unlikely to have kids. If housing was cheaper, people would move out and people would be starting families at earlier ages.
So there are some papers with some estimates of this, but that just common sense argument, I think is stronger than the neighbors.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Honestly, I wouldn't have made the connection. But now that you pointed out, it seems rather obvious to inequality and social mobility. First, from an objectivist perspective, not that you are an objectivist, how important are these? And how does a restrictive housing market aggravate issues such as inequality?
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Well, here's what I'd say. There's a lot of people who are angry at free markets for causing inequality. You can go and say, well, inequality is actually fine. We've got books like equal is unfair. Very interesting points. But still, I would say, well, like, hold on. How do you know it was the free market that caused inequality? Maybe it was government that caused inequality. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. Of course, government is causing massive inequality.
Important thing to keep in mind, housing is what we call a necessity. That means the share of your income that you spend on it falls as you get richer. Anything you do to make necessities more expensive automatically go and increase inequality. On top of that, of course, owners are generally richer than renters, so that's another thing going on. So it's the kind of thing where anyone is friendly to free markets can just say, look, I'm totally against rising inequality caused by government. We should have a fleet market that allows businesses to go and supply goods cheaply to people of all income levels. And in this case, it totally happens to be the case that government is heavily putting its hand on the scale of people are already doing better. Now, important to remember, this does not mean that rich people are to blame for this. Say government is to blame. I mean, rich people would also like to have bigger houses for lower prices. So it's not just that rich people are gaining the expense of poor people, but the lion's share of the gains would go to poor people because they're currently tenants. And on top of that, housing is necessity. Like I said, in terms of social mobility, this is one where when we go and look at the US historically, there used to be a really easy way for most people in the US to go and improve their lives. And that was just moved from wherever you are to a high wage part of the country. Totally worked. We've got good data from 1940 1960. It was a standard thing to do. Contrary to John Steinbeck, it did not normally lead to disaster. It worked.
Unfortunately, that it no longer does, because nowadays, the extra housing cost of moving to a high wage area will normally exceed the salary gain. In the past, there just wasn't much difference in housing price between different areas of the country.
And therefore, if you are moved to a high wage job, you go and basically pocket the gain. Now you burn it all up on higher housing costs. So there's just not much reason to do it. So again, it is a nice way to get more mobility, which again, you don't need to go and say, mobility is great in and of itself, and we need government to go enforce it. But at minimum to say, well, hold on, if you're complaining about this stuff, how about government stops causing the problem? Which it demonstrably is.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Right? Okay, now we have a ton of really great questions that are piling up. Guys, I hear you. I see you. I'm getting to your question. Let's just last cover the initial research that you are citing for the hypothesis that housing deregulation would actually reduce crime.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Right here. I base it heavily upon one particular experiment. But first of all, it is a bona fide experiment. So that is the gold standard of social science. And secondly, the argument really makes a lot of sense. It just begins with the following premise, which is true, easy to check. A large share of urban land is vacant.
It's like, wow, that's weird. Oh, yeah. Government won't let you build something on. It is the most obvious reason why you're going to keep valuable land vacant.
Now, it is also true that it is very standard that vacant lots become centers of crime. And so it's like, hmm, well, maybe if we could somehow go and deal these vacant lots, then crime would go down. Anyway, there was an experiment in the city of Philadelphia where the team was able to get permission to beautify a random half of the vacant lots in Philadelphia. Not allowed to build anything, they were just allowed to go and clean up trash, plant grass, plant some trees, put in some benches, little picket fence, and then they went and measured crime before and after.
This is very much like randomly giving half of the population a vaccine and giving a placebo to the other half and then seeing what happens. And the punchline was that common sense is correct and that both police reported and perceived crime in the neighborhoods that got beautified wound up going down. Now, what's interesting, if you read the paper, is they are obviously really worried that some people think that they favor housing deregulation. Paragraph in the paper saying, we're not talking about gentrifying anything, but we're not terrible people who do that. We just want to go and clean up some trash and plant some trees. Don't hate us. But I'm reading that and like, look, the obvious reading this paper is if just planting some grass can get crime down, how about building an apartment building? It's a much better use of the land. And to go and apologize for the fact that you want to use vacant land in a desirable area for human benefit is a bizarre scruple to have. Anyway, I thought that was a pretty fun paper and very credible. So, yeah, it's worth sharing with a wider audience.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to get to some of these questions. Alan Turner. I'm not familiar with this issue, but maybe you are, Brian. He's asking, does Blackrock and Vanguard really have the corner on the market for housing? Do they get special favor from the government?
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Interesting question. So my memory actually that it's Horton that is the number one home builder in America right now. I could be wrong on that. The main thing that I would say is that there's obviously whatever government's involved, there's going to be some dirty dealings. But for the most part, I say that lobbying by developers is the best lobbying in America. It is the lobbying where we should be really happy that it happens. Because here's why. Public support for new development is really low. There's almost no psychologically normal human that sits around saying, I really support allowing development. And the rules make it hard to do it. So why does anything get built? The answer is the developers heavily lobby the government just to get permission to do stuff. And sometimes they succeed. And that's why almost anything in this country exists. For the privilege of putting roofs over all of our heads, the construction industry has to go and beg from the government. And what is special about real estate development is that for most industries, the people that are already there have some interest in trying to go and cut off supply and raise price. But the whole basis of development is that you make your money off of the new stuff and then you sell it. So if you are a developer, you really don't have any desire to go and prevent new construction in order to go and raise prices. You don't own the stock of housing or not much of it anyway. What you really want is permission to do something new. And therefore, I actually am very grateful for most lobbying in the construction industry or by developers, because they are basically by. They're getting permission from the government to provide this vital product that otherwise there's just so little public support to do it.
I shudder at the thought of what would happen if the developers couldn't lobby the government, because, like, what would get built without the guy, without those developers going and begging and pleading and maybe bribing. Probably not too much bribery, but at least not the official kind. More just like, come on, come on, come on. I'll be your best friend. Come on.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't have that. The knee jerk jerk reaction to lobbying. Sometimes it really is important because otherwise nothing would get done. Okay, you've got a big superfan here in my modern Galt, who's very excited that you joined this interview. He is asking, and he's a regular. He joins us every week. Is America becoming a nation of renters or has home ownership always been difficult?
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Let's see. I would have to go and double check the latest numbers. I don't think there's been any dramatic change in the share of ownership in the US. So I think it's typically been around 60%. I think that it got up to, like, 65 right before the last financial crisis, then fell down again. It's probably been creeping up slowly since then, but honestly, I would just google that one.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Okay.
Jackson Sinclair asks, Brian, what are your thoughts on the 15 minutes city?
[00:21:06] Speaker B: I'm unfamiliar with the 15 minutes city.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, so these are.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: But I don't want to make stuff up.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: They've been a little bit controversial because it's this idea that you're going to ban cars and everything is going to be walkable, and you can, but at the same time, for everything to be walkable, you really would need to build these huge skyscrapers and make these places mixed use. So something to take a look at. Okay, right.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Well, I do have something to say about that.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: So Ed Glaser has this very cool calculation where we just asked the question, so why is it that most people in America use cars rather than other kinds of transportation. And the answer comes down to be pretty simple. Cars are almost always faster. When you consider that to use any kind of public transportation, first you must schlep to the pickup point, then you have to wait for it, then you have to get on it, and then you got to do the opposite thing. Coming back. Cars for almost all trips turn out to be faster. And even in Europe, actually, this is one that I was playing around with the Google Maps. Glazer is almost always correct. The only country where public transportation does seem to be genuinely faster for a lot of purposes is Japan. I have been there, and I got to say, what they're doing is really impressive, but it's also one where it's like, yeah, almost no other country is ever going to be able to do anything remotely like this.
So cars are generally underrated. And people think that if we just went and did something different, then they would be much better. And it's really hard to do better than cars. Cars are awesome. And furthermore, the main reason why cars are not the fastest method is precisely that there is congestion, which every economist in America knows can be solved very easily with peak load pricing. Just charge people for going and driving and parking based upon existing traffic conditions. And so actually, I'd say that if we were to go and use pricing of roads for both parking and driving, then cars would be better than ever, because you could just say, hey, I never have to worry about traffic. It's just always going to be available. The only thing I have to wonder about is what will the price be? Which I can check on my phone before I go.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: Okay. You talk about the NIMBY not in my backyard crowd that lobbies against increased housing development. And Malibu, where I live, is a serious contender for the NIMBY capital of the country. One of the biggest arguments that I hear against not just housing development, but any kind of development, is that it would make traffic worse. And that argument at least seems to make intuitive sense to me. I live up Corral Canyon. It's about 16,000 residents up here. It's extremely difficult not just to build, but speaking from personal experience, to rebuild, but with less red tape and restrictions. Let's say we doubled the population to over 30,000 residents up here in this one particular nook of Malibu. With just one road in and out, how would like doubling the housing supply not make congestion wars?
[00:24:19] Speaker B: Right. Great question. I was already alluding to this. Government standardly have terrible traffic congestion and act like it's a fact of nature. It is not a fact of nature. It is caused by their ridiculous policies of having the price be zero regardless of traffic conditions.
We don't see these same kinds of problems in almost any kind of market because business owners will adjust the price in order to handle the problem. This is the fundamental answer of what governments are going and running these things. At least try to go and emulate the market and adjust price based upon conditions, which with smartphones is so technologically easy. The only reason they're not doing it is because people are just so stubborn about, oh, it's evil to go and charge a price for something. It's better just to have it be unusable for main periods of the day. Now the other thing that I think is really worth pointing out is generally when people are complaining about construction, all that they have to do in order to get their way is just to point out a drawback. That is not a reasonable way to make any kind of policy. But you want to go and at minimum put a price tag on the drawback and compare it to the games.
You might say, well, we're not going to go and fix congestion, so then we should just go and strangle housing. It's like, well, what is the dollar value of the harm of all of this congestion? What does a dollar value, the gain of the new construction?
All right, well, you don't have to be utilitarian to say government shouldn't do things that fail a cost benefit test. And I will say that this is almost certainly a prime example of something that just will fail the test. It is much better to allow building with all the problems than to go and stop it from happening, by the way. So in build, baby, build, I say, look, this isn't just speculation. It's something that you could actually see very easily in the real world. Namely, just listen to anyone who complains about how terrible it is to live in a densely populated area, listen to all their complaints, and then say, yeah, so if you care so much, why do you live here?
Why don't you go and live in a low density area where you don't have any of these problems? It's cheaper and there's no noise, there's no traffic, why are you here? There's really no answer other than, yeah, well, I have a bunch of complaints, but actually there's a bunch of awesome things about living here which are more valuable to me than all the problems. So much so that I gladly pay a huge upcharge to be here. And that really is the main secret economically of development, which is that people focus on the negatives, but there are enormous positives that get almost no verbal attention. But in turn. But actions speak louder than words. And people actually very gladly pay a lot of extra money to get all the good things that people bring combined with all the bad things that people bring.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: So we're getting some questions about charging prices, congestion prices. I don't want to get too much into that. Now, we did interview previously Bob Poole over at Reason, who's written an excellent book about redesigning the infrastructure of roads.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: And never forget Donald shoup of UCLA down the road from you, who wrote the high cost of free parking, the very best 800 page book about parking you'll ever read. Actually good. You're like 400 pages in and like, I can't believe how good this book is.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: All right, well, we'll read that, too, but why don't we put the link to the interview with Bob Poole, the comment section, and you might want to give that a look. So in Malibu, again, neck and neck with these concerns about congestion and traffic are environmental concerns that housing development would potentially aggravate. But you argue that the opposite is in fact the case. How does deregulation benefit the environment?
And also, you know, as you point out, if the greenest places like San Diego and Los Angeles have the highest regulation, doesn't that refute your argument?
[00:28:33] Speaker B: Yeah, great question.
So I'm wondering if Alex Epstein has been on your show before, fossil fuels.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: I would love to have him. We have invited him. We have invited him to come to.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Our galas, but got to get him if he's listening. There's a few things that if I had more time, I would go and make sure he was happy. But anyway, Alex, I love you, but I'm just going to go and tell everybody about the work of Ed Glaser and Matt Kahn on this very question. So in particular for carbon emissions, what they find through some very detailed accounting is, first of all, cities have lower carbon emissions than all suburbs do.
Part of it is like your sharing walls, things like that. So anytime people are trying to go and prevent urban development, you can say, hey, you are actually going and contributing to the very problems that you are complaining about. Second result is that new construction is actually greener than old construction because it's got better insulation.
And then finally, this is a really big one.
The areas, the country that have the best climate, the ones where just based upon natural temperature, you wouldn't be doing much in the way of artificial heating or cooling, which are generally powered by fossil fuels, those are actually the nicest areas in terms of natural climate are generally the strictest housing regulation.
Important to understand.
This is not causal. It's not like California strictly regulates and therefore people don't need much air conditioning. That is a pre existing feature of California, which has nothing to do with regulation. But the self righteous Californians, I'm guessing you know a few of them. Jag, I grew up in California. So yes, the smuggest people in the world with some of the least stuff to be smug about. But anyway, they, in their incredible self righteousness, make it really hard to build stuff. And aries the country where if you cared about global emissions, you would be trying to get as many people as possible in the country to live there. And remember, when people don't live in California because it's too expensive, they don't disappear from the planet. They go and they live in some other area where they do a lot more carbon emissions because they need more cooling and heating. So that is the heart of the glazer con case. And. Sorry, Melody, it's very solid.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Great. Well, again, we would love to have Alex Epstein on. We'd love to have him at our gala or have him come speak to our student conference. So if you've got any poll, please put in a good word for us.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: I will. I mean, I do feel a bit guilty because I think that he is right about the problem of carbon emissions being really overstated. And in particular, he's got some very powerful arguments about just how to understand the science here. So you can, like, if you go to his Wikipedia page, they will go and describe him as a climate denier. And like this total.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: Like, you know, Michael Schellenberger and Steve Koonan and Robert Bryce, you know, all of which, I mean, it's a big topic that we cover at the Atlas Society, so we'd love to get more perspective on that. Okay.
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Anyway, if you just want to convince conventional Californians, just go and tell them correctly that deregulation of construction will reduce carbon emissions. In particular, new housing has lower emissions even though new homes are larger. So that's what's really pretty striking.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: Wow. All right, well, you know, possibly alluding to the reason why Alex Epstein will not play with me. You wrote a very poignant piece earlier this year about being at the Jefferson school event in 1989 as the great schism in objectivism, the purging of our founder, David Kelly, was unfolding. You know, as I mentioned before the show, I'm eight years plus into my role running the Atlas Society. All this history is still relatively new to me. So can you describe for me how you experience this rupture as a young person just learning about objectivism?
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Sure thing. So, I was growing up in Northridge, California. I went and got my little postcard from the sender of Atlas Shrugged and sent it into the in reign institute to get more information about what's going on in the area. I got connected to SCOA, the Southern California objectivist association, met a lot of very nice people there, as well as some quite crazy people.
Through them, I got an invitation to attend the Jefferson school, which was at the time the official Ayn Rand Institute summer event. I think they actually other events. It wasn't just for summer. Run by George Reisman at the time. And this was just a few months after David Kelly went and was kicked out of the purge from the Ayn Rand Institute. There was Leonard Peacock's essay, fact and value. David Kelly wrote this extended response, truth and toleration. Anyway, I had the scholarship to this two week objectivist conference, but this is only for people that were willing to toe the line, or at least who had not explicitly said, I will not toe the line, because some people actually were purged mid conference.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Including George Walsh, who I am probably now the world's biggest fan of George Walsh. I've been doing everything I can to bring back his lectures, which I have on old cassette tapes. Now. They're on. Most of these are now on YouTube, thanks to my efforts. But anyway.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Well, and we would be an ally in that, actually, you know, one of my first missions with which the board entrusted me was to track down Walsh and coax him out of retirement.
While that mission had limited success, did result in our publishing Walsh's Ayn Rand and altruism.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Were you involved in publishing the transcript of the role of religion in history?
[00:34:35] Speaker A: We haven't, but we definitely would be open to doing that.
Yeah. You and I should kind of meet offline about this, because it's a big priority for us here. But on a personal level, I'll never forget my experience having the chance to chat with him over indian food back in 2017. So what were some of your finest memories of him?
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Well, I should probably finish your other question on what was the Jefferson school like? So I was actually there mid purge, and then for nearly the last talk, Leonard Peekoff came and did his Q and A on it. And I still remember the gist of a statement where he just said, the level of evil expressed by David Kelly in truth and toleration is so great that even if I were, even if you were to can't completely today, I would not live long enough to forgive him. Maybe some of the young people would, but not me. So Ramit's a close issue. So he's only in his fifties at the time anyway. And then actually, that evening, I believe, George Walsh came and he said that, like I've been, I've severed tied with the ties with the Eider Institute. And the story that he told me is that after that talk, he went and told Leonard, well, I guess I'm no longer an objectivist, because he said, I have to agree with all this stuff to be an objectivist. And then Leonard said, well, not you, George. We can still talk. And then it's open. And then George said, well, it's either it's open to everyone or it's close to me. It's open to everyone. And that was the last. Those last words they ever said to each other, if I understand correctly.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Such a waste, so irrational. And I short sighted and such a shame. But the doors at the Atlas society are open, so anytime. And, you know, we are providing ancillary benefits. Our AI animated book trailer of Atlas Shrugged, which got 12 million views across platforms, doubled the sales of Atlas Shrugged on Amazon in the ensuing month. So we're putting money in the pockets of those who hold the copyrights to that, and we're going to keep doing it because we want more young people to be able to go on that, on that journey.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: So I've never let any of these personal experiences influence my views about the truth or falseness of the philosophy. I really am an arguments person.
There are sometimes fantastic people with terrible arguments, and there's people who are awful, but they're right. And it's like, all right, well, credit where credit is due. The guy's a jerk, but he's correct on a point, and that's life.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Good point. All right, let's get to some of your other work you wrote. You will not stampede me. Essays on non conformism. What are some of the issues today where you think there is the most pressure to conform?
[00:37:27] Speaker B: I mean, obviously there is a. All of the work pressure, which is especially intense on university campuses. So that one, in a way, it's so obvious that it's kind of boring to talk about. Let's see.
One that is dear to my heart is pressure to not have many kids. There are a lot of people just feel like it's weird to have a lot of kids. I only have four, but I'm happy that I did that. And especially the idea of, well, I couldn't possibly go and have kids and tell I have completed all of the normal steps that come that precede that. It's a very common attitude. And you really can see with human fertility that a lot of it is based on conformity.
Why did the baby boom happen? There's a lot of stories, but if you listen to most of them, you're like, these stories don't really fit the facts. The one thing that fits the facts is people are doing it at the time because other people are doing it. So, of course, conformity can be people conforming on a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of why I wrote that book is that I do think you really can improve your life quite a bit by thinking for yourself and looking at evidence and not just automatically saying, if other people like it, I doubt, but at least being open to the idea. And maybe most people are mistaken about this.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: So that book you wrote in 2012, if I'm correct, are there any new challenges as your kids get older or anything that you feel held up particularly well about the book, or if you were to issue a new edition, what. What might you include?
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So you not stamped me actually came out earlier this year. But there is. There's a book.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: I'm talking about the selfish reasons to have kids.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Selfish reasons. Have more kids. Yes. I think that is 2011, anyway. I mean, yes. The main thing that I did not see coming was a further crash in birth rates.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:39:16] Speaker B: You actually, at the time, had had a big rebound in birth rates from the seventies. So the seventies basically were the previous minimum. And then the US went all the way back up to very close replacement, being second only to Israel among first world countries. And I was saying, all right, well, it's not too bad. And then pretty much the day the book came out, us birth rates started going down again. I don't think this. I caused this, obviously.
At the same time, I can't honestly say that my book went and averted what would otherwise have been an even worse trend. Main thing I can say is that this is a book where I have strong claims from a lot of people that I've changed their minds. So there's hundreds of extra kids that exist because of this book, not enough to see in national data by any means, but in terms of how much actual good have I done for the world then? Yeah, it's billions of dollars by normal measures.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: That's fantastic. Okay. Alan Turner asks, 17 years after the fact, do you think the myth of the rational voters is still prescient.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: I mean, the impression would make it sound like everything was fine up until 2007, and then things got bad, which is totally not what I was saying in the book. What I was saying in the book is demagoguery and democracy are basically the same thing. Thing. In the real world, you can imagine a world where we have elections where reasonable people come and say reasonable things and reasonable people listen to decide who's the most reasonable of the two reasonable people. I don't know of any country where this has ever been true. I think probably there's a lot of objectivists will think that the founding fathers were so much better. But the more you read the history, I think the more you say, gee, at minimum, they had a few huge screw ups which really ruined the entire picture, most obviously with slavery, that kind of thing.
Anyway. So I would say that, like, I have a very dim view of democracy in general for very objectivist reasons, of just most people are highly irrational. Politics brings out the worst in people.
I do have the view that I have talked about in podcasts at the University of Texas with Greg Salmieri on, like, are human beings inherently selfish? And I'm actually a big believer in, yeah, we're mammals, of course, we're evolved to be selfish, but politics is where our most irrational and least selfish impulses hold sway, and that gives us the garbage that we live under. I mean, I've honestly said, look, if only we could just have not even a rights based politics, just a very transactional politics where everyone just says, yeah, well, this is what I want. This is the power that I have. If you don't like it, pay me. That would be a huge improvement compared to the status quo. If you just go to a land use meeting and say, all right, we're not going to get deregulation as a matter of human rights. Correct? Okay. No. All right, how about I just give you this bag of money and you all shut up and never complain again? And if we had a world like that, it would be a huge improvement compared to the world we have, where people just said, well, the real reaction would be, listen, you horrible fat cat, you can't go and bribe the people with your dirty money. We will not allow this horrible monstrosity be erected. No. A thousand times now. And that's what democracy is really like.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, actually it reminds me, I'm up in the Bay Area quite a bit because my parents live there and we have a lot of donors there. And one of our donors, his business model is he goes into rent controlled apartments, and he essentially gives people a lot of money. You know, basically, here's $300,000 or whatever it is, to which they can then go out and move, you know, someplace sparsely populated, get a big, you know, he gets absolutely vilified for it, that what they're essentially doing is something that is going to improve the quality and. And also the supply of housing that people can, can purchase.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: So there are market innovations, even lets them get away with it.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. Well, it's pretty.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Don't talk about it too loudly because otherwise they might notice.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: But the press, the press does. I mean, there he gets picketed and protested and death threats and all kinds of things.
So a question here, Kingfisher. Brian, do you know which states have the most and the least of housing regulations, or does this come mostly from the federal level?
[00:43:57] Speaker B: So with a couple of important exceptions, there's very little going on at the federal level. It's primarily at the local, then state, and finally federal. And the reason your sub state governments have actually started trying to make local governments deregulate in terms of the most and the least, in some sense, it is very rural states that have the least, but it's not very interesting because it's like, okay, you're allowed to build what you want in places that hardly anybody lives, the ones where I think it really is the most meaningful, like Texas. So that's, like second most populous state. A lot of migration there, and still most of the state has low regulation. And even in places like Austin, where the immediate downtown has quite a bit of regulation, you only have to drive like 30 minutes to get away from that, and then you're once again in a low regulation area. Worst areas. General answers are California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: Got it.
Okay, my modern galt. Could you go into a bit more detail? Not a ton, because we only have 14 minutes left.
What you discussed in your recent article regarding Milton Friedman and immigration. Immigration.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: All right, sure. I actually have five recent pieces on Milton Friedman, immigration, or in a sense, seven. But anyway, 1999, Milton Friedman made a very famous statement in the Q and A of a presentation that he did for the International Society for Individual Liberty, where he said, you cannot simultaneously have free immigration at a welfare state.
All right, this is probably the quote that is most often emailed to me. Out of all quotations said by humans. This is the quote that I get most often in email, along the lines of, well, obviously you never heard this great line from Milton Friedman. Like, yeah, I have heard the line. I have a whole dialogue in open borders where I, of course it's imaginary. Milton Friedman was dead by the time I wrote where we go and talk about this.
What I wound up doing in these recent pieces is I went to not only the 1999 piece and just found everything he said about immigration to get more elaboration, but also I found that he did a very similar talk in 1978, where he also had a lot on immigration. And in 1999 I said, look, what he's saying here is very poorly thought out. But the guy's 87 years old, so cut him some slack. 1978, one, that's where Freedman is very near his peak. That's right around the time he did free to choose. And then I wanted to go through that and also said, yeah, the arguments are really quite poor.
In what sense are they poor? So just starting off with the statement is obviously literally false. It is not true that you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. What if the welfare state only costs a dollar a year, which is like, oh my God, we have a dollar welfare spending? Well, that's it for free immigration. It obviously depends upon the numbers. It's the magnitude of the welfare state.
This is something that he presented zero evidence on, right? And it's like there were some people like Julian Simon, that were actually coming up with evidence at the time. In any case, we've got a lot more evidence now. And what we can see for the United States, there's a very careful report by the National Academy of Sciences, and he's just mistaken like it is. In general, immigrants to the US wind up actually being a net fiscal gain for us taxpayers, ignoring everything else. He basically was just going and letting his paranoia run wild with him and saying, like, imagine if we were giving a million dollars to every recipient. Wouldn't that be a disaster? And it's like, okay, well, why don't we look at the numbers and see whether we're anything like that, and we're just not anywhere like that.
Now, the other thing that I wind up saying in the graphic novel is, look, it's exactly the same argument to say we can't have free reproduction in a welfare state. Say, well, look, if taxpayers have to support you, obviously, then we have to go and just have government decide who can and can't have kids and how many you can have. I'm almost sure Milton Friedman would have said, no, no, we can't do that. This is where he would have fallen back on a presumption of human liberty. But it is like a serious analogy. It's like, well, have you looked at those numbers? One question is, well, maybe we don't even care about the numbers. Another one is, it's just hard to believe the numbers are that bad. But again, like, if you're really going to make arguments like that, look at the freaking numbers and see, is it really true that the net fiscal effect of another immigrant or another birth is even negative, much less that it's so negative that you are going to say, well, I reluctantly am going to accept a truly tyrannical government policy because make no mistake, saying that a person cannot legally live and work in your country is a monstrous thing to do to someone.
It's like if you just imagine someone doing that to you if you were born in Haiti, it's like, yeah, sorry, you're stuck in Haiti for the rest of your life. It's like, that's a really harsh thing to do. Ayn Rand, obviously, she was able to go and leave the Soviet Union, come to the United States, and you know what? Government was already spending a lot of money in redistribution, then public education already existed. You could say, we don't want these Russians. They might have kids, could cost us a lot of money. Fortunately for her and for the world, that was not the decision at the time, though.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: She did not have kids. So there is that in the end.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yes, but they couldn't have known that.
[00:49:26] Speaker A: That's true. That's true. All right, well, we got about ten minutes left, and I want to circle back to the main topic of the interview, which is housing and why is it so scarce? Kamala Harris has floated the idea of a $25,000 benefit to help first time buyers break into the housing market. Is there anything, any reason to believe that that would make housing more affordable.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Make it more affordable for the beneficiaries, but worse for everybody else? This is a classic case of what government does for education, for healthcare, and also for housing. Strangle supply, pump up demand, and then go, oh, gee, why is it so expensive?
The way that you get actual prices down, not just for a few lucky people, getting the government help, but for people in general, is to deregulate. So supply is high, which then, by the usual market logic, brings prices down.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: What about her idea of using a tax credit to increase supply?
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So if it's a tax credit for developers, then maybe even there. Like I just say, look, the main issue here, it's not that it is unprofitable to build. It's that it's hard to get permission to do what's profitable in a world where local governments are corrupt and you can go and sort of take your tax break and then bribe them to get permission, then that might work as it is. Yeah, I tend to think it's probably not actually going to be going to help very much. The main problem is precisely you just can't get those pieces of paper at any price. The government is just so unreasonable where it just doesn't matter what the benefit is. Like, here's a billion dollars. Let me build. Like. No.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: All right, well, is there any reason to think that either candidate running for president would be able to do anything to alleviate this problem and at least show some kind of leadership on deregulation? Any evidence that either would, or is this really mostly a question of people exerting leadership on the state level?
[00:51:40] Speaker B: Right. So Harris has just said a few things about how we also need to get supply up, but with very little suggestion about how she would do that. Trump. I would just start by saying I would never believe anything he says.
But that said, his fundamental untrustworthiness being established, he did actually say a few words for one of my very favorite radical proposals, which is to sell off federal land to allow totally new cities to be built.
The us federal government owns something like 23% of all the land in the United States. Might even be a bit higher. But anyway, there's a crazy amount of land that's owned by the federal government. It is basically just kept off the market, where to be benefit to basically no humans. And we just privatize some of this. You could get a large block of it, and there's a bunch of different possible people who would like to buy a large block and build totally new cities from scratch. If you can imagine Elon Musk or Zuckerberg going and buying up 100 sq. Mi to get a totally new city, this, I think, would be one of the best demonstration projects. It would just be amazing and exciting. I would not trust Trump to follow through on any of this because I think especially his main defining personality trait in my mind is just ADHD. He just not so much lying, which is also a liar, but on top of it, just saying something and then forgetting about it and then moving on with his life.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: Yeah. In fairness, I don't think that Biden or Harris get particularly high marks in the honesty department. She was against fracking and now she's.
And they were. You know, the wall is racing on.
[00:53:23] Speaker B: A curve where everyone would get deserves abs, but you're given.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's true. That's fair. So in the last remaining minutes, anything that you didn't get to cover or best ways to follow you. And obviously, guys, I really highly recommend this graphic novel. I love graphic novels, and this one is particularly imaginative and compelling. And I was interested to learn that, Brian, you were involved very much with the storyboarding and these concepts, because that is a lot of hard work.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: I'd say. My main thing, especially for an objectivist audience, but really, any audience, is it's tempting to go and defend free markets just by complaining, right? Saying, oh, there's this, there's that. But what I really, in this book is the opposite. And just say, there is an awesome world that we already have the technology to build. If government just get out of the way, we can do so many great things. Just imagine the future that is available to us if we just go and take a flamethrower to the regulations that exist. So in my mind, that's very much a objectivist message. Look, we have all of the things we need to do. Great stuff. Stuff that is better than anything that has ever happened. Government is holding us back. If government stopped holding us back, it wouldn't just be that. We would have five or 10% more stuff. Rather, there's just a whole new world that is awaiting us if we could just plow through this incredibly irrational regulation that people take for granted. So, honestly, that is one of the main thing that I'm working on, is just what great stuff could we have if government got out of the way? Not just going and complaining and saying, oh, we have to spend, we have to get these stupid paper bags, recycling. All right, that's all true. But to me, just realizing what are the things that are incredible that we are currently doable, but we aren't allowed to do them, and being able to use all the technology for construction so that we can have abundant, cheap, spacious housing and desirable locations is one of the biggest at the top, one of the one on the, one at the top of my list.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: So in other words, not just complaining about what is, but projecting what could be kind of a Kamala Harris, you know, imagining what could be unburdened by what has been. I don't know.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And focusing on the big things. That's why I also did open borders. Let anyone on earth move anywhere. This is very likely to triple the population of the US in a century or less, which I say would be awesome. It would be great to triple our population. We multiplied 100 times since the founding of the country. Why not triple again the easy way? Why not go and open this up to these incredible opportunities that are just being ignored in the book that I'm working on right now. Unbeatable, the brutally honest case for free markets. A lot of it just revolves around what are the really biggest things that government is doing? What are the multi trillion dollar harms that government's inflicting? Or flip it around? What are the trillions of dollars of gains that are lying for us as soon as government gets out of the way?
[00:56:40] Speaker A: I love it. Well, Brian, this has been absolutely delightful, wonderful to get to know you, and maybe we'll do this again, or hope that maybe we can also lure you down to our Gulf Gulch student conference in a future year. So thank you, Brian, and thanks to all of you for joining today. Thanks for your great questions. Of course, if you enjoyed this video or any of the other materials that and content and programming we provide at the Atlas Society, please consider making a donation at atlas society.org donate and be sure to join us next week when author Henry Oliver joins us to discuss his book, second act what late bloomers can tell us about reinventing your life. See you then.
