Saikat Chakrabarti
speaker
279 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Saikat Chakrabarti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And now construction slowed down because part of the reason costs went down was a lot of people left Austin at that time. It started having net migration out of Austin. And so now what happens, right? I think there's another example of just doing the permitting streamlining isn't going to be a silver bullet. But when you're talking about costs, there's not one simple answer.
I think the optimism here that I have is you look at Europe, you know, Europe can build stuff way faster and way cheaper than us. They have a way more unionized labor force. And I think what I wish we had in America was, I wish we had large, you know, union bargaining deals in a sectoral way, the way many European countries do, and do this at a society way.
I wish we didn't have to jam all these requirements into legislation because we had actual societal solutions for it. But I think it's possible, you know, and the other thing Europe does is on a lot of these process questions, they empower their agencies to have more power to actually make decisions, right?
And sometimes we over-index on how much the process is getting in the way because what you see in a lot of cases is We add process, but stuff still gets built. You know, China, in the 1980s, when it was going through massive amounts of development, bringing in American companies, made those companies jump through all kinds of hoops.
You know, they had to train up Chinese workers, they had to do joint ventures with Chinese companies. But it's this overall mindset, we actually have to get this stuff done, that was different there. I think that's the bigger thing that's missing. It's, you know, even in Europe, they have timelines on how long these environmental reviews can take. And in America...
The bigger thing that's happened is we've let open-ended lawsuits and this general kind of culture of letting things languish forever take over.
My theory for why America and Europe ended up differently is Europe actually did their post-war boom and all that development in a more democratic way than we did. We had this Robert Moses era, where we didn't get a lot of public buy-in. We did demolish a bunch of communities, and then we got the backlash, and now we can't build for 50 years.
Whereas Europe, I think, took more of an approach of trying to bring society in through this development. But I think the larger theory of why everywhere is stagnating I think countries have to go through these periods of renewal where they really go for it. And all the European democracies did this in peacetime post-war, right, when they're doing their booms.
And it's in these contexts of a larger society-wide transformation that you're able to do things like change the housing rules. Because housing is a big deal. But if you just do a whole politics around housing, that's not a big enough constituency to call for the huge kind of structural reforms you need across society. You know, in France, for example,
They built TGV, their national high-speed rail, during their post-war boom. And I know you talk a lot about California high-speed rail, but if you look at how they did that versus how we did California high-speed rail, it was this comprehensive plan where they pitched the country on the whole network. And so because it was this huge network, they planned for all the surrounding industry.
They built out universities to train the engineers. They built out rolling car set industries to build the train sets. They built out all the steel industries. And they even planned, this is when they're deploying nuclear power all over France, they planned their nuclear power deployment in a way to make sure they would have the power to power the trains.
And I'd say that whole thing was even made possible because France was in the middle of a larger national renewal where they were building out their whole economy. And Charles de Gaulle even talked about it as a mission for France, actually. But on the flip side, we got California High Speed Rail, where they had this project, which was one line.
And I just think it wasn't big enough to use the political capital of that project to push through the CEQA reforms or whatever other reforms we would need. to make that go faster. Well, they also didn't try.
Yeah.
Well, I think we've lost that muscle. I think we've totally lost that muscle of how do you actually do the kind of comprehensive planning, the execution of these big projects and the transforming your whole economy. And so I I don't think they thought they weren't trying. They were just doing the normal thing politicians do. Zephyr, there's an example you had wanted to bring up.
Well, first of all, I mean, I do agree that, you know, money in politics is this hugely enervating force, right? But even if we got rid of money in politics and all the other forces that kind of get in the way, I don't think our politicians on their own would do things at the scale. You know, even looking at Texas versus California, yeah, people are billing in Texas because...
In a completely, you know, nothing else going on sort of scenario, there's fewer rules in Texas, it's cheaper to build in Texas, so you build in Texas. But that's not going to build out enough clean energy to make any sort of dent, actually, you know, in the global problem of tackling climate change. I think the money in politics and all that just supports the general focus
feeling that our politicians have and this trend that they've had of trying to do less and less. I think one of the really bad parts of money in politics is that politicians spend all their time calling big donors for money, and they think that's their job. And they're really confused by the job of actually trying to build stuff, you know, or make things happen. Like, there was an interview with
Hassan Khan, who I worked on the CHIPS Act on Oddbots yesterday, and he was talking about the stuff that actually got in the way of the CHIPS Act, right? And a big part of it was trying to negotiate with all the different special interests and groups that had stuff to say. And he said, that's fine. That's an important part of the process. And again, you know, Europe does this as well.
But there's no real... And they've lost semiconductor manufacturing. Yeah, that's fair. But, you know, but there's no real focus from the up top. There's no political leadership that was saying, we got to get this fab built, right? I was saying that's actually an overwhelming priority here.
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