&gt; But for the tight limits on construction in California’s Bay Area, they reckon, employment there would be about five times larger than it is.<p>This is farcical.  One reason people flock to the Bay Area is precisely because of the tight limits on construction.  People like sprawled-out, low-density development.  They like to have yards.  They like spacious homes.  They like to see the sky and the mountain vistas and the water.<p>You could lift the limits on land use and densify the area like Manhattan.  But there are only so many workers who will flock to a Manhattan-like locale...and those workers are already flocking to Manhattan itself.  Many American workers simply do not want to live in dense environments like Manhattan.<p>Like an earlier Economist article I think this one misses the possibility that tight controls on land use can make those places more desirable while driving some jobs elsewhere.  Maybe some jobs simply do not exist due to tight Silicon Valley land controls.  But other jobs simply move elsewhere, just as all finance jobs are not in NYC and London.