Idk it seems kind of crazy for Krugman to assert, without any argument, that we haven’t seen huge benefits, so I’m not sure this needs to be shoehorned into the “housing theory of everything.”
Incomes have risen faster in the US than in Europe. One obvious channel: tech became a big, high-paying sector attracting high-skilled graduates. This pushed up demand for high-skill labor and wages. The extra income generated by tech was also spent on non-tradable services to a large extent, pushing up wages in those sectors as well. (Of course there are other reasons for faster income growth in the US, but it’s hard for me to believe this didn’t contribute anything.)
How would we know the counterfactual? Without building more housing, have we gotten 10% of the boom Matt would’ve expected or 90%? (I lean towards the latter.) How do we know that the story I laid out above somehow pales in comparison to Matt’s housing explanation for the lack of a boom?
(A note: Matt often talks up agglomeration benefits, but a lot of the quantifications of agglomeration benefits in econ are completely implausible garbage. Many of the Hsieh/Moretti papers, in particular, have horrible coding errors.)
I responded to a comment below saying I do agree that he's become less interesting to read on substack. But I think comparing him to Stephen Moore, an economist who has contributed absolutely nothing to his profession, is wrong.
There's obviously an asymmetry. Leftwing hacks are going to be more institutional and more intellectually rigorous. Rightwing hacks are going to try to sell memorative gold coins to seniors.
Krugman has a lot of value to offer but he also has never and would never disagree with the democratic establishment, and that makes him a hack. A smart hack, but a hack nonetheless.
He repeatedly criticized the Obama administration (quite famously actually) for not going big enough on the stimulus in 2009 (he was right btw. We can debate how much moderate Dems in Congress were responsible for the stimulus being too small, but directionally he was correct). He also repeatedly criticized the Obama administration's pivot to deficit reduction in 2011 as misguided given the lack of inflation and still elevated unemployment and as giving to "Very Serious People". He used that phrase deliberately to point out too many centrist and left of center pundits were advocating for deficit reduction when the case for deficit reduction was weak.
This idea he would not disagree with the Democratic establishment is just factually incorrect with two very important examples noted above.
The democratic establishment wanted the fiscal stimulus to be bigger. People tend to forget how much anti-deficit energy there was in politics at that time (that was putatively the Tea Party's whole thing).
Krugman has said as much. Even in the '00s, he explicitly took the position that the right was so much bigger of a threat to the country that it was his obligation as a public intellectual to focus his criticism there, not on left-wingers who have no real power or on fellow liberals whose faults are much less harmful. I think his point of view on this was/is overly simplistic, but I also can't say he was entirely wrong!
I think this view is wrong because literally no rightwingers would see a Krugman column and change their opinion. The only people who can get others to change their minds are those who already share their values.
It’s sad, really. In the econ profession he was known not only as a brilliant economist, but also as an incredible teacher.
Then he started writing columns and immediately became one of the least interesting public intellectuals — he basically just did political hackery. He’s somehow gotten even worse since then.
I know some people really don't like hist Trump era writing but I don't think your claim is remotely true about eg the Bush era columns, which have been proved quite right over time.
I feel like he's gotten worse on substack. Most of his posts are just very generic bluesky takes like: we wouldn't care about oil prices if we had a 100% renewable energy economy.
Agree his substack takes have mostly been pretty uninteresting “orange man bad” takes with some interesting stuff sprinkled in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him engage with abundance ideas or on how Democrats could be more effective. I used to read his nyt columns religiously but now find his writing pretty frustrating to read: i can’t see how reading another “trump bad” take helps anything. By contrast, Matt’s posts on how Dems can be more effective seem like they could change things if they were more widely read.
I haven't been reading him much recently (enough substacks already) but the more straightforward point that there's a real tension between "let's cancel renewable energy" and "let's bomb Iran", resolvable only by appeal to fossil fuel identity politics, is correct and important.
I would read that post Matt linked to. Because I think it’s points to a more subtle change in Krugman’s writing. The rhetorical flourish at the end was groan inducing and yes likely a reflection of the fact is audience leans even more left than it did at the Times.
But read the rest of the post. It provides a decent amount of data that the divergence in EU and US GDP growth is a bit illusionary or at the very least not as stark as banner headlines suggest.
Now I think even he would say that there is even more to the story. One of the first things I thought about is that when we’re talking EU economic stats, we’re talking about a large number of countries. So it includes both Germany who’s economic performance has only been “meh” last 10 year and Poland which has zoomed forward.
My point is that while i think there is more to be said about EU vs US economic performance and that there may be some holes or more to the story than Krugman is noting. His basic point that charts purporting to show HUGE (dare I say Yuge!) divergence in GDP growth between US and EU are the very least misleading at least to a degree…seems pretty correct as far as I can tell.
I didn’t say he was wrong about everything. I said he was an uninteresting political hack, which is very different.
To the extent that the Democratic Party was right about stuff, so was he. Whenever they were wrong, so was he.
His basic failure is that he never really explained anything interesting about economics. We just got iteration #1,576 of “do more stimulus.” Reading his columns, you’d come away with the idea that the IS-LM model is long-settled science and the only thing you need to know about macro. This has ruined a generation of wonky journalists.
I just don't think this is remotely accurate. He regularly wrote about economic issues in more detail than you suggest. And he was notably an opponent of eg the Iraq War when most Democrats were for it.
Look, you might think reading a bunch of Krugman columns gave you a good idea of how economists think about these issues. Maybe you’re right.
All I can say is that until I was in grad school, I had exactly that impression. My professors were… unimpressed by the knowledge I’d gained from Krugman columns, and I quickly understood why.
We’ll see how his Trump era columns age. His Bush era columns have held up very well. He was right on the budget chicanery and clear on the basic incompetence of the Bush administration. A lot of right-coded moderates got mad at him then, but his columns seem, in the main, to have been correct.
There's correlation here, and the causal story is plausible, but the "housing theory of everything" is a big assertion and one wants more. For ex, did constrained supply of software engineers limit employment growth as much as housing did? Was the learning curve for building semicon fabs, slower than for meat-packing houses, a major factor? I can imagine data that would help, but I don't know how to get it. Did housing-cost-to-wages ratio really rise more slowly in Detroit and Chicago than in the Bay Area? Did the number of design engineers in Detroit also follow the mega-city growth curve MY cites or was the Detroit curve driven by factory workers in a way that was much less true in the Bay Area? It's fine to publish teaser theories and the post was provoking. But SB readers would probably dunk on a similar assertion, for ex, that explosive growth in trade with China caused a reduction in working-class wages.
Yeah this whole post is a bit confusing. The technology sector built technology. The large infrastructure projects ended up being massive data centers scattered all over the country. The cloud revolution was essentially tech saying "here's how we power our industry, now these tools are available to everyone to use for their industries." There was tons of partnership and investment with heavy industries. At some point the question has to be 'why aren't the building industries building stuff.' and we know the answer isn't due to a lack of tech. It's because they are prevented from building by local NIMBY+anti gentrication alliance(s).
But somehow every other comment here is that "tech bros" (pejorative) should have also been responsible for changing the landscape of major cities. Seems like an extremely odd position to take imo.
"Techbro billionaires are corrupting our politics" is a convenient way of eliding the fact that Democratic candidates lose because the Democratic Party is unpopular, and the Democratic Party is unpopular because it holds a variety of positions that are broadly unpopular with the voting public.
Exactly. Perhaps there are other differences between the nature of the work of the tech industry and the automotive industry, or the broader macro setting of late vs early 20th century, aside from local housing policy that may have driven changes in population growth? I am in general a believer in the yimby/abundance theory of housing, but this particular claim seems under-supported.
Does the general population really hate tech billionaires as much as the messager class says they do? In my time amongst the normies, people seem to really like Starlinks, Amazon deliveries, and Chatpgt. What they really seem to hate are; crackheads rifling through their cars, school strikes, and rising property taxes. Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on how that stuff is the tech billionaires fault and not local officials.
Surely it depends on the billionaire right? I’m not exactly the median American but I personally quite like Jeff Bezos. I liked Musk before he went crazy from overdosing ketamine, social media, and sleep deprivation or whatever happened to him. Gates is obviously a great man (though I am not sure I’d marry him). Ackman can take a long walk off a short pier and can take Andreessen with him.
We need a report card that grades each billionaire so we can have more nuanced views on this. I'm guessing some of the better billionaires are the ones we've never heard of, sort of like how they say the best offensive linemen are the ones whose names you never hear.
Not hard to blame the things you mention on billionaires—if they were paying more, we could pay teachers more so they wouldn’t strike and tax you less.
There are good products and then there are their sociopathic founders that piss in everyone else's cereal. They'd all be better off if no one knew what they got up to in their spare time.
Well, Trump is unpopular, and the tech billionaires went all in on Trump and supported his election and then kissed the ring at the inauguration. Amoral oligarchs are never really popular.
'There are things like political newsletters, where the audience for Slow Boring is quasi-bounded by the borders of the United States because interest in American politics (for good reason) drops quite a bit when you leave the country. "
That would make a lot of sense, but it doesn't seem true. Interest in American politics is extremely high in many countries, often getting as much attention as their domestic politics.
The people I know in Taiwan (obviously selection bias here) are all really knowledgable about US politics. Also, the national media here covers US politics a ton because of how dependent the country is on favorable relations.
So honestly maybe not the best example. But I do think what you're saying is true in many other countries as well.
BBC journalists seem disappointed when they have to talk about British politics. It is always federal politics, foreigners pay little attention to state politics even when important and relevant.
I come from and am living in the republic of Georgia and am a subscriber of Slow Boring, as well as a patreon supporter to a bunch of American creators. I’d argue if you create content in English about anything your potential market is the whole world (which is so unfair lol)
There is a general English language cultural sphere, where media is consumed by plenty of people for whom English is a second language and produced by Americans, Brits and Swedes.
P.S. I have no idea why it is always Swedes and never Norwegians, Germans or Indians.
The state of Uttar Pradesh gets much less attention than places like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Punjab, but has more people tha Spain, France, the UK and Italy combined. Yet I am sure I am far more likely to read or listen to things written by Swedes.
I often listen to foreign (English-language) podcasts because it's nice to listen to other people's problems... unfortunately no one escapes having the United States be one of their problems these days.
I can confirm that I read Vox and Slate before I moved to the US, and I’m not a native English speaker. I know other people from my home country who still read more niche American publications. I don’t know any Americans who read the publications of my home country. When I go home for Christmas, people are more interested in debating, e.g., US gun laws rather than the politics of our own country. (That last part wasn’t remotely true before I moved to the US, but now people are thinking that “Hey, we now have someone who lives there, let’s learn more!”.)
There is still a fair amount of interest abroad (I'm from the UK), but it's surely true that it is lower than interest in the US. I imagine SB's subscribers are noticeably higher per capita from America than anywhere else, surely.
I am sure that is true though probably also true for lots of British Substacks, but I would guess London, Canberra or Ottowa have as many per capita subscribers as Austin or Indianapolis.
It seems like it boosts the income of engineers in Dayton Ohio in a straightforward way. I can threaten to move to California and work there. Cheaper housing in California would increase the price point on my labor in Ohio even more.
The tech bros seem to be NIMBYs in general when it comes to their political priorities. They moved to Donald Trump as he was doubling down on NIMBYism in the 2024 election. There is a strong element of egalitarianism in YIMBY thought and practice that I don’t think they accept.
The tech bros as a whole were notoriously pro-Democrat donors for 15 years, and their widows/ex-wives still are. They've been Trump-leaning for what, 1-2 years? Let's wait a bit before passing judgment on the utility of a huge, fast-growing sector.
Hot take: they should've stuck to being donors (to whomever they wished) and restricted their interactions with the regime to lobbying for their bottom line. No Melania movies, no DOGE, no gold Apple watches, just good old-fashioned lobbying and campaign cash.
Yes, well, there's something about Trump that makes everyone do weird, dumb stuff that they'll regret in 10 years. It's his superpower: bringing everyone down to his level.
I mean, the death count from Musk's actions already seem to be in the hundreds of thousands due to USAID cuts. Usually you have to be a dictator to get numbers like that.
I don't think this is true at all. There were large plans to develop the campuses and surrounding areas of San Jose in the 2010s that were effectively neutered by NIMBY / anti gentrification types. My co workers cars and buses were egged by angry SF leftists as they went to work for it. The calculus was more "not worth engaging with it"
Did Tech bros support Trump? They are less openly opposed to Trump than they were in his first term and make deals with him, but I am sure Kamala won more tech billionaire votes than Trump and the same will be true in 2028.
Boston and biotech is an interesting comparison here. The past 10 years saw massive investment in the industry, and specialized lab buildings sprouted *literally everywhere* to capture that. But housing construction was still lethargic, and at the tail end of the boom the state was beginning to see net outmigration. Now that the COVID bubble has worked its way through the system and RFK et al have chilled investment, we’re stuck with a 34% of this lab space sitting unused in what *should* be the US’s competitor with Shanghai. Of course the industry is notoriously spiky, but I wonder if it would be more robust to shocks like this with lower costs and a stronger local economy. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/business/boston-lab-market-over-supply/
This whole post is, I feel, a bit misguided. The technology sector built technology. They invested hundreds of billions in development of data centers all over the country as a way to make the back end cloud+AI available to all industries. The technology of the 21st century is information management. There was further billions poured into partnerships where modernizing legacy industries from brick&mortar retail to metals&mining to heavy machinery supply chains and so on so those physical industries could utilize the same information management tooling.
At a certain point the question is why the builders are not building, now with the tools readily available and fairly cheap, especially compared to the technical systems of the prior era. The answer is obviously not that the tech industry stopped it, but that the NIMBY+anti gentrification alliance stopped it. We can't even REBUILD los angeles or lahaina after fires burned down large swaths of urban areas.
The idea that tech should somehow also be responsible for remaking the face of America is silly when what commenters are calling "tech bros" (pejorative) run chip making, cloud tech, and advertising tech firms. In the 2010s any attempt to expand the footprint of the campuses themselves was met with SF/San Jose local derision. Egged busses. Screaming anti gentrification activists.
Google Fiber, being sold off now, had to negotiate with each municipality for almost a decade before any cable could be laid. IMO it's everyone else that needs to look inward here as to why the technology handed to other industries on a silver platter is not being effectively utilized to effectively rebuild the modern face of America.
I think the point of the piece is that the NIMBY + anti-gentrification alliance kept tech from booming as much as it could have which would have benefited Americans even more, not that the tech industry should have solved the problems of NIMBYism.
Libertarians have been about charter cities for awhile. Not sure these kind of cities are possible when you have all of a specific set of laws and policies that differentiate it, an openness to others moving in, and democracy.
I was thinking a strike (metaphorically) to take down the supreme leaders (again, metaphorically) of marin county to spur development, but you are thinking big.
I feel like this article’s thesis is fine about most topics but, written about SV, requires us to ignore that at least two, if not four, of the big players are just selling digital crack.
I feel like this criticism is largely disingenuous because while people levy this criticism at Zuckerburg, they never apply the inverse to Bezos or (especially) Musk.
Arguably this seems to be by design and is therefore a good reason to take away housing policy privileges from SFBA altogether for the good of the commonwealth
In 2018 I lived in the bay and visited Hong Kong, and it was just so obvious that everything people said about why SF couldn't grow (water use, preserving nature and parks, traffic) was just a lie and we could be like Hong Kong if we bothered to try.
Hasn’t Tokyo always been huge relative to Japan. It’s about the same proportion of the population as London or Stockholm. Lower than greater Copenhagen, but the country is much bigger.
Totally agree that SF should build more, but even under the status quo, the tech sector generates large benefits for people who live in Columbus that don’t apply to Colombia. Taxes and stock market gains for one (foreign investors can buy US stocks but there are often a lot more hoops to jump through). And tech companies do have local offices in various smaller cities—typically it is easier to get a job at one of them (and cheaper for the companies so they often prefer it), and the reason they don’t expand more is a lack of local talent.
Agree. There's a bit of a missing link here in that it doesn't make the case that the current 9 million people San Fran/San Jose metro area benefits rust belters, but if it was 2 or 3 times bigger it totally would.
Also, taxes are the easiest and most obvious conduit, but maybe after the anti-wealth tax piece yesterday he just didn't want to return to that.
Right. The success of tech is a nontrivial factor in making the United States as wealthy as it is, and that wealth lets the country afford more public goods more easily than would be the case if it were poorer: 3.5 points of GDP buys a more lethal military when you've got a $31 trillion GDP than when your GDP is only 24 trillion. And you can go on on down the line with other things (NASA, pensions, etc). Hell, even healthcare programs benefit: as much as inefficiency weakens the delivery of medicine in the US, imagine how much worse off we'd be if we were a third poorer.
Should a great nation have great cities? There is some uncertainty about whether the model of a city that's prevailed since the first cities is becoming obsolete - a physically small commons where lots of people come together to be near each other in person. Maybe. But regardless, if we want great cities, I think we need policies that are explicitly designed to foster them, such as by channeling commercial activity into city boundaries -- policies that "do what they say on the tin" as it's sometimes said, rather than amorphous policies aimed at making it easier to build, but not in any particular location. There are lots of reasons employers have left cities behind, some driven by policy, some not, but if that's to be reversed, it probably requires policies designed for that purpose. Our cities grew up around transportation nodes and the locations of natural resources, some of which are no longer as economically relevant. But transportation networks now are mostly human creations, rather than dependent features such as waterways or coal deposits. If there are in fact benefits of concentrating innovators and economic activity in clusters, such as making transportation from one to the next more efficient, it is at least in theory within the power of national policy to design and create ideally a network of American cities -- a Hanseatic League on the land, so to speak. Which comes back to the question, should a great nation have great cities, or instead let things sprawl however they will?
Let's imagine -- if Santa Clara County and all the surrounding area repealed all their density restrictions, would it result in a big dense city like in Shenzen, or just more sprawl?
I think that if this prediction were accurate, we wouldn't see banks building big new towers in Manhattan, or Amazon developing in downtown Seattle, or OpenAI and anthropic locating in San Francisco.
There would be some sprawl, but if you sprawled much further out than the area currently goes, then you'd be talking about some truly unworkable, horrific commutes.
And also you'd be bumping into areas that are either physically difficult to develop (mountainous) and/or deserve a degree of protection. Even a rabid YIMBY like me doesn't want every last sequoia chopped down.
I think intercity high-speed rail would really help here! There is a bit of chicken-and-egg because the fact that you need a car once you arrive somewhere significantly reduces the value of rail, but if widely used it would encourage development closer to the city centers where the stations were and make those cities more walkable and transit-friendly.
Ed Glaeser is a great author to read if you're interested in the question of whether cities are still relevant in the digital age. (Spoiler: he says yes)
This essay does invite a few thoughts in response.
First, not all urban tech clusters are excluded from that growth chart. King WA (Seattle) and Travis TX (Austin) are very much tech agglomerations, and they are in the top 10.
But more importantly, the growth of tech means that jobs can be anywhere. Also, unlike industrial centers of the twentieth century, the apex of software requires very few developers. Meanwhile, other tech-related jobs that spring from software are free to locate anywhere. And so we see counties like Maricopa and Hillsborough (Tampa) FL on that list.
Those counties are home to a large number of middle and back office professionals - accountants, call centers, etc - that are enabled by tech to be in metro areas with low costs of living, low taxes, and aggressive pro-growth policies. Perhaps this distribution of relative prosperity might actually be a better outcome than cramped clustering in dense urban megacities. While this pattern does not spread the extreme wealth of the Bay Area, it does spread plenty of well-paying jobs around the country more so than in the industrial era.
This is exactly right. Tech billionaires exist because the marginal cost of that product is close to zero. And the production of those products looks completely different than the place centered world of manufacturing. Matt's argument is pretty bizarre.
Idk it seems kind of crazy for Krugman to assert, without any argument, that we haven’t seen huge benefits, so I’m not sure this needs to be shoehorned into the “housing theory of everything.”
Incomes have risen faster in the US than in Europe. One obvious channel: tech became a big, high-paying sector attracting high-skilled graduates. This pushed up demand for high-skill labor and wages. The extra income generated by tech was also spent on non-tradable services to a large extent, pushing up wages in those sectors as well. (Of course there are other reasons for faster income growth in the US, but it’s hard for me to believe this didn’t contribute anything.)
How would we know the counterfactual? Without building more housing, have we gotten 10% of the boom Matt would’ve expected or 90%? (I lean towards the latter.) How do we know that the story I laid out above somehow pales in comparison to Matt’s housing explanation for the lack of a boom?
(A note: Matt often talks up agglomeration benefits, but a lot of the quantifications of agglomeration benefits in econ are completely implausible garbage. Many of the Hsieh/Moretti papers, in particular, have horrible coding errors.)
Krugman knows where his bread is buttered. Just the leftwing version of Stephen Moore.
I responded to a comment below saying I do agree that he's become less interesting to read on substack. But I think comparing him to Stephen Moore, an economist who has contributed absolutely nothing to his profession, is wrong.
There's obviously an asymmetry. Leftwing hacks are going to be more institutional and more intellectually rigorous. Rightwing hacks are going to try to sell memorative gold coins to seniors.
Krugman has a lot of value to offer but he also has never and would never disagree with the democratic establishment, and that makes him a hack. A smart hack, but a hack nonetheless.
A fair elaboration.
"Allan's" formulation is not actually correct.
He repeatedly criticized the Obama administration (quite famously actually) for not going big enough on the stimulus in 2009 (he was right btw. We can debate how much moderate Dems in Congress were responsible for the stimulus being too small, but directionally he was correct). He also repeatedly criticized the Obama administration's pivot to deficit reduction in 2011 as misguided given the lack of inflation and still elevated unemployment and as giving to "Very Serious People". He used that phrase deliberately to point out too many centrist and left of center pundits were advocating for deficit reduction when the case for deficit reduction was weak.
This idea he would not disagree with the Democratic establishment is just factually incorrect with two very important examples noted above.
The democratic establishment wanted the fiscal stimulus to be bigger. People tend to forget how much anti-deficit energy there was in politics at that time (that was putatively the Tea Party's whole thing).
Krugman has said as much. Even in the '00s, he explicitly took the position that the right was so much bigger of a threat to the country that it was his obligation as a public intellectual to focus his criticism there, not on left-wingers who have no real power or on fellow liberals whose faults are much less harmful. I think his point of view on this was/is overly simplistic, but I also can't say he was entirely wrong!
I think this view is wrong because literally no rightwingers would see a Krugman column and change their opinion. The only people who can get others to change their minds are those who already share their values.
It’s sad, really. In the econ profession he was known not only as a brilliant economist, but also as an incredible teacher.
Then he started writing columns and immediately became one of the least interesting public intellectuals — he basically just did political hackery. He’s somehow gotten even worse since then.
I know some people really don't like hist Trump era writing but I don't think your claim is remotely true about eg the Bush era columns, which have been proved quite right over time.
There was even a study from 2011 that found that Krugman had the highest record of correct predictions among the top 10 liberal and top 10 conservative pundits: https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/An-Analysis-of-the-Accuracy-of-Forecasts-in-the-Political-Media.pdf
I feel like he's gotten worse on substack. Most of his posts are just very generic bluesky takes like: we wouldn't care about oil prices if we had a 100% renewable energy economy.
Agree his substack takes have mostly been pretty uninteresting “orange man bad” takes with some interesting stuff sprinkled in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him engage with abundance ideas or on how Democrats could be more effective. I used to read his nyt columns religiously but now find his writing pretty frustrating to read: i can’t see how reading another “trump bad” take helps anything. By contrast, Matt’s posts on how Dems can be more effective seem like they could change things if they were more widely read.
I haven't been reading him much recently (enough substacks already) but the more straightforward point that there's a real tension between "let's cancel renewable energy" and "let's bomb Iran", resolvable only by appeal to fossil fuel identity politics, is correct and important.
I would read that post Matt linked to. Because I think it’s points to a more subtle change in Krugman’s writing. The rhetorical flourish at the end was groan inducing and yes likely a reflection of the fact is audience leans even more left than it did at the Times.
But read the rest of the post. It provides a decent amount of data that the divergence in EU and US GDP growth is a bit illusionary or at the very least not as stark as banner headlines suggest.
Now I think even he would say that there is even more to the story. One of the first things I thought about is that when we’re talking EU economic stats, we’re talking about a large number of countries. So it includes both Germany who’s economic performance has only been “meh” last 10 year and Poland which has zoomed forward.
My point is that while i think there is more to be said about EU vs US economic performance and that there may be some holes or more to the story than Krugman is noting. His basic point that charts purporting to show HUGE (dare I say Yuge!) divergence in GDP growth between US and EU are the very least misleading at least to a degree…seems pretty correct as far as I can tell.
I don’t think so. He has written a lot of really helpful primers.
I didn’t say he was wrong about everything. I said he was an uninteresting political hack, which is very different.
To the extent that the Democratic Party was right about stuff, so was he. Whenever they were wrong, so was he.
His basic failure is that he never really explained anything interesting about economics. We just got iteration #1,576 of “do more stimulus.” Reading his columns, you’d come away with the idea that the IS-LM model is long-settled science and the only thing you need to know about macro. This has ruined a generation of wonky journalists.
I just don't think this is remotely accurate. He regularly wrote about economic issues in more detail than you suggest. And he was notably an opponent of eg the Iraq War when most Democrats were for it.
Look, you might think reading a bunch of Krugman columns gave you a good idea of how economists think about these issues. Maybe you’re right.
All I can say is that until I was in grad school, I had exactly that impression. My professors were… unimpressed by the knowledge I’d gained from Krugman columns, and I quickly understood why.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the American Communist Party was right about the war in Iraq.
Were the right about the dishonesty of the Bush administration budget calculations?
A hack is someone who repeats the party line. Being right is incompatible with being a hack.
This isn’t right. He was correct on the economics in a way that a lot of Democrats didn’t understand.
We’ll see how his Trump era columns age. His Bush era columns have held up very well. He was right on the budget chicanery and clear on the basic incompetence of the Bush administration. A lot of right-coded moderates got mad at him then, but his columns seem, in the main, to have been correct.
This is an inane comment
There's correlation here, and the causal story is plausible, but the "housing theory of everything" is a big assertion and one wants more. For ex, did constrained supply of software engineers limit employment growth as much as housing did? Was the learning curve for building semicon fabs, slower than for meat-packing houses, a major factor? I can imagine data that would help, but I don't know how to get it. Did housing-cost-to-wages ratio really rise more slowly in Detroit and Chicago than in the Bay Area? Did the number of design engineers in Detroit also follow the mega-city growth curve MY cites or was the Detroit curve driven by factory workers in a way that was much less true in the Bay Area? It's fine to publish teaser theories and the post was provoking. But SB readers would probably dunk on a similar assertion, for ex, that explosive growth in trade with China caused a reduction in working-class wages.
Yeah this whole post is a bit confusing. The technology sector built technology. The large infrastructure projects ended up being massive data centers scattered all over the country. The cloud revolution was essentially tech saying "here's how we power our industry, now these tools are available to everyone to use for their industries." There was tons of partnership and investment with heavy industries. At some point the question has to be 'why aren't the building industries building stuff.' and we know the answer isn't due to a lack of tech. It's because they are prevented from building by local NIMBY+anti gentrication alliance(s).
But somehow every other comment here is that "tech bros" (pejorative) should have also been responsible for changing the landscape of major cities. Seems like an extremely odd position to take imo.
"Techbro billionaires are corrupting our politics" is a convenient way of eliding the fact that Democratic candidates lose because the Democratic Party is unpopular, and the Democratic Party is unpopular because it holds a variety of positions that are broadly unpopular with the voting public.
Exactly. Perhaps there are other differences between the nature of the work of the tech industry and the automotive industry, or the broader macro setting of late vs early 20th century, aside from local housing policy that may have driven changes in population growth? I am in general a believer in the yimby/abundance theory of housing, but this particular claim seems under-supported.
Does the general population really hate tech billionaires as much as the messager class says they do? In my time amongst the normies, people seem to really like Starlinks, Amazon deliveries, and Chatpgt. What they really seem to hate are; crackheads rifling through their cars, school strikes, and rising property taxes. Someone is going to have to do a lot of explaining on how that stuff is the tech billionaires fault and not local officials.
Surely it depends on the billionaire right? I’m not exactly the median American but I personally quite like Jeff Bezos. I liked Musk before he went crazy from overdosing ketamine, social media, and sleep deprivation or whatever happened to him. Gates is obviously a great man (though I am not sure I’d marry him). Ackman can take a long walk off a short pier and can take Andreessen with him.
We need a report card that grades each billionaire so we can have more nuanced views on this. I'm guessing some of the better billionaires are the ones we've never heard of, sort of like how they say the best offensive linemen are the ones whose names you never hear.
I'm sure plenty of billionaires are dickheads. Is punishing dickheads high on the list of voter priorities?
People like some of the companies but view their leaders pretty negatively:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4583555-majority-of-us-voters-hold-unfavorable-views-of-bezos-zuckerberg-poll/amp/
Not hard to blame the things you mention on billionaires—if they were paying more, we could pay teachers more so they wouldn’t strike and tax you less.
If we didn't allow public unions, the teachers wouldn't strike either.
And we would get a lot better service for our dollars
There are good products and then there are their sociopathic founders that piss in everyone else's cereal. They'd all be better off if no one knew what they got up to in their spare time.
Well, Trump is unpopular, and the tech billionaires went all in on Trump and supported his election and then kissed the ring at the inauguration. Amoral oligarchs are never really popular.
I don't think people LOVE tech billionaires but they don't hate their guts either.
'There are things like political newsletters, where the audience for Slow Boring is quasi-bounded by the borders of the United States because interest in American politics (for good reason) drops quite a bit when you leave the country. "
That would make a lot of sense, but it doesn't seem true. Interest in American politics is extremely high in many countries, often getting as much attention as their domestic politics.
The people I know in Taiwan (obviously selection bias here) are all really knowledgable about US politics. Also, the national media here covers US politics a ton because of how dependent the country is on favorable relations.
So honestly maybe not the best example. But I do think what you're saying is true in many other countries as well.
BBC journalists seem disappointed when they have to talk about British politics. It is always federal politics, foreigners pay little attention to state politics even when important and relevant.
I come from and am living in the republic of Georgia and am a subscriber of Slow Boring, as well as a patreon supporter to a bunch of American creators. I’d argue if you create content in English about anything your potential market is the whole world (which is so unfair lol)
There is a general English language cultural sphere, where media is consumed by plenty of people for whom English is a second language and produced by Americans, Brits and Swedes.
P.S. I have no idea why it is always Swedes and never Norwegians, Germans or Indians.
There are more people in Indian cities I've barely heard of than there are in all of Sweden.
The state of Uttar Pradesh gets much less attention than places like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Punjab, but has more people tha Spain, France, the UK and Italy combined. Yet I am sure I am far more likely to read or listen to things written by Swedes.
Noah Smith talks about India and the internet here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia
Massive rise in Indian internet users. I can't say for certain that I've noticed it but it could be felt very much very shortly.
I often listen to foreign (English-language) podcasts because it's nice to listen to other people's problems... unfortunately no one escapes having the United States be one of their problems these days.
I can confirm that I read Vox and Slate before I moved to the US, and I’m not a native English speaker. I know other people from my home country who still read more niche American publications. I don’t know any Americans who read the publications of my home country. When I go home for Christmas, people are more interested in debating, e.g., US gun laws rather than the politics of our own country. (That last part wasn’t remotely true before I moved to the US, but now people are thinking that “Hey, we now have someone who lives there, let’s learn more!”.)
There is still a fair amount of interest abroad (I'm from the UK), but it's surely true that it is lower than interest in the US. I imagine SB's subscribers are noticeably higher per capita from America than anywhere else, surely.
I am sure that is true though probably also true for lots of British Substacks, but I would guess London, Canberra or Ottowa have as many per capita subscribers as Austin or Indianapolis.
It seems like it boosts the income of engineers in Dayton Ohio in a straightforward way. I can threaten to move to California and work there. Cheaper housing in California would increase the price point on my labor in Ohio even more.
Yep, according to levels.fyi, the median comp for software engineers is higher in Dayton than Paris or Tokyo. Not bad!
Ya, but then you have to deal with the perpetual construction on I-75 that has gone on for 25 years.
The Chinese food is not as good, but chili is more plentiful.
China Garden is legit good and it’s funny because it’s owned and run by Indians.
The tech bros seem to be NIMBYs in general when it comes to their political priorities. They moved to Donald Trump as he was doubling down on NIMBYism in the 2024 election. There is a strong element of egalitarianism in YIMBY thought and practice that I don’t think they accept.
The tech bros as a whole were notoriously pro-Democrat donors for 15 years, and their widows/ex-wives still are. They've been Trump-leaning for what, 1-2 years? Let's wait a bit before passing judgment on the utility of a huge, fast-growing sector.
Hot take: they should've stuck to being donors (to whomever they wished) and restricted their interactions with the regime to lobbying for their bottom line. No Melania movies, no DOGE, no gold Apple watches, just good old-fashioned lobbying and campaign cash.
Yes, well, there's something about Trump that makes everyone do weird, dumb stuff that they'll regret in 10 years. It's his superpower: bringing everyone down to his level.
I mean, the death count from Musk's actions already seem to be in the hundreds of thousands due to USAID cuts. Usually you have to be a dictator to get numbers like that.
Exactly. Matt's point and Krugman's point are less separate than he suggests.
I don't think this is true at all. There were large plans to develop the campuses and surrounding areas of San Jose in the 2010s that were effectively neutered by NIMBY / anti gentrification types. My co workers cars and buses were egged by angry SF leftists as they went to work for it. The calculus was more "not worth engaging with it"
The right wing has become more NIMBY but I don’t think it’s the techbro faction who’s behind that at all.
Andreeseen is specifically a NIMBY in Santa Clara County.
For those unfamiliar: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-famous-early-investment-facebook-113000502.html
Literally NIMBYism—America should build, just not in my backyard.
Did Tech bros support Trump? They are less openly opposed to Trump than they were in his first term and make deals with him, but I am sure Kamala won more tech billionaire votes than Trump and the same will be true in 2028.
I would not be sure of that at all. Multiple billionaires owning newspapers killed endorsements for Harris to curry favor with Trump.
Exactly my point they didn't endorse Trump.
I would guess the average tech worker is a YIMBY while the founders / C-suite are more likely to be NIMBYs
Boston and biotech is an interesting comparison here. The past 10 years saw massive investment in the industry, and specialized lab buildings sprouted *literally everywhere* to capture that. But housing construction was still lethargic, and at the tail end of the boom the state was beginning to see net outmigration. Now that the COVID bubble has worked its way through the system and RFK et al have chilled investment, we’re stuck with a 34% of this lab space sitting unused in what *should* be the US’s competitor with Shanghai. Of course the industry is notoriously spiky, but I wonder if it would be more robust to shocks like this with lower costs and a stronger local economy. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/06/business/boston-lab-market-over-supply/
This whole post is, I feel, a bit misguided. The technology sector built technology. They invested hundreds of billions in development of data centers all over the country as a way to make the back end cloud+AI available to all industries. The technology of the 21st century is information management. There was further billions poured into partnerships where modernizing legacy industries from brick&mortar retail to metals&mining to heavy machinery supply chains and so on so those physical industries could utilize the same information management tooling.
At a certain point the question is why the builders are not building, now with the tools readily available and fairly cheap, especially compared to the technical systems of the prior era. The answer is obviously not that the tech industry stopped it, but that the NIMBY+anti gentrification alliance stopped it. We can't even REBUILD los angeles or lahaina after fires burned down large swaths of urban areas.
The idea that tech should somehow also be responsible for remaking the face of America is silly when what commenters are calling "tech bros" (pejorative) run chip making, cloud tech, and advertising tech firms. In the 2010s any attempt to expand the footprint of the campuses themselves was met with SF/San Jose local derision. Egged busses. Screaming anti gentrification activists.
Google Fiber, being sold off now, had to negotiate with each municipality for almost a decade before any cable could be laid. IMO it's everyone else that needs to look inward here as to why the technology handed to other industries on a silver platter is not being effectively utilized to effectively rebuild the modern face of America.
I think the point of the piece is that the NIMBY + anti-gentrification alliance kept tech from booming as much as it could have which would have benefited Americans even more, not that the tech industry should have solved the problems of NIMBYism.
This country needs a Manhattan project to develop San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6
Libertarians have been about charter cities for awhile. Not sure these kind of cities are possible when you have all of a specific set of laws and policies that differentiate it, an openness to others moving in, and democracy.
It took a nuclear war with China for San Fransisco to redevelop in Star Trek.
LA half burned to the ground and Karen Bass mandated it be rebuilt with the same shitty McMansions it had before.
I was thinking a strike (metaphorically) to take down the supreme leaders (again, metaphorically) of marin county to spur development, but you are thinking big.
I understand Elon Musk visits the area from time to time, too (metaphorically)
I feel like this article’s thesis is fine about most topics but, written about SV, requires us to ignore that at least two, if not four, of the big players are just selling digital crack.
Miami property development and population boomed when their biggest businessmen were selling literal crack.
I feel like this criticism is largely disingenuous because while people levy this criticism at Zuckerburg, they never apply the inverse to Bezos or (especially) Musk.
I have repeatedly pointed out, here, that the Kahnie hatred for Amazon and Tesla over Facebook and Xitter is completely fucking insane.
You may take your strawman and dynamite him somewhere else.
yeah it's pretty annoying.
"We hate tech bros like Mark Zuckerburg because his company makes things that are bad for the world!"
ok what about the guy who created Tesla?
"no we hate that guy even more"
So… want to retract the accusation that my criticism is disingenuous?
Or are you gonna stick to that and just expect me to engage with you anyway?
Arguably this seems to be by design and is therefore a good reason to take away housing policy privileges from SFBA altogether for the good of the commonwealth
In 2018 I lived in the bay and visited Hong Kong, and it was just so obvious that everything people said about why SF couldn't grow (water use, preserving nature and parks, traffic) was just a lie and we could be like Hong Kong if we bothered to try.
California allocates more water to alfafa than human residents living in houses.
If having a mega city is so great, why has Japan been stuck in zero growth malaise for three decades.
Even if the cost of housing in NYC declined by 50%, its would still cost radically more than my suburb.
In the counterfactual without Tokyo, Japan would be in steep contraction.
Hasn’t Tokyo always been huge relative to Japan. It’s about the same proportion of the population as London or Stockholm. Lower than greater Copenhagen, but the country is much bigger.
Totally agree that SF should build more, but even under the status quo, the tech sector generates large benefits for people who live in Columbus that don’t apply to Colombia. Taxes and stock market gains for one (foreign investors can buy US stocks but there are often a lot more hoops to jump through). And tech companies do have local offices in various smaller cities—typically it is easier to get a job at one of them (and cheaper for the companies so they often prefer it), and the reason they don’t expand more is a lack of local talent.
“Lack of local talent” my ass, unemployed coders are a dime a dozen these days
Agree. There's a bit of a missing link here in that it doesn't make the case that the current 9 million people San Fran/San Jose metro area benefits rust belters, but if it was 2 or 3 times bigger it totally would.
Also, taxes are the easiest and most obvious conduit, but maybe after the anti-wealth tax piece yesterday he just didn't want to return to that.
Right. The success of tech is a nontrivial factor in making the United States as wealthy as it is, and that wealth lets the country afford more public goods more easily than would be the case if it were poorer: 3.5 points of GDP buys a more lethal military when you've got a $31 trillion GDP than when your GDP is only 24 trillion. And you can go on on down the line with other things (NASA, pensions, etc). Hell, even healthcare programs benefit: as much as inefficiency weakens the delivery of medicine in the US, imagine how much worse off we'd be if we were a third poorer.
Should a great nation have great cities? There is some uncertainty about whether the model of a city that's prevailed since the first cities is becoming obsolete - a physically small commons where lots of people come together to be near each other in person. Maybe. But regardless, if we want great cities, I think we need policies that are explicitly designed to foster them, such as by channeling commercial activity into city boundaries -- policies that "do what they say on the tin" as it's sometimes said, rather than amorphous policies aimed at making it easier to build, but not in any particular location. There are lots of reasons employers have left cities behind, some driven by policy, some not, but if that's to be reversed, it probably requires policies designed for that purpose. Our cities grew up around transportation nodes and the locations of natural resources, some of which are no longer as economically relevant. But transportation networks now are mostly human creations, rather than dependent features such as waterways or coal deposits. If there are in fact benefits of concentrating innovators and economic activity in clusters, such as making transportation from one to the next more efficient, it is at least in theory within the power of national policy to design and create ideally a network of American cities -- a Hanseatic League on the land, so to speak. Which comes back to the question, should a great nation have great cities, or instead let things sprawl however they will?
Let's imagine -- if Santa Clara County and all the surrounding area repealed all their density restrictions, would it result in a big dense city like in Shenzen, or just more sprawl?
Most likely, more sprawl, in search of the cheapest suburban office park real estate within driving distance.
I think that if this prediction were accurate, we wouldn't see banks building big new towers in Manhattan, or Amazon developing in downtown Seattle, or OpenAI and anthropic locating in San Francisco.
You’d see both, probably.
There would be some sprawl, but if you sprawled much further out than the area currently goes, then you'd be talking about some truly unworkable, horrific commutes.
And also you'd be bumping into areas that are either physically difficult to develop (mountainous) and/or deserve a degree of protection. Even a rabid YIMBY like me doesn't want every last sequoia chopped down.
I think intercity high-speed rail would really help here! There is a bit of chicken-and-egg because the fact that you need a car once you arrive somewhere significantly reduces the value of rail, but if widely used it would encourage development closer to the city centers where the stations were and make those cities more walkable and transit-friendly.
Ed Glaeser is a great author to read if you're interested in the question of whether cities are still relevant in the digital age. (Spoiler: he says yes)
They should have begun groundbreaking the site for Hive Primus before I was born but here we are now in 2026 and we've got nothing.
This essay does invite a few thoughts in response.
First, not all urban tech clusters are excluded from that growth chart. King WA (Seattle) and Travis TX (Austin) are very much tech agglomerations, and they are in the top 10.
But more importantly, the growth of tech means that jobs can be anywhere. Also, unlike industrial centers of the twentieth century, the apex of software requires very few developers. Meanwhile, other tech-related jobs that spring from software are free to locate anywhere. And so we see counties like Maricopa and Hillsborough (Tampa) FL on that list.
Those counties are home to a large number of middle and back office professionals - accountants, call centers, etc - that are enabled by tech to be in metro areas with low costs of living, low taxes, and aggressive pro-growth policies. Perhaps this distribution of relative prosperity might actually be a better outcome than cramped clustering in dense urban megacities. While this pattern does not spread the extreme wealth of the Bay Area, it does spread plenty of well-paying jobs around the country more so than in the industrial era.
This is exactly right. Tech billionaires exist because the marginal cost of that product is close to zero. And the production of those products looks completely different than the place centered world of manufacturing. Matt's argument is pretty bizarre.