The New Bazaar

This episode is about an ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco.

The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It has bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County, starting in 2017. That’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one-and-a-half Miamis.

What California Forever wants the city to be is two things.

First:...

Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU who has made important contributions on a startingly high number of topics, speaks with Cardiff about his latest contributions to the study of housing affordability, remote work, artificial intelligence, and finance. 

Arpit is on board with the basic YIMBY project of undoing the oppressive zoning codes that limit housing construction in so many parts of the country, but he doesn&rsquo...

Stefanie Stantcheva is an economist at Harvard and the head of the Social Economics Lab, where her team has done extraordinary work investigating how people form their opinions about economic and political topics. That work was the subject of an earlier New Bazaar episode. 

In this episode, Stefanie chats with Cardiff about the findings in her paper (with co-authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, and Sandra Sequeira), “Ze...

EIG chief economist Adam Ozimek chats with Cardiff Garcia about Adam’s new post, AI and the Economics of the Human Touch. 

An excerpt: 

Either AI is so useless that we are in the middle of a bubble that’s about to burst and take the economy down with it, or AI is so powerful it’s going to replace us all and devastate the labor market.

The pessimism in speculation about the economic effects of ar...

Jen Doleac is an economist and the director of the Criminal Justice program at Arnold Ventures. She joins Cardiff on the show to chat about her upcoming new book, “The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice”. 

From the book jacket: 

Freakonomics for criminal justice, The Science of Second Chances presents a groundbreaking approach to criminal justice reform, revealing how small-scale...

Nearly 30 million workers, or roughly one in five workers throughout the country, are required to have a professional license before they can do their jobs.

That’s more than twice the number of workers who belong to unions. And it’s almost ten times the number who earn the minimum wage. But in comparison to those other economic arrangements, curiously little attention is given to the process that governs licensing, t...

Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor of The Economist, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset.

By one estimate, the value of land makes up roughly a third of all the wealth in the entire world. Add the houses and commercial buildings on top of the land and the total value is almost two-thirds. 

And according to Mike, land “defies some of the usual laws of ...

How can the United States make its economy more resilient not just to future economic shocks but the threat of such shocks from its geopolitical rivals? 

Arnab Datta has spent years working on this very question. In the immediate aftermath of the recent rare earths showdown between America and China, Datta and his colleagues at the Institute for Progress and Employ America published a new analysis titled How to Implement an...

What accounts for the astonishing streak of YIMBY wins this year — and which concessions, if any, should they consider offering to the NIMBYs? Should the center-left Abundance faction be trying to persuade conservatives and not just progressives? 

Do struggling places need more market-based solutions (high-skilled immigration, tax incentives for investing in low-income communities) or more straightforward redistributi...

Jerusalem Demsas is one of Cardiff’s favorite econ and housing journalists, a previous New Bazaar guest, and now the founder and editor of The Argument, a new magazine dedicated to making “a positive, combative case for liberalism through sharp, well-argued opinion pieces, original reporting, and multimedia content that confronts the illiberal drift in our politics.” 

Jerusalem and Cardiff discuss: 

The ROAD (Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream) to Housing Act is a bipartisan bill now making its way through Congress. 

And as today’s guest, Alex Armlovich, and his colleagues at the Niskanen Center argue, it is “the first comprehensive bid to tackle the roots of America’s‬ affordability crisis in a generation—it correctly‬‭ identifies, and takes initial steps to attack,‬ the interlocking ba...

Rob Armstrong is the writer who first coined the acronym in The TACO Trade, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, in a column back in April. He wasn’t trying to go viral, much less have the acronym circulate throughout Wall Street and the media, much less have President Trump be asked about it. But that’s what happened. 

Armstrong is the Unhedged columnist and podcaster at the Financial Times. He also had ...

Will artificial intelligence help you do your job, or will it just straight-up do your job and leave you unemployable? 

Or will the future bring something else entirely — either between those two extremes or a world that we simply cannot imagine yet? And are we already starting to see signs of that future emerging? 

On this episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff is joined by economist Nathan Goldschlag, Research D...

It's hard to think of a better guide to the ongoing US-China trade war than Evan Medeiros. A professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a lifelong scholar of the US-China relationship, Evan is also the co-author (with James Polk) of a new study, China's New Economic Weapons. Ever since the trade wars of the first Trump term, Chinese officials have been designing a new set of weapons to prepare them...

Chad Bown is not just among the world’s most respected trade economists. He is also perhaps the single most careful tracker of real-time trade activity — which obviously makes him the best possible guest to explain the consequences of US President Donald Trump’s decision on April 2nd to impose new tariffs on China and many other countries in addition to further escalating the trade war with China just a week later...

Joining Cardiff for this episode is Jared Bernstein, who was most recently the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Joe Biden following a long career in economic policy and public service. 

Jared shares with Cardiff his thoughts on the current economic moment, the achievements he was most proud of during the Biden years, and a few regrets. They also discuss: 

• How the econ policymaking sausage gets...

On today’s episode, Cardiff chats with his EIG colleagues Adam Ozimek, chief economist, and Connor O’Brien, research analyst, about the one policy that achieves all three of the following goals simultaneously: 

1. It massively boosts the rate of economic growth through its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the creation of entire new industries.

1. It reduces inequality.

1. Not only does...

It’s not often that someone comes up with a new, provocative, and persuasive theory about the competition between the US and China to be the world’s leading economic and technological superpower. The topic is so salient right now, the source of so much commentary, that it’s hard to say something that hasn’t already been said many, many times. 

But this episode’s guest, Jeffrey Ding — a sc...

How close is the 2024 presidential election? 

Here is how the New York Times framed it recently: “Never in modern presidential campaigns have so many states been so tight this close to Election Day. Polling averages show that all seven battleground states are within the margin of error, meaning the difference between a half-point up and a half-point down — essentially a rounding error — could win or lose t...