A while back I relistened to almost all of the past Econtalk episodes and one of my favourites was with Enrico Moretti where he was talking about how Berlin's growth strategy was wrong and it wasn't going to work. That was in 2012. Almost precisely where it starts booming.

Moretti: "theories about how important it is to attract the creative class to revitalize a city would predict that cities that have a lot of highly creative young people are the cities that are going to thrive. And I think a great counterexample is Berlin" econtalk.org/moretti-on-job…

"But there is one problem with this picture--which is that it doesn't really create many private-sector jobs. Berlin has for the past 20 years had one of the highest unemployment rates in Germany; one of the lowest per capita income among German states....

"And it basically survives because it's the capital, and therefore it's directly supported by taxpayers everywhere in Germany." . Anyway, here's what I wrote about East Germany's recovery. I wish we had more recent comparable data. Hopefully soon. tomforth.co.uk/humancapital/

@thomasforth This is an excellent read. I’m not optimistic ‘we’ have the guts/ vision to make investments if models don’t show obvious return on investment, like ie more runways in London. Plus bad recent record delivering major projects/ bias to near London. But strange times. Who knows.