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Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.
Sam Bowman: The last time I felt really
sick was when my neighbor asked me to
clean something from her front porch.
She warned me to bring a shovel.
I came round.
She didn't wanna tell me what it
was, and it turned out to be a dead
rat absolutely crawling with maggots
that had fallen from some scaffolding
that she has outside her house.
I picked it up.
I was almost sick, and
eventually I got rid of it.
And I think I was sick partly
because it was a rat, not just
because it was infested with maggots.
Rats are unbelievably revolting.
They are frightening.
They make your skin crawl.
If you've read 1984, you'll have vivid
images of rats burrowing through your
face, and the reason that we hate rats so
much is that they've always been with us.
They are our most unhappy neighbor.
Wherever there are humans anywhere
in the world, there are rats, nearly.
There are actually two places that we
have humans where we don't have rats.
One is Antarctica, and it's sort of
borderline whether that counts as
having humans, but there are a few.
The other is Canada's province of Alberta.
Alberta is rat-free.
If you go there, you will not see rats.
If a rat is sighted there, the
entire provincial government will
swing into gear and eliminate it.
And what Alberta's done is something
that nowhere else has managed to
do, so it's pretty interesting.
So for the new issue of Works in
Progress, issue 24, we're gonna talk
about how Alberta became rat-free,
and we're gonna talk about some
of the other articles as well.
Aria, Pieter, tell me about Alberta
and how they got rid of rats.
Pieter Garicano: Almost everywhere
in North America has rats.
The rats are actually not a
North American creature at all.
The first rats arrived with Columbus,
the black rat from Spain, but the black
rat wasn't really a very aggressive rat.
It's a small,
Aria Schrecker: Is it cute?
Pieter Garicano: No, it's not cute per
se, but it's not aggressive either,
and the black rats lived around
the coastal areas of North America.
But in 1775 a better rat arrives,
the Norwegian rat or the brown rat.
In America now known as a sewer rat.
And the brown rat is larger,
it's more aggressive.
It's more fertile.
It's better at burrowing into things.
And the brown rat, once it arrives in
New York in 1775, spreads throughout
all North America within decades.
It rides along on barges.
It rides along on trains.
it rides along with carriages.
Basically anywhere where there's a store
or food, basically anywhere where humans
live, the brown rat will live as well.
And the brown rat, once it settles
somewhere, it rapidly becomes endemic
because a brown rat will have, on
average, 50 to 80 children per year.
And so where you have a brown
rat settlement, you rapidly
have a brown rat colony.
Aria Schrecker: I guess this is
also kind of the story of why
cats follow humans as well, right?
So you start with agriculture, and
so you have grain stores, and so
you have mice and you have rats.
And then humans and cats
kind of coevolved together.
Well, I guess humans have already evolved
to this point, but cats coevolved this
semi-domesticated state with human beings,
so that they can eat all of our mice
and rats that we bring around with us.
Sam Bowman: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's
why the Egyptians worshiped cats, which
is a reason to like the Egyptians.
And also I think it's true that during
the bubonic plague, women who had cats
obviously didn't get the plague and didn't
die of the plague nearly as much as other
people, so they were accused of being
witches for you know, having some sort of
spell that stopped them from getting the
disease that everybody else was getting.
Aria Schrecker: So I suspect that isn't
true because, the bubonic plague was
carried by guinea pigs, I think, not rats.
and also-
Sam Bowman: That's not true.
Pieter Garicano: This seems,
this seems like misinformation.
Aria Schrecker: I'm pretty
sure it's guinea pigs.
Pieter Garicano: No, it's not.
No, it's definitely rats.
Aria Schrecker: I'm pretty sure this is
one of those fun facts that you learn.
Sam Bowman: Sorry, you can't
seriously think that European
that Europe in the 14th century-
Aria Schrecker: Yeah!
Sam Bowman: …Was covered in guinea pigs.
We had so many guinea pigs that a third of
the population of Britain was wiped out-
Aria Schrecker: No, no, no…
Sam Bowman: -by guinea pigs.
Aria Schrecker: -The more complicated,
the slightly more complicated, I guess,
thing, which is guinea pigs carry the
particular kind of flea that carries
the bubonic plague, and then that
type of flea then infests all of your
clothing and your hair and everything.
But I thought that the vector-
Sam Bowman: I don't think
that's even true either
…
Aria Schrecker: -from Asia
to Europe was the guinea pig.
Sam Bowman: I've read a book.
I've read a book about the
epidemiology of the Black Death-
Aria Schrecker: Okay, fine.
Sam Bowman: And it doesn't
mention guinea pigs.
Aria Schrecker: I have not read a book
about the epidemiology of the Black
death.
Pieter Garicano: Okay.
We'll pick up on the cats, as you take it.
Cats plus humans keep the
population amount of rats stable.
They don't drive it down.
So London, for example, has
roughly a rat for every inhabitant.
Sam Bowman: Mm-hmm.
New York has one rat for
every three inhabitants.
Pieter Garicano: Which is…
So would imply that London
has more rats than New York.
Sam Bowman: See, I didn't know
London had one per person.
Pieter Garicano: But London's supposed
to have a rough population of 10
million rats, 10 to 15 million rats.
Aria Schrecker: Wow.
Sam Bowman: It's funny
'cause you don't see them.
Pieter Garicano: You don't see them.
They-
Sam Bowman: I mean, when you're in
New York, you see rats everywhere.
But you don't see… maybe it's New
York is so much denser that- this
is the downside of density that a
given square mile of New York will
have many, many more rats on it.
Pieter Garicano: There's also a downside
of storing your waste on the street,
which I think is the main reason why it
appears to be present in American cities.
Sam Bowman: No, I know, but London
doesn't store its waste on the
street and has more rats, so
-
Pieter Garicano: But theirs is hidden
away and not causing problems for
people at least not in the same way.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Yeah, right.
I see.
Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: But, and along with
that, cities spend millions and millions
of dollars every year on pest control.
And this is all to keep rats
at a relatively high level.
And so the best thing you can do with
rats is not have them at all, and this
is what Alberta achieved in the 1950s,
where the rats were marching up westward
from Saskatchewan roughly 20 miles a year.
they-
Sam Bowman: From where?
Pieter Garicano: Saskatchewan.
Sam Bowman: Okay.
Pieter Garicano: Their
neighboring province.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: Importantly, Alberta
has one great feature of geography
which prevents it from being truly
invaded on all sides, which is on the
west it has the Rocky Mountains, to
the north it has the frozen tundra.
To the south is Montana, which
is basically unpopulated.
And so really despite Saskatchewan
having massive land borders,
there's only really one corridor
through which the rats can come in.
Aria Schrecker: So I guess
rats need to go from human
civilization to human civilization.
So if you have too much space,
there's nothing for it to eat.
Pieter Garicano: Exactly.
And so there's only really a narrow
strip, an entry way, into Alberta
through which rats can come in.
And so when in 1950 the first rats
were spotted on this border between
Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Albertan
government declared a state of emergency.
They decided they were gonna try and
stop the rats, and the way they did it
was by creating a dedicated border zone,
they called it the rat control zone,
where it was basically martial law.
They would inspect cars.
They would, they would pull over vehicles
coming in and check them for rats.
They would preemptively spray
rat poison, arsenic, across all
possible rat habitation sites,
within the rat control zone.
So tens of thousands of farms, sheds,
attics, basements were covered in arsenic.
This caused a lot of collateral damage.
livestock were killed, pets were killed.
But very rapidly the initial rat
infestations that occurred in
1950, by 1960, had dropped to zero.
Aria Schrecker: I guess the sad thing
about this, it implies that it's actually
basically impossible to get rid of rats
in places like New York and London.
Once they're in, it's gonna be
very difficult to kill them.
Sam Bowman: Well, I'm not sure about
that because there is another older
Works in Progress article about gene
drives, and gene drives are basically
a way of using CRISPR to insert a
gene into a population that makes some
of them, so say the females or the
males, infertile, but not the others.
So it spreads through all of the… So
all the males, let's say, remain fertile.
All of their female descendants die
off, but all the males continue to
be able to impregnate the females.
And so eventually everything
has this gene in it.
And in theory, at least they die out.
It's never been done,
so it's just a theory.
I am very, very fond of this idea for the
same reason that I'm fond of this story
because I think that what I call conscious
extinction is a very, very underrated
idea and very, very underrated concept.
Basically, everybody thinks that you
should make certain viruses extinct.
It'll be really good if we could
make COVID extinct, for example.
It's really good that we've
made smallpox extinct.
In fact, the man who's the mascot of Works
in Progress online, Victor Jaranov, is
one of the instrumental microbiologists
in the eradication of smallpox.
I think that we should make slightly
bigger things extinct as well.
I think that we should make the mosquitoes
that carry malaria, which is by the way,
only a small subsection of mosquitoes.
So if you like mosquitoes,
you can still have mosquitoes.
You just can't have the
ones that spread malaria.
I think we should also think about making
rats extinct at least in certain areas.
The way Alberta's done it, as you say,
Aria, it's really hard to go back to
kind of the pre-rat period and keep them
out, which is really what Alberta did.
It's not really a thing that
the rest of us can learn from.
But you could use things like gene drives.
And the tricky thing with a gene
drive is that you might be upsetting
the rest of the world if you kind of
unilaterally decide to wipe something out.
'Cause if you insert this gene and kills
everything and then maybe it turns out,
oh, we could have cured cancer with
rats or something like that, then that's
bad and people are angry at you So it
is hypothesized that you could come
up with a gene drive that requires a
certain critical mass in a certain area.
So you'd have to keep topping it up.
It wouldn't be as quite as kind of
unleashed as the thing I've just
described, but it would allow you to
have a kind of regional gene drive that
sort of had to be continually topped
up but wouldn't be able to spread
beyond a certain place, because they
wouldn't be topping it up in that way.
And I think you could actually then
use gene drives to wipe out… Malarial
mosquitoes are obviously the really
big one, but I think urban rats would
be a really, really nice one to wipe
out as well, 'cause they are horrible.
I mean, they're really… They're…
I mean, it's worth thinking about
what animals people have phobias of.
Aria Schrecker: Mm-hmm.
Sam Bowman: And it's always
the really bad ones, right?
It's always the ones that-
Aria Schrecker: Snakes.
Sam Bowman: Snakes, which kill
potentially over 100,000 people a year.
Which we've done another Works in Progress
article on, about advancing antivenom.
Spiders.
Aria Schrecker: Spiders.
I also re-
Pieter Garicano: What's
wrong with spiders?
Aria Schrecker: Oh, God.
Sam Bowman: They're deadly.
Aria Schrecker: They're spooky.
Sam Bowman: They're…
Pieter Garicano: Most of
them are basically harmless.
Sam Bowman: So most spiders, yeah, house
spiders, I agree, are actually good.
They're on your s-
Pieter Garicano: But
you'll still scared of them
…
Sam Bowman: They're on your side.
Aria Schrecker: They get
rid of the worst insects.
Sam Bowman: We teach our children
that spiders are their friends.
Pieter Garicano: Indeed.
Sam Bowman: But that could backfire
because poisonous spiders do exist.
Or venomous spiders, not
poisonous ones, sorry, do exist.
And, but historically, clearly there
has been a… Well, clearly people
have developed a phobia of spiders
because they are venomous and they
can hurt you or kill you, right?
Aria Schrecker: I guess we, you
know… at least Sam and I live in
Britain, where we don't really have
any dangerous wildlife, so it's quite
easy to be like, 'Well, spiders are
fine and snakes are fine,' or whatever.
Sam Bowman: But the rats are,
but rats are the other thing that
people have a deep, deep phobia of.
Heights are another thing, right?
Heights are clearly dangerous.
Like phobias are clearly
an evolutionary thing.
And for the most part, there's
a… If you have a phobia of an
animal, that it's a sign that it's
a thing that is not good for you.
Aria Schrecker: Scorpions, cockroaches.
Pieter Garicano: This, this
topping up process you describe-
Sam Bowman: I have a, I
have a cockroach phobia.
I find them absolutely revol-
Aria Schrecker: Horrible.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
It's dirt that bothers me.
I don't mind snakes at all.
I have in fact done, like- very foolish
things when I was a kid and trying
to show off to girls, like picking
up wild, a wild snake and like-
Aria Schrecker: Ooh, yeah, yeah.
- Sam Bowman: It was so dumb.
I look back and I'm like, 'Wow.
How did you not die, you idiot?'I don't
think it even impressed the girls.
I think it was obvious I
was trying to show off.
Aria Schrecker: It doesn't
sound to me like the kind of
thing that would impress a girl.
Sam Bowman: It's just something you
do when you're 10 years old you know.
But, but dirt and spiders
I actually really like.
Spiders I actually think are
really cool and interesting.
If you go to the zoo, I always go to
the spiders and take a look at them.
But rats and anything that kind of brings
disease I find really, really repugnant.
Pieter Garicano: And of course,
you only have to speak to an
Albertan to know how good it can be.
The Albertan government is- not just
did a one-off rat extermination,
but is continuing rat policing.
And they basic- rats are illegal of course
in Alberta, and they will trawl people's
Facebooks to see images of pet rats.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, I guess a small
number of messed up people have pet rats.
Pieter Garicano: Indeed And they-
and they'll find them and try to
identify them and then go to house
and take the rat away and destroy it.
Yeah.
There's also a rat reporting line
in Alberta, and so regularly,
Deena Mousa, the author
of the piece, spoke to the chief rat
extermination office in Alberta, and she
told of a story of an ex-boyfriend who
reported his ex-girlfriend's secret rat.
And so fortunately they had to…
They didn't exterminate.
They actually deported
it to British Columbia.
They re-homed it elsewhere.
But the key point with the reporting
line is that Albertans are so unfamiliar
with rats that they call roughly
800 times a year, but usually call
for gophers, guinea pigs, squirrels.
They don't know what a rat looks like.
Only, only 30 out of 800 of those
calls are actually real rats because
Albertans have never seen a rat before.
Aria Schrecker: Let's take it
back to other ways of dealing
with animal-borne diseases.
We don't have to exterminate them.
We don't have to eliminate
them from our regions.
We can also cure animals.
So another piece in this issue is called
Herd Immunity, and that is about projects
that we have to vaccinate wild animals.
One of the first diseases that
we've started to try to vaccinate
wild animals for is rabies.
It was quite easy in the rich world
to get rabies out of pet animals.
You can vaccinate pet dogs.
You can notice when a pet dog
has rabies, and you can kill it.
There aren't that many stray dogs around.
But rabies has started to spread to
wild animals, especially in the States.
Raccoons have it.
Foxes have it.
Coyotes have it, and that's
a much bigger problem.
Sam Bowman: It's also pretty interesting
from an animal welfare point of view.
Crazy effective altruists who I think
are really great take the idea of wild
animal suffering really seriously.
And I think they're completely right to.
This sounds completely mad to most people.
Like, they think the idea that you
should care about the suffering of
nature is, is crazy because it's nature.
But if you think suffering is bad, then
it doesn't matter if it's suffering
caused by humans or if it's suffering
caused by the fact that nature sucks.
It's suffering.
And if there are low-cost things we can
do to make their lives slightly less
bad, then that's a good thing to do.
That's good.
That's good.
And what is to me very compelling, apart
from protecting people and livestock and
our animals from being bitten and getting
rabies and things like that, is the idea
that there might be simple interventions
we can do to make wild animal lives
just a little bit less miserable.
It really, really, really is horrible.
You're almost certainly gonna die
either of starvation or of being eaten
or of having a terrible, terrible
disease, from just getting a scratch,
like an infection or something
like that, if you're a wild animal.
And where there are really, really
bad diseases, if it's possible to
vaccinate against them, we should.
You know, it's often said that
smallpox is the only disease that
human beings have eliminated.
It's actually not true.
The other one is rinderpest, which
is a disease that affects livestock.
And that was prioritized because
livestock are obviously very valuable.
We wiped it out.
That's a very good thing.
There also has been as we have talked
about on a previous podcast, a lot
of work by the US government to keep
screwworms away from US livestock.
And screwworms are basically flies
that insert their eggs into animals.
The eggs hatch, the worms come out,
and they kind of eat their way out,
and it's excruciatingly painful for
the animals, and it can kill them.
And the US government, over many
decades, basically dropped huge
numbers of infertile screwworm
flies over the US Southwest.
They would mate with the others.
They would be able to-
Aria Schrecker: So actually very
similar to the gene drive idea.
Sam Bowman: Yeah … very
similar to the gene drive.
Exactly.
They would, they would
impregnate them, but not…
They wouldn't naturally impregnate them.
They can only mate once, so basically
they just kind of knocked them out,
and it managed to push screwworms,
make them extinct in all of the
Southwest of the United States.
They pushed them down through Mexico.
They got them all the way down to Panama.
So basically all of North
America was free of this.
And unfortunately, this, that stopped,
and now it's making its way back up.
But the point is, obviously we're
doing this to protect livestock.
It's obviously not just mad altruism.
But there's a really happy side
benefit of both the livestock and
other animals that would have had
this awful infection or this awful
parasite burrow into them and then
burrow its way out, just doesn't happen.
And so massive, massive
benefits come from it.
So-
Pieter Garicano: My favorite version
of doing this is, the treatments
for koalas with chlamydia, because
chlamydia's really terrible for koalas.
Almost all of them have it.
Sam Bowman: Mm-hmm.
Pieter Garicano: It makes them go blind.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: It makes them go
infertile, and eventually they die.
In fact, chlamydia is the
leading cause of koala death.
Sam Bowman: I did actually know that.
Pieter Garicano: And they,
they all, they all have it.
The problem is, the typical way
to vaccinate a wild animal is to
put the vaccine in their food.
It was pioneered by the Swiss in the '70s.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: They had these rabid
foxes all coming down from Germany,
thousands of them, thousands of them.
And what the Swiss did is they filled
dead hen heads with a vaccine and
threw them out of helicopters over
the Swiss mountain valleys and fields.
And they stopped all the rabid foxes
…
Aria Schrecker: they tried
other food types first.
They tried eggs, but apparently
the foxes just take the eggs and
squirrel them away to eat later.
So they, they don't as reliably-
Pieter Garicano: Exactly.
Sam Bowman: When I was young, I had to do
a… I think there was a class assignment
when I was seven years old, let's say.
And I think it was about koalas,
and I remember distinctly drawing a
picture of a koala and pointing to
it and writing what I thought was the
word for chlamydia, pointing at it.
And my piece was about how koalas, they
look cute, but they're actually very
deadly, and I thought this was very funny.
And I got in trouble for it.
My teacher, my teacher thought I was,
I was breaking a rule of some kind.
And I-
Pieter Garicano: I think that's
a terrible, terrible thing.
But the key problem is you can't vaccinate
koalas by putting it in their food.
Because koalas only eat eucalyptus leaves.
And there's no way to put a
vaccine in eucalyptus leaves.
We tried this many, many times.
In fact, their preference for eucalyptus
leaves also means they can't be treated-
Sam Bowman: Mm-hmm
…
Pieter Garicano: Because they have
very sensitive digestive systems,
and so they can't take antibiotics.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, I guess they're
like pandas as well, where they just eat,
they eat one kind of thing, and that thing
is really, really difficult to digest.
And I think eucalyptus leaves also
has a bad side product for the koalas.
I think it's part of the reason
they're so soporific or something.
Pieter Garicano: Correct.
But this has a happy ending because we've
come up with a new way to vaccinate them,
which is basically we just surround the
trees with koala colonies with traps, and
the Australian government's now doing this
at a large scale in Eastern Australia.
We surround them with traps.
They come down from the trees,
'cause eventually they come down.
And we capture them and we vaccinate them.
And currently right now the
Australian government on a very
large scale is manually vaccinating
koalas against chlamydia.
Aria Schrecker: As in grabbing, injecting?
Pieter Garicano: Grabbing, injecting.
That's the way to do it.
Aria Schrecker: Upside of curing koala
chlamydia is, I assume,they become
more fertile, 'cause chlamydia, at
least in humans, makes you infertile.
Pieter Garicano: In koalas as well.
Aria Schrecker: In koalas as well.
Makes sense.
Well, another way of becoming more
fertile is perhaps to become part
of a conservative Jewish community.
Let's talk about Sonja
Trauss's piece Chabad Life.
Pieter Garicano: And what makes the
Orthodox Jews in Chabad Life so notable?
Aria Schrecker: So I think
there are several highly fertile
subcultures that live in the West.
I think the Ultra-Orthodox Jews in,
at least America are slightly unusual
in that they live very densely.
They live in cities side
by side with secular people
with much lower birth rates.
They're often actually working in
the regular labor market, and they
still maintain a reasonably high birth
rate despite all of these things.
They're not like the Amish, who
largely cut themselves off totally.
They're not like the Finnish Listidians.
I don't know how to pronounce that word.
They're not like a very similar group to
the Amish in Finland, who are also very
religious and also largely quite cut
off from the rest of Finnish society.
And I think there are some ways that
we can learn from Orthodox Jews in
the US about how we can increase
birth rates for urban, secular
working people in the western world.
Pieter Garicano: So
what, what is the trick?
What do they do?
Aria Schrecker: They
do a handful of things.
Some of them we might want to port over,
some of which we might not want to.
So I guess simple thing, every
very high fertility group does it.
They get married quite young.
They have… They start having
children when they're 20, 21, and they
continue to have them until they stop
being fertile in their 30s and 40s.
that is probably something
that we won't imitate exactly.
They have a lot of rituals that
surround male and female relationships
that I think both mean that getting
married young and getting sort of…
Sonja shies away from calling them
arranged marriages, but they are
essentially arranged marriages
because teenage boys and girls
are kept apart from each other.
They have a courtship that is
largely quite a pre-filtered group
that their parents or the rest of
their community select for them.
So they have their- so they're largely,
male and female relationships are not
very common or at least especially
not unilateral dating style ones.
So that's one, one feature.
So the relationship that a husband and
wife have with each other is, like-
They're not going to have that kind
of like romantic, flirtatious energy
with anyone else because they're
not s- like they're largely kept
apart in shul and synagogue as well.
That's one thing.
Another thing is there are lots of
rituals that surround when you can
and can't have sex, which largely
funnel couples towards having sex
during their more fertile periods.
So one thing is that you are largely
encouraged to have sex on the Sabbath.
That's… I think people like kind of…
I think they're used to like a more
Christian understanding of the Sabbath,
where there's lots of prohibitions
and there's lots of worshiping God.
But I think baked into Orthodox Jewish
culture, it's obviously slightly
different because there are different
subsets of Orthodox Jewish people.
But Orthodox Jewish culture
kind of encourages you to
also have fun on the Sabbath.
They often, music is encouraged.
Like dancing is encouraged at
lots of Jewish celebrations.
And also sex is encouraged on the Sabbath,
which I think is one interesting aspect.
Another interesting aspect is husbands
and wives are not allowed to touch each
other when she is on her period and then
for a certain number of days afterwards,
not until there is the ritual mikveh bath.
And then after that, about 12 days after
the period, during her most fertile
period, she'll come home and she hasn't
touched her husband in 12 days and there
is some implication and also in some
cases encouragement to have sex then.
So there are several different aspects
of their lives that are quite structured
towards making them more likely to have
sex when they are fertile, basically.
Sam Bowman: So- It's very,
it's a very interesting piece.
I think that basically most of the
things that it talks about are not things
that most normal people would want to-
Aria Schrecker: We
wouldn't do any of them.
Sam Bowman: -To do or to adopt.
So it's not really a good guide to
increasing birth rates for normal people.
But it is fascinating to both hear about
what, if anything, is the kind of adaptive
reason to have some of these rituals.
I had no idea about the, I guess,
the kind of pro-fertility spin on
some of these kinds of taboos around
menstruation and stuff like that.
And it is really interesting.
You're right to kind of look at a group
that in loads of ways is much more similar
to sort of mainstream culture in terms
of where they live and in terms of where
they work and things like that, than any
of the other groups that we have that
have really, really high fertility rates.
But it is a bit depressing if
you're kind of hoping to find the
secret from these kinds of Jews
or the Amish or anybody else.
It's … If this is the secret, then
it's kind of like the conclusion
is, well, it's not possible.
Pieter Garicano: Well, the one thing
Sonja says that universalizes is that
they have an extremely strong, pro-child
culture, very welcoming culture.
So children are encouraged to
attend a synagogue, encouraged
to make noise, encouraged to
be at the front of every event.
There's a very strong culture
of childcare usually done as by
communities who pay into a pot.
And so her view is that most of
the features that Aria described
can't be ported, but the fact that
there is a very strong emphasis on
children being part of public life
is the one element she would copy.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, I guess the aspects
that you can port over is the idea that
any space that an adult is in, usually
it is acceptable for a child to be there.
Like, obviously it… There are lots of
workplaces where that wouldn't be normal,
but I think they're disproportionately
likely to work in the kind of environments
where you can bring children around.
But also they like Pieter says, they
use childcare like paid childcare, more
than I think the average American does.
Another, I think, interesting feature
that we could use is men are much more
likely to be involved in childcare and
it doesn't… and it seems like they're
also much more likely to be involved with
children that they are not the fathers of.
It's much more normal for a man
who is unrelated to a child to do
a little bit of care for them, but
to also do some reprimanding and
there's more of a sense that the
whole community is raising a child.
And we have much more of a sense that
especially strange men should not really
be talking to or engaging with children.
But it just means that the load
of child-rearing is much more
disproportionately on women and
then much more forces those women
to not be in normal public spaces.
I think I think what Sonja would
say is it would be more normal in a
largely conservative Jewish area for
if a child is running around a cafe,
A, for that to be acceptable, the
child to be running around the cafe.
But, B, if they start to be naughty
for a strange adult to say, 'No,
you shouldn't do that.' And that
is a kind of whole society doing
parenting that we don't really do
in the sort of modern West, which I
think would have pro-fertility ends.
Sam Bowman: Let's do a, let's do
a hardcore gear change and move
from these studies of sociology
to hard economic history.
We have a piece which is about the
Glorious Revolution, which is an event
that happened in 1688 in England, where
the Dutch successfully invaded and
conquered England, basically,at the
invitation of some treasonous Whigs.
And it is arguable that this
is the thing that set in motion
the Industrial Revolution.
There is a decent case that William of
Orange coming over and becoming King
William ultimately led to the changes in
the political structures of the political
economy of England, that made it possible
for these deep long-term investments
and things like that to happen.
And our colleague Ben Southwood and Kara
Dimitruk, who's a economic historian, have
written an article about what actually
happened, because I think the sort of
standard story of the Glorious Revolution
is that it strengthened parliament, it
weakened the Crown, this made it possible
for people to invest, property rights were
strengthened and protected, and so on.
And this sort of made it,
made this kind of long-term
accumulation of capital possible.
That's sort of true.
But what's interesting is diving into
what actually Parliament did when
it had these new kinds of powers.
And actually it wasn't strictly
that Parliament was more
powerful, although it was.
It was that Parliament
was meeting regularly, so
Parliament had more bandwidth.
It was actually much more of a
bandwidth change than a power change.
And what Ben and Kara argue is that
this increased bandwidth and the kind
of willingness to do more things and
to kind of be a bit more activist led
to really big reforms in three areas.
So one is land, one is capital
and and kind of ownership,
and one is infrastructure.
And what they argue is that Parliament
enabled three things, all of which
required parliamentary kind of consent
or parliamentary approval to go ahead.
So the first is, as everybody knows,
in the medieval era, land was split in
an incredibly inefficient way across
peasants who had different strips
in all sorts of different fields,
all spread around where they lived.
This was because different fields
had different amounts of output.
They each wanted to, each peasant who
was working for the local lord wanted
to, or the lord wanted the peasants
to be able to sustain themselves and
pay tax and so they were each given
a strip of each of these fields.
And so this kind of farming meant
that every peasant gave a kind of
roughly equivalent amounts of output.
Nobody starved because their
field was unproductive that year.
But it also meant that you had
incredibly fragmented land ownership.
And what this meant was that as new
technologies were brought forward, things
like better crop rotation, things like
better horse-drawn plows and so on,
the economies of scale that you would
get from those things weren't possible.
You needed to consolidate
the land holdings.
To take a really straightforward example,
the horse-drawn plow is just much, much,
much easier, and you get much, much
more use out of a horse-drawn plow if
you can use that plow for the entire…
for the same entire field rather than
having to move it from strip to strip.
So one of the big things that the
post-1688 Parliament did was pass
a large number of acts allowing
landowners to consolidate their land.
So it wasn't, in some cases,
kind of imposing this.
It was landowners who sort of wanted to
do this but needed parliamentary approval.
It was also enclosures, so putting
kind of walls, putting stone enclosures
around land that had been held in
common and so suffered from the
tragedy of the commons and allowed
for these kinds of economies of scale
to emerge in agricultural production.
So that was one.
That's the most basic one, kind
of consolidation of land holdings.
The second I think is really amazing, and
this is to do with settlements, which is
a word for the rules that said what you
could do with your land and who could
buy and who could inherit your land.
So throughout Europe, especially
in the second millennium AD, noble
families were completely terrified
of their holdings being split up.
This had been the norm.
It led to families just
whittling down to zero.
The families that gave everything to a
single son ended up becoming the ones that
survived and consolidated their holdings.
Aria Schrecker: The standing is this
is the problem with the Frankish
Empire, which is that I think
they didn't have primogeniture.
So you would have a king, he would
have three sons, and then you'd have
to divide up the empire all over again.
And then they couldn't…
It just wasn't as stable.
Sam Bowman: Also a problem in Ireland,
which didn't move to primogeniture.
And in fact the Capetian dynasty, which
was the kind of French royal dynasty that
succeeded the early, kind of Frankish
kings kind of ended up leading France
in the kind of late middle age period
into the sort of early modern period.
The thing that they had was,
number one, they always had a son.
So they were just very lucky and
they, they never had an unbroken
they never had a break in their line.
Aria Schrecker: That is lucky.
Sam Bowman: Number two,
they did primogeniture.
So they, they were pioneers of
primogeniture when others were not
necessarily doing primogeniture.
So while everybody else was
splitting up their land holdings,
the Capetians who started off with
almost nothing, and in many ways
were not a particularly impressive
family, they just slowly accumulated
and consolidated their holdings.
Aria Schrecker: Interesting that the
French did that because I think it was
the French post the French Revolution,
they banned primogeniture and France
still has quite aggressive inheritance
law where you have to give money to your
children and they have to split it evenly.
But when they brought that in, the
French nobility or like remaining
aristocracy or aristocrat-like people
decreased their birth rates quite
substantially and also started doing
loads and loads of cousin marriage.
Sam Bowman: Well, pre-1688 England,
as with most of Europe, had something
like giga primogeniture; because not
only did you leave everything to your
son, there were also really strict
rules saying that you couldn't sell
land because that would stop your
heirs from being able to have it.
There were really strict rules that said
that you would have to get permission
from your heirs to do anything with your
land, to sell it or to borrow against
it, or to even invest in it and to
kind of irrigate a field that you had.
Aria Schrecker: Which was also an adaptive
system because the families that didn't
have that had lower birth rates as well.
Sam Bowman: And up until securitization
of land became really important and up
until it became the case that investing
in your land and kind of overhauling the
land was possible and really valuable.
And once that became possible and
valuable, all these rules on what you
could do with your land became incredibly-
all these rules became incredible
barriers to change and improvement.
And so what Parliament did after 1688
was endless numbers of acts that would
allow people to bypass these rules.
They would constantly be passing
these rules saying, 'You know what?
You don't actually have to consult
your heir who's somewhere off in
Russia or the Austrian Empire, or who's
underaged, or who's missing, who's
been missing for 15 years in one case.
So what that did was make it possible
for the first time for all this land
to be traded, invested in, improved
in a way that just had not been
possible except with great difficulty.
And this was a bandwidth thing.
This was really just Parliament
sort of allowing, passing acts
that allowed people to do this.
And the final one, and I love this because
this has very, very significant relevance
to antitrust, which is a sort of other
thing that I'm really interested in.
And the final one is infrastructure.
It used to be incredibly painful
to move things around the country.
Average road speed in England and much
of Europe was about two miles an hour.
It was basically worse than walking.
And what this meant was that obviously
all the English economy was a kind
of micro economy, so it wasn't
really a joined up economy at all.
This is why shipping really became
such an important thing, and it
was much easier to transport things
by sea than it was over land or by
canal or river or anything like that.
But by passing Turnpike Acts, they
allowed landowners to invest in roads,
but not to charge for the use of the road.
They would invest in the road
because that would increase the
value of the surrounding land.
And this meant there were huge
improvements in the value of the roads and
huge improvements in the speed of transit.
And this meant that you could have
this sort of division of labor and
this specialization across the country.
So you would, you would end up eventually
with Sheffield producing steel, you
would end up with, Lancashire producing
cheese, you would end up with all of the
different places that we now associate
with particular industries that had no
prior kind of specialism in that industry
because they just couldn't trade it.
And you suddenly had this huge
internal market in England that still
didn't exist in the rest of Europe.
So the article argues that it was this
legislative change that allowed the kind
of reorganization of property and has
suddenly made property kind of something
that was liquid, something that you could
invest in and you could transact with, and
this was the thing that kind of laid the
scaffolding for the Industrial Revolution.
I think it's very compelling.
Pieter Garicano: Now, I am
personally something of a
Glorious Revolution truther.
I think the Brits have gone through
like a COVID style great forgetting
with what actually happened in 1688.
Because for three years it was actually
a Dutch military occupation of London.
And the british Army units were
-English at the time, English
Army units were forbidden from
coming within 20 miles of London.
And Whitehall was manned by Dutch
soldiers, Kensington by Germans, were
mercenaries of course, the Tower of
London by Luxembourgish mercenaries.
And it was very controversial at the time.
In fact, the first time the Brits
actually started using the word Glorious
Revolution was in the 1720s, when they
kind of retconned it and decided the fact
that William of Orange was invited by
them and was in fact it was an organic
thing rather than a foreign imposition.
But regardless of what happened
those first three years-
Sam Bowman: He was, he was invited.
Pieter Garicano: To be clear … he was
invited by eight Whig-ish aristocrats.
Sam Bowman: He was invited
by, yeah, protestant whigs.
Pieter Garicano: Yeah.
But it seems to be the case that at
least in the 1690s there was like large
scale dissatisfaction with the Britain-
Sam Bowman: Well they
were, they were traitors.
It might be that the treason
was, was good, but they were-
Pieter Garicano: But they,
they did commit treason
…
Sam Bowman: ..They, they, they
thought that the king was-
Aria Schrecker: I'm so instinctively
on the side of Protestants,
sort of whenever it comes up.
But I'm like, 'How dare
you call them traitors?'
Pieter Garicano: Re-
regardless, regardless of-
Sam Bowman: King James II
was the legitimate king.
You may disagree with what he did, that's
fine, but, and you may think that treason
is sometimes acceptable, that's fine.
But it's not … I mean, it seems
undeniable to me that if you conspire
with a foreign power and invite the
ruler of a foreign power to come over
with a military, then just because your
own military then surrenders to him,
which is what happened, and your king
then flees, which is what happened.
I'm, I'm not saying James II was
great, he was not a great king,
but it's still treason, you know?
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
I guess you're right.
I know nothing about James II.
All I know is that the
Protestants were on one side and
the Catholics were on another.
Pieter Garicano: Importantly, William
of Orange from the goodness of his
heart, in fact immediately handed over
power within a few years to parliament.
It's actually worth thinking, the
goodness of his Dutch heart of course.
It's actually worth thinking
about why Parliament was able to
be active in a way the absolutist
monarchies in Europe were not.
Because in fact, re- making, rearranging
estates and reforming land was a
thing that would made land across
all of Europe much more productive.
It would have made land in France
more productive, made land in
Spain, Spain more productive.
And in fact,the absolutist monarchs
of Europe did try to do this.
We have, in Austria in the 1760s
did a very big land reform,
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in France
tried this in the 1780s but they failed.
Much of Europe was entailed or was, was
locked in these, these giga primogenitures
until the middle of the 19th century.
Germany only managed to abolish
the giga primogeniture with the
Weimar Constitution in the 1920s.
And so it's really interesting
that Britain specifically,
through this empowering of
Parliament,managed to pull it off.
Now, I think that, Kara and Ben
implicitly, I don't think explicitly,
suggest two, two channels for this.
One is that people, Parliament,
because it was made up of landowners,
was trusted by landowners.
In large part, when, when it was a
king doing it, the landowners believed
that they were getting expropriated.
They didn't trust the king
to act in their interest.
Aria Schrecker: I guess historically
they were getting expropriated.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: And a
lot, often they were.
And so it being their own people
doing it led to greater, trust in
their ability to see it through.
And the second thing is, if you look
at all the three things Sam described
they always compensated losers.
They were extremely generous,
both with the land reforms, with
land reorganization, but also when
they broke up the settlements, the
entails, the giga primogenitures.
They always compensated
losers very, very generously.
Aria Schrecker: I guess similarly
it's because it was them.
Pieter Garicano: It was
because it was them.
Aria Schrecker: They were
compensating themselves for-
Pieter Garicano: Because it was them.
Aria Schrecker: -Taking their own.
Sam Bowman: This has, this has,
I think, incredibly important
relevance for contemporary debates.
and there is a through line in lots of
Works in Progress articles that talks
about the importance of legitimacy, so
the importance of the people who are
being, having their property rights
changed kind of going along with that,
and also the importance of compensation
for the loss of de facto rights.
And this is a thing that can be very
controversial because lots of people
will say, 'Well, they don't deserve
those rights they never, they didn't
earn them,' or, 'There was no kind
of legal basis for those rights.'
But they de facto may have had them.
And if you are … And in this
case, they sometimes de facto,
sometimes de jure had these rights.
And the takeaway from this
is that- Compensation gets
you to a much better outcome.
It avoids… It isn't necessarily
that it's the right thing to
do from a moral perspective.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
It's that getting to the outcome
that eventually England got to, that
Britain got to, and that ultimately
the world got to, required doing it
in a way that actually could work and
that didn't have this massive backlash.
And that unlike when kings and
absolute monarchs tried to do this,
didn't meet the kind of resistance
that stopped it in the cradle.
Aria Schrecker: I have a question.
How did Parliament know what
good policy was at this time?
It seems like they could have very easily
just had these ideas about like how to
restructure land that was essentially
just expropriating the peasants or
expropriating the king or finding a
group to just like seek rents from.
And yet they've done something
that was net positive.
Pieter Garicano: The vast majorities
of these were estate acts, which
were usually in response to
petitions from landowners themselves.
So, before 1688, estate acts happened,
but were very infrequent and were only
in response to petitions from like the
large landowners, so disproportionately
Dukes, who would have estate acts passed.
An estate act was an act of
Parliament, all of Parliament
voting it, which would govern the
property rights of a single estate.
And you f- and you as a landowner, would
just come into Parliament and say, 'I
would like, for example, my heir to
be disinherited,' or, 'I would like
to be able to chop down this forest.'
Sam Bowman: It wasn't I think, that
Parliament sat down and thought like,
'Wouldn't it be really good if this is
the way England looked?' It was more,
like I say, that it had the bandwidth
to meet the demand from landowners to
do this that it previously hadn't had.
You know, there were
estate acts, there were…
There was the ability to petition,
to consolidate land to kind of remove
the settlements and the entails
that were on your land and stopping
you from doing things with it.
It was that Parliament didn't meet
enough to actually deal with all that.
And it, it was the fact that it just
was able to do more, and the process
to do this just became much, much, much
quicker, and there was just much more
turnover in these kinds of resolutions.
Pieter Garicano: And it was also more
responsive to smaller landowners.
That's the other big change you see.
Part-
Aria Schrecker: Yeah,
I guess your bandwidth
…
Pieter Garicano: Partly because of
the quantity of estate acts, but
also partially because of the smaller
landowners were disproportionately
more powerful in a system where
the monarch was very weak.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: Right.
And so you see both the frequency
increases tenfold, but also the average
size being redesigned drops massively.
Sam Bowman: So the themes that we've
just talked about, of legitimacy and of
compensation is… which, which might
not even be the right word, are also
in what I think probably my favorite
piece of the issue, which is about
Senac which is a development being done
by the Squamish Nation in Vancouver.
I was in Vancouver last year.
I saw it.
I went there.
The Squamish people lived in the
greater Vancouver area for centuries
before the arrival of Europeans.
They were then put into a reservation.
Europeans basically kind of settled,
displaced them eventually kind of put them
onto a reservation across the one of the
inlets from what's now downtown Vancouver.
And about 100 years ago, they
were just fully expropriated.
They, they had a legal right to be
there under Canadian law, but Canadian
law allowed the expropriation of these
people, and they were then,evicted.
And so the article in Works in
Progress tells the story both of
how the Squamish Nation got its land
back and then what they did with it.
And the story of what, how they got their
land back is very, very interesting,
and one that I had no idea about.
I've read other articles about this
development, but I had no understanding
of kind of how they got this land
it's really, really fascinating.
There was a really long, decades-long
process done by members of the Squamish
Nation to basically say 'Hey, we were
just… we had our land stolen, and
we had our land stolen in two ways.
J- in the kind of standard way that
native peoples had their land stolen
by Europeans in North America,'
that is a story that we're all very
familiar with, that's very sad.
'and in, and in another way where
there was actually supposed to
be a legal protection for us.
So we were, we were given this
reservation, and then you took that away
as well.' So in the early 2000s, after
a long process of establishing that they
had been wrongfully evicted from their
land, the Canadian government settled
with them, gave them a small parcel of
land, still a fraction of what they had
previously owned, and money, and they
had the right to develop it And then what
happened was really interesting because
as some people know, they are now building
around 8,000 rental units on the land.
They will become individually very rich.
Each of them will make around
2 million Canadian dollars.
And if you go there, you will see
they're building 10 or 11 towers.
I have to admit they're not
particularly attractive towers.
They're, they're built not to my taste.
Aria Schrecker: They're density maxing.
Pieter Garicano: I quite like them.
They, they, they look all things
considered pretty passable
…
Sam Bowman: they're building a
year's worth of housing supply for
Vancouver in this very small area.
So I think fair enough it's, it's…
And also Vancouver is not you know,
Vancouver is mostly striking because of
the number of towers downtown that it has.
It's not, it's not that it's
amazingly architecturally beautiful.
But it is, it's very striking and I think,
I think very beautiful, but more because
of the kind of collection of towers
than because of any individual tower.
But as I say, every single member
of the Squamish Nation is gonna
become very wealthy from this.
But what's interesting, and I think the
kind of final point that I wanna make
here is that I had understood this before
this article was researched and written
as a kind of loophole was found in the
system where these First Nations peoples
had special rights over their land.
The city and the state couldn't stop
them from building, so they just built.
Great.
Cool.
Aria Schrecker: I guess kind of
like the story of Vegas where,
like the reason you have all that
gambling is because the regular state
regulations don't apply to them.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Yeah.
And, It turns out that actually
the city could have stopped them
at any point because they still
need connection to the municipal
utilities that the city can provide.
So had the city of Vancouver
wanted to prevent this, it
could easily have done it.
It could have just not, not complied.
And in fact, the provincial government
l- made a huge loan to them to allow
this development to happen because
for various reasons around the…
They can't give the land up, so they
can't secure loans against the land.
It's kind of interesting, the
kind of downside of not being able
to alienate your, your property.
you can't borrow against it
because you can't have it taken
away if you don't pay it back.
And yet they went, they
went along with it.
And one of the reasons, this piece
argues at least, that they went along
with it, is that the Squamish Nation had
voted enthusiastically in favor of this
development, and it had legitimately
backed the plans for this development.
And so once you have the kind of
clear and enthusiastic support by the
people who don't actually live here
but own it and have rights over it to
this development, there's much less
opposition to doing it than if it was
just kind of decided by the kind of
random property developer or the, by,
by the landowner or something like that.
Now, clearly the politics of
First Nations peoples in Canada
complicates this somewhat.
It's not obvious that this is something
that we can extend to everywhere else.
Pieter Garicano: Is it true that
the neighbors are angry about it?
I always read this on Twitter, that
the people who live nearby were kind
of bamboozled and thought that the
Indians wouldn't have big towers,
and they put them down anyways.
Is this true or, or-
Sam Bowman: I don't know.
But it wouldn't surprise me because
they're pretty big and they're pretty
ugly and it's a pretty suburban place.
But then, then again, Vancouver's
urbanism… You know, Vancouver
did transit-oriented development.
Like, Vancouver has a very dense core,
then a very, very, very low density
sprawl outside the core, but it has these
little islands of towers around transit.
And it's… I mean, it doesn't work that
well because Vancouver has very high
costs, but I think it probably works
better than lots of other attempts to
do kind of upzoning, things like that.
But I don't know if the
neighbors object or not.
That's-
Pieter Garicano: Anya doesn't
tell us this in the article.
Sam Bowman: I don't think so.
A shame.
Aria Schrecker: What was going on
on the land before they did this?
Was it just suburban?
Pieter Garicano: It was brownfield site.
Sam Bowman: It was empty.
Aria Schrecker: It was empty?
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
It was empty.
Aria Schrecker: Okay.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
It's, I- it's really
striking in Vancouver.
Your picture of Vancouver
is that it's like Manhattan.
Aria Schrecker: I don't
have a picture of Vancouver.
Sam Bowman: Oh, okay.
It's I mean, photographs of Van… I mean,
it's by the way, maybe the most beautiful
city in the world in terms of the setting.
It's absolutely incredible.
You get there, you look
out on the the bay.
There are seaplanes landing
and taking off on the bay.
There are mountains on the other side.
It's incredible.
And there are ships going around.
It's really, really amazing.
The classical photograph of Vancouver
is of a very kind of almost Hong
Kong or Manhattan-like downtown.
And some of it is like that, but the
rest of it, like I say, is sprawl.
And this is built adjacent to the
sprawl, sort of over the bay, over
one of the bays from the downtown.
But yeah, it's, I mean,
thousands of units.
It's essentially a year's worth
of housing supply in Vancouver.
it's very, very impressive.
And the kind of lesson, if you want
it's I think a very interesting and
valuable story in and of itself,
but the lesson being that If you
give the right incentives and if the
development decision seems like it has
a legitimate backing of enough people,
then this kind of thing can happen.
But like I say, the First Nations
dimension does complicate it somewhat,
and I don't think it's kind of
totally obvious that this is a model
for the rest of the world to follow.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah, the version of it I
can imagine in other places is you would
like to bring like a small town on the
outskirts of a city into the city and
densify it accordingly, and it's like
a sufficiently small community that you
can, you can compensate them all in the
same way and people consider that to be
like the legitimate government and parish.
Be like a parish government or a
local government that would sign up
for that for all of their people.
But I suspect our local governments
are too large for something like
that to work in most countries.
Sam Bowman: I don't know about most
countries, but definitely in Britain.
Yeah.
And I think most… maybe
not, maybe not most of the US.
There are definitely places in the
US, like San Francisco once you go
out of San Francisco itself, there
are all sorts of kind of cities
quote, unquote cities sort of.
They're administrative
units called cities.
They're not, I don't think, recognizable
as cities like Brisbane, that have
some tens of thousands of residents.
Which I think possibly could be
you could imagine one of those
places saying, 'Hey, you know what?
If we build like a new Vancouver here,
then we could all become very wealthy.'
I think getting people, getting that
mechanism to exist is really difficult.
Pieter Garicano: Of course, you don't
need the residents to say yes if
you just build the houses in the San
Francisco Bay, which is the theme of
perhaps my favorite article in this
issue, which is terraforming Earth.
Aria Schrecker: You can drive the
fish extinct with specially placed, um
…
Pieter Garicano: well, the fact of
the matter is America used to do
tremendous amounts of land reclamation.
Roughly 10% of all urban land in America
was reclaimed between 1890 and today.
Many cities in America have doubled
in size with land reclamation.
Places like Boston,
places like Charleston.
Everything from San Francisco's
airport to the Lincoln Memorial, to
the Back Bay in Boston were reclaimed.
And reclamation is the quintessential
way of building houses in
America, and they stopped.
They don't do it at all anymore.
And this article by Maxwell Tabarrok
and by Zigmund Forrest asks the
question: Why'd they stop, and
how do we get them going again?
Sam Bowman: This is an amazingly
recurring thing that we have tried
to get articles written about.
This is, this is… I think in terms
of like our desire to run an article on
this and our ability to run an article
on this, this is the… where the
biggest kind of gap has ever been, and
I'm so happy that we've finally done it.
Aria Schrecker: You said this
to me the first week I started.
The first week we started you
were like, 'I really want a
piece on land reclamation.
Can you fix it?' And I'm like, 'No.
I don't know anything about it.'
Sam Bowman: Well, although now we
have a piece on land reclamation.
So.
Aria Schrecker: And I had
nothing to do with it at all.
Pieter Garicano: The great thing about
this piece is that it's the definitive
piece because it explains why all the
other reasons why people think it's
stopped why those reasons are wrong.
So the most common reason you'll hear for
why land reclamation stopped is because
we ran out of good places to do it.
That we reclaimed all the
easy land and then, and then-
Sam Bowman: Ideas are
getting harder to find-
Pieter Garicano: Exactly
…
Sam Bowman: But for, for land.
Pieter Garicano: Indeed.
And so the first, the first argument
Maxwell and Zygmunt give made me
think is that America's only been
reclaiming land for 200 years, and
China's been doing it for two millennia,
and they're still going, and they're
going much faster than America.
So plausibly, and many countries have
reclaimed much more and continue to
reclaim much more, than the US ever
has, without running out of land.
But the more concrete evidence they give
for why this isn't true is because we
know the soil conditions and depth of
these areas, and by modern standards,
they are vanishingly easy to reclaim.
So most of the San Francisco
Bay is less than 10 feet deep.
The parts around the neighborhoods
you were describing were near
the near the Stripe office,
for example, is six feet deep.
And frequently in Asia, they
will claim up to 50 feet deep.
Monaco recently claimed
up to 160 feet deep.
The soil conditions in much of America
are very good, and so places like the SF
Bay, the lagoons near Miami, Boston, the
New York Harbor, all of these by global
land reclamation standards are some of the
easiest places in the world to reclaim.
The other explanation you hear
very frequently is that it
became economically inviable.
This is like the smart man's
reason for why land reclamation
stopped being necessary.
Because when everyone is walking
everywhere, you really… There's
a limit to how far you can sprawl.
For most of New York's history, up until
the 1870s or 1880s, the… Where, where
Central Park is, that was all farmland.
Because if your office or if your place
of work is near the southern tip of
New York there's… You can't walk six
or seven miles every morning to work.
And so the way to add more central
land is by reclaiming port areas
rather than by sprawling outwards.
But the moment we unlocked better
transportation initially streetcars
and trains, then rapidly the
car, we unlocked vast amounts of
suburban land land reclamation
became economically inefficient.
So very quick example reclaiming land
roughly, in modern dollars in the
start of the 20th century costs roughly
$300,000 an acre, if we look at the
1913 New York subway expansion, which
added 330 stations, that added land,
sub- land that was within commuting
distance at roughly $100,000 an acre.
So it was far, far cheaper.
And this has been true until the 1850s,
but ever since then, we've seen an
extreme revival of urban land values.
This process obviously has a natural limit
as well, 'cause you can't commute further
than 40 miles at a time, or 30 miles.
And so now, once again-
Aria Schrecker: I guess also
building trains just seems to be
getting more expensive as well.
Pieter Garicano: Building trains is
possible.
People hate building highways.
We couldn't do another Robert
Moses and build into New Jersey
or up into Upstate New York.
There's now limits to
how far we can sprawl.
And now, once again, it seems to be the
case, or it is the case that actually
the land values of new land near, big
American cities, also near big, big,
big European cities, the values there
of the new land are far, far higher
than the value cost of reclaiming them.
In fact, in San Francisco the cost
per acre or the revenue per acre
would be on the order of $20 million.
And the cost for reclaiming it,
an estimate from California,
was roughly $300,000 an acre.
Sam Bowman: So why don't they do it?
Pieter Garicano: Because
of environmental laws.
Because, basically, they passed, of
course, as we all know, in the early
1970s, first NEPA, which requires you
to do a bunch of impact statements,
and then the Clean Water Act.
The Clean Water Act specifies any
time you dredge a piece of land,
you have to go through the NEPA
process, which takes decades.
So in America, in, near Norfolk, Virginia,
there's a naval base, a big waste heap.
It's 2,000 acres, and the waste heap
is where they, where they basically put
all the dirt from the shipping canal.
And they decided we should reuse this
waste heap for a container terminal.
Very legitimate use.
Building the first 2,000 acres
took them two years in the '50s.
In the '90s, they decided to
add an extra thousand acres.
They're, they're working very hard.
The project is on schedule.
It's scheduled to finish in 2065.
So the American policymakers
here are thinking in decades.
But so ba- basically, in America-
the environmental laws made
it impossible to reclaim land.
Now, the strongest piece of evidence
we have that it is in fact the
environmental laws that did this
is because land reclamation stopped
everywhere in the Western world at the
same time, where they passed these laws.
So Germany used to reclaim thousands
of to- tens of thousands of hectares
from North Sea, doesn't do it anymore.
And within three or four years of
passing their version of these laws.
France stopped doing it.
Even the Netherlands-
Aria Schrecker: I was gonna say,
you should tell us about the Dutch
example, the OG land reclaimers.
Pieter Garicano: Yeah … history's
great land reclaimers.
Yeah.
if you pull up a map from Netherlands, you
have this great big lake in the middle.
They, they carved out five polders,
and four of those got drained,within a
few years each in the 1950s and '60s.
The fifth one, right outside Amsterdam, is
Europe's most valuable residential land.
they w- they've already dammed it.
It's already dyked.
And in 1975, they passed
the Dutch version of NEPA.
They had to pause it for a few years, and
then the environmental campaigners started
saying there's some birds that live here.
Four years later, they passed the
European Birds Directive, and it was
basically paralyzed for 20 years.
And in 1992, the Dutch government gave
up, and they designated a nature reserve.
Now, they're still reclaiming
land there, but the land they're
reclaiming are fake sandbanks, so the
protected birds have a place to live.
but so- We're- … all of Europe
stopped reclaiming land at once
at the same time as America.
Sam Bowman: We're so audience
captured because Canada is our,
apart from Britain and America, our
biggest English-speaking market.
And the Netherlands is, I
think, our biggest continental
European speaking market.
We have two Canadian articles and
we have two Dutch articles in this.
If you want a piece about your
country in Works in Progress,
then encourage your neighbors to
subscribe and you will get this piece.
Pieter Garicano: Indeed.
And so what Maxwell and Zigmund say is
that,land reclamation, there are obviously
places where you might not want to do it,
but certainly in places like San Francisco
Bay- New York Harbor, and Miami, we could
easily get on the order of hundreds of
millions or billions of dollars of uplift
for a few million dollars reclamation.
Sam Bowman: Although I hate being
cheems about anything like this, I
do think that this is a really good
case where just modern sensibilities
are so far from where they would
need to be for this to be acceptable.
Like, I can… Even people who I think are
very, very pro doing things and building
things and stuff like that, lots of people
I can imagine finding it kind of sickening
to eat into the San Francisco Bay or maybe
not the New York Harbor because it's,
it's a harbor and there's much more of it.
But it does feel like one of those
kind of… It's become quasi-sacred,
the idea that you would eat into
this body of water that sustains you
and that you look out on all day.
Aria Schrecker: And also, you have some
losers to compensate in that surely
river and seafront property is incredibly
valuable and so you have to compensate
all the people who are gonna be like,
'We're just gonna take your view of the
ocean and put a bunch of flats there.'
Sam Bowman: Well, you could let them-
do the ones who own the development.
Aria Schrecker: You could let them be
the people who own the development.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Aria Schrecker: Yeah.
Maybe that is probably
the trick to get it done.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: I'm sure Maxwell and
Zigmund won't mind me saying this, but
in the original version of the article,
they wanted to include exciting land
reclamations to make people feel it
was a good idea, and the main one they
wanted to suggest was a big airport in
the New York Harbor outside Manhattan.
I think Maxwell… I'm not sure
the readers will think that planes
taking off within a few hundred
yards of the World Trade Center
will be the thing they really want.
Aria Schrecker: Ooh, I have a land
reclamation plus World Trade Center fact.
Pieter Garicano: Go on.
Aria Schrecker: Which is, so Singapore
has reclaimed Jurong Island it's
largely used for industrial stuff.
So there are lots of
chemical plants on it.
And my husband has a chemical
engineering company, and he was
allowed to visit Jurong Island.
But most people aren't because it's
full of highly sensitive stuff.
But until 9/11, people
could just walk into it.
And it was considered fine.
And then the Singaporean
government was like, 'Oh, no.
this is actually potentially a threat.'
So they actually only closed off
their reclaimed island post 9/11.
Sam Bowman: Well, I think we're coming
up to the end of the conversation,
but it's amazing how many pieces
we haven't managed to get to.
We have a piece on epidurals.
I really wanted to talk about that because
my wife gave birth this year with an
epidural, and it was incredibly easy
compared to, in her words, compared to
the previous birth that she had done.
We have a piece on the
discovery of tectonic plates,
geology's theory of everything.
What else have we got,
Aria, that I'm forgetting?
Aria Schrecker: We, we've got the
piece on how we discovered what DNA
is from bacteria, which I think I
was particularly surprised by this
because it kind of never occurs to
you what you, what you don't know.
And obviously it's actually totally
unintuitive that every single thing that
any living creature has happened to its
body is encoded in this four-letter code.
Obviously now we have computers,
so binary kind of makes this
a little bit more intuitive.
But that?
It didn't occur to me
that we didn't know that.
And actually the process of discovering
that is incredibly difficult, and
you're gonna have to actually read
the article to learn about it.
Sam Bowman: And there's a piece
on data centers and the huge
constraint, as everybody knows,
to data centers being electricity.
But whereas almost everybody talks
about this as being about electricity
supply and price, so if you have
high electricity prices, then you're
in trouble, and if you have cheap
electricity, then you're well off.
Actually, especially in America,
the real problem is actually
getting connected to the grid.
It's not actually the cost of
electricity once you're there.
It's a pretty small share of the
cost of running a data center.
The difficulty is that it takes
years to connect to the grid because
they do a crazy queue-based system.
You can't pay, you can't get a fast track.
You can't say, 'Hey, I'm building
a billions of dollars data center.
Can I pay a few millions
of dollars to plug in?
I'm just gon-…' You just
have to wait for years instead.
And we didn't get to that either.
Aria Schrecker: I've heard rumors
about companies that are getting
purchased exclusively because
they are higher up the queue.
Sam Bowman: Yes, it's an incredibly
inefficient kind of shadow market
that is better than nothing,
but it's a lot worse than just
having an explicit auction system.
And this piece explains the problem.
It explains why this is really materially
slowing down America's AI compute
build-out and that of the rest of the
world as well, and it explains a really
simple way of fixing the problem.
I'm very excited about it.
Pieter Garicano: And then we have-
And we have, two fan favorites, of
course, who you haven't mentioned yet.
Sam Bowman: Yeah.
Pieter Garicano: Samuel Hughes on
how Japan had a quarter millennium
of stability by turning Tokyo
into the world's biggest prison.
Sam Bowman: Mm-hmm.
Pieter Garicano: And we have Alex Chalmers
on why radiation isn't that bad for you.
Sam Bowman: Yes.
That was a very, very
enjoyable article to edit.
One of those pieces where you
really do have to check every
single claim three times.
Because some of them are so
unbelievable and so counterintuitive,
but they're all true.
Issue 24 of Works in Progress is out now.
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