Treating cost disease with Congressman Jake Auchincloss

How can we build new cities in America? Which historical president is Trump most like? Why did immigration policy go so wrong? Sam and Pieter sit down with Congressman Jake Auchincloss to discuss the politics of the Abundance movement. They talk about Auchincloss’s fight against free parking, regulating big tech, the success of YIMBYs, and why curing Alzheimers should be the next American moonshot project.

You can watch and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

To read more about some of the things they talked about:
How Madrid built its metro cheaply
How France achieved the world’s fastest nuclear buildout
The Housing Theory of Everything

Transcript

Sam Bowman (00:00):

Hello, welcome to the Works in Progress podcast. My name’s Sam Bowman. I’m an editor at Works in Progress.

Pieter Garicano (00:05):

And I’m Pieter Garicano, another editor with Works in Progress.

Sam Bowman (00:09):

You might’ve seen that we’ve got a new print edition. The print edition is coming in November, but you can subscribe to it now. It’s $100 in the US, £80 in the UK, and subscriptions will soon be available in Europe, Canada, Australia, and some more countries as well go to worksinprogress.co/print to subscribe. Our guest today is Congressman Jake Auchincloss. Congressman Auchincloss is one of the most thoughtful congressmen working on issues like economic growth and speeding up technological and scientific progress. And he joins us today to talk about a whole manner of issues. But I wanted to start Congressman by asking you, is there value in building new cities? I know this is something you’ve talked about. I tend to think of the value of new homes as being that they’re close to existing cities that are close to existing economic activity. So what’s the case for building a new city?

Jake Auchincloss (00:58):

Thanks for having me on. Yes, there’s value in building new cities and Americans used to build new cities all the time. Much of the story of the 19th century was that Americans would go south or west and they would bump into a river and they would found a new city wherever they hit a river. And that is a major part of the dynamism and economic development of the United States over the last 200 years. We stopped doing it, we should do it again for at least three reasons. One is affordability. ...