Krugman in the uncanny valley: A theory about east coast pundits and California

One of Palko’s pet peeves is East Coast media figures who don’t understand California. To be more specific, the problem is that they think they know California but they don’t, which puts them in a sort of uncanny San Fernando or Silicon Valley of the mind.

He quotes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who first writes about Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles entertainment complex and then continues:

California as a whole is suffering from gentrification. That is, it’s like a newly fashionable neighborhood where affluent newcomers are moving in and driving working-class families out. In a way, California is Brooklyn Heights writ large.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. I sometimes run into Californians asserting that there’s no room for more housing — they point out that San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles ringed by mountains. But there’s plenty of scope for building up.

As Palko points out (but unfortunately nobody will see, because he has something like 100 readers, as compared to Krugman’s million), “SF is not part of Silicon Valley; it’s around fifty miles away” and “Neither the city nor the county of LA is ringed with mountains.” This is not to say that Krugman is wrong about making it possible for developers to build up—but this seems more of a generic issue of building apartments where people want to live, rather than restricting construction to available land that’s far away. As Palko’s co-blogger points out, rising housing prices are a problem even in a place like London, Ontario, “a mid-sized city with a mid-ranked university and a 9-10% unemployment rate” not ringed by mountains or anything like that. I’ve heard that rents in Paris are pretty high too, and that’s not ringed by mountains either.

Here’s my theory. When East Coast media figures write about Texas, say, or Minnesota or Oregon or even Pennsylvania, they know they’re starting from a position of relative ignorance and they’re careful to check with the local experts (which leads to the much-mocked trope of the interview with locals in an Ohio diner). And when they write about NYC or Washington D.C. or whatever suburb they grew up in . . . well, then they might have a biased view of the place but at least they know where everything is. But California is the worst of both worlds: they’re familiar enough with the place to write about it but without realizing the limitations of their understanding.

The point here is not that Krugman is the worst or anything like that, even just restricting to the New York Times. I’ve complained before about pundits not correcting major errors in their columns. Krugman’s a more relevant example for the present post because his columns are often informed by data, so it’s interesting when he gets the data wrong.

As we’ve discussed before, to get data wrong, two things need to happen:
1. You need to be misinformed.
2. You need to not realize you’re misinformed.
That’s the uncanny valley—where you think you know something but you don’t—and it’s a topic that interests me a lot because it seems to be where so many problems in science arise.

P.S. It was funny that Krugman picked Brooklyn Heights, of all places. He’s a baby boomer . . . maybe he had The Patty Duke Show in mind. The family on that show was white collar, in a Father Knows Best kind of way, but my vague impression is that white collar was the default on TV back then. Not that all or even most shows had white collar protagonists—I guess that from our current perspective the most famous shows from back then are Westerns, The Honeymooners, and Lucy, none of which fit the “white collar” label, but I still think of white-collar families as representing the norm. In any case, I guess the fictional Brooklyn Heights of The Patty Duke Show was filled with salt-of-the-earth working-class types who would’ve been played for laughs by character actors. Now these roles have been gentrified and everyone on TV is pretty. Actually I have no idea what everyone on TV looks like; I know about as much about that as NYT columnists know about California geography.

P.P.S. Unrelatedly—it just happened to appear today—Palko’s co-blogger Delaney does a good job at dismantling a bad argument from Elon Musk. In this case, Musk’s point is made in the form of a joke, but it’s still work exploring what’s wrong with what he said. Arguing against a joke is tricky so I think Delaney gets credit for doing this well.

38 thoughts on “Krugman in the uncanny valley: A theory about east coast pundits and California

  1. Krugman has Pundit’s Syndrome, the belief that having expertise in one highly technical field gives you expertise in other areas. His political analyses are usually really bad.

      • Yes,
        Much wider than that, actually. I live in SF Bay Area and I consider it one big city. It’s all connected and yes, some places have been gentrified big time. YIMBY and NIMBY are somewhat interchangeable terms ’round here, depending on whether one is a home owner or a renter.

  2. Krugman might well be ill-informed about CA, but here I believe you (or rather Palko) are misrepresenting him. The “SF is a peninsula, LA ringed by mountains” is a quote he is attributing to his Californian interlocutors. As for Silicon Valley and Hollywood, he appears to be just looking at extreme examples from the distribution of housing availability. So Palko’s polemic has strong vibes of reviewer 2. If you must ding him for anything, it should be for wanting to model a distribution from its summary.

  3. Might want to turn on the terrane on LA. Technically it’s not a “ring” or circular chain of mountains; and technically it’s not just around LA, but also San Bernadino, Riverside, Pasadena, Santa Ana etc; but yeah the LA metro area is pretty much hemmed in by very steep, very rugged mountains: San Gabriel Mountains; San Bernadino Mountains; San Jacinto Mountains; Santa Ana Mountains; Santa Monica Mountains.

    • Those points are explicitly addressed in the post. The problem is that Krugman’s argument was that LA can’t build out so it has to build up. Roughly speaking, the town is bounded by mountains to the north and water to the west which still leaves plenty of room for building out, particularly in the Inland Empire. I’ve made the drive to Riverside dozens of times. No mountain passes were involved.

      I’m not in favor of building out rather than (read the post) but LA is not spatially constrained.

      • “Those points are explicitly addressed in the post. ”

        Uh, no they aren’t!!!!

        That’s hilarious! Zoom out dude! :)) I thought you were a California Expert!

        Your farmland link shows that as of five years ago LA County itself was only 2% farmland with a measly 57K acres. Before 1997, 57K acres of land would have been a slow five years of farmland disappearance. The five years prior to 2017 it lost 34K acres, declining at an average of 7K acres per year. If it has continued to decline at the same rate since, it now has 33K acres which is less than five years’ supply and about what disappeared from 2012-2017.

        In other words: LA is out of land.

        I’m not really interested in your other arguments but your claim that LA has plenty of space is just plain wrong. Sorry. Nothing personal.

        • When I said this was addressed in the post, I was talking about your point about LA being hemmed in and this passage: “Neither the city nor the county of LA is ringed with mountains. We do have some pretty good peaks (the high point in the city is over five thousand feet. Twice that for the county), but they run mainly to the north.”

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_California#Transverse_Ranges

          In terms of geography, there’s nothing stopping us from expanding east all the way to the Inland Empire, which is exactly what has happened and no, the IE has not run out of developable land.

          The constraint is not space but time. We are talking truly hellish sprawl, but that’s a different question.

          As for farmland, I included that to show that we haven’t reached saturation, not that it would cover our needs. Comparing the population densities of LA city and LA county suggests that there’s considerable underutilized land around the city, especially east of the 605

        • Mark Palko wrote:

          “Comparing the population densities of LA city and LA county suggests that there’s considerable underutilized land around the city, especially east of the 605.”

          If you have indeed driven through this area, you must have done so in deep fog. The idea that this area is underutilized is just nutty. First of all, it is all torn up by various extractive industries. Second, the areas that you consider vacant land are almost all badlands. Do you really think buildable land is sitting undeveloped within driving distance of LA simply because no one has gotten to it yet? The vast majority of the buildable land has already been utilized all the way out to San Gorgonio Pass.

          I don’t know if this will load right, it should show both the development highlighted with bright blue, and the topography.

          https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@33.1371279,-117.0613736,102571a,35y,34.31t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c2c75ddc27da13:0xe22fdf6f254608f4!8m2!3d34.0522342!4d-118.2436849

          You can see that there are two types of land, already built up and unbuildable.

  4. I think Krugman fell into a common misconception. When I lived in CA, my wife worked in Palo Alto where there were/are a lot of high-tech heavy weight headquarters. I always assumed that was “Silicon Valley”. However, as Palko correctly points out, it is actually down by San Jose. Andrew, I know you lived out there: what do you think? Did you always know exactly where Silicon Valley actually was or where you think it should be? For me, San Jose was not it. Palo Alto is far more upscale (or I should say “was”: I moved back in 1998 after seeing the Packers beat SF in the NFC championship at Candlestick!). In my experience, San Jose was where you went if you were looking for a puppy in the classifieds.

    • “as Palko correctly points out, it is actually down by San Jose”

      I can’t find a thing wrong with what Krugman wrote about California. Per Wikipedia: “,,,other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino..” Redwood City is about 20 miles from SF. Sunnyvale is such pure, distilled Silicon Valley that it is not even really a place.

      And of course LA is hemmed in by big mountains. Does anyone really think people actually want to live in Lancaster and work in LA? Have you seen the sprawl there? For that matter, have you seen the vacant land in LA county east of the city? Steep slopes in earthquake red zones with no water, deep in the fog.

      Meanwhile, is there any pressing issue more bereft of good ideas than affordable housing? Seattle currently has a large and very visible homeless population. If you build tiny apartments for them, they still won’t be living there because they will be outcompeted by upper middle class folks from Iowa who want a summer apartment in Seattle. I do think that those who advocate for affordable housing are coming from a place of compassion, but there is a distinct lack of workable ideas.

      • The Wikipedia article does call it a region. But for a location, it places SV in NW San Jose. And other mapping applications do the same. So, Palko is right based on that, but what I called a “misconception” is more reality (as the Wikipedia article suggests).

        • > . But for a location, it places SV in NW San Jose

          That’s odd, because for me it’s showing “37°22′39″N 122°04′03″W” which turns out to be on El Camino Real and CA-85, right between Mountain View and Sunnyvale.

      • If you build tiny apartments for them, they still won’t be living there because they will be outcompeted by upper middle class folks from Iowa who want a summer apartment in Seattle. I do think that those who advocate for affordable housing are coming from a place of compassion, but there is a distinct lack of workable ideas.

        I don’t think building solves everything, but it’s definitely better than not building. The fact is that the upper middle class folks are coming into Seattle and New York and San Francisco anyways, often chasing jobs and willing to live in old grungy places. Even if you build a luxury tower and 500 yuppies move in, that’s 500 people not pricing out lower income residents. The only way building wouldn’t help is if 100 more units attracts >100 new residents from out of town.

        There are obviously lots of things that can and do unhouse people–the rise of opioids, the closure of mental health facilities, labor market gaps. But with the lack of new construction, the growth in the urban homeless population is mathematically guaranteed by the pigeonhole principle. You have a n units for n – k people in a city. The city becomes a tech hub. j > k people, all with tech money, want to move in. The possibilities are:

        1. Create more units
        2. Somehow prevent new people from moving in
        3. People are priced out and moved onto the streets

        And behold, San Francisco. 75000 new people 2010-2018, chasing an expanding economy
        https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CASANF0POP

        squeezing into under 30000 units
        https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/documents/reports/2020_Housing_Inventory.pdf

        driving the rent up by 50%
        https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUURA422SEHA

    • I lived in Palo Alto for several years and I never did figure out what the boundaries of Silicon Valley were supposed to be, even in the roughest sense. It always seemed that “Silicon Valley” was more of a metaphor than anything else. How far north? How far south? Who knows?

      Actually, it never made sense to me that it was a valley of any sort. A valley, surely, is a low-lying area with higher elevations on at least two sides. The name seems inapplicable to a strip of land between a mountain range and a body of water.

  5. Andrew wrote: “In this case, Musk’s point is made in the form of a joke, but it’s still work exploring what’s wrong with what he said.” Should that be, “In this case, Musk’s point is made in the form of a joke, but it’s still worth exploring what’s wrong with what he said”? Sort of makes sense either way, but which fits in better with the discussion?

  6. I grew up in the Bronx and therefore, Brooklyn was a distant land somewhere out there. As a kid, I had never heard of the term, “Brooklyn Heights.” So, instead of the easy “Brooklyn Heights wiki” I googled instead
    “when did Brooklyn Heights get its name” and got this

    ——————————————————–
    Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead

    Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to ny.curbed.com. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.

    What can you do about it?

    The issue is most likely with the website, and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. You can notify the website’s administrator about the problem.

    Learn more…
    —————————————————————

    Many years ago, Thomas Wolfe wrote a magnificent short story, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” and ever since then I have managed to avoid Brooklyn as much as I can.

      • Today’s blog began with
        “East Coast media figures who don’t understand California”
        But Andrew just pointed to a 2010 blog which referred to the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. Park Slope never hoved into my youthful view, but well before that, Thomas Wolfe ended his famous short story,”Only the Dead Know Brooklyn,” with the following:

        “Jesus! What a nut he was! I wondeh what eveh happened to ’m, anyway! I wondeh if someone knocked him on duh head, or if he’s still wanderin’ aroun’ in duh subway in duh middle of duh night wit his little map! Duh poor guy! Say, I’ve got to laugh, at dat, when I t’ink about him! Maybe he’s found out by now dat he’ll neveh live long enough to know duh whole of Brooklyn. It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.”

        Wolfe, who was from North Carolina, was attempting to transcribe into writing the Brooklynese he was newly exposed to. Read today, it possibly comes across as another example of crude appropriation or just plain mockery. Or not, depending on how touchy a native of Brooklyn feels. In fact, rather than just ruminating on it, it might well be possible to survey the locals of Park Slope to see their reaction to this classic New Yorker short story
        https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1935/06/15/only-the-dead-know-brooklyn
        Park Slope residents who were there in June of 1935 are the only ones allowed to vote.

  7. I like most of Palko’s comments, but this time I believe he missed the mark. Regarding, LA being ringed by mountains, consider this from Geology of the Los Angeles Basin California – An Introduction by Yerkes, et al (Geological Survey Professional Paper 420-A, 1965)

    “The present-day Los Angeles physiographic basin
    (index map, fig. 1) of coastal southern California is
    an alluviated lowland, sometimes called the “coastal
    plain (Mendenhall, 1905, p. 11), which is bounded on
    the north by the Santa Monica Mountains and the
    Elysian, Repetto, and Puente I-Iills and on the east
    and southeast by the Santa Ana Mountains and San
    Joaquin Hills.”

    Of course a professional geologist knows not so say “ringed by mountains” when there is an ocean on one side, but the description strikes me as ringed except for the ocean side).
    Regarding Silicon Valley, consider this from Joint Venture Silicon Valley (https://jointventure.org/about-us/faq):

    “Q. How do you define “Silicon Valley?”
    A:Silicon Valley is really a phenomenon more than a place, one fueled by innovation and entrepreneurship. That phenomenon is taking place throughout the entire Bay Area. At Joint Venture we think of Silicon Valley extending from San Francisco to San Jose and Fremont, a footprint that takes in at least 40 cities and five different counties.”

    Perhaps the Board of Directors and staff of Joint Venture Silicon Valley don’t count as real California residents (I couldn’t see where they were located). In fact, perhaps they live out of state, given the housing costs in California!

    That, of course, is the real issue Palko is raising (although his complaint about east coast pundits distracts from this, in my opinion) concerns the housing costs and the extent to which public policies are contributing factors. I do believe some Californians are sensitive to these common criticisms that seem to lay the blame on high housing costs on the zoning and regulations that make it hard to build new affordable housing in the state. That view is fairly common among economists – it even cuts across the ideological spectrum. I think some of the sensitivity stems from the fact that some of these restrictive policies derive from real desires to preserve environmental and cultural values, while the skeptical economists see rent seeking and protection. Perhaps it is both.

    I don’t see the fact that Krugman is on the East Coast and talking about California as germane to these real issues at all.

    • Dale,

      1. You have to keep in mind the scale of things out West. LA county and the Inland Empire have a combined area well over 30,000 sq miles. the Santa Ana Mountains and San Joaquin Hills are way down in Orange County (aka behind the Orange Curtain). They would be a big factor if you wanted to work in the OC and live in Riverside, but in terms of LA building out, they aren’t a big deal.

      2. We should focus on San Jose because it’s the biggest city in the Bay Area, the center of Silicon Valley jobs and because it has (like most CA cities) a much lower vacancy rate than SF.

      3. The Krugman post was part of thread on the way that the NIMBY/YIMBY framing of the California housing crisis, particularly as covered by New York journalists, is lousy with misconceptions and bad narratives which muddle the actual issues. To the extent Krugman was singled out, it was to show that even the NYT’s best could get caught up in the group think.
      https://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-primer-for-new-yorkers-who-want-to.html

      • Mark
        At this point, I am having trouble understanding what your point is. It seems like you want to double down on everything, so what is your gripe with Krugman, et al? I’ll repeat that I don’t see anything wrong with Krugman’s characterization – yes, there are open spaces (plenty? I’m not so sure) in Southern California, yes time is the real constraint since commuting is a mess, but Krugman is certainly correct that building up is an option and one that is usually constrained by a number of regulations. That is true for almost the entire country and a main reason why US cities look so different than those in Europe (lower density, more reliance on automobiles, less public transit, etc etc). I can’t tell what is really bothering you – is it that Krugman lives on the East Coast, that his statements (e.g. “ringed by mountains”) is technically incorrect, or is it the implicit accusation that NIMBY policies are responsible for unaffordable housing? The latter seems worthwhile for discussion, but the question of whether or not the LA Basin is “ringed by mountains” or how large the area is, strike me as not very important.

      • I have the opposite opinion as you. Krugman as an opinion columnist generally really annoys me, yet these statements in particular seem fine to me. I can’t comment on LA because I don’t know anything about it, but I have lived in the East Bay and worked in San Francisco, and your gripes about Silicon Valley feel pretty spurious.

        1. Whether “Silicon Valley” proper is South Bay or the whole Bay is pretty much semantic
        2. San Francisco has 100% had a tech boom and an associated housing/homelessness crisis
        3. People do object to new building projects in San Francisco, and often do pretend there’s just no more room to build

        Maybe discussing the housing crisis of San Jose is indeed more relevant, and yeah San Francisco soaks up a lot of undeserved national attention. It’s become a representative of Californian blue-state blue-city culturally liberal governance. But that’s not really a factual error, it’s just annoying

  8. Thanks for the link to Observational Epidemiology! I wish I could believe that the billionaire had enough self-insight to be joking (or at least consider why his previous partner wanted to use a surrogate mother before having a second child with him). I am afraid that he really believes it, in the same way Victorian factory owners believed that Britain was in charge of the world and they were in charge of most of Britain out of sheer innate excellence and just providence. Man is the rationalizing animal.

  9. San Francisco may not be relevant for a discussion of housing policy in California but I agree with other commenters that the first remark

    1. SF is not part of Silicon Valley; it’s around fifty miles away.

    doesn’t seem pertinent either. Krugman wrote that

    “I sometimes run into Californians asserting that there’s no room for more housing — they point out that San Francisco is on a peninsula, [Los Angeles …]”

    and there is no mention of Silicon Valley in there.

    I can’t access the full article, I don’t know if there is any passage in the missing text identifying San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Maybe this critique is based just on some pattern matching with this quote several paragraphs above: “a region’s overall growth is determined by the performance of its export industries — that is, industries that sell mainly to customers outside the region, such as the technology firms of Silicon Valley [and the Los Angeles …]”.

    Even if the association was intended it’s not really relevant for the argument – and it’s not really wrong. People from both coasts use “Silicon Valley” to refer to the tech industry in the Bay Area:

    https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-06-22/silicon-valley-layoffs-netflix-coinbase-hiring-freeze-essential-california

    In fact, what seems wrong is the claim that San Francisco is around fifty miles away from Silicon Valley. Under that definition even Palo Alto – less than 35 miles away from San Francisco and known as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley” according to their web page – would be miles away from Silicon Valley.

    • John:

      Thanks for the links.

      The Cochrane article seems overstated to me. First, he says that Krugman is claiming “most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time.” That’s ridiculous. For one thing, Krugman did a lot of research himself—and all of that is since the mid 1960s. Second, it’s not at all ridiculous for someone to say that the mainstream of a respected academic field has been going down a blind alley. Some physicists say this about string theory, some psychologists say this about much of social psychology—heck, I’ve said this about much of social psychology!—also there’s lots of statistics research over the years that I think has been a waste of time. That’s fine—academia moves in many directions—but I don’t buy Cochrane’s claim that there’s something wrong with Krugman being skeptical of swathes of academic economics research. The other thing is that Cochrane talks about “the efficient markets hypothesis . . . probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences.” C’mon. What about those shaky loans and all the rest of it? If Cochrane wants to treat the economy as one big unpredictable black box, he can do so, but meanwhile other people were looking inside the box and seeing problems. Also I don’t get what Cochrane is saying about Bernie Madoff: “He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it.” Huh? Madoff stole the money, no? That’s not the same as giving it to people. Anyway, reading this just makes me feel that I’ve stepped into the middle of an argument, and I wish they could tone things down.

      • Are the “shaky loans” and so forth really a refutation of the efficient-markets hypothesis as Cochrane conceives of it? He’s quite clear that the central claim is about the unpredictability of markets. I almost think it would be better if he dropped the word “efficient” altogether and said “unpredictable” in its place. I can see how economists draw a link between the two, but in ordinary usage they’re so different that using one word for the other is only likely to cause confusion.

        The larger point is whether it’s valid to move from “markets are efficient” to “markets are better than central planning.” The rough argument seems to be that if a central planner is better than a market, then the central planner would be able to outsmart the market; but no one can outsmart the market; so no central planner will do better than the market. But the first premise is suspect. The role of a central planner is not the same as the role of a market participant. It’s conceivable that even if you can’t predict the market price of wheat, you may produce more social utility by controlling the price of wheat rather than letting the market determine it.

        • > He’s quite clear that the central claim is about the unpredictability of markets.

          The thing is, he also acts as if markets *are* predictable. It enables him to make claims like “stimulus is bad because even if it raises share prices temporarily, in the long term it comes at a cost and there will be a correction downwards.” Predictions about the market’s reactions to government intervention are still predictions about the market. If the market is truly unpredictable he’d be out of a job.

    • I’m not really sure how Cochrane banging the drum against government regulation after 2009 is supposed to show Krugman’s columns aren’t informed by data.

  10. Late comment here: I’m not so sure that what Musk said is so unrelated after all. Since 2000, the population of California has increased by 16%, corresponding to 5.3 million people. Hardly evidence of an underpopulation problem, I’d say. Furthermore, the distribution of the population is a lot patchier than in many other places. Most people either live in the Los Angeles-Riverside-San Diego area or the San Francisco-San Jose-Sacramento area. Widely as they may sprawl, they’re still a small fraction of the total area in the state. With so many more people around, it’s surely inevitable that housing prices are going up.

    If total U.S. population stabilizes or even goes down a bit, then I expect the problem will ease considerably.

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