This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 22nd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Great Recession ended more than five years ago,

yet the U.S. economy remains sluggish and growth is well below the long-term historical trend.

Edward Glazer is a professor of economics at Harvard University.

He spoke at the Cato Institute Conference, the Future of Economic Growth.

He argues too little attention is paid to land use

regulation and its impact on economic growth in the United States. So I really

focused on a couple of things, the first of which was exactly this point about land use

regulations.

And this, of course, is my personal hobby, and has been for about 10 years.

Because I believe America has had a redefinition, a revolution in property rights over the last 50 years

that has by and large gone unremarked, unsteady, that to a first order approximation in the 1960s,

if you wanted to build a project in

coastal California you would just go ahead and go ahead and build it and if somebody

needed to get bribed for that to happen you would bribe them and it would move forward and it would all be

swell and good. Today of course to a first order approximation every resident of Berkeley

gets to turn down any project gets a personal veto on not only every project in Berkeley, but really every

project in the Bay Area, right?

So we've moved to a completely different regime about how much growth we can have.

Now this may seem like the sort of pickyune thing that only

someone who's obsessed with local government can care about but it really

...