This is a fascinating interview that touches on a number of interesting aspects.

You frame cities as labor markets. What do you mean by that?

Sometimes when I read the papers of my fellow urban planners, I get the sense that they think cities are Disneyland or Club Med. Cities are labor markets. People go to cities to find a good job. Firms move to cities, which are expensive, because they are more likely to find the staff and specialists that they need. If a city’s attractive, that’s a bonus. But basically, they come to get a job.

This is one of the lessons I learned when I worked in China in the early 1980s, when it was still very much a command economy. There were no labor markets. People would get a job in a state factory, and they would stay there for life. The factory would provide housing next door. Similarly, state factories were stuck where they were, with the workers they had. There was an enormous mismatch between employees and employers and everyone was worse off. {…}

Some of the most interesting stories you tell fall in these times of transition, as command economies like the Soviet Union, China, and Vietnam transitioned to market economies. What was it like working as an urban planner in those cities?

In a way, the dream of every urban planner or architect is to not be constrained by the market. You believe, as an architect or as a planner, that you alone could efficiently allocate land uses and densities, just like designing a house.

I quickly realized that if you do not have prices to guide you, you end up relying on arbitrary norms. For example, in China, the central government decided that every home must have one full hour of sunshine each day. So you would plug in the height, latitude, and angle of the sun at winter solstice for your site, and that would formulaically spit out the permitted density of housing.

This was not an entirely silly idea! If you don’t have prices to show how land should be used, you must fall back on strange heuristics like this. You try to find something that sounds scientific. The angle of the sun in Beijing at winter solstice is completely scientific. What’s not scientific is setting sunlight standards for the housing of an entire country.

Cities attract workers, workers create the culture, which then attracts more jobs. Richard Florida built a name trying to convince cities that they could short-circuit the process by creating the culture to attract the right workers, only admitting he was wrong after cities spent fortunes they didn’t have. My view is that cities should take a page from Bob Dylan, who desperately wanted to be Elvis but surveyed the market and found that he would instead be the best Woody Guthrie he could be. The markets only needs so many Seattles.

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President Trump’s long-time personal attorney Michael Cohen has been sentenced of 3 years in prison, after having plead guilty to 9 charged crimes in federal court.

ABC News

Before leveling his sentence, U.S. Judge William Pauley said “Cohen pled guilt to a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” and “lost his moral compass,” according to a Newsday reporter inside the courtroom.

Judge Pauley added that “as a lawyer, Mr. Cohen should have known better.”

Cohen pleaded his case for leniency in front of a federal judge in Manhattan, accusing President Trump – his former boss – of causing him to “follow a path of darkness rather than light” and “cover up his dirty deeds,” according to the Newsday reporter.

Prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York charged Cohen with eight felony counts in August, including tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, and campaign finance violations. Special counsel Robert Mueller, tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, tacked on an additional count of lying to Congress last month.

Cohen has pleaded guilty to all nine counts.

Cohen, who once defiantly declared he would “take a bullet for Donald Trump,” will have to settle for a prison term instead, not to mention a decidedly less than supportive former employer:

“He’s a weak person,” Trump told reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for Buenos Aires, Argentina.

“He was convicted with a fairly long-term sentence with things unrelated to the Trump Organization,” Trump said, citing Cohen’s legal issues with mortgages and the IRS.

Trump speculated that “what he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence.”

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Conor Sen: A Steady Job Beats a Higher Paycheck

Despite this “hard economic data,” the “soft economic data” — public sentiment — shows that the economy and labor market are perceived to be about as good as they’ve ever been. Gallup has been asking the public every month since 2001 what it considers the nation’s most important problem, and in November only 13 percent responded with an economic problem. The just-completed midterm elections were largely a referendum on health care and President Donald Trump, not on the economy. […]

As a worker, I’d rather be in a labor market with lots of job postings, a low level of jobless claims and a sustainable level of wage growth. It’s certainly preferable to being in one fueled by speculative excess, where I have to constantly worry about when the mania is going to collapse. I’ll take 3 percent wage growth today with good prospects for being employed tomorrow over 4 percent wage growth today and unemployment tomorrow. […]

The good news for workers today, and perhaps why their optimism is higher than some economic data might suggest, is that there’s no reason why this labor market can’t continue for at least several more quarters. The excesses of the past couple years have been in financial markets, not in the real economy. Bubbles in cryptocurrencies, cannabis and private technology companies should not lead to a heavy-handed response from the Fed. Household leverage remains low, and business investment remains modest.

It’s remarkable how much of the employment web site ads I see are aimed at employers rather than people looking for work. That’s a new phenomenon. And like Sen, I don’t think a recession is necessarily right around the corner, as many are predicting. Wishful thinking? Maybe.

On the other hand, there are still some indications that our labor market still has some work to do.

I will believe the labor market is too tight for employers when employers act like the labor market is too tight for employers. https://t.co/2SsOTyF7b4

— Will Truman (@trumwill) October 25, 2018

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Support has dipped a bit, but opposition is up and the gap has closed:

President Donald Trump’s approval rating among active-duty military personnel has slipped over the last two years, leaving today’s troops evenly split over whether they’re happy with the commander in chief’s job performance, according to the results of a new Military Times poll of active-duty service members.

About 44 percent of troops had a favorable view of Trump’s presidency, the poll showed, compared to 43 percent who disapproved.

The results from the survey, conducted over the course of September and October, suggest a gradual decline in troops’ support of Trump since he was elected in fall 2016, when a similar Military Times poll showed that 46 percent of troops approved of Trump compared to 37 percent who disapproved. That nine-point margin of support now appears gone.

“The troops are turning Democratic!” is a thing I’ve been hearing since 2004. Maybe it’s happening now, or maybe it’s just Trump.

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