Seated in two comfy-looking chairs on the Mimi Ohio Theatre stage, Stephen Dubner and Mayor Justin Bibb dug into topics like Cleveland, housing, the pandemic and money on Tuesday night.
The longtime Freakonomics Radio host and co-author of the successful 2005 book Freakonomics was in town to discuss and analyze a variety of topics for a special event hosted by United Way. At first, he gave a half-hour presentation about the health of cities and their future, before being joined by Cleveland’s mayor for a conversation.
Between both components of the far-ranging talk, Dubner touched on plenty of topics, including Sherwin-Williams, the independence of Japanese kids, the work-from-home revolution and more.
Here are a few takeaways.
Housing
Affordable housing has been a problem for cities, Dubner says, but it’s also key to their growth. He spoke to his experiences living in New York City when he discussed the negatives to regulations on new home building and the layers of permitting and taxes that can prevent new builds from taking place and accommodating housing needs.
Later, when Bibb asked Dubner to talk about homeownership and inaccurate bank appraisals, Dubner pointed out out-of-state investment firms disrupting the economics of home-buying in cities like Cleveland.
“Homeownership is in the process right now of being commoditized and monetized in a way that it hasn’t, and that’s not good,” Dubner said, plainly.
COVID
The pandemic’s greatest economic change has been the work-from-home revolution, Dubner says. That change in working environments has already had far-reaching consequences — like parenting loads, political polarization and a lack of mentorship for a young workforce that started during the pandemic.
“Mentorship doesn’t just mean, like, an older person saying ‘Here’s how I do it.’ It means learning how to be a working person, including, like, ‘How many hours do we work?’” Dubner says. “I think on average, what we will also see is that people in that cohort will be less likely to be great leaders, they’ll be less likely to be great innovators, because they didn’t have the opportunity to be taught.”
Cleveland
When Bibb asked Dubner to talk about Cleveland’s impressions, Dubner was flattering, lauding Cleveland’s leadership roles in healthcare, colleges and the arts — particularly, theater. But he encouraged those industries to embrace technological advancements like artificial intelligence in the future.
“When you’ve got industries that you really care about, like culture, like education, like healthcare, we need to be way better at not being luddites and not saying, ‘No, I don’t want the technology to come in here,’” Dubner says. “It’s really important that we work with technology to make ourselves better and more efficient.”