Smash Notes
Stephen Jennings
Episodes
Notes
Conversations with Tyler · Stephen Jennings on Building New Cities
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Why Does Stephen Jennings Treat Growth as the Default?
Stephen Jennings says per capita GDP growth is the default. Unless a country does things really badly, per capita GDP is going to grow, and it is probably going to grow quite quickly. His bias is massively toward more change and more growth.
The view started in New Zealand. He saw how a country could be changed and how growth could be catalyzed, and he says that opened his mind to change. Humans, he says, evolved over a period of time when no change happened, so people are wired to think the world does not fundamentally change. He calls that a cognitive default. Since the Industrial Revolution, a wider and wider group of countries, with a more and more diverse set of institutional settings
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Why Does Rendeavour Chase Forever Projects?
Stephen Jennings says there are not many perpetual projects anywhere. Few projects literally have a 50 year time horizon, because there is not really very much 50 year capital. Private equity money is supposedly seven years, but you have to sell before the seven years, so private equity is really five years, and people still think of that as long term capital. Development finance institutions say they have long term capital. They do not. They have to generate a return, they talk about exits, and they do not go into 30 year projects.
Rendeavour treats the perpetual horizon as a comparative advantage. The firm looks for less competitive spaces, and virtually no capital is available for very l
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What Would Grow Kenya Tourism So Fast?
Stephen Jennings says Kenya can develop its tourism resources a lot and very quickly. He says the area has been studied and benchmarked against Costa Rica. Costa Rica has similar amenities but has had a tenfold growth in visitor numbers.
Kenya's tourist assets are amongst the best in the world and they are large scale. Promotion and the support for infrastructure have been extremely poor. Visitors come to Kenya and they are completely blown away, yet so many people do not understand the quality of the visitor experience.
A lot of work remains. Stephen Jennings says the work is not difficult and the work can be done very quickly. The task is to promote Kenya and to support key infrastructur
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Why Does City Life Melt Kenya's Tribal Barriers?
Stephen Jennings says urbanization is the sign that Kenyans are coming to think of themselves as a single nation. Kenya has many ethnic groups and tribal groups. Asked whether the soccer team, the music people listen to, or politics is the variable to track, he says it is probably urbanization. Once people move into an urban setting, tribal barriers and differences gradually melt away.
He says the pattern shows up in his office, where most of the staff grew up in an urban context. People there cannot be told apart by tribal background, because they are living together and working together. Through urbanization, he says, the barriers have already eroded massively. Politicians like to stir th
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Why Does Building More Roads Worsen Nairobi Traffic?
Stephen Jennings says Nairobi has done what everybody does with traffic. The city has built more and more road capacity. More capacity creates more demand, so the new roads achieve nothing. The extra capacity has clogged the center of the city more and more.
Congestion charges should be used in Nairobi, as they should be everywhere, but they are harder to do in low-tech settings. Asked whether smartphones can handle the job, Stephen Jennings says the problems are technically easy and politically complicated. People try to blame the technology. The technology exists, was developed a long time ago, and is ubiquitous. The political will to apply the technology is missing. The city will get mor
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Why Is Stephen Jennings Optimistic About Kenya?
Stephen Jennings says Kenya has been on a path of political and economic modernization and development going back to the 80s, and has averaged over 5% GDP growth over that period. Kenya moved away from a one-party system, essentially a dictatorship, toward a vigorous democracy and pluralism, which he says showed up last year.
Infrastructure, the wider economy, school enrollment, and life expectancy have improved with that record. Jennings says every indicator of development, as with much of the continent, has been transformed over the last 25 years, and his expectation is that the transformation will continue. He is more optimistic about the politics because Kenya has a more pluralistic sys