Central Air - Europe Needs Central Air

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.centralairpodcast.comOn this week's show: Why is Europe poor? Megan wrote about the issue this week, and Sam Bowman of Works in Progress magazine joins us from London to discuss our differences in work culture, leisure, and how we dry our clothes. Plus, we talk about the ignominious unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour, which has not delivered on its promise to build instead of block, even though Britain’s central government has all the authority over planning and zoning that Abundance advocates here dream about.That’s for all free listeners. Yes, the paywall is here — for paying subscribers, we also chat with Sam about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film ‘The Odyssey,' the Long Island Rail Road strike, and we discuss central New Jersey’s missing congressman, Tom Kean Jr., who hasn’t been seen since early March. Is he in a mental institution? We discuss that possibility with Ben, who is an alumnus of America’s most prestigious mental institution.Upgrade your subscription (and find instructions for setting up your private paid podcast feed) at www.centralairpodcast.com and RSVP to our D.C. happy hour on June 2 here.

Hi, this is Josh Barrow. You're listening to the free version of this week's episode of Central Air. We have a conversation for you with Sam Bowman from Works and Progress magazine about why Europe is poor. There's not enough central air in Europe. And also about why Britain's labor party's imploding. It's a great conversation. But if you want to hear the whole show, if you want to hear our talk about the freak out over Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, about the Long Island Railroad Strike and the uselessness of New York Republicans, and our theories about where missing New Jersey Congressman Tom Kane Jr. has been. to upgrade and get the premium version. That also gets you Ben Dreyfus's expert assessments as someone who's been in one of America's premier mental institutions about whether the congressman might be at one of those. Go to centralairpodcast.com if you want to upgrade. By the way, if you're already a paying subscriber and you're hearing this message, now first of all, thank you. And you

already have access to the full show. Just look at the email that came with this week's episode, and it has instructions about how to get it in your podcast player. You can also go to Centralairpodcast.com slash account and scroll down to private podcasts. There'll be buttons there that will help you get the show where you want it. We hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down, and Megan McArdle, who is a columnist for the Washington Post. You know, here in New York, I don't know how the, I don't know how the weather is in Idaho, Ben, but it's finally getting hot here in New York,

which means I get to turn on my central air conditioning, one of my favorite moments of the year. It's been getting quite hot here. People have a very weird relationship with heat here because in the winter they only want it, and then it suddenly comes and everyone starts whining about it. I guess that happens everywhere. But I, too, have been killing the environment with central air.

No, no, no, no. We're an advanced, prosperous nation, and we are finding increasingly clean ways to produce the electricity needed for that cooling. And, Megan, I mean, you live in a literal swamp. Actually, the swamp thing is a canard. It was never a swamp. But we've had our AC on for like a month.

It was almost 100 degrees yesterday here. So, I mean, you know, we called the show Central Air. You know, it's a great double meaning because, you know, we are here to be, you know, the gathering place for the political center. But it's also a celebration of American prosperity. About 90% of American homes are air conditioned. And about two-thirds of American homes have central air conditioning, a system that keeps the whole house at a comfortable 72 degrees and you don't even have to hear the compressor running.

This is my big bug bear. We used to live in an apartment. In New York City, you get a lot of these PTAC units, packaged terminal air conditioners, where basically the air conditioner is a big box that sits right under your window. And those are really noisy because the compressor is right there. So now I live in an apartment that has genuine central air conditioning. The compressor's 30 feet away from my office, and I never have to hear it. It makes me very happy.

I live in the future. But, you know, in Europe, they don't know this joy because Europe is poor. In terms of GDP for capital, Megan was writing about this this week. France is as poor as Alabama, even if you adjust for local prices being lower for services in Europe than they are in the U.S. And you can see that in the form of climate control, only about a quarter of French homes or air condition, which is a substantial increase from 20 years ago. Europe is getting less poor than it used to be. But still only about a quarter, and that's almost always those windows type units. Almost nobody has central air in Europe. And that's one of the things that goes into those

statistics along with, you know, clothes dryers that don't work and small houses and that sort of thing. They don't even have closed dryers. It's true that they don't work. And when I lived in London, the first week I was there, I was like, oh, I'll throw some laundry into this combo unit. And then I'll go to sleep. Oh, no, oh, no, my friend, you are not going to sleep when that thing is running. It was like being inside of a steel drum while like an entire tribe of mechanics was banging on it. And then I pulled the clothes out. I have never experienced any. that wrinkled. The wrinkles had wrinkles. And also, they were not dry. But even those combo units are actually not that common in Europe. I was just looking this up. Only like 60 million European

homes have tumble dryers, which is just shocking. How do they dry it? With a clothesline? Yeah, they hang them up inside their house. And when I would go to people's houses in the winter, it was fascinating because their apartments would just be like, because England is very damp. Right. So their houses would just be draped in all of their wet stuff that was taking like three days to dry. And it's not, I don't want to say that this is backward. I do want to say that is there some sort of agency that the United States government could establish to help these people? You want a second Marshall Plan. So we brought an actual European here this week to explain himself and his continent. Sam Bowman, who's based in London, is founding editor at Works and Progress Magazine. from Stripe Press. Welcome, Sam. Why don't people have clothes dryers over there? I'm an Irishman, so I can speak on behalf of the European Union. So I have a tumble dryer. I find the entire American conversation about tumble dryer. It's totally a desire.

So I have one, and I never use it, because for one thing, you can't put synthetics into it, right? Because they shrink. I used a tumble dryer when I was in America, and I put my Uniclo, erasm underwear in, and they all came out with kind of shrunk. It was much time. that I like, so I had to kind of walk around Portland wearing like really, really tight underwear for a few days, which is terrible. Well, it's normal in Portland. Yeah, I know I fit right in. Part of the government agency's mission should be to explain the delicate cycle,

which is what you dry things on in order to avoid the shrinkage. And do you worry about the fire risk? So I live in a terrace Georgian house. It's four stories. It's very tall and very narrow. I think it's very beautiful. I think it's a very efficient way to fit a lot of people. in, this is kind of the, this is my answer with the housing crisis. It's like tall, narrow

Georgian homes, but I really, really don't want there to be a fire. So I will never run the tumble dryer when I'm asleep. I will never run it when I'm out of the house. I'm like watching it like a hawk when it's running. And it just feels amazingly inconvenient compared to just hanging your clothes up and letting them dry, which is what everybody's done for a huge. Wait, wait, you don't use a dryer because you're afraid that in the middle of the night, it's just going to burst into flames? Yeah. Does that happen a lot over there? Is this some sort of blitz mentality thing where there's just... It doesn't happen because we don't use them.

We have incredibly prudent approaches to fire safety. But I will say that the clothes horse thing, it's funny hearing you guys kind of talk about, like, what do they do instead? Because I have had an American friend come to my house and point at our clothes horse, which is what we call them, and say, what is that? Like, what is that weird metal contraption that you've got in your hallway? But to me, this is just a completely reasonable. I don't want my clothes to get damage, though.

I don't want to have a thing running overnight, pumping out heat. I want to live at a time and safe home. I'm so sorry. What is the metal contraption? I don't even know what you're talking about. It's a drying rack. Yeah, a drying rack. A clothes force is what I'm called.

They have a funny name for a drying rack. Okay, but I feel that there may be some propaganda here. I mean, look, you guys are on 240 volt power and we are on 110, so maybe that's the difference. Well, but dryers usually run on 240-volt power in the United States, too. Yeah, oh, I guess that's right. You have a special circuit. I have never met anyone whose house was set on fire by a burning dryer. You should brush out the lint trap once a year.

They sell brushes on Amazon for like $10 to do this. But most people I know do not do this, and in fact, have never had a house fire. Our dryers are vented to the outside, which really helps. And I think one of the reasons that the one I had in London didn't work was it wasn't vented. But also, like, does it ruin my clothes? I don't know. Does it shorten the lifespan of my clothes by, like, a year at the end of the life? I don't know.

But also, by the time, my clothes are reasonably well made. And I've, I don't, I rarely have to throw anything out because it has holes in it. I usually throw it out either because I've gotten fatter or because it just isn't in style anymore and I don't have room in my closet. I mean, if they cause structural fires all the time, like the LG Corporation would be bankrupt from lawsuits. Like, they, you know, I can assure you. that, you know, the 330 million Americans all around the country, almost everyone has one of

these in their house. And it is very rare for them to cause a fire. I, you know, I happily go to sleep while mine is running. I mean, can you imagine it would be, it would be front page news in every newspaper in America if it started happening. People would be terrified. This would, it would be like Ebola. Ebola was here. Suddenly, suddenly, suddenly the bombs were in our homes. But so, I mean, you know, we can make fun of the idiosyncrasy of the clothes source and that sort of thing. But, like, the broader statistical thing is true, right, Sam, that like, you know, GDP per capita is lower over there, and that manifests in certain things that, you know, are common in America, but not over in Europe. You have, you know, much smaller home sizes. For some reason, everyone has manual

transmission over there, although that seems like, like with the drying seems to be a thing that's like, oh, no, actually, we prefer to have to choose the gears ourselves in our cars. But what drives that divergence in your view? It's partially, there's a kind of Eurocote and, And it is true to some extent. The Eurocope is that we work less, we take long holidays. You know, if you ever work with people who are in Sweden over Christmas, they basically just put an out-of-office on for two weeks and you can't hear back on them. If you work with people in France or in Germany, they just disappear for six weeks over the

summer. Hours are shorter, people retired, younger. You know, French people have rioted recently over raising the retirement age from 63 to 65. like it's completely, the entire center of gravity is around leisure time. And you may disagree with that. I do disagree with that. I think that that actually is a bad thing. But, like, clearly there is a lot of value.

I mean, the French are also just lazy. I think the French are actually the most interested economy in Europe, actually. I think that France is one of the great mysteries and one of the most interesting economies in the world, because France is a really rich, productive country, despite all of the things that it does wrong. And I think people like me who are, you know, believers in low tax rates and believers in relatively unregulated markets and they have a really, really big question to answer because France seems to get everything wrong. And yet it's still a pretty nice place to live. It's still a pretty impressive country. They still have like actually a lot of really impressive like global companies.

They have some very large companies in the fashion industry, but they have a lot of like middle stand type kind of mid-tier companies that do really, really good work. And I also think the French had like a lot of self-confidence in a way that most Europeans don't. I think that a real, there's a kind of cultural malaise in a lot of Yorking countries that they just don't feel like they are worthwhile anymore. But the French don't have that. They're quite proud. And, you know, left and right, they feel like, yeah, we're good. We're cool.

I'm sorry, I actually admire and I'm quite fascinated by the French. But it's definitely true. But even if you control for all of that and you look at just how much output per hour and so long is done, Europe is behind and it's falling behind. You know, it was almost level pegging, Western Europe, with the US in the 1990s. Now, I mean, it's fallen behind by like 15% of points. Look, I don't want to crap on France too much. I am also kind of weirdly impressed by how much they managed to do despite all of their, not just mistakes.

I was talking to an economist who studies social trust and its economic effects. And France is this weirdly low outlier where they've got extremely low social trust measured by things like, can most – what you ask people, can most people be trusted most of the time? It's like a quarter of French people think that most people. people can be trusted most of the time. In the Nordics, it's in the 60s, right? And yet somehow, they managed to have pretty decent GDP. And he was like, I don't know. It's France is a mystery. They're a real outlier on that as well. At the same time, the question I had in the column is, to what extent, you know, because these arguments in the United States are a proxy between the left and the right. It's a proxy between people who want America to have a more European

style regulatory state, a more European-style welfare state, and to prioritize leisure over work. And the question I had is, Paul Krugman came in and said, like, look, America's growth, productivity growth is mostly in software and in tech. And if you kind of assume that that's just flowing through to Europeans, they're buying iPhones too. They get all the same stuff we do because we export it. And the marginal cost of those exports is pretty low. Then maybe maybe Europe is just getting the better deal out of this. And I think that's a real question, but I also then think, so what does that imply about if America adopted a European-style welfare and regulatory state, what would Europe's standard of living look like? Because I think they're

already running into the political problems of you've got an aging society. Your productivity growth isn't growing that fast. Your GDP is like, it's not stagnant exactly, but it's lackluster, let's say, in the growth department. And if America weren't out there, would Europe be doing even worse? And would that be causing not just people not getting richer, but would it be causing the kind of social unrest that I think you're already seeing in lots of places in Europe? So I have a theory about France, because hourly labor productivity in France is excellent. And France also has this 35-hour work week rule that is unusual even within Europe in terms of, you know, most employees are limited. They're only supposed to work 35 hours a week. And so when I look at that and you say, you know,

few hours worked reported, very high productivity per hour reported. I just assume that they're under reporting hours in certain circumstances, that there are firms that are not really abiding by the 35-hour a week rule. And so their workers are in fact working more hours than reported at a lower productivity level than it would appear. I mean, at least that's what would happen in the United States if you had this kind of rule. Now, I realize that in France, there's a, the culture is very strong around the 35-hour work week, and a lot of French people would be very resistant to that sort of thing. But I sort But, you know, when you cap something, normally you get some evasion around the cap, and then that's what the statistics would end up looking like.

Am I wrong to suspect that? I don't know. I mean, there's definitely some misreporting. People might be familiar with this kind of famous chart that the economists put out like 10 years ago that shows French firms by headcount. And it's like there's a huge cliff edge of 49 employees because all of these labor regulations or all of these regulations around like medium-sized firms kicking at 50 employees. But a French economist has showed that really this is just down to misreporting, and really, in fact, they just disguise when they have 50 or 55 or 60 employees, they just have those kind of extra people with contractors or whatever it might be.

So there are definitely things like that. My read has always been actually that it was in the same way that if you have high levels of unemployment and the people who are unemployed are the relatively less productive people, then like just compositionally you will end up with the appearance of higher productivity. And my assumption is that that's true to some extent with hours worked as well, that, you know, you're the last five hours of the week that you work, not literally the last, but the kind of if you have 40 hours a week versus 35 hours a week, you're not getting an average amount of outputs for every hour worked. And you might be, the kind of extra five hours you might be less productive than the first 35 hours that you do. I don't know if that's true, but that's only been my hypothesis. Now, the real reason I think France is rich, despite getting all kind of regulatory and task things wrong, is that they build like crazy. And they have really, build costs. You know, they, like Paris has tripled in size since, it's kind of in geographical extent, since the Second World War, whereas like, for comparison, London has not increased that all full stop. It's an increase about 3%. They've built trams in like 23 cities in the last 20 years. They build tons and tons of toll motorways. So the motorways are really free flowing. They charge people for using them. They just build and build and build. Everybody knows about the TGV,

the high-speed rail that they have. Works and Jorgist did an article about the kind of French nuclear build-out, what they did in the 70s and 80s, where they built, like, 50 reactors in 10 years. It's really, really impressive how early they nuclearized and decarbonized and now export electricity to the rest of Europe. So, like, in some really important ways, they are actually just genuinely really impressive, and they have really, really high output and really, really low construction costs. And I think my hypothesis, as like a person who thinks that building things is really important, is that that then kind of sustains everything else, and they can afford to do all these other things that I think would tend to make you poorer because they do all this building.

This point, though, I want to do a kind of defense of Europe. The Americans go to Europe and they say, there are no ice machines. What the hell? You know, I can't have any ice in my wine or something. I don't know why you guys want that so much. Not wine in softwares. This is fake. Red herring.

American's for ice and everything. You also need ice for making cocktails, but Europeans don't know how to make cocktails. That's true. We do have much, much better wine and beer than we have cocktails. But Europeans go to America and they say, like, there were parts of the city that I couldn't go into because a guy would have shot me. Like, a European goes to Chicago and says, like, more people were killed in Chicago last year than were killed in Italy that year. You know, they go to places like New York and they go on the subway and, like, crazy people are shouting at them. They're like, I have sat down on the subway and there's just like a bag of raw, rotting meat next to me or like just in a seat.

Like, it's disgusting. And you don't get that kind of thing in Europe. And so Paul Griffin in this article that Megan was responding to has this kind of slightly trite thing called the Walking Around Test. And it's really, really, really skewed, as you point out, Megan, because for one thing, you know, when you're a tourist, you go to cities, you don't go to suburbs. And American suburbs are, like, extremely prosperous, even in kind of mid-tier cities.

They're, like, extremely nice. You have very big houses. It's a, like, the quality of life is very, very high. And much higher, I would say, an equivalent suburb in most European countries. But... What you don't pick up and, you know, granting all of that is that we don't have very good measurements for, like, centuries of built environment and centuries of kind of cultural capital. You talk about this negative piece. Like, we don't, we just do not try to do hedonic measurements of, like, what's it like to live in Paris?

Like, what's it like to live in Rome or Florence? It's incredibly difficult to measure. And I do think that there's something quite meaningful in that. And, you know, similarly, we don't do hedonic measurements for feelings of safety. We don't do hedonic measurements for, like, I don't go to certain parts of the city when I'm in America. There are really places like that. There are maybe, like, maybe I'mudely a few places like that that at certain times of the day you wouldn't want to go to in London. But it's nothing like America.

And, you know, you wouldn't want to go there because it might feel a bit rough, not because you would be the actual serious danger. Hasn't everybody's phone been stolen in London in the last two years? This is what I keep reading about in the paper that you cannot walk around the street. in London without like a very firm grip on your iPhone because someone will rip it out of your hands and send it to some warehouse near Heathrow Airport in order to export it to Afghanistan as part of a criminal gang. Yes, which is absolutely terrible, appalling, unacceptable, completely a shame on the city. But personal safety, I mean, I'm never worried that my wife, when she walks around London at any time will be in any serious physical danger, like full stop. And I don't think anybody is,

is basically anywhere in London. No, that is absolutely real. I will. But that isn't true. That isn't true of most American cities. I will say that the only time I've ever had my pocket picked was in Copenhagen. Somehow, I managed to go to Copenhagen and get my iPhone stolen, which has never happened to me in the United States. But no, this is absolutely, it is absolutely true that America lags far behind on public safety. It's not, that's not really an economic thing. That's a bunch of policy choices that I think were bad. It's still, I mean, it's like obviously a huge improvement in quality of life to not worry about that. We had a pretty sizable shooting across the street from our house. And I don't think that that's a normal thing to happen in Europe. And I remember when I went to Dublin in the 90s, I was, or I guess it was

2000s. No, it was the 90s. So anyway, I am staying with a guy. And I go out, he's at work. So I am walking around the city and I come back and he asked me where I went. And I showed him on the map. And he like lost his mind because I guess I walked through the bad part of Dublin. And I was just like laughing at him. I was like, you don't understand what a bad neighborhood looks like, my friend. The neighborhood I live in on the Upper West Side right now is rougher than anything I saw in Dublin. And that's broadly true. I am not actually arguing that like it is better to be an American. You know, from say like going to the Nordics and reporting on their economy, I think the conclusion I came to is that probably most Americans would hate living.

in a Nordic country, and most Nordics would not love living in America. And that's partly just because of what you're used to, right? And that goes from everything from consumer goods. I almost paid $20 for a teeny tiny jar of peanut butter when I was living in London, because I was so homesick. But a lot of it is also that, like, Americans are used to having really big houses and lots of appliances and all these things. And giving that up in exchange for national health care and all the rest of it would feel

really cramped, right? You move into that small house, your kids are sharing a bedroom, whatever. You would be annoyed by all of that. You'd be annoyed by your taxes. But if you are used to not having to pay doctors or fuddle with insurance, all the rest of it, you move to the United States, and suddenly the thing that you're not used to doing feels like a huge imposition. So it's not, I was not trying to make a direct comparison between like our quality of life is higher. I don't even know how you would get that measurement, although I will say that the French people are slightly less satisfied with their lives than Americans. when you ask them on happiness surveys.

But a lot of people are asking, like, well, is America really richer after you throw in health care and all that and vacation? It's like we have measures of actual individual consumption, which is called actual individual consumption. And it adds all that stuff in. It adds the NGO and the government spending on health care and all the rest of it. And yes, we're like 50% higher than France. And I think that tracks with my experience of knowing people who are French and live, and are not like super wealthy. It's not like their lives are hell pits of misery,

but they visibly have smaller homes, less stuff than Americans would at their same income level or at their same like professional level, I guess is the right way to put that. Can we talk about Britain some? Because Sam, watching your politics from afar and as, you know, the Labor Party is sort of imploding right now, the last election campaign, Kirstarmer,

had sort of moved labor to the center and ran on this idea of builders, not blockers, we're going to revitalize the British economy by making it easier to invest and build, and particularly that they were going to build a ton of homes. And then they took office and did not appear to do any of that. And the weird thing watching this as an American is, you know, when we watch our politics, it's like, oh, there's the filibuster in the Senate. And you have, you know, one party runs one branch, another party runs.

And there's all these veto points in the system. It seems like one of the, you know, for better or for worse, one of the features of the British system of government is supposed to be that you come in, especially you come in as labor did with a huge majority, you can just pass law. and implement the agenda that you ran on. And they, they, like, didn't do that. And it comes following a conservative government that was elected in large part in a populist revolt about immigration that takes office and then increases immigration levels.

And that's, like, destroyed the conservative party politically. And I just, I don't understand what's going on there. It seems like people are greatly dissatisfied because people keep running and then not doing the thing that they were elected on. And I can't even identify why they don't do it. the initial mistake that you're describing for Labor there, I think, was twofold. So the first was they were very cautious, I think, in some ways maybe correctly cautious in waging the election campaign.

They made very, very, very limited commitments in any way. They ruled out certain tax rises and it box themselves in in quite important ways by ruling out any kind of increases to income tax or payroll tax or our version of sales tax. And we're very, very cautious. And even though they won a massive majority, they did so with a very narrow share of the boat. So they really, really had kind of brittle, large majority. So they hadn't won a mandate really to do very much. And I think the really crucial mistake that you were getting out there is that they hired a senior civil servant.

We have a very large professional civil servant that is politically neutral. And one of the kind of means in British politics is that you need to know how to use the civil service. Like it's a it's a Rose Royce if you know how to drive it. So they hired a very senior civil servant, a woman named Sue Gray, and she was supposed to prepare them for government. And it turned out that she hadn't done any of the things. When they got in, they said, okay, great, what's the plan? And it turned out that she had approached her challenge much more as a civil servant than as a kind of political appointee and hadn't really thought about any of the policy work.

It was all about, well, we should set up this implementation unit here and all these kind of very, very procedural type of thing. So they came in, they didn't really have anything to do for a year. I think that's kind of one reason they didn't get going very soon. I think they really did and do have a will to build houses, at least. But because they didn't have any real ideas about how to do it, and I think they still don't really have any ideas about how to do it, nothing happened. And it's probably too late now for any kind of feed-through,

any changes they actually bring in. At this point, you know, you might get some construction beginning, although you might not, but you won't have any houses built by the next election by any means. And at the same time, they're massively, massively constrained on fiscal issues. They tried to raise taxes that they thought people wouldn't notice, and people noticed. They tried to cut some benefits like payments for old people, and there was a massive backlash, and they reversed it. And they basically went in with the premise being that they would be competent, and that they

would be the unsmeasy alternative to the Conservatives. And as soon as they've come in, they've seemed like they have no idea what to do. So I think they've lost on that front, and they've lost their own base, particularly on Gaza. they've been caught in a sort of pincer between the sort of center, the center ground, medium voter who cares about good governance and cares about taxes and things like that, and their base that cares very much about Gaza, both Muslim voters and kind of younger urban voters, they care very, very much about Gaza and feel completely appalled and betrayed, in the same way the Conservatives base did on immigration.

So I kind of feel sorry for them because they've been caught so badly in exactly the same sort of trap that the conservatives were. But ultimately, it's a commonplace problem. I mean, you say they didn't have the ideas about how to build housing. I mean, I have ideas, but also like, I thought one of the key things was basically that sort of similarly to the U.S., you have these powerful local authorities that basically people just don't want houses built near them. And then you have this added cultural dimension where there's this obsession with farmland. And so you'll get like a beetfield literally next to one of the outer London underground stations. And someone wants to build townhomes on it. and then everyone freaks out that you're like to spoiling the green belt by building houses near the subway.

But I thought the idea was basically to just big foot the local authorities. You'd have new national laws that say you're allowed to build X in place Y, and then people just go ahead and build that. But they didn't do that. The thing is, actually, we already have all those laws. The mayor of London and the Secretary of State or Housing, the kind of central government figure, can both call in any project they want and overrule any local authority they want. they can give by-right zoning so they can say, this area and just zoning,

you can build anything you want. They don't need any parliamentary authority to that. They don't need any kind of vote. They can just do that tomorrow if they want to. And they've had those towers since the 1970s. They don't use those for, I think, very interesting political reasons. And this is, incidentally, why I'm quite skeptical

of American YIMDs who think that these sorts of powers will solve America's problems with building, because I don't think they will. But we have had these centralised a kind of overrule to build powers for decades. They're very, very, very unpopular. People don't like them.

And, you know, just this week, there's been a big story where a development near where I live in South London that would have built kind of 700 or 800 new homes has been blocked by both the local authority and by the planning inspector, which is the kind of central government agency that's responsible for this. And both the mayor and Secretary of State had the power to call this in,

but have no interest in doing so because it would look back and it would be unpopular. So I think actually the ideas are really important in getting things built, because I think most people don't want to see these powers used. Most people would be very angry if these powers were used. And in my opinion, the answer really is to changing sentence so that there are rewards for places that get things built. In the same way that, you know, Loudoun County or Prince is a Prince William County in Virginia are building tons of data centers because they're getting tons of tax revenues for that. And people there are presumably maybe unhappy in some ways of data centers, but they're compensated in some way as well. So they have some incentive to do it.

So rather than thinking of this as a problem of preaction, of kind of overruling local authorities, in my opinion, the real problem we have is that we have such a centralized local tax system, that really there is no tax benefit to areas that take new housing or take new building. And fixing that is quite tricky. I don't think it's impossible at all. But it's certainly not a thing you just come in and say, okay, well, we're just going to do it. It takes quite a lot of design. There are winners and there are losers,

and you need to think carefully about how you are going to do it because everything from old age care to schools to children with special needs is affected by this kind of policy. All these things, to some extent, are funded locally. Megan, what do you make of that? Because, I mean, when I look at this in the U.S. context, I think one of, you know, there's so much focus on California, And one of the problems there is that Proposition 13, the property tax limiting ballot measure from the 1970s, means you can't collect property tax more than 1% of the value of a home.

And then that actually declines over time because it's pegged to the purchase price rather than to the market value. And so you have jurisdictions, you know, they'll permit new housing. And in a lot of cases, the residents of those homes are going to consume more in services than they can collect in taxes. What they really want is retail, because retail will throw off local sales tax revenue and not consume a lot of government services. So I can see that as a problem. But on the other hand, you know, we have these northeastern jurisdictions where property taxes are much higher. And so the proposition in terms of you, you permit new homes and it improves your tax base and that'll actually like pay for new services in your area, that doesn't seem to be producing much better planning policy in

Massachusetts, for example, which is, you know, along with California, one of the worst performers on this. And Massachusetts, in theory, has built the sort of system that Sam is describing there where the local economic benefits are captured locally and can be poured back into services. So my dad's house is near Marblehead, Massachusetts, where a guy just went viral because Massachusetts had made this rule that said you have to zone for affordable housing. And so they upzoned a country club, which could theoretically be sold to develop affordable housing, but will, in reality, not be. So they got zero affordable housing, but they did comply with the law. And this guy stood up at a town meeting. It was like,

Aren't we just being jerks? Because he actually starts by asking, he's like, so what you're saying is this is, you're complying with a law, but you will create no housing doing this. And the counselor clearly thinking like that was what the guy wanted to hear was like, yeah, no, that's right. That's right. And he's like, but aren't we being jerks? And he's right, obviously.

But the greatest essay on American politics of all time is the last chapter of PGR Works, Parliament of Hors. Yes. In which he describes a town meeting in his town of, I believe, Jeffrey, New Hampshire. When Megan says town meeting, in these New England towns, including where PGA O'Rourke lived, that is the legislature. All of the voters of the town gather at least once a year, and they get together and they vote on things, including often zoning issues.

So the entire populace is the lawmakers. Yeah. He describes all of the, like, crazy conversations they have. This thing takes hours. but then the final vote, the fight people really came for, was a guy who wanted to upzone a piece of property so that, or I think maybe he didn't need to upzone, but he wanted to build a golf course and condominium complex.

And the town votes it down. And why does the town vote it down? Is it because they hate golf? No, many of them are golfers. Is it because they don't like condos? Not exactly. But the reality is that because this is inexpensive housing, anyone who buys those condos and has, say, a kid or two is going to cost the town more than they

generate in services. So it's not just... Then they generate in property taxes. Sorry, then they generate in property taxes, exactly. So, like, you need a really quite expensive house in order to be net revenue positive for the town. And the higher the property taxes are, likely the more they're spending on schools and the more that may be true, right? that it is very difficult to up zone in a way that's going to create value for the town that you're

going into, especially if what you're trying to create is affordable housing where young starter families can live. The way we got around that before was Greenfield development, right? We went out, we bought a bunch of farms that had zero surfaces. We paved them. We covered them with houses. And the problem is that in American cities now, we've kind of built out to the limit of where it's reasonable to commute into the city. Even in the 90s, I worked with a guy who lived in the Poconos and took a three-hour bus ride to get into Manhattan every day to work.

And then a three-hour bus ride home. He got up at three in the morning, climbed on the bus and went to sleep again. This is a crazy way to live, but it's a product of the fact that even, you know, by the mid-90s, we just reached the limits of how much farmland you could turn into new single-family homes. And that's a problem that's not going away. And then there's also the fact that, like, parents don't want their kids to go to school with the children of people who are poorer and less educated than they are. And they will go to extraordinary lengths to keep those families out of their schools. And so when you put those two things together, it's incredibly hard to get around. And I'm, like, I am sort of coming around to the idea that, like, a big part of the solution is just going to be new cities and figuring out greenfield development in places that don't already, haven't already.

kind of hit their natural limits because the political incentives are so difficult. And I, like, hoped that this, that more centralized, I know Britain does do a lot of local spending, but it's, I think, less, there's more kind of central government control, more central government spending. And yet Britain has exactly the same problem we do. And lots of other countries do, too. And maybe it's common law. Maybe it's that our NIMBYs, you know, British NIMBYs are reading American nimbie tricks and American nimbibes are reading British American nimbie tricks, and we're all just making each other worse. But I think it might also just be that it is really actually very difficult to make new housing pencil out for existing residents.

Can I just say, sorry, my internet disappeared at the exact worst time because you were on my favorite subject about France and Europe versus the United States. And I just have to return to it before we move on. Because, Sam, you said this thing about how there's meat on our subways. and meat packets on our subways. And that is just a sign of affluence. That's how much meat we have. We can leave it on the subway. But also,

the idea that the tourists in European tourists come to America and are like, oh, my God, there's South Chicago, there's violence, there's violence, they're shooting us everywhere. Last year, I wrote this piece where I went and cataloged all of these foreigners giving recommendations, travel tourist recommendations, to other foreigners about the United States. And it was a fascinating exercise because, you know, you really see through the way the world visits you.

And it'll say things like, you know, America is generally quite tolerant of gay people with some huge exceptions. Like, do not go regionally to the South and stuff like that. But also, it's filled with things saying, don't go to South Chicago. You have heard that the guns are here and that they will kill you. Everyone is getting shot in America. But then it says, but please do not worry.

The chances of being killed in a mass. shooting are incredibly low. And mostly the gangs are shooting each other. You will not be shot as long as you are European or Asian. I just think that like there's there's a

cognitive thing that people do when they go visit places. You know, when you go to London, the first thing that you think is like, you're like, oh my God, the artful Dodgers going to fucking be in East London and he's going to be picking buckets and doing terrible things. There's ghettos everywhere. There's awful places everywhere. And like, A lot of Americans might be dead, but you'd have to have a lot of gang violence in America

prior for us to match the numbers of, like, the millions of people, Europeans kill each other. I don't think that's right. The three cities I go to in America are San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and New York City is probably my favorite city in the world, by the way. I think it's an absolutely amazing wonder of the world. Thank you. It's incredible. But San Francisco, like, if you get the bus in San Francisco, it's horrible. I mean, it's completely horrible.

You can walk around. If you stay on North Hill and you walk down the hill, it's, immediately in the tenderloy, and it's horrendous. It's right in the central time. Washington, D.C., there's, like, there is a street that, when you visit it, they're like, don't go past this street. But this is great up until this street, but don't go past that street. New York is, I feel very safe whenever I'm in New York, but there are still extremely mentally disturbed people in public wherever you go. There are people kind of urinating, defecating in public, wherever you go. It's disgusting. It's dirty and it's squalid.

While you get some things like that in Europe, you don't get anything remotely on the scale of that. And you certainly don't get any of the kind of typical violence. I just don't agree that it's a gang thing. Like, it just isn't. Like, you're so much more likely to be a victim of interpersonal violence in America, whoever you are than you are in Europe in any kind of like-for-like comparison. San Francisco has a very low rate of violent crime. Like, San Francisco has really significant problems with public disorder.

They've gotten somewhat better in the last year, you know, the new major. Daniel Lurie, I think, has done some good things, you know, cracking down on public drug use and that sort of thing. They also, interestingly, they were having a big problem with car break-ins. So I guess, sort of similar to the phone-snatching thing in London. And the police department is literally using drones now to chase suspects. And it's been highly effective. And they've, you know, really deterred people from from breaking car windows and stealing out of them in San Francisco. So do you think there is a major European city that is as dangerous or more dangerous in violence in terms only than San Francisco? I don't know. I would have to look at the crime statistics, but SF has a very low murder rate by U.S. standards. I am going to weigh in on Sam's side here after he was so nice about me teasing him about the dryers.

Look, the best policed large city in the United States is Boston. It has a homicide rate of about three per hundred thousand. The UK has a homicide rate of about 1.1 to 1.2 per 100,000. Our cities are just massively, more violent than Europe. And of course, like, that's the best. In D.C., a couple years ago, it was 27 per 100,000, right? Like, we are mass, our cities are massively more violent, even the ones that we don't think of as being. That was this week's free episode of Central Air. If you want to hear our whole conversation, the rest of our talk with Sam Bowman, if you want to hear about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and the controversy over the casting decisions there, the Long Island Railroad Strike and Kathy Hokel standing up for the taxpayer when New York Republicans won't do so.

And our discussion of where missing Congressman Tom Kane Jr. has gone missing. Did he have a hair transplant gone wrong? That's Megan's theory. Anyway, if you want to hear more about that, go to centralairpodcast.com, upgrade, get the full episode, get every full episode, get playbacks of our substack lives. We're going to have a really fun live coming up next week. And we hope that you will join us over there. Thank you.