The Hidden Cause of the Industrial Revolution (with Ben Southwood)

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0:36Today is July 1st, 2026, and my guest is Ben Southwood. Ben is a founding editor of Works in Progress and has been head of research at Create Streets and head of housing and policy exchange. Our topic for today is a recent essay you wrote for the Works in Progress newsletter, which I saw on Substack, which I recommend your site. And you also have a print edition in the newsletter. Your essay was called The Secret Cause of the Industrial Revolution. Cue the exciting music.

1:08Ben, welcome to EconTalk.

About Works in Progress

1:10Thanks for having me on. Before we get to your essay, tell listeners what Works in Progress is. A few of my friends and I decided in 2020, when I didn't have any children, so I had a lot more time, and I had a lot more time because I was stuck in my house, we decided to set up an online magazine. We thought that we know so many good people who aren't being given the time of day they deserve, that if we just put their articles on our website, and then we, you know, sat back and enjoyed the rents, then we would really, this would benefit us usually.

1:44And to an extent that worked out, and now I do it as a full-time job, then it was just an unpaid side hustle for fun, now prestige and status maybe. Now it's my actual job, and I spend lots of time thinking about how to make it better. And as you say, we have a print magazine and thousands of subscribers that we send it to, and we're kind of a real media business, although not quite, but on our way to being one if we play our cards right. So yeah, but what do we do? We are about new and underrated ideas to improve the world is our official tagline.

2:18And the way I interpret that is we write a lot about how global health has been improved in the past and how we could do it better today, how new drugs have made our lives better and how we could get more new drugs, how reforms have led to higher efficiency or more technologies being invented or more technologies being deployed or distributing property rights around poor countries has led to economic growth there and poverty reduction. Those sorts of things. Sometimes it's case studies. Sometimes it's making a case for something that we should do, but always trying to bring out parallels that are lessons for growth and progress for the world.

2:55And the version I saw in the Substack version is really quite beautiful. The aesthetics of it are quite nice, and I'm sorry I don't get the print edition, but for people who like beautiful print design, I think you guys are, if it's anything like the newsletter, I'm sure it's beautiful. I can't take any credit for that, but we have an excellent art director, and she does a brilliant job, and we get lots of compliments on our design. Yeah, it's very gorgeous.

The Secret Cause of the Industrial Revolution

3:26Okay, you open your essay with the following. You say, make a very bold claim.

3:34Industrial modernity was invented in the English Midlands around the end of the 18th century, kicking off an unprecedented global rise in living standards that continues to this day. But what made this revolution possible was a lesser-known political revolution that took place in the previous century, a period known in English history as the Glorious Revolution. Today, the Glorious Revolution is remembered for having introduced the system of constitutional monarchy, which subordinated the power of the monarch to parliament.

4:05What is really interesting, though, is how parliament used its new power to untangle excessively strong and complex property rights, making it possible for the first time for sustained investments to take place in infrastructure and agriculture across England. And unlike in most other political revolutions, this happened almost entirely peacefully and with the consent of the people whose rights were being redrawn. End of quote. Great opening. You say, today, the Glorious Revolution is remembered for fill-in-the-blank.

4:39Unfortunately, there are many people listening who don't know. They don't remember it because they've never heard of it. So explain for us outsiders what it was just politically, and then we'll look at its application to the issues of the Industrial Revolution.

Understanding the Glorious Revolution

4:56OK, great. Well, I'm going to be slightly I'm going to draw a slightly strong, stronger parallel than history can actually justify. But I think it's very useful for thinking about the Glorious Revolution. The Glorious Revolution is basically a middle revolution as part of three war slash revolution situations that happen in Britain and America between the early 1600s and the late 1800s. And basically, you can see, if you want, you can see the English Civil War in the mid 1600s, then the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s, and then the American Civil War in the mid 1800s as being like the same struggle playing out a few different times.

5:40And so ultimately, there's, I mean, as I say, I think that this is actually stretching, stretching things, but I think it's a useful way of thinking about things in the Britain, before that England, and then after that, the US. There's ultimately a struggle between older aristocracies, and that depend on rents from their farmland, and they're, you know, they've been they've taken this farmland through conquest hundreds of years before been given it by the king, whatever.

6:12And then new mercantile elites who are growing up because of trade and technology and science and whatever. And I mean, this is, as I said, this is the very broad brush, I think it's actually slightly overfitting things to a simplistic model, but like, it's a nice way of looking at things. And then the civil war, the English civil war, you have this, the mercantile side effectively wins, takes over, but then tries to set up its own hereditary system, everyone decides to restore the king, king comes back, Charles II, son of Charles I, who was executed at the beginning of the English Civil War.

6:50Then when he tries to hand over to, sorry, when he hands over to James I, but when he tries to hand over to James II, who is an open Catholic, then the same mercantile elites are worried, we're going back to absolutism, we're going back to rule by the aristocratic elites, and we're not going to have the system of, I guess, like mercantile freedom that they wanted. But lots of other stuff is wrapped up in that, like different kinds of Christianity and so on.

7:22And so they invite in the ruler of the Netherlands, the ruler of Holland, well, they would have said Holland at the time, William, who happens to be married to the daughter of the English king. And they invade in Devon in southwest England, and pretty much no one puts up a fight. It is actually a massive invasion. A lot of the recent historical work has been highlighting how it's a massive invasion, and there are actually loads of troops, and it was the biggest invasion for a long time before or after in England.

7:56But ultimately, there aren't really any battles. They're very minor. James gives in very easily, and they come, William becomes king, and they reestablish many of the rights that Parliament thought it had. That it kind of lost over the last – the previous 150 years and gained at certain times, then lost, and then gained, and then lost. So the simple story is that out of fear of a Catholic king, some of the influential, powerful people of England decide they'd rather be ruled by a foreigner, although he's married to the daughter of the king.

8:39And they invite him, William, to come be king. And the crucial thing is that he's a Protestant, and their view is that if they've invited him and he's a Protestant, they'll understand that ultimately the aristocracy is in charge, or at least the landowners as a whole are in charge. And the king has an important role. He's very important, single most important guy, but he cannot overrule what Parliament as a whole assembled together on important issues.

9:16So this is a side question for a non-Brit. Why would William accept this? So he thinks – he gets this letter. I'm trying to imagine him sitting wherever he was in the Netherlands. He gets the letter and says, could you come bring a bunch of troops here because we're not happy with this king who's an open Catholic. Open meaning just that it's not a secret. And he says to himself, oh, that'll be great because I'd really like England to help reestablish the power of Parliament and reduce the power of the monarchy.

9:54Usually when you bring a bunch of people with weapons and you're dominant and no one stands up to you, you kind of have a lot of authority and you can decide what it's going to look like. Do you have any idea – this is, again, a side question, but why did he concede to the parliamentary importance? Really interesting question. I'm not sure at all. I don't know the answer to that question. I think he was already kind of keen on taking over England and discovering that there were a big group of powerful people who were up for it made him a lot more interested.

10:30They were called the Immortal Seven who wrote the letter to him. And you can get the actual exact – the letter itself, you can go and look up a picture of it if you like. I guess it's not that long ago, so it still exists somewhere. And we have nice pictures on Wikipedia of the letter. And they said about all the different ways that James II was injuriously riding roughshod over their rights. He was trying to do pretty – it did look like he was trying to head the country towards absolutism in various different ways. For example, like in many countries, the local governments were in charge of running elections, and he was trying to take over all the local governments around the country to install his own guys in there to obviously fix all the elections to get his stooges elected to try and get him to do all of his stuff.

11:20So it isn't just institutional – what is effective in an institutional reform of boosting the power of parliament. It's also making sure that a threat, perhaps exaggerated or not totally real, but a perceived threat or a useful threat to wave around, that the king was going to head back towards some time in the past when the king had more of an authoritarian opportunity. But let's get – let's put that down now.

Reforming Property Rights

11:49So as a result of this, parliament becomes a lot more active and passes a lot more acts. And the opening half or so of your piece is that parliament changes property rights. And I want listeners to imagine this conversation as a conversation about the rules of the game. So you have certain institutional rules, norms, and other kinds of things, but you also have legislation.

12:20And the claim of this piece is that empowering parliament, which was effectively answering to the land-owning class, resulted in a surprisingly positive outcome. As opposed to – to take one of my favorite examples, Japanese farmers, there aren't very many of them, but they – the Japanese diet, the legislative branch of Japan, privileges Japanese rice over world rice because they're powerful, those farmers.

12:52And the rest of the people pay a much higher price for rice to eat it, and that's often the case. You know, the – a special interest group gets its way and extracts resources from the rest of the society. Here you're arguing that the special interest group – not small, but a large group, but it's still a piece of society. The landowners got parliament to do a bunch of things that were highly productive as opposed to extractive.

13:24Is that a fair claim to summarize what you're saying? Absolutely, yeah. So the – two interesting things here. One is that there's a whole bunch of scholarship that thinks the core feature of the Industrial Revolution in institutional terms was constraining the power of the monarch. And I think there's something to that, but it's a bit – I think it's a bit exaggerated how important that is. Because, in fact, what you tend to see is not that the English parliament and the English state is less vigorous than continental states after this point, but actually they seem more vigorous, that they're doing more stuff in general.

14:07It's not that the state has been – More interventionist. Exactly, yeah. I mean, the ways in which they're interventionist are very different, right? Because it's kind of like – if we're drawing the parallels to today, and maybe I'm prefiguring where we're going to go with this conversation, but if I was drawing the parallels to today, it's more like they are intervening to make local governments more yimby, for example. Like, they are being interventionist, but interventionist in a way that is concordant with, like, what you – basically productive, as you're saying.

14:38But, sorry, to go more directly, second point – second point that's interesting is that it wasn't just that parliament happened to be a committee of landowners. It basically was exclusively landowners, and after 1711, you actually had to be a landowner to – you had to own a significant amount of land, otherwise you weren't allowed to stand for parliament. So parliament, to an extent you can't imagine today, it's, like, exclusively made up of landowners. The whole point is basically to sort out landowner problems. They're thinking of things from a landowner perspective.

15:11They are all actually landowners. What you might expect, or what you might predict based on our experiences, like with the Japan example, or thinking about a parliament that people accuse of representing homeowners, say, today in the UK or many other developed countries in the US. What you might expect is that giving them power leads to them coming up with more and more ways to protect these privileges. But strangely enough, almost the opposites happened. Now, they didn't – let's be clear – they didn't remove people's big land holdings.

15:47But the land holdings of the time were not exactly how we would think about property rights. So the kind of standard property right that we have today is – it will be called – what I think is called a fee simple in their terms. But basically, we have loads – we can do whatever we want with it. We can mortgage it. We can sell it off. We can chop it up into different parts. There might be restrictions on these things. But by and large, if we have property rights, we expect to be able to do lots of different things to them. That wasn't the case for the property rights of the 17th century in England and, indeed, anywhere in Europe.

16:25If you were a landowner, you had tenants. You often couldn't kick the tenants off, right? So, like, if you're a German big landowner, your tenants couldn't leave. But also, you couldn't kick them off in the 1600s or 1700s. They had a hereditary right to farm your land. So you were the landowner, but you probably – but you didn't have the same kind of rights that you would expect the landowners to have today. Equally, if you were the mainland owner, almost exclusively men, but whoever was the heir, then you couldn't get rid of it. So if you had a – you might have a big plot of land.

16:58You might want to mortgage one bit of the land. Use that to improve another bit of the land by draining some marshes or by improving the irrigation or by getting a new crop or by buying new animals to, you know, horses instead of oxen. You often couldn't do any of these things. So you would have a life tenancy, basically, where you got a certain income out of the land each year, but you didn't have the right to change anything about the land. And this happened in different ways in different countries.

17:29In England, there was just a long contract which came out of trusts. And, I mean, before the 1300s, you didn't have the right to write a will. So there wasn't such a thing as a will. It was just a set of rules that everyone customarily agreed where property went to. But after that point, you did have a will. And then you would write these really complicated things called entails. And you would settle these entails with your heirs. So when your heir came of age, you and your heir would sign a contract saying that you get this land when I die, subject to all of these different deals.

18:03And the deals would be things like you have to pay dowries out. So if one of your sisters is marrying out, that gets paid out of the land. You can't squander all of the property before her dowry gets paid. You might have a widow who is in the family. You don't want that widow to go without. So the widow gets an income out of this estate as well. You owe that to the widow. You can't split up your estate. And usually they would stop them from mortgaging, selling, splitting because they were terrified that in a few generations, their family would have gone.

18:33No one would know who they are. The land is all broken up. They're all poor or middle class or whatever. And so they signed these contracts. So the property rights of the day, the key thing I'm going to here is not just in that. There are loads of different examples we could give. But the property rights of the day weren't the kind of property rights always that we understand today. And that meant that there were lots of problems with them. And just to add one more piece, and then I want to say something else about the general issue. Talk about commons, the commonly held land, and how important that may or may not have been.

Commons and Open Fields

19:07So, yeah, so another one of the interesting ways in which property rights were held is that there were two kinds of land that basically don't exist today. Common land does exist in small cases. In London, there are lots of individual parks called commons, like Wimbledon Common, Blackheath Common is near me. And this would originally have been common land that, when everything else was turned into houses, stayed as parks in the middle because the rights over who could develop it were complicated.

19:38But this was the case in no less in the 1500s and 1600s. And lots of land would be held in common. And one mistake that people make when they think about this common land is they think that everyone had a right to use this common land. That wasn't usually the case. What was usually the case is this common thing. So basically, there were very complex. If people have read the work of Eleanor Ostrom, then her stuff is often about how people manage these common resources without making them get massively overused. And these commons were an example of that.

20:09So you actually had to be a local landowner to graze your animals on this common land or to use this common land in almost all cases. It's called stinting. You had a certain number of stints and you got the stints from having a certain amount of land. So you have more land. You had more stints. You could graze more animals for more days on the common land. And in some places, the rules were extremely complex. There were special houses called tofts. And if you had a toft, they gave you one extra day per month of grazing your – like, the rules are extremely complicated. And if people are really interested, they can look up Laxton, which was the last open field village.

20:45Now, the – so that common land is where there's a plot of grass, basically, that you can graze your animals on. People get a certain amount of rights of how long they can graze their animals, how often they can graze them. And it was overgrazed. That's the standard, like, tragedy of the commons. You overgraze your – it was overgrazed. But it wasn't overgrazed that much because there were lots of restrictions on how you could graze it. And there was a period of exaggerating how overgrazed it was because people didn't realize about how there were many restrictions. And not just anyone, any local poor person couldn't graze their animals on that land.

21:17And the second kind of land is open land, open fields, the open field system. So across Europe, much of the farmland was under something called the open field system. Basically, one big landowner owns a bunch of land. And then that land is sub-owned, like, by leaseholders, effectively. But tradable leases often – sometimes not tradable. Sometimes they were, like, surf-esque. Surf or they were tied to the land. And sometimes, like, in England after the 1300s, there would be leaseholders who sold subleases, who sold subleases.

21:52And you owned it through an incredibly complex chain up to the original freeholder. And the freeholder was supposed to own it subject to the king anyway. But so the land would be split up into lots and lots and lots of small strips across this big farm. And everyone would have strips split across different farms. And if you're all doing the same crop and you have a very organized system, it's not so bad, right? Because the great thing is you have massive insurance to one idiosyncratic risk hitting a particular field. If you own one whole field and that field gets, you know, a rust disease or that for some reason there's snow on that field or, you know, some idiosyncratic risk hits that field,

22:34then you might just starve to death, you and your whole family. Whereas if you have lots of strips, tiny strips spread across lots of different fields, and you farm them all collectively, so you don't have to re-plow everything, you all plow it together, you put the same crop in each field, then you have insurance. You're never going to lose too much because your strips are all spread out. That's great. The downside is when you want to change crops, use a different method, get a horse instead of an oxen. Horses go much quicker, but they use more food, so you need big fields so they're not turning around all the time.

23:05When you want to make any of these changes, then having your land split out across different places is a big deal. And lots of these changes started coming about. So from the 1500s particularly, people started making lots more innovations. Innovations started picking up. And you get the horse plow risings, one I've already mentioned, but lots of different crops. New world crops, for example, are more like the potato and maize are just better crops than wheat and rye and barley. And so people wanted to implement them.

23:37But if you have, you can't plant a new crop on just one strip of a big field, or at least you can't do that economically. And things like turnips will often grow across the edges, and so your neighbor can take them easily. Or their animals are there, and their animals just eat your plants. Basically, these things require coordination. It's a massive coordination problem when you want to change crops. And in a world of stasis for a long time, it just didn't matter that much. And the insurance benefits were probably worth it in many cases. And you got slow enclosure of some fields as it became really worth doing.

24:10But at this time, suddenly, all fields became worth enclosing, basically, because people needed to make changes. It was impossible to get the kind of consensus needed to make those changes. And so this is just another case, the open and common field system. Common land is the grazing area. Open fields are these big fields. They've got crops in them, but you only own a strip, like a really small strip at a time. These are just two cases of, yeah, sorry. That's the interesting farming system that existed, totally different from what we have now.

24:42Now, I was going to say that a lot of these, quote, inefficiencies, the strip land, which you have no chance of taking advantage of economies of scale, restrictions on how you use land, which means, you're talking about like the dowry for the sister, the widowed sister, or the sister to be married. A lot of these were, quote, inefficient, but they provided a social safety net that otherwise wasn't available.

25:14And in a time of where people are close to subsistence, they're not literally at subsistence, but they're not very far away from starvation. There's a certain natural equilibrium where these, quote, inefficient rules persist because they provide other things other than bigger crops. The only other thing I want to throw in is that my understanding was always that primogeniture, primogeniture, which is the law that requires the oldest son to inherit all the land, was to avoid those kind of strip farming inefficiencies that are really costly.

25:56You talk in the paper about just the time, travel time to go from one piece to the other is going to make you less efficient. But the fact that you don't have a large plot, which means that your horse turns around a lot, I mean, there's all kinds of problems with this kind of system. The only benefit, besides seeing your neighbor more often because his plot is next year's and you're not very, they're not very big, so your neighbor's nearby farming beside you, the only real benefit is this social safety net issue.

26:32Of course, if you're not going to, if you can't imagine improving the land, if you can't imagine the role of a horse, if you can't imagine selling your land and using it to invest in some kind of capital project,

26:47you're kind of, the status quo is going to persist for a long, long time. And it did. We're talking, you know, for hundreds and hundreds and centuries and centuries. The standard of living in the world's agricultural nations, which was almost everywhere, was stagnant and not much higher than in Roman times. There was a little improvement. The plow got a little bit more effective. There was some, that was the technological change. Let's make it sharper. Let's make it sharp instead of round. Oh, good idea. Right? So there were a few innovations, but not much.

27:18So suddenly, and this I think is, you know, you can debate, listeners, you can debate the importance of some, any one of the institutional changes, the acts of parliament that we'll talk about in a second. But just to foreshadow, parliament comes along and does a bunch of things to make, to give people more freedom to do things with their land and sort of link things together and to make bigger plots and to mortgage them and to not have to give, wait for your sister's dowry and so on.

27:52And this unleashes two things, productivity changes in the land itself, but also I assume it also leads to capital accumulation that wouldn't otherwise be available. So this is, this is really important.

Why Parliament Intervened

28:07So the question is, and you can debate how important it is and there is a thousand things happening at the same time. But what I'm curious about is if you have anything to say about why this happened. And so parliament does all this, you have a wonderful set of charts about how active parliament was in legislating. And usually, again, as we said, to begin with, well, that's not usually a good thing. You want parliament to be on vacation, not passing all kinds of legislation. But a lot of this legislation was plot specific, family specific, estate specific.

28:41So it's doing all these interventions that are suddenly giving people more freedom to do with their land what they might otherwise not have thought of doing or being able to do. Why? Why did parliament move in this direction? What are your thoughts?

28:59Yeah, great question. And to some extent, if you look at what parliament was doing when it was active before then, right, so during the 1500s and early 1600s, when it was actually doing stuff. So the issue with parliament in the 1500s and 1600s, especially between the English Civil War in the 1640s and restoration. So after restoration in the 1660s, up to the Glorious Revolution in the 1680s, during this time, the big issue was that parliament just kept getting prorogued.

29:32So what you would do is you'd be a promoter. Getting word. Prorogued. Shut down. Shut down. So they'd shut them down mid-session. So the king could just shut parliament when he thought they were making a mischief. And so he'd call parliament because he wanted to raise some taxes for something and he wanted consent of the governed to raise those taxes. Parliament would come in and then all the landowners would be like, hey, great, parliament's in session. Let's bring a bill to deal with all the problems on my land that I've got and I'll bring it to parliament. And they'd bring the bill and they'd be working through the bill.

30:03They'd be working through the bill. Forty days later, the king would be like, you guys, you won't give me the taxes I want. I'm closing parliament. And so all bills instantly get killed if they're in progress, despite all the time, money and effort you've put into getting that bill through. And so people just didn't bring bills, right? So people would have this extremely big problem, like, I don't know. So the system wouldn't let them cut any of the wood on their land. They'd signed a settlement with their dad and their dad is dead. They need an heir, age 21, before they can change the settlement system to cut the wood.

30:34But it turns out their heir has gone missing, but not proven dead. So they haven't got anyone they can sign with. There's no one that can consent in the country, except for parliament, to them cutting the wood on their thing. It's all going been planted 100 years before. It's all going rotten. They're wasting this massive investment in wood over 100 years of land and time, keeping this wood going. They can't do it. These guys are really annoyed. They come to parliament. Please, can you fix this problem? Please, can you untangle this rights problem I've got? It's not so much like, do I want you to proactively produce some public good or just I have a rights problem.

31:11This is a badly written right. We can make everyone better off or nearly everyone better off. I mean, the really interesting thing you said is carve widows out of their portions and get rid of your sister's dowry. In fact, until the 1880s, when they got rid of entail, strict settlements. So in the 1880s, they just scrapped this system where you can bind all of your heirs to how they use your land that you hand to them. But between the 1400s and the 1800s, we have this system.

31:41After the Glorious Revolution, what they do is not scrap the system and they don't even scrap the system in individual cases. What they do is undo the entail briefly, let you do something and then restore the entail afterwards. And so the key thing here is that you're only allowed to mortgage your land to improve it or cut down the trees to sell them or whatever it is you want to do. Cut a canal through your land. You're only allowed to do any of this stuff if it benefits all the widows, all the dowries, all of the third heirs who get £1,000 a year off your land.

32:12Actually, they tried to do it in a really consensualist way. And so they use two of the things I think are useful for, like, making political changes. One is they've got big legitimacy because it's just a panel of all the landowners saying, what do you landowners reckon is fair for landowners? And then, and of course, since they're dealing with land, they're the right people to have because, you know, when you get a consensus of all those guys, it sounds like all the landowners agree. And two is that in any individual case, they're trying to make as few people worse off as possible.

32:44So it wasn't like they were expropriating all of these streams of money you would be expecting to get into the future. It was just they're saying, if you were alive or if you were here, you would probably want us to increase the value of this property, right? Like, you would probably want us to let the current owner invest. You would like us, like everyone, if you're the, you know, the 10th heir down the chain, you haven't been, you're not a twinkle in the eye yet. No one is, you don't exist in anyone's, yeah, you're the great, great, great grandson of the one who currently exists.

33:16You would prefer when you inherit that this guy right now was given the right to cut his wood down, sell it off to make boats or to drain the land so you can get more higher rents for that period or irrigate or whatever. You would prefer that. So what Parliament was in principle doing was working out with the heirs who don't currently exist like us to loosen this property right in just temporarily. And then they did that on a case-by-case basis, thousands of times, which is amazing to me.

33:48It was basically like a committee they had set up of all the richest guys in the country to decide whether another one of those rich guys was allowed to slightly alter his inheritance rules and his will, which I think is a remarkable, like a very obviously inefficient system. But given the inefficiencies that were in the status quo, turned out to add efficiency, I think. What's great about it is that if you go back to, I want to say it's 2009, I'm just guessing, the first time I interviewed, it might have been the only time.

34:19I interviewed Walter Williams of George Mason University, and I remember we were talking about this idea of if you could pass one piece of legislation, what would it be? And if I remember correctly, Walter quoted Hayek's suggestion, which was that the piece of legislation he would pass would be that all legislation that is passed going forward from today has to apply equally to everyone. And meaning, you can't, you know, go back to another 2009 episode, we were talking about how the financial crisis, in the settlement of the financial crisis's financial, its bailout for financial institutions.

35:12There was a piece in it about the Chevy Volt, which was an electric car, and it just had a set of, it wasn't about the Chevy Volt, it was about electric cars. But they wrote it in a way that it only applied to the Chevy Volt. You know, they were very, it was basically a giveaway of, I think, $7,500 for new to new owners, but it didn't apply. Or, you know, there would be an emissions law about catalytic converters, you had to put a catalytic converter on. Now, it turned out Honda, the Civic, had better environmental impact, meaning fewer emissions, without a catalytic converter than even its competitors did with a catalytic converter.

35:53But, of course, they passed a law that said everybody had to have a catalytic converter, imposing a tax, essentially an equal burden on all competitors so that the American car makers could do a little better. So, these things are common as can be, and worse than that, there's all kinds of legislation in the United States, say, to benefit. You know, there's basically, I think, about 10 families that own the sugar beets and sugar cane that exists in America, and any law about, say, importing sugar, it's a payoff to 10 families.

36:28I mean, it's grotesque. It's an incredible example of rent-seeking, and as I, you know, often point out, those 10 families paid a lot of attention to sugar legislation and quotas, and the rest of us just ate the candy bars and the food that had sugar in it and paid a higher price and didn't think about ever that this was caused by some act of Congress. So, here's the flip side, and what I love about this story is, here's an example where the legislative branch only overwhelmingly passed legislation, it's not really legislation, decreed, created acts that only affected one family.

37:09Forget everybody. One. And it's basically, you know, what we would call a waiver. It's like, okay, we got this law, it's good for a lot of people, but it's really awful for you, and obviously you don't like it, and normally that means too bad. You're by yourself, but no, we got a little desk over here, go make your case, and we'll give you a waiver. Sure, and the amount, and you have charts, as I said in the piece, of the activity of Parliament in this area of dealing with land rights is, it's an explosion.

37:44Yeah. So, you know, I think of it, I don't know if it was good-hearted, I mean, it's not good-hearted, and obviously they were looking for ways to make more money, but they're not using it to make more money at other people's expense. It's not, the right way to say it would be, it's not redistributive. It's not taking people's land and giving it to other people, taking large landowners, putting their land up and share it, forcing them to share it, which would be sometimes what revolutions led to. This is a weird revolution. This is a change in institutional power, the empowerment of a particular class because of the way they dominated the legislature we're talking about, which is Parliament.

38:22And as a result, they're doing ad hoc stuff, and other stuff as well, but ad hoc stuff that actually was maybe for the best, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I personally think that most of what they did had good results. The one we haven't talked about so far, so there were three kinds of bills they did a lot of. One was unpicking particular families' inheritance problems so that they could invest. One was taking land that was either in common ownership or split up into lots of inefficiently small strips and allowing it to be combined into larger, more efficient fields where new techniques could be applied, et cetera, et cetera.

39:01And the third thing they did was to basically let people set up a bunch of toll roads, toll canals, and toll rivers. And so – Go ahead.

Infrastructure and Toll Roads

39:11We're going to – that was my next area. Well, there you go, yeah. Really important. Infrastructure, we would call it in modern terms. Exactly, infrastructure. And later on, they did use these same things to provide other kinds of infrastructure like clean water, gas, electricity. Sewage, I assume. Sewage, exactly. But at this time, that stuff wasn't done so much. But the three things they did an awful lot of were canals, navigable rivers, and building roads.

39:42And so in the 1660s, before the Glorious Revolution, before these acts started being passed, which were called statutory authority acts, basically they set up kind of a company, kind of a form of local government. But the local government, insofar as it was a form of local government, had a really, really skinny territory, right? Like a long, skinny territory. You only apply along the length of this road or this canal or this river. But before these were done, Britain basically had no canals.

40:13Its rivers were not particularly navigable, less so than most of the European rivers. And it had extremely poor roads. So I've read some historians who suggest that the roads in the 1660s were actually worse than the roads under King Alfred a thousand years earlier in the 660s because they still had the declining Roman roads then. And so they were still a bit better, whereas they were genuinely almost unusable in winter and rainy seasons in the 1600s. So just a quote, which I loved, it's, you're right, in 1700s, English road speeds, which were similar to those on the continent, averaged 2.3 miles per hour in summer and 1.5 in winter.

40:51In 17, you know, which the problem we have, I think, as moderns is we've seen too many movies, Dickens or Jane Austen novels, where, you know, there's a group of people in a coach, in a carriage, and they're clip-clopping away at a nice, brisk, maybe 15, 20 miles an hour. The roads really didn't allow that, a mile and a half per hour. So you said, you're right, in 1705, the journey from London to Birmingham, a distance of about 100 miles, 100 miles.

41:23So that's an hour and a half in a car today.

41:28In those days, if you had a fast course, and it could go fast, again, maybe 100 miles would take you six hours. I don't know, I'm just guessing. But in those days, it took 65, 65 hours. That's five days to go 100 miles if you go in daylight. I guess you could go at night if you were really stupid. But it was really, really hard to move things, people or stuff, around. It's hard to imagine how disconnected the city was, given that, sorry, the country was, the world was, when the fastest you can send a letter is that speed, right?

42:06Like maybe if you have a guy changing horses, and it's just one guy carrying one letter, you can go at the speed you're talking about. So like you can get it there in 10 hours or eight hours or something. But sending anything more than that and you traveling yourself is going to take days and days to go between two pretty close cities in a pretty small country. And this means that so much stuff that we take for granted just couldn't happen. Like one that I found while researching this article is that some places would have loads of manure because they were animal farming areas.

42:40And some places would need loads of manure. But transporting was so expensive that it wasn't worth doing. And so there would just be loads piling up, not being used. I wonder what it smelled like. And then loads of areas that had massively lower yields. And it just happened if you were next to one of the areas with loads of spare manure, you would have high yields. But by 1800, when thousands and thousands and thousands of miles of toll roads have been built, thousands of miles of canals have been built, hundreds of miles of rivers have been made navigable with improvements.

43:11By that point, you have this national market in grain, national market in manure, national market in pottery, national market in textiles. And so you start getting concentration of comparative advantages. Like you can't really get Adam Smith's ideal of people specializing their comparative advantages when transport costs are so high. Actually, oversee in a big ship large quantities of high value goods. You can do that even before all of this stuff. But inland, inland just doesn't exist.

43:43So the cheapest place to get like London had stone because there was a place with stone, Portsmouth, Portland, that you could ship around the edge. But nowhere inland had it unless they had stone right there. And London had coal because Newcastle had coal right next to the coast. But getting it even 50 miles inland from Newcastle didn't happen. So you didn't have – no one was using coal 50 miles inland. But they were using it along the coast because you could transport stuff relatively cheaply by ship. So just a footnote, it's – Adam Smith is not comparative advantage.

44:16That's his successor, David Ricardo, which is important compared to advantage. But in this case, it's really Adam Smith's insight that's more important, which is that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. So if you're producing a small amount of something, you just can't use very effective techniques to do it. And if you can't ship it and sell it outside your hometown, you're basically – you're in the Middle Ages, as I like to say, when buy local was the rule of the day and it was really poor.

44:52It doesn't work so well. It's not so pleasant. So I want to talk about the significance of this and comparing it to the rest of continental Europe. But what did parliament do that unleashed toll roads, canals, and making rivers more navigable? Basically, so they just said you're allowed to charge to create them, and we will give you the right to expropriate the land, use eminent domain to get the land on the way. Not always eminent domain, sometimes they bought it, but usually it was just a strip of someone's farmland, so it wasn't a big deal.

45:27And usually the person proposing it was one of the landowners who owned the land. So, again, it wasn't such a big deal because the landowner wanted there to be good roads, wanted to export his grain around the country, was willing to give up a bit of his land. But they did use eminent domain compulsory purchase together. But basically, yes, parliament would – a bunch of landowners of an area would come to parliament and say, I want to build a road here. I want the right to charge a toll, which you can't otherwise charge, and I want to be able to – I promise I will use that money to improve the road.

45:58Or, like, I will raise a loan, use that to improve the road, repay the interest on the loan. Basically the same thing as if you are, I don't know, Harris County in Texas, going to your voters and saying, I want to build a new road in the Hectra toll road network. Will you cover the bond? They wanted to – they asked – they were doing the same thing there. And they – parliament said yes to hundreds and hundreds of these schemes. And sometimes they – as I say, sometimes they expropriated new land to build new roads. They always did that for canals because obviously there wasn't a canal to go from.

46:31They never did that with rivers because they were taking over the existing river. But the river had no owner. So no one could charge. No one improved it. All the ships would break on the rocks and the places would be unsafe to go down. And then sometimes they took over existing roads that were there for a long time. And the road previously had been rubbish but free to travel on. And then afterwards it was improved. They put macadam down or they put stones down or whatever. Instead of mud, which was not a good – those who have been to the United Kingdom know that it does occasionally rain.

47:06So it was – these roads were the reason that travel was a mile and a half per hour, two point – well, that was in winter because it's raining all the time and you can't go fast in mud. But I also learned, an important piece of trivia for me, that this macadam surface, which I'd heard of, it's a form of paving. They would sometimes add tar to it, and that's called tarmac. And tarmac is now – I don't know what it's actually made of, airport runways. But we call – when a plane lands, we say it hit the tarmac.

47:39It's on – the plane's on the tarmac. So it must have been a point in life, if not still the case, that runways were made of macadam with tar added to it, which is tarmac. So thank you for that, Ben. That's really nice to know. And by the way, in England, we call asphalt tarmac. So tarmac to us is just the standard road material, and because of – again, because of the – of old macadams. It's like Googling. It's a search, whether it's on Google or not.

48:11Now, you point out, it says by 1840, you write, by 1840, Britain had 20,000 miles of turnpikes, more than twice France's density of paved road per square mile, and nearly 10 times Spain. By 1760, average travel speeds in France were half of Britain's, meaning Britain's were twice as fast. By 1820, British speeds had quadrupled to eight miles per hour. Dazzling foreign visitors, Carl Philip Baritz, a German traveler in England in 1782, called the country's roads, quote, incomparable.

48:43I am astonished how they have got them so firm and solid. A thousand charming spots and beautiful landscapes in which my eye would long have dwelt with rapture. We're now rapidly passed with the speed of an arrow, eight miles an hour.

48:59But what's – That's like a – Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say that's like a Netherlands football fan in Texas going to a Buc-ee's and being like – they're having the exact same experience of the German travelers in England in the 1780s. Like, how are there roads like this, so big and wide? Yeah, my favorite is the size of the drinks in America for the Europeans. They go, this thing is the size of my head, and there's free refills. Yeah, sometimes there are wonders outside of one's home country that travel allows you to appreciate.

49:30But the point is that these incentives – this is an incredibly important thing. These incentives that were allowed to operate to bring improvement, privately driven with the permission of parliament, to create infrastructure, what we would now call public goods, were extremely – it's got to be unbelievably important.

The Economic Significance

49:51So I just want to – I want to pause here and take stock of the argument because, you know, before we started recording, we talked about some people were skeptical of this, the claims in your piece that really is this – what caused the industrial revolution. I want to say just one thing. Here's what I hear when I read your piece. Agriculture, through a set of legislative changes in property rights, agriculture became more productive. And you give some examples of the actual – the size, the magnitude, of the productivity.

50:22It's not a small thing. It's the most important industry in the country to start with before the industrial revolution. So agriculture suddenly starts to be more productive. Farmland becomes more productive. There's probably the beginning of accumulation of capital, which allows for investment in other things. And then as technology starts to grow, which would be the steam engine and other things that are the more traditional sources of the so-called industrial revolution or the changes in standard living that we're talking about here that begin in the late 17th – mid-17th through century going forward.

50:58With this change in infrastructure, you suddenly have the return to investment in innovation and technology go crazy. It's the equivalent of saying – where I live is a perfect example. Israel is an incredible high-tech powerhouse, an extraordinary innovator. Unicorns per capita are out of control. The amount of innovation here in technology is unbelievable.

51:29If you could only sell it in Israel, it wouldn't be worth doing. Those people would be doing other things with their time, the Israeli high-tech sector. Once you can sell it – and, of course, digitally, you can sell it anywhere at almost no cost. Once you can distribute software, for example, around the world, your market is enormously larger and the economies of scale and the divisional labor does the magical stuff that Adam Smith talks about. And that's not a small thing. It's like saying, well, you know, technology is what drove the industrial revolution.

52:01Well, it can't if you can't use the technology outside your hometown, right? It's one thing to say, well, my hometown has got really great construction equipment because we use steam. Well, what, to build the 40th house after you've built the 39th? But if you're building a factory and you're selling the product of that factory around the world because you can actually ship it somewhere on a carriage and eventually a truck, it makes all the difference. I think one of the lessons I get from your piece – and maybe the claims are overblown and maybe you're making too strong a case.

52:36It's always possible. It's hard to know. It's a speculative piece almost by definition. But it makes you appreciate the unseen infrastructure that has to exist for technology to be worth bringing into the world. And we take it for granted. We always assume government has to do it. Here's a case where government probably just allowed it to happen, which is very cool, through essentially reassigning the property rights for the river or the strip of land that became the canal or the road that got improved.

53:07But whether it's privately done or whether it's government, the role of infrastructure and ability to move stuff around and create national markets is extraordinarily important. And I think it's easy to miss it. And so I think readers who read your piece, and I recommend it, will really benefit from having – it's like lifting up – looking behind the curtain.

53:29Yes, I agree with all of that. And one additional thing I would say is, okay, cards on the table. I think that probably some kind of industrial revolution would have happened if these reforms hadn't happened. I think that the important thing really was the stuff Joel Mokir and Anton Howes talk about, the accelerating innovation. And it happened in stuff that wasn't just classic hard, heavy industries, like watches were getting better.

54:00Actually, Adam Smith speculated about watches getting better. And then I can't remember who, but someone did a paper in the last 10 years showing that he was right. And they were getting like 1% more efficient each year for the whole 1700s up to the time he was writing. He added that it doesn't make people any more likely to be on time for their meetings, but people do like that the time is more accurately kept, even if it doesn't change their behavior. There you go. So I think the overall constant innovation, everyone thinking it's possible to improve things and then trying to do it, that's the most important thing.

54:32But I think sometimes people go a bit too hard in like, oh, it doesn't matter. Everything else can be messed up. As long as you've got the improving mindset, then we're going to get the growth one way or another. And it just doesn't matter if institutions are done well, like technology will solve everything. Obviously, technology is really important and often the most important thing. But there are loads of cases like the Ottoman Empire and de facto preventing the printing press or the Western world and de facto preventing nuclear power from being used since the 1970s, where actually society, institutions can slow down things even when technology is racing ahead.

55:08And if you think about right now, the reason why data centers have become so extremely expensive and then the inputs into data centers like GPUs and memory and energy and so on is because we can't build the physical things, the straightforward stuff, the stuff we know how to do. No technological improvements necessary. Like this is just getting better at what we already know how to do or just allowing what we already know how to do. We're not coming up with ways to do that and that's holding back our growth right now, not the ideas.

55:39It's the application of the ideas rather than having new ideas. And I think both of these things are really important. This case shows us a case where I think the Industrial Revolution probably happened more quickly, more effectively, delivered more benefits and scaled more, as you said, because of these institutional changes that allowed it to happen. And I think that's like the lesson I really want people to get. The other important, the other lesson would be that there are tricks to pulling off these kinds of reforms.

56:10Like when you have these complex overlapping rights where lots of people have an endowment effect and everyone is a bit skeptical of allowing change because they're worried. Am I the widow whose portion is going to get taken away? Am I the sister whose dowry is going to get taken away? Am I the heir who's not going to get their inheritance because my father has gambled it all away, which is, by the way, something that happened all the time. They were constantly gambling away their estates before the settlement system came in.

56:40They were constantly spending their night until 7 a.m. drinking and gambling and gambling like 20,000 pounds. And they even did this, by the way, when they did have settlements, but they could only do it up to a max amount. Like once all the money they were going to get per year was covering interest on the loans that their creditors would give them. Then no one would give them another loan. But anyway, that side is very important too. And many of it, like pulling those things off requires carefully thinking, can I pass this reform?

57:15Do I have a coalition in favor? Even good reforms, like good reforms give you an advantage because you're generating more upside. So you should be able to build a bigger coalition than bad reforms. When bad reforms win, we should think to ourselves, like, how have these guys managed to pull it off when we are offering more benefits than the bad reform guys? Like we should be able to offer more upside because there should be slightly higher growth every time we do a deregulation that improves things or, you know, a fixing a thing. And these guys did that systematically. They came up with ways to get the growthist reform through by buying off all the people who would be affected by the growthist reform.

Sclerosis in Modern Property Rights

57:52So you start off the piece talking about the vitocracy, the ability of players in the political game to veto improvements or efficient legislation or any kind of policy improvement. And it feels like – we used to talk about this a lot on the program, and I think I've told the story before of telling my 11 or 12 or 10-year-old child that we're not allowed to put a – build a building in our backyard and rent it out.

58:27And my son said, what? This is America, meaning in America you have property. You have freedom of property. It's yours. You can do whatever you want with it. And increasingly, it seems in America that's not the case, especially in cities. In cities, lots of people have a veto on what you do with your land, and to do something creative, different, whatever it is with your land requires getting the approval of a long list of players who – and that very uncertainty reduces the incentive of people to make the investments that are necessary.

59:02The length of time it takes means that the return on those investments has to be quite a bit larger, which means many investments can never take place because it's not worth it. So I think we have a very sclerotic property rights system in the United States. You could debate whether there are good things that come from that. You could arguably – and certainly in Europe, and we talk about this all the time on the program. You know, if you go to – I'll take Venice as my latest favorite example.

59:34If you go to Venice, Venice is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's magnificent, and it's so static. It'll – you know, it's – one of the reasons it's beautiful is it doesn't look like anywhere else. One of the reasons it's beautiful is it looks the way it looked more or less 500 years ago, and the idea of putting up a skyscraper there, forget whether it's feasible or not, is offensive because it's like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It's like, well, what are you talking about? You're just spoiling an enormously beautiful human creation.

1:00:06The city itself is a work of art that needs to be preserved, and I'm sympathetic to that. I would say the same thing. I was just in San Francisco. So you drive around San Francisco, and listeners, it's still a very beautiful city. There are certain blocks you don't want to go on, but in general, it's a gorgeous city, and the housing stock there is mind-blowingly beautiful. And I am sure that if you own a certain kind of house there, you can't do whatever you want with it. You can't add a story. You can't change the front. You can't et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and there's a lot of benefits to it.

1:00:38It creates a unique, nostalgic setting, but it comes at a price. And so take us home and talk about what you think should be changed a la the Glorious Revolution in property rights today or in freedom to do what you want with what you own and make it better, at least in your eyes. So I think there are some very interesting points from American history that help us think about this question.

1:01:12In the 1920s, or let's say in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century, if oil was found in a suburban neighborhood, you might just see smoking derricks stuck up next to your house. And I think that there are some people out there who might think, this is freedom, this is progress. But I think basically everyone, including me, including I think that we shouldn't, that it's reasonable to have some constraints on what people do for externality-based reasons.

1:01:47And those extreme cases are like the highest possible externalities, like black smoke flooding into your garden. Those cases, it's reasonable there. And there's a general point, which is that when you're, when you think of a residential property, a lot of what you're buying is not in the property's boundaries, right? And so is it reasonable for people to have a kind of collective ownership over the areas they, over the areas they live in order to make those areas nicer? I think it is reasonable. I think it is reasonable.

1:02:17I think that's a reason why neighborhoods have often been developed en masse in a single go, because then you can deliver more amenities. Like, should we have it that someone could buy up a park and build a skyscraper on your park, therefore causing, losing everyone their access to a park and benefiting them by maximizing the profit of the, but like potentially reducing the total value of the neighborhood. I think that we, it's good to have institutions that deal with that.

Graduated Density and Land Assembly

1:02:41And so therefore, the way I think about things is not, do we want to come up, like, how do we unleash everyone's right to build a skyscraper on their own plot? But more, when it actually does increase the total value of the neighborhood to allow it to be built in a different way, when it is the case that the scarcity of housing or whatever else it is you want to build, the scarcity of housing is so high that you can take a, you know, house per quarter acre development and turn it into a classic row home neighborhood, for example.

1:03:14In a world where you can do that, and at scale, not just individual plots, but at scale make a profit, like it benefits, what you lose in amenities, you over gain in development. I would like to create institutions for doing that. And I think some people have come up with interesting ways of doing that. So one interesting way is Donald Shoup came up with something called graduated density zoning. And what that is, is the larger the assembled plot you have, the greater your development rights.

1:03:48So if you have one plot, just like I'm only one homeowner, I can build the normal amount, which may be a home per quarter acre. We're in like New England suburbs here. But if I own four, then the externalities I impose outside that four lot unit block are limited because I'm not imposing any externalities on the ones that are within my ownership block. So I get a bit more density and that extends outwards. And this has, this is quite powerful tool. So between 1916 and 1961, New York basically had this.

1:04:23They had a rule that you drew a line from the street, the line, a diagonal line upwards, and you could build under that line. And obviously, if you just think about the 3D geometry there, the more you build out that plot, the bigger you can build. And so there weren't any rules for like forcing people to come into your plots. But the bigger your, the bigger your assembled unit of land was, the more rights you got. So you had strong incentives to keep absorbing more. And the Rockefeller Center in the 1930s was built under this system. And you can see the individual plots that they didn't get.

1:04:55They would have made them huge offers. There are like diners, two-story diners, and then like a 50-story building next to it. They will have made them like, you know, in 1930s money, I'll give you a million dollars. Please, you're costing me, you know, 100,000 square foot here or a million square foot from the line you're cutting across my giant building. And the guy said no, but they still managed to assemble a pretty damn good center. And they made like 300 transactions. And only about four people said no. And so that was graduated density zoning.

1:05:25I think that's a great idea. I think versions of it could be used. If you want to go a bit further, Michael Heller, the law professor, came up with something called land assembly districts. And in land assembly districts are very similar to enclosure. So in Britain in the 1680s and 1700s, it's basically the same mechanism. I wonder if he was inspired by enclosure. You get together a group of people, so plots of homeowners, and you don't have to get everyone, right?

1:05:56So you get up to like, you just need 90% of people or 85% of people. And with 85% of people, you can unify your land into one plot, right? And then you each get a share in that. So instead of an even share or a share in proportion to your land contribution or your property value contribution. And so the downside of this, right, is that like enclosure, there might be 10% of people who don't want to enclose their land. Those people get overridden. The upside is that you don't get people carving giant blocks out of a big development because of their holdout rights.

1:06:29And I think it's a genuinely hard question whether we want, like, some questions are always going to involve, for the greater good, some overriding of individual rights. That's just like it's necessary. It's impossible to make some decisions socially that don't have those kind of impacts. But where the right threshold is, whether you should do it at all, whether just graduated density zoning is enough, I'm interested in land assembly districts as another kind of mechanism that would do that. I think fairly, but I don't know if 90% is enough or if it's too much and you should let it happen with 66%.

1:07:03In Israel, they have a system called Tama 38.

1:07:09So maybe you know about it. Individual buildings, if they're built before 1980, can agree to demolish themselves and rebuild them. And they have to get two-thirds approval. So you have to get two-thirds of the residents in the building to approve it. And in this case, your house gets demolished, and you get a nicer, better property back at the end. But if two-thirds of your neighbors agree, then you can, without your consent, see your apartment get demolished. And this is now producing 50% of the homes in Tel Aviv and is a very well-used scheme and hasn't been overturned.

1:07:41There's some controversy, but, like, the forces of anti never quite managed to overturn it. Again, very similar to the mechanism of enclosure. If you vote against it, you do get to live somewhere, by the way. I can't remember what the deal is, but the developer has to pay for your rent. I can't remember the deal, but it's not as bleak. They recently changed the rules so that the developer had to sort you out while it was being done. The original rules were developer comes to a building, says, do you want me to demolish this building, build a bigger one, give you all a nicer apartment in it?

1:08:12They can't just kick you out for nothing. Everyone has to get a nicer apartment at the end. Everyone has to get an equally nicer apartment at the end, like your Walter Williams rule. And they can only propose equal rules to everyone. You can't have it so that two-thirds of the apartment steal the space of the other guys. And then if you can get two-thirds of people to sign up for it, it was originally 80%. And then it was so effective that they decided to reduce the threshold. If you can get two-thirds to sign up, then they demolish it, build the new one, and you get to move back in. And the recent change they did was to make sure that the developer has to house you in the intervening time.

1:08:47Because some people said, no, the house got demolished. They had nowhere to go. They did get a nice apartment at the end, but what happened in between? Yeah, and that would also give the developer an incentive to finish the building sooner than later, which is a serious issue here, as it is in many parts of the world. I bet.

Lessons for the Modern World

1:09:10Let's close with anything else you want to add about the implications of your piece for the modern world or footnotes, anything? So the one overriding idea I have is that the world has rightly discovered that physical constraints are one of the big things holding developed Western countries back. So whereas, especially to a larger extent in the East, where China's building energy infrastructure quicker, it's building train infrastructure quicker, it's building road infrastructure quicker, building homes quicker, it's building water infrastructure quicker, it's building physical things more quickly than the West.

1:09:52And there's a big movement that's arisen to try and tackle this problem in the West. And it's biggest in the US, but it has outposts in Australia and the UK and Ireland and New Zealand and Canada, and to some extent, a growing extent in continental Europe, although continental Europe is a bit behind. And this movement says we need to allow more building, particularly of homes, but like in a wide range of other areas, too. And I think homes is the biggest constraint. So I think that's it's fine that it's particularly of homes.

1:10:23Overwhelmingly, the view of this faction is that the best strategy is to advocate, advocate, advocate, highlight who the enemy is, build up a giant like force of enthusiastic supporters, and then get the highest level of government that they can get control of to force lower levels of government to accept reforms that allow people to do more with their land, that allow more development.

1:10:53That up zone areas that remove urban growth boundaries, and so on. And I'm not saying I think this is this strategy has shown some successes. But if we look at other really controversial land right changes of the past, by and large, very few of them involve this strategy, right? The huge successful ones like in 1947, the eastern Punjab in India, redrew all of its land at once in a single one off big enclosure scheme, right?

1:11:23Now, that wasn't that wasn't that wasn't that was not because of a like, oh, let's like cleverly take over the government and force everyone that this was this was like a popular bottom up thing. I think the glorious revolution shows that the same strategy should be part of our toolkit, not the only part of our toolkit, we should be advocating, we should be convincing, we should be top down in where it works. But I also think that schemes that buy in locals to change can have much more much quicker and more powerful changes, can generate quicker and more powerful changes more quickly, right?

1:12:01Like we can get more powerful upzonings that come in next year, we can get like urban growth boundaries removed, we can build nuclear infrastructure or data centers. And I think that's that's the big lesson I want. And the glorious revolution is just one example. There are many, many, many examples around the world. But I'm interested that there was a case where it went across society, like they did it systematically for a huge range of things. And so that's what inspired me to get an expert to write it with me.

Because by the way, this is a co authored piece with Kara Dimitruk, who is a professor who is a genuine expert on this topic. And I'm more of a dilettante that read read lots and lots and lots about it and have the I'm interested in the world today. And this is my parallel, whereas she's an actual expert. But but yes, that's, that's my story. My story is that like, we can push on multiple fronts at the same time.

This is one of the fronts we should push on if you are one of the people like me, who thinks that restrictions on building in the physical world are holding back to the West.

1:12:55My guest today has been Ben Southwood. Ben, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thanks for having me.

1:13:08This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.