Edward Glaeser

119 results back to index


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“Independent Report on Holyoke Soldiers’ Home COVID-19 Crisis Paints Early Decisions by Superintendent Bennett Walsh as ‘a Catastrophe.’ ” MassLive, June 24, 2020. masslive.com/boston/2020/06/independent-report-on-holyoke-soldiers-home-covid-19-crisis-paints-early-decisions-by-superintendent-bennett-walsh-as-a-catastrophe.html. Bartik, Alexander W., Marianne Bertrand, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, and Christopher T. Stanton. “How Are Small Businesses Adjusting to COVID-19? Early Evidence from a Survey.” NBER Working Paper Series 26989, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, April 2020. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26989. Bartik, Alexander W., Zoe B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, and Christopher T. Stanton. “What Jobs Are Being Done at Home During the Covid-19 Crisis? Evidence from Firm-Level Surveys.”

Also by David Cutler The Quality Cure Your Money or Your Life Also by Edward Glaeser Triumph of the City Cities, Agglomeration and Spatial Equilibrium Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (with Alberto Alesina) Rethinking Federal Housing Policy (with Joseph Gyourko) PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.

Artsy, Avishay. “Boyle Heights, the Land of Freeways.” KCRW, October 6, 2015. www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and-architecture/boyle-heights-the-land-of-freeways. Ashraf, Nava, Edward Glaeser, Abraham Holland, and Bryce Millett Steinberg. “Water, Health and Wealth.” NBER Working Paper Series 23807, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, September 2017. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23807. Ashraf, Nava, Edward L. Glaeser, and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. “Infrastructure, Incentives, and Institutions.” American Economic Review 106, no. 5 (May 2016): 77–82. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20161095. Ashton, Rosemary.


pages: 329 words: 85,471

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

Kautsky further observed that the individuals most likely to leave the countryside were “propertyless labourers, and of these the unmarried” and that it was “not simply the physically strongest, but also the most energetic and intelligent” that migrated (p. 224). 39 Mario Polèse. 2009. The Wealth and Poverty of Regions. Why Cities Matter. University of Chicago Press, p. 139. See also Edward Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin Press, p. 7. 40 Mario Polèse. 2009. The Wealth and Poverty of Regions. Why City Matters. University of Chicago Press, p. 140. 41 Edward Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin Press, p. 70. 42 Ben Worthen. 2010.

Huber and Mark P. Mills. 2000. “How Cities Green the Planet.” City Journal (Winter) http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_1_how_cities.html. 50 Ed Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. How our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Penguin Press, p. 201. 51 David Owen. 2009. “Is Locavorism Good for the Environment?” http://www.davidowen.net (September 9) www.davidowen.nethttp://www.davidowen.net/david_owen/2009/09/is-locavorism-good-for-the-environment.html.His more detailed argument can be found in David Owen. 2009. Green Cities. Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.

Were they worse off in the city, they would move back to the countryside.39 Polèse also observes that it “should thus come as no surprise that attempts to slow down or to stop urbanization have failed miserably” and that in places like China where political authorities were able to do so temporarily, the result was “even greater rural-urban income disparities and an explosion of urbanization once the measures [were] lifted.”40 People should be given the alternatives that only large and prosperous, if chaotic and unsettling, cities can offer. As the economist Edward Glaeser observes: “Megacities are not too big.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

In Atlanta, the city’s outer suburban ring: “Real Estate Expert Dubs Area ‘Ring of Death,’” wsbtv.com, June 2, 2011. In December 2011, one foreclosure “heat map”: Alexander Soule, “Feds Consider Changes for Seized Foreclosures,” Westchester County Business Journal, January 23, 2012. The economist Edward Glaeser: Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Rethinking the Federal Bias Toward Homeownership,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 13, no. 2 (2011): 5–37. Also see “Ed Glaeser on Why Cities Matter,” video produced by CEOs for Cities, December 27, 2011.

A litany of volumes have come out in the past few years praising cities and urbanism, titles like Richard Florida’s popular The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life and The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work; Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay; The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt; and Edward Glaeser’s love letter to cities, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. Highbrow publications like Salon.com and The Atlantic have launched new sections of coverage devoted entirely to cities. Our nation’s big cities have bloomed in the last decade. Reversing a ninety-year trend, in 2011 our largest cities grew more quickly than their combined suburbs. In many of the biggest cities, downtown populations grew at double-digit rates from 2000 to 2010. It’s particularly pronounced in cities like New York, which saw the population within a two-mile radius of city hall grow by nearly forty thousand people from 2000 to 2010—even in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and where new census numbers show a net population inflow for the first time in fifty years.

Besides, no one is suggesting that this group is going to rush entirely to the center of big cities. The right urbanized suburbs will do the trick just fine for many in this generation. “We don’t hate the suburbs, we just hated to be bored—or boring,” says Gen Y expert Hira. Indeed, the economist Edward Glaeser points out that when it comes to the younger generation, there is little distinction between city and suburb if all needs and services are within walking distance. “If they can walk everywhere and there’s tons of stuff that they can walk to, then it’s a city.” Even, he says, if it happens to be an urbanized neighborhood in a suburb.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Just look at jointly written academic papers: Gaspar and Glaeser, “Information Technology and the Future of Cities.” Since the 1980s: Gaspar and Glaeser, “Information Technology and the Future of Cities.” “She was dissatisfied”: Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, p. 51. The business guru Michael Porter: Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review 76, no. 6 (November–December 1998): 77–90. A group of four economists: Edward L. Glaeser, Hedi D. Kallal, Jose A. Scheinkman, and Andrei Shleifer, “Growth in Cities,” Journal of Political Economy 100, no. 6(December 1992): 1126–52. Nor is this the only: Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, “The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from US Cities,” NBER Working Paper 10904, November 2004, available at: ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jecgeo/v6y2006i1p9-44.html.

THE WORLD IS SPIKY The World is Spiky: I stole this delightful title from Richard Florida’s article with Tim Gulden in The Atlantic, October 2005. “Our dollar looks the same”: Daniel Gross, “The Value of a New York Dollar,” New York, November 6, 2006. The bottom line: Gross, “The Value of a New York Dollar.” Ed Glaeser, the Harvard-based economist: Edward Glaeser, “Are Cities Dying?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2(spring 1998): 139–60. “Who needs a network?”: Jeff Jarvis, “Points to Forbes,” blog posting, www.buzzmachine.com/2007/04/23/points-to-forbes. “Great are the advantages”: Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, eighth ed.

The idea of using rents: Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, chapter 18, gives a great account of the Lucas lecture and its importance. The lecture was eventually published as “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics 22 (1988): 3–42. When, in 1959: Interview with Gary Becker, September 2005. See “It’s the Humanity, Stupid,” FT Magazine. Ed Glaeser found it: Edward Glaeser and David Maré, “Cities and Skills,” NBER Working Paper 4728, May 1994. Studying the official records: It may be an underestimate because Jaffe and his colleagues eliminated cases where, say, an IBM patent cited an earlier IBM patent, because they weren’t sure whether this sort of citation was just cheap talk or suggested some real inspiration from the earlier patent.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

*See “Remuneration of Health Care Professionals,” OECD, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_REAC. *Heather Hahn et al., “Why Does Cash Welfare Depend on Where You Live?” Urban Institute, June 5, 2017, www.urban.org/research/publication/why-does-cash-welfare-depend-where-you-live. *Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, “Why Are Welfare States in the US and Europe So Different?” Horizons Stratégiques, 2006. *Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), tables 9.1 and 9.2. *Michelle Ye He Lee, “Trump’s ridiculous claim that veterans are ‘treated worse’ than undocumented immigrants,” Washington Post, September 13, 2016.

*Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, “On the Spatial Economic Impact of Global Warming,” Journal of Urban Economics, May 15, 2015. *James Pethokoukis, “How will America’s economy grow in the 2020s? My long-read Q&A with Peter Klenow,” American Enterprise Institute, January 16, 2020, www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/how-will-americas-economy-grow-in-the-2020s-a-long-read-qa-with-peter-klenow. *Edward L. Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston: 1630–2003,” Journal of Economic Geography, 2005. *Gregory Clark, “Microbes and Markets: Was the Black Death an Economic Revolution?” Journal of Demographic Economics 82, no. 2, June 2016, 139–65, https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2016.6. For an even more optimistic account, see Peter Temin, “The Black Death and Industrialization: Lessons for Today’s South,” VoxEU, June 4, 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/economic-history-and-economic-development.

*Frank Morris, “Critics of Relocating USDA Research Agencies Point To Brain Drain,” All Things Considered, September 10, 2019, www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759053717/critics-of-relocating-usda-research-agencies-point-to-brain-drain. *Ed Kilgore, “Smug, Elitist Senator Attacks Middle-Class Journalist as a Smug Elitist,” New York, October 22, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/smug-elitist-senator-hawley-attacks-humble-journalist.html. *Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 4. *Adam Ozimek, Kenan Fikri, and John Lettieri, “From Managing Decline to Building the Future,” Economic Innovation Group, April 2019. *John Lettieri, “Want to Fix the United States’ Immigration and Economic Challenges?


pages: 342 words: 86,256

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Betz, Eric. “The First Nationwide Count of Parking Spaces Demonstrates Their Environmental Cost.” The Knoxville News Sentinel, December 1, 2010. Branyan, George. “What Is an LPI? A Head Start for Pedestrians.” ddotdish.com, December 1, 2010. Brooks, David. “The Splendor of Cities.” Review of Triumph of the City by Edward L. Glaeser (New York: Penguin, 2011). The New York Times, February 7, 2011. Brunick, Nicholas. “The Impact of Inclusionary Zoning on Development.” Report of Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, bpichicago.org, 2004, 4. Buiso, Gary. “Marty’s Lane Pain Is Fodder for His Christmas Card.”

Dom Nozzi, http://domz60.wordpress.com/quotes/. 16. Owen, 19, 23. 17. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation, 7–12. 18. Edward Glaeser, “If You Love Nature, Move to the City.” 19. Owen, 2–3, 17. 20. Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer, Resilient Cities, 7, 88. 21. Ibid., 92. 22. John Holtzclaw, “Using Residential Patterns and Transit to Decrease Auto Dependence and Costs.” 23. “2010 Quality of Living Worldwide City Rankings,” Mercer.com. 24. Newman, Beatley, and Boyer, 99. STEP 1: PUT CARS IN THEIR PLACE 1. Dom Nozzi, http://domz60.wordpress.com/quotes/. 2.

“Traffic Fatalities and Injuries: The Effect of Changes in Infrastructure and Other Trends.” Center for Transport Studies, London, 2002. Noonan, Erica. “A Matter of Size.” The Boston Globe, March 7, 2010. “Off with Their Heads: Rid Downtown of Parking Meters.” Quad City Times editorial, August 8, 2010. Peirce, Neal. “Biking and Walking: Our Secret Weapon?” citiwire.net, July 16, 2009. _____. “Cities as Global Stars.” Review of Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser. citiwire.net, February 18, 2011. Peterson, Greg. “Pharmaceuticals in Our Water Supply Are Causing Bizarre Mutations to Wildlife.” alternet.com, August 9, 2007. Pucher, John, and Ralph Buehler. “Cycling for Few or for Everyone: The Importance of Social Justice in Cycling Policy.”


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

Dubner, “Toward a Unified Theory of Black America,” New York Times Magazine, March 20, 2005. We are also grateful for the excellent article by Mark Warren in Esquire, “Roland Fryer’s Big Ideas” (December 2005). See also: David M. Cutler, Roland G. Fryer Jr., and Edward L. Glaeser, “Racial Differences in Life Expectancy: The Impact of Salt, Slavery, and Selection,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University and NBER, March 1, 2005; and Katherine M. Barghaus, David M. Cutler, Roland G. Fryer Jr., and Edward L. Glaeser, “An Empirical Examination of Racial Differences in Health,” unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and NBER, November 2008. For further background, see: Gary Taubes, “Salt, We Misjudged You,” The New York Times, June 3, 2012; Nicholas Bakalar, “Patterns: Less Salt Isn’t Always Better for the Heart,” The New York Times, November 29, 2011; Martin J.

Thanks to Jonathan Rosen for pointing out this idea. 32 CONSIDER A PROBLEM LIKE SUICIDE: For a fuller treatment of this topic, see Stephen J. Dubner, “The Suicide Paradox,” Freakonomics Radio, August 31, 2011. We are particularly indebted to the broad and deep research of David Lester, as well as multiple interviews with him. We also relied heavily on David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Karen E. Norberg, “Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide,” from Jonathan Gruber (editor), Risky Behavior Among Youths: An Economic Analysis (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Various reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Vital Statistics System were very helpful; see also Robert E.

Dubner, “100 Ways to Fight Obesity,” Freakonomics Radio, March 27, 2013; Pablo Monsivais and Adam Drewnowski, “The Rising Cost of Low-Energy-Density Foods,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 107, no. 12 (December 2007); Tara Parker-Pope, “A High Price for Healthy Food,” The New York Times (Well blog), December 5, 2007; Cynthia L. Ogden, Cheryl D. Fryar, Margaret D. Carroll, and Katherine M. Flegal, “Mean Body Weight, Height, and Body Mass Index, United States 1960–2002,” Advance Data from Vital and Health Statistics 347 (National Center for Health Statistics, 2004); David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Why Have Americans Become More Obese?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003). 108 CONSIDER A 2011 TRAFFIC ACCIDENT: See Josh Tapper, “Did Chinese Laws Keep Strangers from Helping Toddler Hit by Truck,” The (Toronto) Star, October 18, 2011; Li Wenfang, “Hospital Offers Little Hope for Girl’s Survival,” China Daily, October 17, 2011; Michael Wines, “Bystanders’ Neglect of Injured Toddler Sets Off Soul-Searching on Web Sites in China,” New York Times, October 11, 2011.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Kaufman (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2010). 24.The possibilities and limits of distributive analysis are discussed in Lisa Robinson, James Hammitt, and Richard Zeckhauser, “Attention to Distribution in US Regulatory Analyses,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 10, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 308–28. 25.Henig, The End of Exceptionalism. 26.David Schleicher, “City Unplanning,” Yale Law Journal 122, no. 7 (2013): 1670–737; Roderick Hills and David Schleicher, “Planning an Affordable City,” Iowa Law Journal 101 (2015): 91–136. 27.See Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Happier, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), p. 162. 28.See Edward Glaeser, “Land-Use Restrictions and Other Barriers to Growth,” in Reviving Economic Growth: Policy Proposals from 51 Leading Experts, ed.

Gabe, “Productivity and the Density of Human Capital,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report no. 440, March 2010 (revised September 2011), http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr440.pdf. 17.See Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, pp. 94–95. 18.Enrico Moretti, “Estimating the Social Return to Higher Education: Evidence from Longitudinal and Repeated Cross-Sectional Data,” Journal of Econometrics 121 (2004): 175–212. 19.Ryan Avent, The Gated City (Amazon Digital Services, Kindle Edition, 2011). 20.See Edward L. Glaeser and Kristina Tobio, “The Rise of the Sunbelt,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 13071, April 2007, http://www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf. 21.See Ganong and Shoag, “Why Has Regional Convergence in the U.S. Declined?” 22.Enrico Moretti and Chiang-Tai Hsieh, “Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 21154, May 2015, http://www.nber.org/papers/w21154. 23.See Jesse Bricker et al., “Changes in U.S.

Fischel, “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for Its Exclusionary Effects,” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 317–40, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wfischel/Papers/02-03.pdf. 2.See Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven E. Saks, “Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 11129, February 2005, http://www.nber.org/papers/w11129.pdf. 3.Glaeser et al., “Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?” 4.Glaeser et al., “Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?” 5.See Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, “The Causes and Consequences of Land Use Regulation: Evidence from Greater Boston,” Journal of Urban Economics 65 (2009): 265–78, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/the_causes_and_consequences_of_land_use_regulation_evidence_from_greater_boston_2009.pdf. 6.See Edward L.


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Belinda Lanks, “The Incredible Shrinking City,” Metropolis, April 17, 2006. 20. Tom Leonard, “US Cities May Have to Be Bulldozed to Survive,” Telegraph, June 12, 2009. Also see Edward L. Glaeser, “Bulldozing America’s Shrinking Cities,” New York Times, June 16, 2009, retrieved from http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/bulldozing-americas-shrinking-cities. 21. For a history of planned shrinkage and benign neglect, see Deborah Wallace, A Plague on Your Houses (London: Verso, 2001). 22. My team and I have conducted a wide variety of research on this point. For our city and regional findings, see my “Worsening Unemployment,” Atlantic, July 3, 2009; “Unemployment’s Geography,” Atlantic, June 5, 2009.

Calculation by the blog Discovering Urbanism, “Charting the Reinvestment in Central Cities,” October 5, 2009, based on Census data, retrieved from http://discoveringurbanism.blogspot.com/2009/10/charting-reinvestment-in-central-cities.html. 9. Discovering Urbanism, “Charting the Reinvestment in Central Cities.” 10. Quoted in Conor Dougherty, “Cities Grow at Suburbs’ Expense During Recession.” 11. William H. Frey, The Great American Migration Slowdown: Regional and Metropolitan Dimensions, Washington D.C., The Brookings Institution, December 2009. 12. Edward L. Glaeser, “How Some Places Fare Better in Hard Times,” New York Times Economic blog, March 24, 2009, retrieved from http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/how-some-places-fare-better-in-hard-times. 13. The one other type of place that my research shows does well with this demographic is great college towns near the heart of megaregions such as Austin, part of the Dal-Austin megaregion; Boulder, part of the Denver-Boulder megaregion; and Raleigh-Durham in Char-lanta.

America’s “pro-suburb, pro–big home policies,” writes Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, “help keep America’s households consuming plenty of energy, both inside the home and in the car.” On average, he calculates, if a family moves from a home two miles away from the center of the city to one ten miles away, it consumes about a hundred more gallons of gas per year.6 The greenness of cities also reflects their fast metabolism. When members of the Santa Fe Institute looked at environmental emissions, they found that the same scaling effect applies to city size: large cities use energy more efficiently and produce fewer carbon emissions.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

“No Parking,” The Economist, March 24, 2012. 57. See Christopher H. Wheeler, “Cities and the Growth of Wages among Young Workers: Evidence from the NLSY,” Working Paper 2005-055A (St. Louis, Mo.: Federal Reserve Bank, 2005). Edward Glaeser and David Maré discovered that workers in large metro areas eventually accrued a 33 percent wage premium, which stayed with them even after they left the metro, indicating that being in the metro mix with other skilled people makes individuals more productive. Edward L. Glaeser and David C. Maré, “Cities and Skills,” Journal of Labor Economics 19 no. 2 (2001). 58. See Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Penguin Group, 2010), pp. 9–10. 59.

There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to flourish in fairly compact geographic concentrations. “Innovations cluster in places like Silicon Valley because ideas cross corridors and streets more easily than continents and seas,” as the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser puts it.16 In that respect, technology is no different from the garment industry that flourished in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, film production in Hollywood, music recording in Nashville, computer chip making in Portland, or scores of other examples from around the world and across centuries. All of these industries benefit from—even depend on—the effects of clustering.

“Engineering a Tech Sector,” Center for an Urban Future, 2007 (www.nyc future.org/images_pdfs/pdfs/Engineering_A_Tech_Sector.pdf). 15. Edward B. Roberts and Charles Eesley, “Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Sloan School of Management and the Kauffman Foundation, 2009), p. 5. 16. Edward L. Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), p. 36. 17. Mark Muro and Bruce Katz, “The New ‘Cluster Moment’: How Regional Innovation Clusters Can Foster the Next Economy” (Brookings, 2010), p. 10. 18. Rui Baptista and Peter Swann, “Do Firms in Clusters Innovate More?”


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Between 1982 and 2012 farms under one hundred acres grew: Ibid. “The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers”: Edward L. Glaeser, Matthew Kahn, Manhattan Institute, and UCLA, “Green Cities, Brown Suburbs,” City Journal, January 27, 2016, https://www.city-journal.org/html/green-cities-brown-suburbs-13143.html. Poland, for example, today has… thirty-three of the Continent’s fifty most polluted cities: Maciek Nabrdalik and Marc Santora, “Smothered by Smog, Polish Cities Rank Among Europe’s Dirtiest,” New York Times, April 22, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/world/europe/poland-pollution.html.

So more homesteaders would have meant more land under cultivation, more water and fertilizer used, and so on. Second, rural life is less environmentally friendly than urban or suburban dwelling. City folk live in high-density, energy-efficient apartments and condos, travel only short distances for work and errands, and frequently use public transportation. None of these things is true of country living. As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth.

“The ‘three strict bans’ will continue to be enforced”: “China Postpones Lifting of Ban on Trade of Tiger and Rhino Parts,” Reuters, November 12, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-wildlife/china-postpones-lifting-of-ban-on-trade-of-tiger-and-rhino-parts-idUSKCN1NH0XH. “Traditionally, economists have been skeptical”: Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser, and Lawrence H. Summers, “Saving the Heartland: Place-Based Policies in 21st Century America,” in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Conference Drafts, 2018. Glaeser is forthcoming… shrinking social capital: Eduardo Porter, “The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy,” New York Times, December 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/14/opinion/rural-america-trump-decline.html.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The builders who did survive tended to be more conservative, and across the industry developers focused on higher-end projects whose rent and sale prices could overcome steadily rising labor costs and the various fees and layers of process that were now baked into how cities did things. Just as all this was happening, a revival of the exclusionary zoning research of the sort first kicked up by Bernard Frieden started seeping into urban politics, led by a Harvard economist named Edward Glaeser. Glaeser was an urban romantic who grew up in Manhattan riding graffiti-covered subways in the late 1970s. Now he studied cities in an imperial, six-columned building on the edge of Harvard Yard. His office was comically messy, full of disjointed stacks of books and paper and a collection of stained teacups with dried-out bags still inside them, and this seemed reflective of his academic specialty, which was to plumb the hidden economic order that lies below the chaos of urbanity.

CHAPTER 2 The history of how land use became an issue of growing economic importance and study was based on the books, news clippings and academic papers listed in the endnotes, combined with interviews with about a dozen academics, notably Kenneth Rosen, Jennifer Wolch, and Enrico Moretti at UC Berkeley; Edward Glaeser, Lawrence Katz, Jason Furman, and Daniel Shoag at Harvard; Peter Ganong at the University of Chicago; and Michael Storper at UCLA. The early history of the YIMBY movement was based on first-hand reporting and interviews with several policy writers including Matthew Yglesias, Ryan Avent, and Kim-Mai Cutler, as well as dozens of early YIMBYs, notably David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington, Will Toor of Better Boulder, Laura Loe Bernstein of Share the Cities, Madeline Kovacs of Portland for Everyone, Alan Durning of the Sightline Institute, Janne Flisrand of Neighbors for More Neighbors, Susan Somers of AURA, Alexander Berger of the Open Philanthopy Project, John Myers of London YIMBY, and Anders Gardebring of YIMBY Stockholm.

It helped that economists were still producing studies and that those studies were becoming ever more severe in their conclusions and commanding ever higher levels of attention. Two of Ed Glaeser’s former students published a paper that argued antigrowth land-use policies had raised housing costs to the point that zoning rules were now stunting American migration and raising inequality by making it prohibitively expensive for people who didn’t have a high-paying job or family money to move to cities where the best-paying jobs were growing fastest. A second pair of economists put the cost of this problem, tallied across all the lost jobs and missed opportunities that people who would have moved but didn’t missed out on, at about 10 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, or $1.7 trillion a year.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

When that illusion possesses us, it is not long before our ascent finds its opposite number in the terror of the fall.’ 8. Housing: Luxified Skies Building Up to ‘Save’ the City? In March 2011, Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser wrote a manifesto for the building of vertical cities in the Atlantic magazine.1 Arguably the world’s most influential urban economist, Glaeser playfully invoked the Book of Genesis, citing the builders of the legendary Tower of Babel when they declared, ‘Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.’

See his ‘Figures of Destructuration: Terrorism, Architecture, Social Form’, November 2009, available at bratton.info. 67Ibid. 68Darton, ‘Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism’. 69It must be stressed here that there is no evidence that Atta and his colleagues had any way of predicting, let alone planning, the final collapse of the buildings once they had been struck by the two aircraft. 8. Housing: Luxified Skies 1Edward Glaeser, ‘How Skyscrapers Can Save the City’, Atlantic, March 2011. See also his Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, New York: Penguin, 2012. 2Ibid. 3See Richard Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’, Washington Monthly 34:5, 2002, pp. 15–25. 4Jamie Peck, ‘Edward Glaeser’s City: A Triumph of Economism’, unpublished paper, 2014. 5Glaeser is affiliated with the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, which was a key intellectual player behind George W.

– Goldhagen, ‘On Architecture: Living High’ No area of the politics of the vertical dimension comes close in importance to that of housing. With urban populations mushrooming and 75 per cent of the world’s population of 11 billion likely to be living in cities by 2050, the stacking of housing will inevitably, as Ed Glaeser argues, be a crucial factor in the future of humanity. Equally clearly, the sprouting of towers for the super-rich that in many cities now constitutes de facto housing policy is a social catastrophe in the making. The parallel transformation of cities discussed here is the material and often dystopian embodiment of the ways in which the current neoliberal version of capitalism continues to concentrate ever more extreme amounts of wealth and resources into the hands of the very few, to be used to sustain speculative dynamics that accentuate this wealth further while severely damaging the lives and life chances of everyone else.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Grusky and Szonja Szelényi (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007). 8. Mitchell Petersen and Raghuram Rajan, “Does Distance Still Matter? The Information Revolution in Small Business Lending,” Journal of Finance 57, no. 6 (December 2002): 2533–70. 9. Christopher R. Berry and Edward L. Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities,” Papers in Regional Science 84, no. 3 (December 2005): 407–44. 10. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation,” rev. ed., NBER Working Paper No. 21154, May 2017. 11. Han Kim, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales, “Are Elite Universities Losing their Edge,” Journal of Financial Economics 93 (2009) 353–81. 12.

Bruce Katz and Jeremy Novak, The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017). 10. See Antoine Van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation (New York: Hachette, 2016); James Fallows and Deborah Fallows, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018). 11. See Katz and Nowak, New Localism. 12. See Katz and Nowak, New Localism. 13. See Fallows and Fallows, Our Towns. 14. See Benjamin A. Austin, Edward L. Glaeser, and Lawrence H.

Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 36. Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, “Corruption and Reform: An Introduction,” in Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s History, ed. Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14. 37. See, for example, John Joseph Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History,” in Corruption and Reform, ed. Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). 38. Hicks, Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931). 39.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

There were few natural meeting places for people from different firms to mix, no Wagon Wheel restaurant. There were fewer weak ties.44 Cities Come Back—with Weak Ties After the disastrous 1970s, when the future of cities seemed bleak, people returned. In the 1980s, housing prices began to rise in the same cities that had experienced drops in the previous decade. New York City gained population. Personal income in cities increased, too, reversing declines in the 1970s. Not all cities added people and income. Edward Glaeser discovered that there was a complete switch in the types of cities that grew. In 1950, seven of the eight largest cities had a higher percentage of people employed in manufacturing than the nation as a whole.

The Economics of the Big Sort: Culture and Growth, in the 1990s 1. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 129. 2. See Bill Bishop and Mark Lisheron, "Cities of Ideas" (series), Austin American-Statesman, 2002, http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/content/specialreports/citiesofideas/. 3. Edward L. Glaeser and Christopher R. Berry, "The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities" (Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper 2091, August 2005), p. 10, http://www.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2005papers/HIER2091.pdf. 4. Richard Florida, "The World Is Spiky"Atlantic, October 2005, pp. 48–49. 5.

Glaeser and Berry, "The Divergence of Human Capital," pp. 10–11. 6. Joe Cortright, "The Young and Restless in a Knowledge Economy" (report prepared for CEOs for Cities, December 2005), p. 30. 7. Edward Glaeser and Jesse M. Shapiro, "City Growth and the 2000 Census: Which Places Grew, and Why" (Center of Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Brookings Institution, May 2001), p. 9, http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2001/05demographics_edward-glaeser-and-jesse-m—shapiro.aspx. 8. Glaeser and Berry, "The Divergence of Human Capital," pp. 2–11. See also Michael E. Porter, "The Economic Performance of Regions," Regional Studies 37, nos. 6 & 7 (August/October 2003). 550–51. 9.


pages: 168 words: 46,194

Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, energy security, framing effect, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, nudge unit, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler

See CHANGING BEHAVIOURS: THE RISE OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STATE (Rhys Jones et al. eds., 2013). 33. A positive answer is vigorously defended in SARAH CONLY, AGAINST AUTONOMY: JUSTIFYING COERCIVE PATERNALISM (2012). Negative answers are defended in RICCARDO REBONATO, TAKING LIBERTIES: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF LIBERTARIAN PATERNALISM (2012); Edward L. Glaeser, Paternalism and Psychology, 73 U. CHI. L. REV. 133 (2006); and Joshua D. Wright & Douglas H. Ginsburg, Behavioral Law and Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty, 106 NW. U. L. REV. 1033 (2012). 34. See THALER & SUNSTEIN, supra note 9, at 252. 35. For one example, see Paul Rozin et al., Nudge to Nobesity I: Minor Changes in Accessibility Decrease Food Intake, 6 JUDGMENT & DECISION MAKING 323, 329 (2011). 36.

., Libertarian Paternalism, Information Production, and Financial Decision-Making (June 6, 2012) (unpublished manuscript), http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~sgervais/Research/Papers/LibertarianPaternalism.WP.pdf. 6. MILL, supra note 2. 7. Id. 8. Id. 9. Id. 10. See JOHN Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), for a version of this argument. Related discussion can be found in Edward L. Glaeser, Paternalism and Psychology, 73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 133 135–42 (2006), which emphasizes the ability of those in the private sector to balance relevant values and to incorporate new information. 11. Mill, supra note 2. 12. Id. 13. See Cass R. Sunstein, Impersonal Default Rules vs. Active Choices vs.

Persp. 3 (2012). It is clear that more research is needed on this topic. FIVE Soft Paternalism and Its Discontents 1. See Ry. Express Agency v. New York, 336 U.S. 106, 112–13 (1949) (Jackson, J., concurring). 2. Id. 3. F. A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty 155 (1960). 4. See Edward L. Glaeser, Paternalism and Psychology, 73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 133, 149 (2006). 5. See Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism 7–8 (2012), for the suggestion that nudging can be both manipulative and ineffective, thus giving us “the worst of both worlds.” 6. See Glaeser, supra note 4, at 151. 7.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

Rent control doesn’t increase the supply and tends to constrict it because people don’t give up bargain apartments, and developers are wary of building if they think their returns will be held down. In some cities, owners can also convert rentals to unregulated condominiums. Meanwhile, rent control tends to increase demand, so you have more people competing for fewer apartments. There’s also a growing consensus among economists that zoning rules—such as limiting many areas for single-family dwellings—reduce the supply of affordable housing and thus increase homelessness. Builders often find it more lucrative to supply housing for the top end while neglecting the low end. In some areas, the economists Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko concluded, “our evidence suggests that zoning and other land use controls play the dominant role in making housing expensive.”

., “Stable Homes Make Stable Families,” Children’s HealthWatch What If? series, July 2017. These are areas lacking adequate affordable housing: Andrew Auramd, Dan Emmanuel and Diane Yentel, “Out of Reach: The High Cost of Housing,” National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2018. one shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of one’s income on housing: Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability,” NBER working paper, March 2002. “our evidence suggests”: Ibid. “zoning and other land-use controls contribute significantly”: “Housing Development Toolkit,” The White House, September 2016, p. 7. financial literacy programs have had a mixed record: See Daniel Fernandes, John G.

the incidence of child neglect rose by 20 percent: Dan Brown and Elisabetta De Cao, “The Impact of Unemployment on Child Maltreatment in the United States,” University of Essex, UK, working paper, March 2018. in Flint, Michigan, where 35 percent of men of prime working age were not employed: Edward Glaeser, Lawrence Summers and Benjamin Austin, “A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland,” The New York Times, May 24, 2018. See also Benjamin Austen, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers, “Saving the Heartland: Place-Based Policies in 21st Century America,” Brookings Institution, March 8, 2018. There’s growing interest in Congress in job-creation programs. But at a time of full employment, it may not make sense to introduce such a program at a national level.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Gaspar, Jess, and Edward L. Glaeser. 1998. “Information Technology and the Future of Cities.” Journal of Urban Economics 43 (1): 136–56. Giorgio Marrano, Mauro, and Jonathan Haskel. 2007. “How Much Does the UK Invest in Intangible Assets?” CEPR Discussion Papers, No. DP6287. http://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/6287.html. Giorgio Marrano, Mauro, Jonathan Haskel, and Gavin Wallis. 2009. “What Happened to the Knowledge Economy? ICT, Intangible Investment and Britain’s Productivity Record Revisited.” Review of Income and Wealth 55 (3): 686–716. Glaeser, Edward L. 2011. Triumph of the City. Macmillan. Glaeser, Edward L., Hedi D.

Finally, to reap the benefits of spillovers people can organize themselves in various ways. One of the most obvious of these is into cities. As Edward Glaeser, one of the leading economists working on cities, has put it, one of the puzzles of urbanization is the increased willingness of people to pay very high rents to live next door to other people paying very high rents (Glaeser 2011). This seems a particular puzzle in our connected world, where the importance of proximity would surely have declined. One answer is that the spillover benefits of living in cities have increased. Indeed, given the undoubted increase in the disbenefits—congestion, prices, and air pollution—there must be some offsetting benefits, and those might very well be around the chances of more interactions and collaborations.

The cities where housing prices have risen dramatically tend to be the ones with thriving economies, where it is hard to build new dwellings. But this explanation only raises a further question: Why are the economies of some of these cities thriving? Here we can turn to the work of the economist Edward Glaeser, whose influential research has focused on how economic growth happens in cities (see, for example, Glaeser 2011). It had long been known that cities are rich in spillovers. Dense populations mean people exchange, observe, and copy ideas from one another. Initially, economists had focused on spillovers within industries; the Marshall-Arrow-Romer spillovers we referred to in chapter 4. Glaeser’s research highlighted the importance of a different effect: positive spillovers between industries.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“The National Debt and Washington’s Deficit of Will.” Washington Post, 15 April. Akerlof, George. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84:3, pp. 488–500. Alesina, Alberto, and Edward Glaeser. 2006. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001. “Why Doesn’t the US Have a European-style Welfare State?” Discussion Paper No. 1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Institute for Economic Research. Alesina, Alberto, and Dani Rodrik. 1994. “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth.”

At a broad level, the differences between countries with similar average levels of GDP per head and similar economic structures means that actual measured inequality must result from differences in the ways their labor markets and tax and welfare systems operate. These economic institutions clearly embed social and political attitudes. And it has been frequently noted and confirmed that the United States does have a different culture of money making and an admiration for financial success. For example, Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser set out convincing evidence on different attitudes to inequality in the United States and Europe.25 Figure 8. America has once before seen today’s extreme inequality. Krugman’s point was that the recent increase in inequality went well beyond the traditional spirit of can-do and aspiration in America.

“The Contribution of New Technology to Economic Growth: Lessons from Economic History.” Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (Second Series) 28, pp. 409–40. Csikszentmilhalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins. Cutler, David, Edward Glaeser, and Karen Norberg. 2000. “Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide.” Working Paper No. W7713. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. London: Green Print.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Currid, Elizabeth. The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cutler, David M., and Edward L. Glaeser. “Are Ghettos Good or Bad?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 3 (Aug. 1997): 827-72. Cutler, David M., Edward L. Glaeser, and Karen Norberg. “Explaining the Rise in Youth Suicide.” Chapter in Jonathan Gruber, ed. Risky Behavior Among Youths: An Economic Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Cutler, David M., Edward L. Glaeser, and Jacob L. Vigdor. “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto.” Journal of Political Economy 107, no. 3 (June 1999): 455-506.

Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2011 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Edward Glaeser, 2011 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Glaeser, Edward L. (Edward Ludwig),———. Triumph of the city : how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier / Edward L. Glaeser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-101-47567-6 1. Urbanization. 2. Cities and towns—Growth. 3. Urban economics. 4. Urban sociology. I. Title. HT361.G53 2011 307.76—dc22 2010034609 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

“Water, Water Everywhere: Municipal Finance and Water Supply in American Cities.” In Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., pp. 153-84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Davey, Monica. “Detroit Mayor’s Tough Love Poses Risks in Election.” New York Times, Sept. 25, 2009. Davis, Heather Greenwood. “Dubai Hits the Heights Again: World’s Tallest Tower Goes over the Top with Luxury Complex.” Toronto Star, Jan. 7, 2010, Travel. de Long, J. Bradford, and Andrei Shleifer. “Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of Law and Economics 36 (Oct. 1993).


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

These two objectives are directly related to the overall goal of maximizing the size of a city’s labor markets, and therefore, its economic prosperity. Notes 1. Edward L. Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz, “Consumer City,” Journal of Economic Geography 1, no. 1 (2001): 27–50. 2. The Internet is certainly able to spread knowledge quickly without requiring spatial concentration. However, the impact of the Internet on disseminating knowledge might be similar to that of books: it makes knowledge available quickly and cheaply, but it doesn’t replace the serendipity of a random meeting of people with similar interests. 3. Shlomo Angel, Planet of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012). 4.

Fansler, “The Economics of Urban Sprawl: Theory and Evidence on the Spatial Sizes of Cities,” Review of Economics and Statistics 65, no. 3 (1983): 479–482, quote on 479. 20. Jan K. Brueckner, “Urban Sprawl: Lessons from Urban Economics,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2001. 21. Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” NBER Working Paper 9733, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 2003. 22. Marcial H. Echenique, Anthony J. Hargreaves, Gordon Mitchell, and Anil Namdeo, “Growing Cities Sustainably,” Journal of the American Planning Association 78, no. 2 (2012): 121–137.

He warns that reducing arbitrarily the urban area generated by distorted market forces might reduce urban welfare significantly, without addressing the negative effects created by the distortions. Many urban economists have argued against containment policy, pointing to its social cost and its unconvincing environmental advantages. Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn write:21 Sprawl has been associated with significant improvements in quality of living, and the environmental impacts of sprawl have been offset by technological change. Finally, we suggest that the primary social problem associated with sprawl is the fact that some people are left behind because they do not earn enough to afford the cars that this form of living requires.


pages: 456 words: 185,658

More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws by John R. Lott

affirmative action, Columbine, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, G4S, gun show loophole, income per capita, More Guns, Less Crime, Sam Peltzman, selection bias, statistical model, the medium is the message, transaction costs

However, the effect of an unusually large percentage of young males in the population may be mitigated because those most vulnerable to crime may be more likely to take actions to protect themselves. Depending upon how responsive victims are to these threats, the coefficient for a variable like the percent of young males in the population could be zero even when the group in question poses a large criminal threat. 23. Edward L. Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Is There More Crime in Cities?” Harvard University working paper, Nov. 14, 1995. 24. For a discussion of the relationship between income and crime, see John R. Lott, Jr., “A Transaction-Costs Explanation for Why the Poor Are More Likely to Commit Crime” Journal of Legal Studies 19 (Jan. 1990): 243–45. 25.

What makes these graphs particularly surprising is that a gun ban should, everything else equal, actually cause nongun suicides to rise simply because at least some (if not all) of those who would use guns to commit suicide would use some other way of doing so. After all, the ultimate public policy goal would seem to be to reduce overall suicides and not just one method of committing suicide. Yet even more perverse results have been obtained. David Cutler, Edward Glaeser, and Karen Norberg have conducted by far the largest study on what factors are related to suicides by juveniles.165 They find some evidence of a relationship between higher gun ownership and suicide, but that relationship not only disappears but is in fact reversed when they include a variable for the rate at which people go hunting.

That research provides extremely strong evidence that these questions were answered consistently between 1988 and 1996. See John R. Lott, Jr. and Larry W. Kenny, “How Dramatically Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” University of Chicago School of Law working paper (1997). The relative differences in gun ownership across groups is also consistent with recent work using other polls by Edward Glaeser and Spencer Glendon, “Who Owns Guns?” American Economic Review 88 (May 1998). The empirical work that will be done later will allow us to adjust for the changes in the reported level of gun ownership that might result from the change in this question. 6. I appreciate Tom Smith’s taking the time to talk to me about these issues on May 30, 1997. 7.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. , accessed 08/08/2010). The analysis relating gas prices and housing draws from Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” NBER Working Paper, May 2003; and Census Bureau, American Housing Survey of the United States, 2007 and 1997 editions (found at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/nationaldata.html, accessed 08/13/2010). The comparison of urban patterns in Moscow with those of other cities draws from Alain Bertaud and Renaud Bertrand, “Cities Without Land Markets, Location and Land Use in the Socialist City,” the World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 477, June 1995, in Journal of Urban Economics, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 137-151. 11-12 When Prices Misfire: The anecdote about incentives and births in Australia comes from Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, “Born on the First of July: An (Un)natural Experiment in Birth Timing,” Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 93, 2009.

,” New York Times, February 14, 2000; and Dan Hammermesh, “Time to Eat: Household Production Under Increasing Income Inequality,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 89, No. 4, November 2007, pp. 852-863. 77-78 La Joie de Vivre: The impact of higher taxes and stronger unions on working hours in Europe is discussed in Edward Prescott, “Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than Europeans?,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, July 2004, pp. 2-13; Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?” NBER Working Paper, April 2005; and Olivier Blanchard, “The Many Dimensions of Work, Leisure, and Employment: Thoughts at the End of the Conference,” comments on papers presented at the Rodolfo DeBenedetti conference on “Are Europeans Lazy, or Are Americans Crazy?”

The relation between religious attitudes and people’s opportunities in the secular world is discussed in Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungerman, “The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?” NBER Working Paper, July 2006; Jonathan Gruber, “Pay or Pray? The Impact of Charitable Subsidies on Religious Attendance,” NBER Working Paper, March 2004; and Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, “Education and Religion,” NBER Working Paper, 2001. 185-188 What Does It Cost?: Maimonides’ comment on circumcision is found in Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated from the original Arabic text by M. Friedlander, 2nd edition (Charleston, S.C.: Forgottenbooks. com, 2008), pp. 646-647.


pages: 430 words: 109,064

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Census Bureau, Housing Vacancies and Homeownership, Table 14, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/historic/index.html. 59. Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse M. Shapiro, “The Benefits of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction,” Tax Policy and the Economy 17 (2003): 37–82, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140504. 60. Edward L. Glaeser, “Attack of the Home Buyers’ Tax Credit,” Economix Blog, The New York Times, November 10, 2009, available at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/attack-of-the-home-buyers-tax-credit/. The paper he cites is Denise DiPasquale and Edward L. Glaeser, “Incentives and Social Capital: Are Homeowners Better Citizens?” (NBER Working Paper 6363, January 1998), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w6363.pdf; compare Tables 2 and 4. 61.

Or it may be the product of various government policies designed to encourage homeownership. There may also be an element of truth to this idea; homeownership is generally thought to create positive externalities, since homeowners are on average more likely to devote effort to improving their communities. After reviewing other empirical studies and doing their own analyses, Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro conclude: [T]here is a limited body of evidence suggesting that homeownership creates positive spillovers for near neighbors. Homeowners do appear to be more active citizens. They vote more. They take better care of their homes. Houses that are surrounded by homeowners are worth a little more than houses that are surrounded by renters.59 However, much of the positive effect of homeownership is due not to ownership itself, but to other factors that differentiate owners and renters.

The Center for Responsible Lending found that subprime borrowers ended up paying the equivalent of 1.3 percentage points of interest more for loans obtained through mortgage brokers than they would have paid borrowing directly from a retail lender.19 The city of Baltimore sued Wells Fargo, alleging that the company systematically targeted minority borrowers through such policies as offering bonuses for steering borrowers who would have qualified for prime loans into subprime loans instead.20 According to Shaun Donovan, secretary of housing and urban development, 33 percent of subprime mortgages in New York City went to borrowers who could have qualified for conventional loans.21 These examples demonstrate that unscrupulous brokers and lenders, armed with dense fine print, can induce consumers to choose products that are not in their best interest.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In this book, we bring together insights from a wide range of disciplines in order to inform our understanding of the challenges facing cities and their potential. Historians, economists, sociologists, urban planners and other experts all look at cities through different lenses. Each are valuable, but problems do not emerge in disciplinary silos, nor do solutions. We are far from the first to recognize the fundamental importance of cities to the modern world. Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs and many other excellent books over recent years have laid a trail before us, as have canonical works such as Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development.

Using a compelling combination of history and data, the authors remind us that life is better lived in urban streets and cafes than in Zoom waiting rooms. This is an important read for anyone who cares about cities.’ Professor Edward Glaeser, Economics Department Chair, Harvard University and author of Triumph of the City ‘A compelling, holistic and well-balanced narrative on the critical role of cities in an age of global warming – full of insights based on hard data. From cover to cover, a great read. Full of positive ideas for the future, and grounded in vital lessons from the past. The authors link together many disparate subjects into one integrated whole – bringing alive history, planning, infrastructure, pandemics, urbanism, deprivation, industrialisation, fertility, wars, governance and more – all in support of the city.’

For generously taking time from their busy schedules to offer us their wisdom, we would like to thank: Ed Glaeser, Chairman of the economics department at Harvard and one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of cities; Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford and a renowned authority on the Silk Roads; John-Paul Ghobrial, Professor of Global and Modern History at Oxford and a valued colleague of Ian’s at Balliol College; Lord Norman Foster, not only a world-renowned architect but also an insightful observer of the built environment; Billy Cobbett, director of Slum Dwellers International with a lifetime of experience working to understand and improve cities in developing countries; Robert Muggah, co-author with Ian of Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years and an expert on all things cities; and Carl Frey, Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Work and an innovative economic historian.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Desperate for a place to live but worried they can be evicted any day because it’s not their land, they build makeshift housing that sticks out like scars on the urban landscape. These are the famous third-world slums. Making matters worse, as Ed Glaeser has argued in his wonderful book Triumph of the City, are city planners who resist building dense neighborhoods of high-rises for the middle class, aiming instead for a “garden city.”56 India, for example, imposes draconian limits on how high buildings can be, much stricter than what is found in Paris, New York, or Singapore. These restrictions result in massive urban sprawl and long commutes in most Indian cities. The same problem also shows up in China and many other countries, albeit in a less extreme form.57 For the would-be low-income migrant, this set of bad policy choices creates an unenviable trade-off.

Romer, “Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 5 (1986): 1002–37, https://doi.org/10.1086/261420. 34 Danielle Paquette, “Scott Walker Just Approved $3 billion Deal for a New Foxconn Factory in Wisconsin,” Washington Post, September 18, 2017; Natalie Kitroeff, “Foxconn Affirms Wisconsin Factory Plan, Citing Trump Chat,” New York Times, February 1, 2019. 35 Enrico Moretti, “Are Cities the New Growth Escalator?” in The Urban Imperative: Towards Competitive Cities, ed. Abha Joshi-Ghani and Edward Glaeser (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 116–48. 36 Laura Stevens and Shayndi Raice, “How Amazon Picked HQ2 and Jilted 236 Cities,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2018. 37 Amazon HQ2 RFP,” September 2017, https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything/test/images/usa/RFP_3._V516043504_.pdf accessed June 14, 2019. 38 Adam B.

The kind of mathematics it used, which is an application of the branch of applied math called “game theory,” is now taught to economics undergraduates. 52 Banerjee, Enevoldsen, Pande, and Walton, “Information as an Incentive.” 53 World air quality report, AirVisual, 2018, accessed April 21, 2019, https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities. 54 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007): 141–68. 55 Global Infrastructure Hub, Global Infrastructure Outlook, Oxford Economics, 2017. 56 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (London: Macmillan, 2011). 57 Jan K. Brueckner, Shihe Fu Yizhen Gu, and Junfu Zhang, “Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China’s Building Height Limits,” Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 4 (2017) 663–77. 58 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “Barefoot Hedge-Fund Managers,” Poor Economics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). 59 W.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It is the equivalent of creating jobs in a city but then denying those jobs to any applicant who comes from somewhere else. Moreover, it is likely to accelerate the displacement of poor residents, not to slow it down. The reason is quite simple: rationing new housing in a city invariably results in even higher real estate prices. It makes intuitive sense: if there is high demand for housing in a city, reducing supply can only raise the price. In a series of recent studies, the urban economist Ed Glaeser and various collaborators have uncovered clear evidence that cities that adopt more restrictive residential development policies invariably end up with higher housing costs relative to wage levels.

“Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82, no. 2 (May 1968): 175–97. Kane, Yukari Iwatani. “Overseas Start-Ups Move In.” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2011. Kerr, William R. “The Agglomeration of U.S. Ethnic Inventors.” In Edward L. Glaeser, ed., Agglomeration Economics, pp. 237–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Kissack, Andrea. “Electric Vehicle Companies Tap Silicon Valley Cash.” Morning Edition, NPR, October 13, 2010. Klepper, Steven. “The Origin and Growth of Industry Clusters: The Making of Silicon Valley and Detroit.”

In particular, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Paul Oyer, Pat Kline, Giovanni Peri, Jesse Rothstein, Alex Mas, Michael Yarne, and Willem Vroegh read early drafts (or parts of early drafts) and were generous with insightful comments and constructive criticism. Bruce Mann and Matt Warning were kind enough to provide me with useful information about the history of Seattle. Throughout the project I benefited from conversations with Nick Bloom, John Van Reenen, Severin Borenstein, Ward Hanson, Mark Breedlove, Ed Glaeser, Jacques Lawarree, Gerald Autler, Marc Babsin, Ben Von Zastrow, Marco Tarchini, Ted Miguel, Antonio Moretti, and Giacomo De Giorgi. Alex Wolinsky and Joyce Liu, two exceedingly bright, curious, and hardworking Berkeley students, provided excellent research assistance and helped me improve the text.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

Source: Sarah Williams After extracting the data our team began to develop a predictive model to identify pockets of vacancy in existing cities.17 After a few failed attempts, including one process that looked at activity levels based on Weibo data (China's Twitter equivalent), the team homed in on a model shaped by the idea that healthy communities have good access to amenities—restaurants, banks, schools, malls, beauty salons, grocery stores, and other commercial establishments.18 According to quality-of-life researchers, amenities help determine housing decisions.19 Edward L. Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz (2001), for example, argue that the future of cities will depend on the availability of such amenities and the consumption capital they generate.20 Similar work in China has shown that there is a positive relationship between housing prices and urban public amenities such as public transit, parks, and educational institutions.21 Given how the presence of amenities suggests the health of a community, we assumed that residential areas with no amenities in close proximity were likely to be vacant or partially occupied.

And we didn't know exactly what data we might use, although we had a hypothesis. Finding out that certain data sets do not work is also important to work like this. 19 Sherwin Rosen, “Wage-Based Indexes of Urban, Quality of Life,” Current Issues in Urban Economics, 1979, 74–104. 20 Edward L. Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz, “Consumer City,” Journal of Economic Geography 1, no. 1 (2001): 27–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/1.1.27. 21 Siqi Zheng and Matthew E. Kahn, “Land and Residential Property Markets in a Booming Economy: New Evidence from Beijing,” Journal of Urban Economics 63, no. 2 (March 1, 2008): 743–757, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2007.04.010; Siqi Zheng, Yuming Fu, and Hongyu Liu, “Demand for Urban Quality of Living in China: Evolution in Compensating Land-Rent and Wage-Rate Differentials,” Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 38, no. 3 (April 1, 2009): 194–213, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-008-9152-0; W.

Edward Coulson, “The Impact of China's Housing Provident Fund on Homeownership, Housing Consumption and Housing Investment,” Regional Science and Urban Economics 63 (2017): 25–37. 12 Edward Glaeser et al., “A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 1 (2017): 93–116. 13 Michael Batty, “At the Crossroads of Urban Growth,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 41 (2014): 951–953; Jing Wu, Joseph Gyourko, and Yongheng Deng, “Evaluating the Risk of Chinese Housing Markets: What We Know and What We Need to Know,” China Economic Review 39 (July 1, 2016): 91–114, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2016.03.008; Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World's Most Populated Country (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2015); Christian Sorace and William Hurst, “China's Phantom Urbanisation and the Pathology of Ghost Cities,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46, no. 2 (2016): 304–322. 14 Shepard, Ghost Cities of China. 15 Guanghua Chi et al., “Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China,” ArXiv:1510.08505 [cs.SI], October 28, 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08505. 16 Xiaobin Jin et al., “Evaluating Cities’ Vitality and Identifying Ghost Cities in China with Emerging Geographical Data,” Cities 63 (March 2017): 98–109, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2017.01.002; Yongling Yao et al., “House Vacancy at Urban Areas in China with Nocturnal Light Data of DMSP-OLS,” Proceedings of 2011 IEEE International Conference on Spatial Data Mining and Geographical Knowledge Services, June 29–Jult, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDM.2011.5969087; Chi et al., “Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China.” 17 Predictive data models often use statistical methods.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

Specifically, the technicalities involved in integrating the Krugman-Venables logic with the Grossman-Helpman logic were first worked out in a paper on the geography of growth takeoffs that I wrote with Philippe Martin from the Paris School of Economics and Gianmarco Ottaviano from the London School of Economics (Richard Baldwin, Philippe Martin, and Gianmarco Ottaviano, “Global Income Divergence, Trade, and Industrialization: The Geography of Growth TakeOffs,” Journal of Economic Growth 6, no. 1 [2001]: 5–37). 3. Edward L. Glaeser, “Why Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities?” Economix (blog), New York Times, May 19, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/why-has-globalization-led-to-bigger-cities/?_r=0. 8. RETHINKING G7 GLOBALIZATION POLICIES 1. Reported in Pew Research Center article, “Faith and Skepticism about Trade, Foreign Investment,” September 16, 2014, based a poll of forty-four nations, http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/09/16/faith-and-skepticism-about-trade-foreign-investment/. 2.

Or to put it differently, where will the industrial zones for this type of “industrial” activity be? Cities as Twenty-First-Century “Factories” According to Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, talented people gather in cities because this makes them more productive. What this means for rich-nation competitiveness policy is straightforward. Human capital and cities are likely to be the foundations of the twenty-first-century landscape of work. Cities are where people meet and form local networks for face-to-face connections and exchanges. They are where people exchange ideas and where competition among ideas plays out. Cities are where most new technologies develop and start-ups flourish.

As numerically minded readers will have already understood, it was exactly this growth gap—plus the inescapable implication of growth compounding—that put the “great” into the Great Divergence after just a few decades. Urbanization The only fact of the first unbundling that is left unaccounted for concerns urbanization. Urban economics has many explanations for the close association between globalization’s first unbundling and rising city size. Among the most compelling is Ed Glaeser’s simple assertion that cities are a way of economizing on communication costs. Cities are where people meet and exchange ideas. As Glaeser put it in a 2009 Economix blog post: “Globalization and technological change have increased the returns to being smart; human beings are a social species that get smart by hanging around smart people.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Wherever the demand for innovation comes from, it tends to be supplied in cities. Jane Jacobs, a great American urbanist, pointed this out in the 1960s.598 More recent research by Ed Glaeser of Harvard University documents this. In his masterful Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, he explains how most innovation takes place in diverse, densely populated cities, where people are forever interacting with each other and experiencing new things.599 “We are a social species and we learn by being around clever people,” he observes.600 “Cities have long sped this flow of ideas.

Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University finds that it takes ever more people to produce new research, a trend he attributes to the increasing “burden of knowledge” associated with rising technological complexity and an expanding knowledge base.604 One reason why Europe is not as innovative as America – in particular, why it has nowhere that rivals Silicon Valley – is that its digital innovators are spread across many locations, where there is not a dense enough network to produce as many new ideas. Ed Glaeser and Matthew Resseger of Harvard University find that in highly skilled areas, city size explains 45 per cent of the variation in worker productivity.605 It’s not just that smart workers choose to live in bigger cities. The cities themselves seem to promote learning: newcomers tend to enjoy faster wage growth over time. The McKinsey Global Institute reckons that around three-quarters of the productivity gap between the US and Europe is due to Europe’s relatively small cities.606 At the very least, then, Europe should stop subsidising people to stay in rural areas.

title=File:Gross_domestic_expenditure_on_R%26D,_2000-2010_%28%25_share_of_GDP%29.jpg 595 http://www.oecd.org/site/innovationstrategy/45183382.pdf 596 http://www.oecd.org/site/innovationstrategy/45184357.pdf 597 Nick Bloom, Mirko Draca and John Van Reenen, “Trade Induced Technical Change: The Impact of Chinese Imports on Innovation and Productivity”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 1000, 2011 http://www.voxeu.org/article/who-s-afraid-big-bad-dragon-how-chinese-trade-boosts-european-innovation 598 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House: 1961 599 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, Macmillan: 2011 600 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d6074404-48f5-11e0-af8c-00144feab49a.html 601 http://www.economist.com/news/business/21581695-city-leaders-are-increasingly-adopting-business-methods-and-promoting-business-mayors-and-mammon 602 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 1890 603 Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin and Bhaven Sampat, "The diffusion of scientific knowledge across time and space: Evidence from professional transitions for the superstars of medicine", NBER Working Paper #16683, January 2011 604 Benjamin Jones, "The burden of knowledge and the ‘death of the renaissance man’: Is innovation getting harder?"


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Blalock’s Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research. The interview with Amos Hawley was conducted at his home in March 2008. He died August 31, 2009. Marshall McLuhan’s quote is taken from the first chapter of Understanding Media. The Ed Glaeser reference is to the working paper “Did the Death of Distance Hurt Detroit and Help New York?” by Edward L. Glaeser and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. Jane Jacobs’s recollection of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre is taken from Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Raymond Vernon introduced the product cycle in “International Investment and International Trade in the Product Cycle.” Vernon’s quotes are taken from the essay “Economic Sovereignty at Bay” (Foreign Affairs, October 1968).

And the process reinforces itself,” until these hubs achieve critical mass, as Babylon, Byzantium, Venice, and New Orleans once did. But hubs are also vulnerable to the vicissitudes of new technology. Each of these cities was supplanted by younger rivals as caravans gave way to caravels, clipper ships, and eventually Pan Am Clippers. The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has documented how the advent of the automobile (and of long-distance trucking) canceled out the geographic advantages of waterfront cities such as Buffalo, Detroit, and Cleveland. “The rise and fall of route centers is a familiar phenomenon to students of history,” Hawley wrote in Human Ecology.

In Amsterdam, home to the world’s first aerotropolis-by-design, Dutch planners have a saying: The airport leaves the city. The city follows the airport. The airport becomes a city. Although Kasarda’s models are more elaborate, the fact remains: the aerotropolis is a city with a center. As such, it represents a return to the way our cities were built and how they produced some of our greatest monuments. We have not built high-rise cities in Manhattan’s mold since the turn of the previous century, when the owners of the New York Central railroad oversaw the construction of a shining “Terminal City” above Grand Central’s tracks buried beneath Park Avenue—thirty square blocks of midtown Manhattan and some of the most prestigious real estate in the world.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Richard Wilkinson, 2000, Mind the gap: An evolutionary view of health and inequality, Darwinism Today, Orion, 4. 10. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, 2014, “Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), 1553–623. 11. David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Karen E. Norberg, 2001, “Explaining the rise in youth suicide,” in Jonathan Gruber, ed., Risky behavior among youths: An economic analysis, University of Chicago Press, 219–79; Julie A. Phillips, 2014, “A changing epidemiology of suicide? The influence of birth cohorts on suicide rates in the United States,” Social Science and Medicine, 114, 151–60. 12.

, Institute for International Economics, loc. 178 of 1486, Kindle. 17. Robert Joyce and Xiaowei Xu, 2019, Inequalities in the 21st century: Introducing the IFS Deaton Review, Institute for Fiscal Studies, May, https://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-IFS-Deaton-Review-launch_final.pdf. 18. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, 2006, Fighting poverty in the US and Europe: A world of difference, Oxford University Press; Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly, 1999, “Public goods and ethnic divisions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(4), 1243–84. 19. Michael A. McCarthy, 2017, Dismantling solidarity: Capitalist politics and American pensions since the New Deal, Cornell University Press, 51. 20.

The economic forces that are harming labor are common to all working-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, but the stories of blacks and whites are markedly different. In the 1970s and 1980s, African Americans working in inner cities experienced events that, in retrospect, share some features with what happened to working-class whites thirty years later. The first wave of globalization hit blacks particularly hard, and jobs in the central city became scarce for this long-disadvantaged group. Better-educated and more talented blacks deserted the inner cities for safer city neighborhoods or the suburbs. Marriage rates fell as once-marriageable men no longer had work.5 Crime rates rose, as did mortality from violence, from drug overdoses in the crack cocaine epidemic, and from HIV/AIDS, which disproportionately affected blacks.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

The exceptions to this trend are Houston and Dallas (and Seattle, of all places), where there is more of an inclination to spend on beauty products, including wigs and hairpieces. THE HIDDEN AND NOT-SO-HIDDEN AMENITIES OF CITIES Irrespective of these intercity differences, there are distinct qualities of urbanity that connect cities to one another. Earlier in this chapter I discussed how cities offer experiences that are not entirely material and yet often explain the compelling nature of city living and why so many people are willing to put up with the general mayhem of city life. As previously noted, Rebecca Diamond calls these things hidden amenities.40 Edward Glaeser sees social interaction and density as a means for city dwellers to be more productive in their work lives and maximize their potential in the marriage market.41 Personally and professionally, people thrive when they are close together and have access to many options and resources, in much the same way that biotech research scientists or artists are most creative in concentration and socialization with others like them.

While some of these developments are in downtown (Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas Downtown Project, Chicago’s New City, or the Los Angeles Staples Center), many simply replicate the downtown experience with sidewalks, outdoor music, and cafés and apartments overlooking the “street life” (Santana Row in Silicon Valley, the Grove in Los Angeles, or the uber-luxury Bal Harbour shops in Florida). Some 150 years after the Industrial Revolution took hold of the metropolis, long after the last factory closed shop, the city has become the center of consumption, rather than production, of material goods. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has spent the last few decades trying to understand this relationship between consumption and city growth.

Yet, another important aspect of this pattern is that urbanites spend so much time outside of their homes that their materialism is devoted to their own external physical appearance, rather than that of their internal world, thus encapsulating Georg Simmel’s early-twentieth-century observation of eccentric urbanites who use clothing as a quick signal of identity and individuality.39 When we look at both men’s and women’s apparel and footwear we find exactly this trend: People in cities spend more on shoes and clothes. Certain cities are acutely emblematic of this trend. As a share of their outgoing expenditures, New York City women spend two times more on shoes than everyone else. As far as women’s clothes go, Dallas and New York City are home to the biggest spenders, unsurprising given the ostentatious need-to-be-seen nature of both cities’ cultures. New York City and Washington, DC are home to the biggest spenders on men’s shoes—likely a result of being the epicenters of two male-dominated industries: finance and politics. While most cities spend an average amount on watches, New York City and Los Angeles spend more by a large margin.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

“Moderation of Summertime Heat Island Phenomena via Modification of the Urban Form in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area,” Journal of Applied Meteorology & Climatology, vol. 53, 1886–1900, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-13-0194.1. ADES, Alberto and Edward L. GLAESER. (1995). “Trade and Circuses: Explaining Urban Giants,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 110, 195–227. AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE. (2013, August 6). “China’s Young Adults Are Becoming More Obese,” The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/china-young-adult-obese_n_3711059.html. AHMED, Samir Naim. (2010, December 3). “Impact of Globalization On A Southern Cosmopolitan City (Cairo): A Human Rights Perspective,” Countercurrents.org, http://www.countercurrents.org/ahmed031210.htm.

The increase in homeownership between 1946 and 1956, notes author Stephanie Coontz, was greater than that achieved in the preceding century and a half.59 Homeownership was widely seen as a critical factor in America’s experiment with self-government. As sociologist Robert Lynd notes, “the characteristic thing about democracy is its diffusion of power among the people.”60 This movement continued, notes economist Ed Glaeser, despite widespread suggestions that “a New Urbanism”—associated with higher-density housing and greater transit use—was generally gaining at the expense of suburbs.61 Indeed, before the 2008 financial crisis, the homeownership trend actually accelerated. According to the 2010 census, covering the decade from 2000, inner cores gained 206,000 residents, reversing years of losses.

“Cinco Ranch History,” http://www.cincoranchlife.org/page/20251~312161/Cinco-Ranch-History. CITY LIFE. (2014, April 25). “Micro Units—The Newest Trend in Real Estate,” CitiesJournal, http://www.citiesjournal.com/micro-units-newest-trend-real-estate/. CITY OF MELBOURNE. “Multicultural communities,” http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-melbourne/melbourne-profile/Pages/multicultural-communities.aspx. CITY-DATA.COM. “Cinco Ranch, Texas,” http://www.city-data.com/city/Cinco-Ranch-Texas.html. ——— “New York, New York,” City-Data.com, http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html. ——— “San Francisco, California,” City-Data.com, http://www.city-data.com/city/San-Francisco-California.html.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Barro, Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). At the city and regional level, see Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969); Robert Lucas, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics 22, no. 1 (1988): 3–42; Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Edward Glaeser and David Maré, “Cities and Skills,” Journal of Labor Economics 19, no. 2 (2001); Edward Glaeser and Albert Saiz, “The Rise of the Skilled City,” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs 1 (2004): 47–105; James Rauch, “Productivity Gains from Geographic Concentration of Human Capital: Evidence from Cities,” Journal of Urban Economics 34, no. 3 (1993): 380–400. 16.

David Hulchanski, in “The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighborhoods, 1970–2005,” Cities Centre, University of Toronto, 2010, www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/curp/tnrn/Three-Cities-Within-Toronto-2010-Final.pdf. See also Richard Florida, “No Longer One Toronto,” Globe and Mail, October 22, 2010, www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-longer-one-toronto/article4329894. CHAPTER 1: THE URBAN CONTRADICTION 1. The urban optimists include Harvard University’s Edward Glaeser, Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, and the political theorist Benjamin Barber. See Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011); Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013); Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 2.

See Michael Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome,” Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 3 (1992): 288–300. There is a rapidly expanding literature on the effects of NIMBYism and land use restrictions on housing costs and urban development. See, Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011); Ryan Avent, The Gated City (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2014); Ryan Avent, “One Path to Better Jobs: More Density in Cities,” New York Times, September 3, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/one-path-to-better-jobs-more-density-in-cities.html; Matthew Yglesias, The Rent Is Too Damn High (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); Matthew Yglesias, “NIMBYs Are Killing the National Economy,” Vox, April 25, 2014, www.vox.com/2014/4/25/5650816/NIMBYs-are-killing-the-national-economy.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

That tends to happen in dense, diverse cities with people of different disciplines sparking off each other – what I call the 3D model of innovation. The stimulus for new ideas may be a questioning mind, a pressing demand for solutions to problems or the pressure of competition. Wherever the demand for innovation comes from, it tends to be supplied in cities, as Jane Jacobs, a great American urbanist, first pointed out in the 1960s.6 More recently, Harvard economist Ed Glaeser documented in Triumph of the City how most innovation takes place in diverse, densely populated cities, where people are forever interacting with each other and experiencing new things.

id=4472&plang=EN 5 Quoted in Daniel Finkelstein, ‘How to bring brains together – at top speed’, The Times, 11 September 2013. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/danielfinkelstein/article3865753.ece 6 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, 1961. 7 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, Macmillan, 2011. 8 Richard Florida, The Rise of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community And Everyday Life, Basic Books, 2002. 9 ‘Mayors and mammon’, The Economist, 13 July 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/business/21581695-city-leaders-are-increasingly-adopting-business-methods-and-promoting-business-mayors-and-mammon 10 Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Harvard Business School, 2004. 11 Donald Campbell, ‘Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes’, Psychological Review, 67:6, 1960, pp. 380–400. 12 Dean Simonton, Origins of Genius, Oxford, 1999. 13 Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Princeton, 2007. 14 Ibid. 15 Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato and Paula Stephan, ‘The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists’, Economics Letters, 122:1, January 2014, pp. 89–93. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176513004874 16 Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle, ‘How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?’

(He also had his picture taken – grinning, thumbs up – with baby Paul and his relatives.)2 In his 2019 State of the Union address seven months earlier, President Trump had slandered the peaceful, Latino-majority city. He had falsely claimed that El Paso was ‘one of our nation’s most dangerous cities’ until the erection of a border wall to separate it from its neighbouring Mexican city, Ciudad Juárez.3 Soon after, he compounded the insult when, at a rally on the city’s outskirts, he accused unauthorised migrants of ‘murders, murders, murders, killings, murders’, while the crowd bayed, ‘Build the wall!’ Yet it was actually a white supremacist, from a town more than 1,000 kilometres away, who massacred innocent people in that diverse city – a successful union, like Jordan and André were, of races and cultures.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Another study confirming this result is Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Democracy and Resource Rents,” Department of Economics, University of Oxford, April 26, 2005. 24.Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, “Governance Matters IV: Governance Indicators for 1996–2004.” World Bank mimeograph, May 2005. 25.This section is based on W. Easterly and R. Levine, “European Settlers, Inequality, and Economic Development,” New York University and Brown University, mimeograph, 2005. 26.Edward L. Glaeser, “The Political Economy of Hatred,” Harvard mimeograph, October 26, 2004, http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/papers/Hatred.pdf. 27.W. Easterly and R. Levine, “Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions,” November 1997, Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (November 1997): 1203–250; R.

Minority European Versus Mostly European Colonies Illiberal Democracy Fareed Zakaria, in his 2003 book, The Future of Freedom, has brought to wide attention the idea of “illiberal democracy.” Why do democracies sometimes produce awful government despite free elections? A big problem with democracy and development, particularly with uneducated voters, is that the politicians could appeal to voters’ gut instincts of hatred, fear, nationalism, or racism to win elections. Edward Glaeser of Harvard had the insight that politicians will promote hatred when it helps achieve other unrelated political goals.26 A politician who wants to avoid redistribution to the poor will preach ethnic hatred toward a poor minority that happens to be ethnically distinct. Thus, for example, rich white leaders in the American South defeated populism in the late nineteenth century by persuading poor whites to hate poor blacks.

Datang is China’s Socks City, producing nine billion pairs of socks a year, a third of the world’s output. As recently as the late 1970s, Datang was a sleepy rice-growing village of less than a thousand people. People sewed socks in their spare time and sold them by the road in baskets. Ms. Dong Ying Hong worked in the 1970s as an elementary-school teacher at nine dollars a month. She gave up her teaching to make socks at home. Today, she is a millionaire as the owner of Zhejiang Socks. Near Datang, in coastal China, there are other enclaves: Underwear City, Necktie City, Sweater City, and Kid’s Clothing City. Hong Kong investors brought modern technology and designs to Necktie City in 1985; the workers at the initial enterprises soon left to start their own necktie companies.


pages: 232 words: 60,093

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Measured as a percentage of the total population living in cities (115.9 million in 1960, and 186.1 million in 2006), the big cities’ share dropped from 34.0 percent in 1960 to 28.0 percent in 2006, whereas the small cities’ share rose from 31.6 percent in 1960 to 43.9 percent in 2006. 16. Denver Tops List, 5. 17. Joel Garreau, “Face-to-Face Places,” Wharton Real Estate Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 73. 18. Ibid. 19. “The 2008 Global Cities Index,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2008. 20. Edward L. Glaeser, “Why Economists Still Like Cities,” City Journal, Spring 1996, 44. 21. Eugenie Ladner Birch, “Having a Longer View on Downtown Living,” Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 1 (2002): 5–21. 22.

New cities generally have new, and often streamlined, building regulations, new social compacts between management and labor, and new ways of doing things. Houston’s absence of zoning, its less restrictive building regulations, and its lower construction costs, for example, mean that, according to the 2006 census, the average owner-occupied dwelling cost $126,000, compared to $496,000 in New York City.9 Since incomes in greater Houston are only slightly lower than in New York, that makes the city much more affordable for the middle class and, according to Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser, accounts for Houston’s greater appeal; between 2000 and 2007, the city grew by 19.4 percent, compared to just 2.7 percent for New York.10 The presence of a large middle-class workforce also explains why Houston has more blue-collar manufacturing jobs than New York.

Government Printing Office, September 1995), 12. 9. Edward L. Glaeser, “Houston, New York Has a Problem,” New York Sun, July 16, 2008, 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Denver Tops List, 5. 12. David Brooks, “I Dream of Denver,” New York Times, February 17, 2009, A29. 13. See Blake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 14. Kristol, “Urban Civilization,” 31. 15. According to the U.S. Census, the total number of people living in cities larger than 250,000 was 39.4 million in 1960, 42.3 million in 1970, and 52.1 million in 2006. The corresponding figures for cities between 25,000 and 250,000 were 36.6 million in 1960, 45.8 million in 1970, and 81.7 million in 2006.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

• For more on the high cost of certain zoning rules, see The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (Routledge, 2011). CHAPTER 4: THE WEALTH WE LOST • For an early study of how artificial constraints on housing in wealthy cities are driving economic stagnation, see The Gated City by Ryan Avent (Kindle Single, 2011). • For a broad look at the economic importance of dense cities and the zoning regulations holding them back, see Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser (Penguin Press, 2011). • For a more recent overview of the distressing economic implications of zoning, see The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Take gasoline consumption, which makes up about one-fifth of US energy consumption. As Owen notes, the typical resident of Vermont—renowned for its commitment to environmentalist causes—consumes three and a half times as much gasoline per year as the typical resident of New York City.15 Narrow it down to the most densely built part of the city—Manhattan—and Vermonters use six times as much gasoline. One estimate by economists Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn suggests that a resident of an area with a population density of fewer than one thousand residents per square mile consumes nearly twice as much gasoline as a resident in an area with over ten thousand residents per square mile.16 That means that within a single metropolitan area, annual gasoline consumption might fall by three hundred gallons as you move from a suburb to an urban area.

Worse yet, what happens when these cities, which are all subject to zoning, run out of vacant land and become just as expensive as today’s superstar cities? 11. Adam B. Jaffee, Manuel Trajtenberg, and Rebecca Henderson, “Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evinced by Patent Citations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 3 (August 1993); Hyuk-Soo Kwon, Jihonh Lee, and Sokbae Lee, “Knowledge Spillovers and Patent Citations: Trends in Geographic Localization, 1976–2015,” Economics of Innovation and New Technology (2020). 12. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 29. 13.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

When the towers fell [on September 11, 2001], I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before.”22 Meetup’s appeal is a powerful reminder that bringing people together for social interaction is the true killer app for smart cities. But we are merely writing the latest chapter in thousands of years of urban evolution—the purpose of cities has always been to facilitate human gatherings. While we celebrate their diversity, as economists such as Harvard University’s Ed Glaeser argue, cities are actually social search engines that help like-minded people find each other and do stuff. “People who live in cities can connect with a broader range of friends whose interests are well matched with their own,” he argues in his 2010 book Triumph of the City.23 The big buildings we associate with urbanity are merely the support system that facilitates all of those exchanges.

At current rates of greenhouse-gas emission, the point of no return will arrive sometime around 2017. After that, global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius can still be avoided, but it will cost four to five times as much as we extensively retrofit old, inefficient power plants and infrastructure.75 Economist Edward Glaeser of Harvard University sees cities as green alternatives to help stabilize emissions. That makes sense in America, where higher population density would dramatically slash the energy we waste through sprawl. Residents of transit-dependent Manhattan have the lowest per capita carbon output of any American community, argues David Owen in Green Metropolis.

In 2010, Geoffrey West, the physicist who studies cities, remarked at a gathering of urban scholars in New York that if we don’t have a science of cities, “then all cities need to be dealt with individually.”34 But for designers, dealing with cities individually is the only proper approach. This growing tension between expedient deployment and careful design in smart cities isn’t going away. Every city is its own sticky knot of people, places, and policies. Even if every smart city was crafted from a common template, it will need to be customized to get the right fit with the existing city. Every city will have to strike a balance based on its patience, its financial resources, and its capacity to innovate locally.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Chapter 6 1 “The World Goes to Town,” The Economist, May 3, 2007. 2 Alfonso Hernandez Marin, “Cultural Changes: From the Rural World to Urban Environment,” United Nations Chronicle, November 4, 2006. 3 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, Oxford University Press, 1987; Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History, University of Chicago Press, 2005. 4 Joel Garreau, Edge City, Anchor, 1992. 5 Alan Ehrenhalt, “Trading Places: The Demographic Inversion of the American City,” The New Republic, August 13, 2008. 6 David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, Simon & Schuster, 2001; Brooks, On Paradise Drive, Simon & Schuster, 2004. 7 Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities, Harvard Institute of Economic Research, August 2005. 8 Richard Florida, “Where the Brains Are,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2006, p. 34. 9 Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 12355, July 2006.

., 1817). 2 Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, Vintage, 1970; also Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Vintage, 1985. 3 Jean Gottman, Megalopolis, Twentieth Century Fund, 1961. 4 Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, Simon & Schuster, 1995. See also Ohmae, “The Rise of the Region State,” Foreign Affairs, Spring 1993. 5 John Gapper, “NyLon, a Risky Tale of Twin City States,” Financial Times, October 24, 2007. 6 Robert Lang and Dawn Dhavale, Beyond Megalopolis: Exploring America’s New Megalapolitan Geography, Brookings Institution, July 2005. See also Edward Glaeser, “Do Regional Economies Need Regional Coordination?”

Regions with concentrations of high-tech, high-growth industries are also likely to see housing prices exceed income gains, as a 2002 study of Silicon Valley revealed.10 Areas with more amenities and attractions, such as coastal locations, typically command higher real estate prices—a correlation pinpointed in 1982 by economist Jennifer Roback Morse, who found that amenities carry as much weight in determining housing prices as do land costs and wages.11 Other studies confirm this. In their research on the “Consumer City,” Edward Glaeser and his colleagues found that in cities, housing prices tend to rise faster than wages, suggesting that urban amenities, not high incomes, explain higher housing values.12 Glaeser and his collaborators stated this in a simple formula: urban productivity premium + urban amenity premium = urban rent premium. But beautiful beaches, sidewalk cafés, and bicycle trails aren’t the only indicators of a real estate hot spot.


pages: 112 words: 30,160

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

And indeed, a number of the studies cited above either assume or speculate that information technology is driving the changing relationship between skills, cities, and productivity. In a paper called, "Did the death of distance hurt Detroit and help New York?" economists Edward Glaeser and Giacomo Ponzetto make this connection explicitly. They produce a model in which falling transportation and communication costs boost the fortunes of talent-rich places, while eroding the benefits to concentrations of manufacturing. It's no longer important for industrial firms to locate near to each other on expensive city land in order to economize on costs, so big, land-intensive production activities disperse out to cheaper locations, undermining the economies of manufacturing cities in the process.

The great Greek philosophers were a product of Athens. Their ideas, and the ways in which they presented them, developed as part of a dialogue between a community of great philosophers. Movements in art, philosophy, and science are often associated with cities; Adam Smith, founding father of economics, was a product of the Scottish enlightenment centered in Edinburgh. Technology is little different. Economist Edward Glaeser describes Detroit in the early 20th century as a place where seemingly every block had its own would-be carmaker, tinkering with designs and production processes in constant competition with and awareness of rivals.

Each year, local government officials might adopt a planned level of allowable capacity expansion – a budget – that is then used to navigate NIMBY waters. Residents' demands can be accommodated in whatever way the city likes, so long as the net change in potential development meets the budget. If nothing else, the zoning budget plan turns neighborhood groups into adversaries rather than allies in the effort to shape planning decisions – a useful outcome, so long as the groups can be convinced of the general utility of increased development in the first place.[18] Economist Edward Glaeser argues for a variant on this proposal relating to historical preservation designations. NIMBY groups are often quick to seek preservation of properties targeted for development on historical grounds.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Richard Florida, “It’s Up to the Cities to Bring America Back,” BusinessInsider.com, February 3, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-florida-its-upto-the-cities-to-bring-america-back-2012-2. 15. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, New York: Penguin, 2011, p. 15. 16. Max Weber, The City, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1985, p. 25. 17. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York: Free Press, 1958. 18. Pelu Awofeso, “One Out of Every Two Nigerians Now Lives in a City,” World Policy Journal, Winter 2010–2011, p. 68. 19. Richard Dobbs, Sven Smit, Jaana Remes, James Manyika, Charles Roxburgh, and Alejandra Restrepo, Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities, McKinsey Global Institute, March, 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_world. 20.

The solution stands before us, obvious but largely uncharted: let cities, the most networked and interconnected of our political associations, defined above all by collaboration and pragmatism, by creativity and multiculture, do what states cannot. Let mayors rule the world. Since, as Edward Glaeser writes, “the strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist,” then surely cities can and should govern globally.2 In fact, it is already happening. Cities are increasingly networked into webs of culture, commerce, and communication that encircle the globe.

Eric Corijn asks that precise question, “Can the city save the world,” in a work on rescaling the planet and remodeling the city. Eric Corijn, “Can the City Save the World,” in The Future of the Past: Reflections on History, Urbanity and Museums, ed. M. Nauwelaerets, Antwerp: Koning Boudewijn Stichting, 1999, pp. 263–280. 2. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, New York: Penguin Books, 2011, p. 15. 3. The United Nations Population Fund reports that for 2008, 3.3 billion people, more than half of the world’s population, lived in cities, with 5 billion projected to do so in 2030. In the developed world, the percentage is much higher, approaching 70 percent.


pages: 58 words: 18,747

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

If we had a free market in land, a parcel of land with a house on it would be worth more than a house-less parcel simply because the physical structure has value. Instead, the land itself is more valuable largely because permission to build is such a valuable commodity. In his book Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser discusses the costs of these density restrictions primarily in terms of anti-skyscraper sentiments in classic cities, such as Paris, and with reference to historical preservation rules. But in terms of aggregate impact, these measures are relatively minor. Most Americans live in the suburbs, and by their nature suburbs take up the vast majority of the space in any metropolitan area.

In one district, a minimum width of 100 feet and an area of not less than one acre is required. In another, the minimum width is still 100 feet but the minimum total area is two acres. In a third, it’s 150 feet and three acres. That’s a lot of rules. And they matter a lot. In a 2005 paper, economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks used a method called “hedonic price estimation” and found that “generally a quarter acre [of land] is worth about ten times more if it sits under a house than if it extends the lot of another house.” Imagine two adjacent houses in Johnson County in the area where the smallest lot allowed is one acre.

If we don’t allow tall buildings to go up on that land, people will have to commute a longer distance. The New American Geography There is another option besides denser cities or more sprawling ones: People can just relocate to other cities altogether. And increasingly, that’s what Americans have been doing. If the only way to afford a place in a safe neighborhood in some metropolitan areas is to bear the enormous costs of long commutes, those are just cities with little if any housing that’s truly affordable. The natural choice is to go to the cities that aren’t choked with these problems. As Forbes magazine put it, “It’s no secret that the Southeast and Western United States are booming.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

What makes cities succeed? It is worth starting with some observations about what makes cities succeed and fail. The acknowledged expert on the subject is Harvard academic Edward Glaeser, author of The Triumph of the City.1 He and I have been working along parallel lines on the driving forces behind the economic growth of cities for more than twenty years now and although we have never corresponded, our views appear to have moved in similar directions. Glaeser’s key insight is that cities depend on transport. Historically it has been difficult for land transport to feed large cities which has limited the growth of those cities who do not have access to sea or river transportation.

Other countries Silicon Valley, Boston and in a different way Bangalore are world renowned for their digital economies. But we have shown that there is a range of cities in the US with growing digital economies. The latest group to start to present themselves are the rust belt cities of the Northern mid-west. Detroit might take some time to reinvigorate itself, with unpaid city workers and feral dogs roaming the streets but Chicago, Minneapolis and even Buffalo, famously written off by economist Edward Glaeser, look like candidates for success. And of course Silicon Valley is not the only part of the West Coast to be host to a digital economy – both Seattle and Portland Oregon are already successfully driving Flat White Economies of their own.

‘The economic contribution of the media sector in Glasgow’: Report for the Glasgow Chambers of Commerce April 2014 37. www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ad9ab0a2-9e1e-11e2-bea1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Umx03300 38. features.techworld.com/sme/3589108/edinburgh-scale-up-fanduel-rejected-by-80-investors-on-way-to-becoming-1bn-firm/ 39. www.ft.com/cms/s/0/58d74174-7381-11e2-9e92-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NC4cAj7g 40. www.cebr.com/reports/uk-local-innovation-index CHAPTER SIX 1. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, Edward Glaeser, 2011, Penguin. 2. The details are contained in the ‘Report From The Joint Select Committee Of The House Of Lords And The House Of Commons On The Port Of London Bill’: Joint Select Committee, Houses of Parliament. 3. Personal correspondence. 4.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

Demographic inversion will also mean different futures for different cities. It goes without saying that the phenomenon will not apply in the same way or at the same pace in every big city in America. It will not come to Detroit or Buffalo in the way it is coming to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Some cities will lack the central job base to generate a large-scale affluent urban revival, and will lag behind their more fortunate counterparts by a long period of years, if they ever get there at all. This is the argument of scholars such as Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, who see an increasing bifurcation between cities economically equipped to regenerate themselves in the twenty-first century and those whose obsolete industrial economies will leave them mired in the downtown blight and exurban outward pressures of an earlier era.

Mayor White once commented that “one reason Houston is affordable is that they don’t have to pay lawyers several extra thousand per lot to go through a zoning.” Despite the existence of informal zoning by other municipal codes, several scholarly studies have pointed to the absence of zoning in its official sense as the main reason the city remained (relatively) affordable even in its most desirable districts during the height of the national real estate boom of the early 2000s. In 2008, the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser published an essay in City Journal that attributed lower housing costs in Houston directly to the absence of official zoning laws and the relative simplicity of the permitting process. “The unavoidable fact,” Glaeser wrote, “is that New York makes it a lot harder to build housing than Houston does.

B1. 13 “When you look at what they were being displaced from”: Larry Davis, quoted in Buntin, “Land Rush.” 14 “If it’s historic”: Spencer Lightsy, quoted in Ellison, “A Neighborhood in Flux.” 15 “Gentrification was never my goal”: Bob Lanier, unpublished interview with John Buntin, 2006. 16 One is LARA: Carolyn Feibel and Bradley Olson, “Mayor Moves on the Great White Way,” Houston Chronicle, January 1, 2010, p. 1. 17 More ambitious was Houston HOPE: Ibid. 18 “redevelopment that’s the opposite”: Buntin, “Land Rush.” 19 One effort that Coleman has supported: Ibid. 20 “Every time one of these little old houses”: Ibid. 21 In a survey conducted early in 2010: Stephen Klineberg, personal interview, April 2010. 22 “multicentered metropolitan region”: Ibid. 23 “If the rich are going into downtown now”: Ibid. 24 “one reason Houston is affordable”: Mayor Bill White, unpublished interivew with John Buntin, January 9, 2006. 25 “The unavoidable fact”: Edward Glaeser, “Houston, New York Has a Problem,” City Journal, Summer 2008. 26 “There are no tools”: Peter Brown, personal interview, April 2010. 27 “As long as they can put forth the required cash”: Tom Diehl interview. 28 “You’ve always loved trains”: Frank Liu, personal interview, April 2010. 29 “You see people buying housing”: Bob Eury interview. 30 “The higher the price”: Frank Liu interview. 31 “They’ve already fallen in love”: Ibid. 32 “pedestrian-friendly atmosphere”: Woodlands promotional brochure, April 2010. 33 “Urban and Sugar Land were not always compatible words”: Sugar Land promotional brochure, April 2010. 34 “Everybody wants that”: David Crossley, personal interview, April 2010. 35 “There will be more transit-oriented real estate”: Ibid. 36 “The people who want to live close in”: Tom Diehl interview. 37 “If I had to take one thing”: Peter Brown interview. 38 “is the most interesting city in America”: Stephen Klineberg interview.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Besides, the idea of moving the UK capital is supported by just one in eight Brits.6 There is a stronger argument for moving national media and cultural institutions of a national nature, though the agglomeration benefits provided by big cities are simply unavoidable: put simply, the most highly skilled people want to live in places where there is lots to do. What cities, towns, and villages outside of London and the south-east need is not necessarily the Department of Administrative Affairs to move in, but something a little more entrepreneurial. Improved skills provision is vital; improved connectivity seems important too. Urbanist Edward Glaeser has argued that declining cities like Detroit should simply be left to decline: ‘Helping poor people is an appropriate task for government, but helping poor places and poorly run businesses is not.’7 And yet increasing regional disparities are not just unfair; they can lead to anti-urban and reactionary policies on the part of national governments, with tangible drawbacks for economic growth.

‘The London Intelligence’, Centre for London, 8/20, op. cit. 8.Ibid. 9.S. O’Connor, ‘Goodbye to the “Pret economy” and good luck to whatever replaces it’, Financial Times, 1/9/20. 10.A. Hernández-Morales, K. Oroschakoff & J. Barigazzi, ‘The death of the city’, Politico, 27/7/20. 11.E. Glaeser in CentreForLondon, ‘End of an era? Edward Glaeser on cities after coronavirus: The London Conference 2020 [video]’, YouTube (uploaded 2/11/20). 12.‘Barclays boss: Big offices “may be a thing of the past”’, BBC, 29/4/20. 13.N. Bosetti & E. Belcher, ‘The London Intelligence – Snapshot of Londoners – October 2020’, Centre for London, 21/10/20. 14.

What’s more, eight of these German cities perform better than the European average, whereas London is the only UK city to do so.30 It is a matter of fact, then, that London overperforms and other UK cities (and regions) underperform. Whether the former is responsible for the latter is much more debatable but, as this book will show, it is safe to say that the gap between London and the rest is desirable for neither capital nor country. International magnet London’s global city status generates taxes that pay for public spending across the UK, but it also brings other benefits. It is the number one city in the world for foreign direct investment in headquarters for multinational corporations.31 It draws investment worth billions into the UK that would otherwise go to one of the world’s other great global hubs.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Perhaps this example is a little far-fetched, but it illustrates well the point that the ability to ship weightless ‘products’ at almost no cost could boost existing urban centres. Edward Glaeser at Harvard offers another argument in favour of an urban renaissance. He argues that telecommunications may be complementary to face-to-face contact rather than a substitute for it. This means cities will become more important as communications improve in quality and become cheaper. His research indicates two conditions that produce this result. Communications will favour the cities if urban residents use them more than rural residents; and if the value of interaction between people increases, say because the ideas that need to be exchanged become more complex and creative.

Jostein Gaarder (1995) Sophie’s World, Phoenix House, London. Bibliography 239 John Kenneth Galbraith (1991; first published 1958) The Affluent Society, Penguin, London John Kenneth Galbraith (1992) The Culture of Contentment, Sinclair Stevenson, London. Jess Gaspar and Edward Glaeser (1996) Information Technology and the Future of Cities, Boston University working paper. Jeffrey Gates (1996) Revolutionising Share Ownership, Demos Arguments no. 8, Demos, London. William Gibson (1984) Neuromancer, Voyager Books, London William Gibson (1986) Burning Chrome, Voyager Books, London. Anthony Giddens (1994) Beyond Left and Right, Polity Press, Cambridge.

I must also thank Bill Allen, Jane Ashley, Ed Balls, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Simon Briscoe, Lindsay Fraser, Paul Gregg, Gerry Holtham, Will Hutton, Vinita Juneja, Mervyn King, Denis McShane, Bethan Marshall, Richard Marshall, Bill Martin, Ed Mayo, David Miles, Henry Neuberger, Gus O’Donnell, Trevor Phillips, Penelope Rowlatt, Peter Sinclair, Jamie Stiehm, Raj Thamotheram, Nick Timmins, David Walton, and Martin Weale for helpful suggestions and friendly criticism. Thanks also to Edward Glaeser at Harvard University and Paul Krugman at MIT for providing references and papers. I owe a great debt to The Independent, especially my editor Andrew Marr and his deputy Colin Hughes. The newspaper has not only allowed me to try out ideas, but has also proved a constant source of stimulus thanks to the The Weightless World xxii wonderful people who work there.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

It is worthwhile, however, to explore the benefits of cities, which often can be obscured when the bad news crowds out the good. But Kasarda is hardly alone in his willingness to champion the modern city. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, provides perhaps the most uncompromising defense for high-density, skyscraping living in his book, Triumph of the City. This is essential reading for critics who point fingers at China’s “ghost towns” or another set of stalled city building plans. Glaeser provides illuminating historical context and parallels that find common lessons in the circumstances that gave the United States a “Motor City” in Detroit, India an electronics and technology hub in Bangalore, and Dubai an aerotropolis.

Instead, they must lead to communities that have a technological infrastructure that can adapt over time and enable citizens and municipal leaders to shape their communities in ways that will best work for them. The second question that began this chapter—whether the majority of the newly enfranchised will live in cities—is easier to answer on the face of things. The world is becoming more urban; indeed, many thinkers, such as Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, believe that high concentrations of population are essential to innovation and productivity. It is almost certain that cities will become more affluent over time, but the benefits of better living need not be confined to cities. Initiatives like Digital India will raise many boats as government kiosks, broadband, and Wi-Fi hotspots bring interconnectivity and information to even the most remote villages.

Imagining the advent of a new age of glitter, the article describes planes outfitted with showers and a lively bar area that add to “the allure of the voyage” to the Mideast desert. 10 Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City (Penguin US, 2011), p. 158. 11 Ibid, p. 29 12 Ibid., pp. 248, 37–38 13 dIbid., p. 143. For contrast, it is notable that one current tenant of the Empire State Building is leasing space near the observation deck for $832 per square foot, thought to be the highest price for any rental in the city above ground. See Adam Pincus,“Empire State Building: A buyer’s manual,” The Real Deal, September 2013, http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/empire-state-building-a-buyers-manual/. BEYOND SONGDO AND THE FUTURE OF THE CITY BY 2014, TELEPRESENCE (TP) technology had rolled out in selected business-to-business conditions in Songdo.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

It is true that real prices in many countries did shoot up vertiginously in the years immediately prior to the crisis, but that is the exception, not the rule.7 Add all these things together, and it becomes clear why property is a paradise for students of behavioral finance, the idea that psychology can explain investors’ systematic errors. In a 2013 lecture to the American Economics Association, Edward Glaeser, a Harvard academic, described nine different episodes of property bubbles in the United States, from a land boom in Alabama in 1819 to the skyscraper craze in New York in the 1920s. He revealed a consistent failure to remember a very basic rule of economics: supply and demand. The boom in Alabama in 1815–1819 was driven by the belief that its cotton-growing soil and English demand would deliver endless profits; instead, more cotton was grown, driving prices down and land values with it.

., “How Well Do Individuals Predict the Selling Prices of Their Homes?” (Levy Economics Institute Working Paper 571, 2008). 6. Figures come from Nationwide’s house-price index. 7. Neil Monnery, Safe as Houses? A Historical Analysis of Property Prices (London: London Publishing Partnership, 2011). 8. Edward Glaeser, “A Nation of Gamblers: Real-Estate Speculation and American History” (NBER Working Paper 18825, February 2013). 9. The leverage-ratio requirement may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. 10. Thomas Hoenig, “Back to Basics: A Better Alternative to Basel Capital Rules” (speech at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Washington, DC, September 14, 2012). 11.

Figures from 2013 supplied directly to the author. 9. Abacus is famous principally for being a transaction that landed Goldman in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The supersenior tranche in Abacus was not rated, but since AAA is as high as the rating scale goes, it too would have received this rating. 10. Edward Glaeser, “A Nation of Gamblers: Real-Estate Speculation and American History” (NBER Working Paper 18825, February 2013). NOTES TO CONCLUSION 1. Robert Shiller, Finance and the Good Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Index AAA credit ratings, 49–51, 233–236 AARP Public Policy Institute, report on home ownership by, 139 Abacus, 235 Accenture, 54, 56 Adaptive-market hypothesis, 115–116 Adelino, Manuel, 49 Adoption, SIB program for, 97 Adverse selection, 21, 174, 175, 182 AIG (American International Group), 65 AIR Worldwide, 222, 225 Alabama, land boom in, 74–75 Algorithms, 53–54, 56–57, 62–63, 113, 202, 216–217 Alibaba.com, 219 Allia, 108 Alzheimer’s disease, megafund for, 122 Amazon, 162, 216–217, 219 American Diabetes Association, 102 American Dream Downpayment Act of 2003, 78 American International Group (AIG), 65 American Railroad Journal, 24 American Research and Development Corporation, 150 Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 14–15, 24, 38 Anchoring effect, 137–138 Annuities, 20–22, 139 Apax Partners, 91 Aristotle, 10 Asian debt crisis (1990s), x, 30 Asian Development Bank, 27 Auto-enrollment in pension schemes, 135 Auto-escalation, 135–136 Availability heuristic, 73 Baby boomers, retirement rate of, 125 Bailouts, xi, 35, 65 Bank, derivation of word, 12 Bank deregulation, effect of on college enrollments, 171 Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 224, 226 Bank of America, 98 Banks advantages of, 192–193 bailouts of, xi commercial paper, use of, 185 competition, response to, 193–194 crisis, episodes of, 35–36 in Dark Ages, 11 deposits, xiv, 12–13 equity, 186–187 innovator’s dilemma, 189 leverage, 50, 70–71, 80, 186, 188 liquidity and, 12–14, 185–186, 193 operating expenses, 188 profits of, ix property and, xiv, 69, 75–80 public attitudes toward, ix, xi purpose of, 11–14 raising returns in, 51 repurchase “repo” markets, 15, 185 runs on, x, 13, 185 secured lending, xiv unbanked households, 200 Barbon, Nicholas, 16–17 Basel accords, 77 Basildon, England, 52–53, 58 Bass, Oren, 166, 168 Behavioral finance, 132–138, 208–214 Belinsky, Michael, 103 Benartzi, Shlomo, 136 Benitez-Silva, Hugo, 73 Bernoulli, Jacob, 18 Betting on Lives (Clark), 144 Bid-ask spreads, 55 Big data, xviii, 22, 47, 199, 201, 218, 236 Big Society Capital, 95 Biotechnology, decline in investment in, xii-xiii, 114–115 Black, Fischer, 31, 123–124 Black Monday, October, 1987, 62 BlackRock, 132 Black-Scholes equation, 31, 32, 124 Blackstone, 85 Blood donation, experiment with, 110 Bloomberg, Michael, 98 Bonds attractiveness to investors, 120 catastrophe, 224–227 income, 25 inflation protected, 26 samurai, 27 Book of Calculation (Fibonacci), 19 Bottomry, 8 Brain, reaction of to monetary rewards, 116 Brazil, financial liberalization of, 34 Breslow, Noah, 216, 219 Bretton Woods system, 30 Bridges Ventures, 93 Britain average age of first-time home buyer, 84 average house price, 74 banking crisis, 69 equity-crowdfunding, 154 government spending, 99 life expectancy, 125 peer-to-peer lending, 181 social-impact bonds (SIB), 95–97 student indebtedness, 171 total residential property value, 69–70 Brown, Gordon, 93 Bucket price (okenedan), 40 Bullae (early financial contracts), 5 Bush, George W., 78 Byng, John, 143 Call options, 9–10, 131 Calment, Jeanne, 144 Cameron, David, 95 Cancer megafund.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

.: Spatio-Temporal Patterns and Socio-Economic Controls,” Earth’s Future, May 18, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016EF000511. 134 consuming less . . . electricity: “In almost every metropolitan area, carbon emissions are significantly lower for people who live in central cities than for people who live in suburbs,” in Edward Glaeser, “Green Cities, Brown Suburbs,” City Journal, Winter 2009, https://www.city-journal.org/html/green-cities-brown-suburbs-13143.html. 134 Major European and Asian cities: See Arcadis Sustainable Cities Index 2018, https://www.arcadis.com/media/1/D/5/%7B1D5AE7E2-A348–4B6E-B1D7–6D94FA7D7567%7DSustainable_Cities_Index_2018_Arcadis.pdf; and Robert Muggah and Parag Khanna, “These 10 Asian Cities Are the Most Prepared for the Future,” World Economic Forum, September 5, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/these-asian-cities-are-best-equipped-for-the-future/. 134 Many rural areas in the United States: For instance, reservations like those of the Navajo.

Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books, 2007). 128 adding a new Chicago: United Nations, “World Population Prospects 2018,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Dynamics, https://population.un.org/wup/. 128 just two cities with at least one million: David Satterthwaite, “The Transition to a Predominantly Urban World and Its Underpinnings,” Human Settlements Discussion Paper Series, “Theme: Urban Change—4” (2007), https://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/10550IIED.pdf. 128–29 soared to 371; “megacities”: All data in this section drawn from United Nations, The World’s Cities in 2018—Data Booklet, 2018, https://www.un.org/en/events/citiesday/assets/pdf/the_worlds_cities_in_2018_data_booklet.pdf. 130 Glaeser notes: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011); see also https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/glaeser-triumph-of-the-city-excerpt/. 130 half of global GDP: “The Destiny of Density,” Economist, June 11, 2020. 131 94% higher in urban areas: David M.

Most of the people who leave one city will simply move to another, perhaps smaller one. Others will buy homes in the suburbs, still centering their lives around a city, and many more will decide to stay put. Critics say this time is different. New technologies make it much easier for people to work from home, and the danger of disease will keep them away. And it’s true that there will be some significant changes in the nature of work and the old requirement that people be at the office week in and week out. But today’s urban problems seem tame compared with previous eras’. The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points out that US cities faced a bleak future in the 1970s—far bleaker than today.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

When the economists Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga analysed “agglomeration effects”—the link between city size and economic growth—they identified three causes, which they called matching effects, learning effects, and shared facilities.5 Being in a big city makes it easier to match employees to jobs, customers to services, and partners (business, social, or romantic) with one another. It also makes it easier to learn from other workers and other firms. And it allows people to share costly resources. The matching and the learning functions become even more important in an economy with more abundant synergies and spillovers. The economist Edward Glaeser describes the rise of cities since 1990 as driven by “human-capital intensive services.”6 We would add that these services are also intangible-capital intensive. Successful cities have also traditionally generated work for less-skilled workers, in sectors such as hospitality and food service.

In addition, there is a growing gap between thriving cities and the rest of the country, particularly between cities and “towns,” a term that in British political discourse has come to mean poorer, usually postindustrial conurbations with fewer than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Inhabitants of towns tend to be older, whiter, less educated than city dwellers, more alienated from the establishment, and keener on populist politics. The resulting political agenda would not seem too out of place in the mouth of Thomas Jefferson: a feeling that the “triumph of city,” to use economist Edward Glaeser’s phrase, has gone too far and that a rebalancing is needed. And then along came COVID-19, creating a new dynamic as large numbers of office workers around the world found themselves forced to work from home, in some cases for months. In the United Kingdom, 45 percent of people surveyed were working from home in the winter of 2020, and 40 percent in March 2021, compared with perhaps 5 percent in pre-pandemic times.4 Videoconferencing went from a novelty to a mainstay of working life.

In both cases, motorists pay for a shared resource that they could previously consume ad libitum, and provide a source of revenues that can be spent on improving roads and public transport. Edward Glaeser’s recent article, “Urbanization and Its Discontents,” makes the general point that city institutions (from transport and traffic management, to policing, to schools) are lagging behind the challenges that cities face and causing ever-larger economic problems.25 In the United Kingdom, some surprising voices have supported road-user charging in recent years, including the RAC Foundation,26 a motoring charity, and at least one right-leaning think tank.27 The challenge here is not just choosing the optimal policy but rather—as with NIMBYism—overcoming politics and special interests.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review (2004). 29. Steven Davis and Magnus Henrekson, Tax Effects on Work Activity (2004). 30. HM Treasury, Public finances databank; ONS, Labour Force Survey, 8 December 2011. 31. HMRC, Income Tax Liabilities, by Income Range, http://www.hmrc.gov. uk/stats/income_tax/menu.htm 32. Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, Work and Leisure in the US and Europe: Why so Different? (2005). 33. http://scrapthetax.co.uk/newsshow.aspx?id=3 34. ONS, Labour Market Statistics and Economics and Labour Market Review The data for 2011 cover January to November inclusive. 35. Data from the Department of Work and Pensions, May 2011. 36.

David Willetts, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give it Back (Atlantic Books, 2010). 65. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055497/JEREMY-PAXMANBaby-Boomers-selfish-generation-history.html 66. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8840963/ Baby-boomers-are-very-privileged-human-beings.html 67. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8840963/ Baby-boomers-are-very-privileged-human-beings.html 132 Britannia Unchained 68. http://www.economist.com/node/15495760 69. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/8840963/ Baby-boomers-are-very-privileged-human-beings.html 70. http://www.economist.com/node/15495760 71. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7831bd68-6f56-11e1-b368-00144feab49a. html#axzz1paqUyRCO Bibliography Adams, Jonathan, and James Wilsdon, The New Geography of Science: UK Research and International Colloboration (Demos, 2006). Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, Work and Leisure in the US and Europe: Why So Different? (2005). Autor, D., The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings (Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, 2010). Balls, Edward, Euro-Monetarism: How Britain was Ensnared and How it Should Escape (Fabian Society, 1992).

Distinctions about capability and ability are much more obvious when maths and science are under discussion than when arts subjects are being considered. This makes arts subjects inherently attractive for the wavering student. While many an Oxford classicist still enters the City in London, banks fill the need for mathematical knowledge with foreign quant experts. One banker estimated that only one in eight high-level mathematicians recruited in the City came from the UK.38 This is hardly surprising given that in India and China top executives and bankers are often paid a lot less for doing the same job. The Chief Executive of the ICBC, by market capitalisation the world’s largest bank, based in Hong Kong, earns $235,000 a year while the heads of the Bank of China and CCB earn $229,000 apiece.39 Demand for top French maths graduates remains high, and recruiters openly admit that they only consider Oxbridge in the UK, compared to broader recruitment from France, Germany and Singapore.40 Although science is particularly affected, there is a wider problem with academic attainment overall.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The riots, the rising crime rate, and the loss of jobs “helped create a sense that civilization had fled the cities,” Edward Glaeser wrote in his 2011 book, Triumph of the City. So, many city-dwellers themselves fled, in what became known as “white flight,” and businesses—even those outside the manufacturing industry—began to follow them. The great escape was made easier by the concurrent growth of planned suburbs and the completion of a federal highway system. Cleveland’s population fell 37 percent from 1950 to 1980. Boston’s dropped 30 percent, and Chicago’s 17 percent. This significant depopulation made the situation in cities even worse, leading to falling tax revenues—there were fewer people to tax, and those who had stayed behind were, generally speaking, poorer than those who had left.

Contrast that to the city, which historians agree began to take shape sometime during the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, as our hunter-gatherer ancestors became agricultural and created more permanent settlements. Rome, for instance, has been a city for at least 2,800 years. (Don’t worry—this will be quick, just proving to my parents that Sarah Lawrence gave me a good education.) This is not to say that older is necessarily better. But cities have been through countless ups and downs in the last few thousand years. That they were able to rise again out of the ashes of the riots of the 1960s and 1970s should come as no surprise. In his book Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser points out that riots in cities are more often than not tipping points, signs that change is not only needed but on its way.

It would behoove progressives now, given their dominance in urban areas, to concentrate on local government, not to think of policies going from top down or bottom up but instead to think of them as flowing horizontally, across the country and across the world, from city to city to city. This development is not something to fear. It is that change I talked about. It is here now and it is the future. There will be one hundred or so great cities that will lead the world. They will look a bit like city-states. They will be smart and safe and diverse and environmentally aware and economically healthy. They will influence the world and national governments with gathering strength. None of the three city-states that exist now—Vatican City, Monaco, and Singapore—quite fits the bill. Vatican City is a one-religion theocracy; Monaco lacks diversity and functions mainly as a tax haven for the rich; Singapore has many good traits—diversity, a strong economy, a healthy city—but its authoritarian bent cannot be ignored.


pages: 249 words: 66,383

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

For details on these calculations, see Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, “The Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion: Evidence from the U.S. Mortgage Default Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 124 (2009): 1449–96. 8. In reality, the debt and animal spirits view are not independent. For example, debt may allow those with irrational beliefs to buy homes, a channel that we emphasize in chapter 8. 9. Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Albert Saiz, “Housing Supply and Housing Bubbles,” Journal of Urban Economics 64 (2008): 198–217, provide the motivation for the use of housing -supply elasticity to generate variation in how bubbly a housing market is. 10. Mian and Sufi, “Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion”; Albert Saiz, “The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (2010): 1253–96. 11.

The discussion below is inspired by John Geanakoplos, “The Leverage Cycle,” in NBER Macroeconomic Annual 2009, vol. 24, ed. Daron Acemoglu, Kenneth Rogoff, and Michael Woodford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1–65. 9. This can be confirmed by noting that 100 × $125,000 = $12.5 million. 10. See, for example, Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb, and Joseph Gyourko, “Can Cheap Credit Explain the Housing Boom?” (working paper no. 16230, NBER, July 2010). 11. Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation, and Financial Fragility,” Journal of Financial Economics 104 (2012): 452–68. 12.

If the mortgage-credit expansion to marginal borrowers occurred even within elastic housing-supply cities—where house prices did not grow, and thus there was no bubble—then we can be sure that the housing bubble did not cause the credit expansion.9 We carried out exactly this test in our research, using an index developed by Albert Saiz from satellite-generated data that estimates the amount of developable land in U.S. cities.10 As theory would predict, housing-supply elasticity had a large impact on house-price appreciation from 2002 to 2006. From 1999 to 2001, inelastic cities experienced slightly higher house-price growth than elastic cities. But the real difference occurred during the height of the boom, from 2001 to 2006. House prices rose by almost 100 percent in inelastic cities in these five years. In elastic cities, they rose only 40 percent. House prices increased in inelastic cities by more than twice those in elastic cities. House-price growth during the boom was highly uneven across the country.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Europe has a safety net that eliminates poverty for nearly all of its native-born citizens, doing far more to blunt the effects of income inequality as well. To accomplish this, the governments of the European Union tax and spend an amount equivalent to half of their economic output each and every year, versus about a third here in the United States. In 2001, three top economists—Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth—asked why the two economies on either side of the Atlantic were so different in that way, given how similar they were in so many others. They looked at a few economic explanations: the shape of income distribution before taxes and transfers, the volatility of earnings for individual workers, and expected growth in earnings among them.

Senate, Committee on Finance, “Welfare and Poverty in America,” 114th Congress, 1st sess., Oct. 29, 2015, https://www.finance.senate.gov/​imo/​media/​doc/​21409.pdf. “They had very realistic guidelines”: Aretha Jackson, telephone interview by author, Nov. 8, 2017. half of their economic output: Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2, 2001. “Within the United States”: Ibid. “residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’ ”: Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (June 15, 2007): 137–74, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/​doi/​10.1111/​j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/​abstract.

They had problems with their cars, problems paying bills, problems accessing medical care, problems with insurance, problems trying to save, problems getting food on the table. Like many other Rust Belt cities, Pittsburgh was ravaged by the loss of manufacturing jobs. In some ways, Uber has offered the city a salvation, creating thousands of flexible ridesharing gigs and a smallish number of highly compensated positions for scientists and technologists at its local Advanced Technologies Group office. But salvation has seemed chimerical, with those ridesharing jobs paying little and pulling work away from the city’s taxi and jitney drivers and those highly compensated positions at the Advanced Technologies Group dedicated in part to eliminating the need for human drivers entirely.


pages: 283 words: 73,093

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

In their book The Right Nation, they conclude that “the United States has always been a conservative country, marinated in religion, in love with business, and hostile to the state.… Americans are exceptionally keen on limiting the size of the state and the scope of what it does.”2 A more recent statement of this view comes from Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, who argue that differences in the generosity of government social programs across the world’s rich nations stem from differing popular views of the causes of poverty. Alesina and Glaeser find that in countries in which a larger share of the population believes people’s effort is the key determinant of their income, government spending on social programs tends to be lower.

OECD Economic Studies 30: 191–197. Adema, Willem and Maxime Ladaique. 2009. “How Expensive Is the Welfare State? Gross and Net Indicators in the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX).” Social, Employment, and Migration Working Paper 92. Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2005. “Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 20: 1–100. Alesina, Alberto and Eliana La Ferrara. 2005. “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance.” Journal of Economic Literature 43: 762–800. Alesina, Alberto and George-Marios Angeletos. 2005.

National Commission on Higher Education Attainment. 2013. “An Open Letter to College and University Leaders: College Completion Must Be Our Priority.” Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Nelson, Timothy J. and Kathryn Edin. 2013. Doing the Best I Can: Fathering in the Inner City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newman, Katherine S. 1999. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City. New York: Vintage Books and Russell Sage Foundation. Newman, Katherine S. 2006. Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market. New York and Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press. Newman, Katherine S. and Elisabeth S.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

I am grateful to Alan Altshuler, Hillary Ballon, Frank Barrett, David Barron, Paul Bass, Jonathan Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Peter Bray, Robert Caro, Michael Carriere, Sue Cobble, Nancy Cott, John Davis, Jameson Doig, Claire Dunning, Robert Ellikson, Louise Endel, Susan Fainstein, Justin Florence, Eric Foner, Gerald Frug, John Gaddis, Gary Gerstle, Jess Gilbert, Glenda Gilmore, Edward Glaeser, Brian Goldstein, Linda Gordon, Robert Gordon, Chris Grimley, Michael Gruenbaum, Dirk Hartog, Dolores Hayden, Diana Hernandez, Jennifer Hock, Andy Horowitz, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ken Jackson, Jerold Kayden, Alice Kessler-Harris, Jim Kloppenberg, Alex Krieger, Michael Kubo, Clifford Kuhn, Matthew Lasner, Stephen Lassonde, Deborah Leff, Neil Levine, David Luberoff, Elisa Minoff, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell Moss, Dan Okrent, Mark Pasnik, Alina Payne, Alan Plattus, Douglas Rae, Tim Rohan, Mark Rose, Lynne Sagalyn, Nick Salvatore, Hashim Sarkis, Chris Schmidt, Jane Shaw, Gaddis Smith, Jonathan Soffer, Tim Stanley, Robert Stern, Tom Sugrue, Mary Summers, Adam Tanaka, Lawrence Vale, Jim Vrabel, David Wylie, and Elizabeth Ylvisaker.

Gareth Davies, Daniel Horowitz, Laura Kalman, Michael Kazin, and members of the Boston Area Twentieth-Century U.S. History Writing Group read one or more chapters, giving me the benefit of their incisive feedback. Financial support from several sources made possible the time to research and write, and subsidized travel and interview transcriptions. At an early stage of this project, Ed Glaeser and David Luberoff, who were at the helm of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local History at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, enthusiastically awarded me a research grant, conveying great confidence in the project, which in turn buoyed my own confidence in proceeding.

The masterful politician and his bureaucratically savvy partner together piloted schemes in New Haven that other cities would watch and copy. Medium-size New Haven, a struggling old industrial city in an increasingly suburban postindustrial age, became the model city of urban renewal, a laboratory for salvaging urban America. The problems that Dick Lee and Ed Logue were addressing were faced by many American cities that had flourished with the rise of America’s industrial might in the nineteenth century. Now, in the second half of the twentieth, these cities were atrophying as their manufacturing bases disappeared. Strategies to renew American cities would evolve continually for at least two more decades, in response to new ideas, mistakes made and learned from, the ebb and flow of funding, and political pressures exerted from many quarters, most notably policy makers in Washington and critics at the grass roots.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

., “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014,” JAMA 315, no. 16 (2016). 178 Contagious behavior may be driving some of this: Julia Belluz, “Income Inequality Is Chipping Away at Americans’ Life Expectancy,” vox.com, April 11, 2016. 178 why some people cheat on their taxes: Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Emmanuel Saez, “Using Differences in Knowledge Across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings,” American Economic Review 103, no. 7 (2013). 180 I decided to download Wikipedia: This is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “The Geography of Fame,” New York Times, March 23, 2014, SR6. Data can be found on my website, sethsd.com, in the section “Wikipedia Birth Rate, by County.” For help downloading and coding county of birth of every Wikipedia entrant, I thank Noah Stephens-Davidowitz. 183 a big city: For more evidence on the value of cities, see Ed Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011). (Glaeser was my advisor in graduate school.) 191 many examples of real life imitating art: David Levinson, ed., Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002). 191 subjects exposed to a violent film will report more anger and hostility: Craig Anderson et al., “The Influence of Media Violence on Youth,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4 (2003). 192 On weekends with a popular violent movie: Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?”

He has set the bar for a modern book on social science—an engaging exploration of the fundamentals of human nature, making sense of the best research from a range of disciplines. That bar is one I will be struggling to reach my entire life. My dissertation, from which this book has grown, was written under my brilliant and patient advisers Alberto Alesina, David Cutler, Ed Glaeser, and Lawrence Katz. Denise Oswald is an amazing editor. If you want to know how good her editing is, compare this final draft to my first draft—actually, you can’t do that because I am not going to ever show anyone else that embarrassing first draft. I also thank the rest of the team at HarperCollins, including Michael Barrs, Lynn Grady, Lauren Janiec, Shelby Meizlik, and Amber Oliver.

So why do some places seem to allow the impoverished to live so much longer? What attributes do cities where poor people live the longest share? Here are four attributes of a city—three of them do not correlate with poor people’s life expectancy, and one of them does. See if you can guess which one matters. WHAT MAKES POOR PEOPLE IN A CITY LIVE MUCH LONGER? The city has a high level of religiosity. The city has low levels of pollution. The city has a higher percentage of residents covered by health insurance. A lot of rich people live in the city. The first three—religion, environment, and health insurance—do not correlate with longer life spans for the poor.


pages: 441 words: 96,534

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Denser, better-functioning cities mean fewer people fleeing to the country along with their cars and the roads, parking lots, strip malls, and the low-efficiency HVAC and sewer systems needed to support them. Seen this way, many of New York City’s neighborhoods aren’t nearly dense enough, particularly if they want to retain even some of the varied architecture and small-scale streets that make cities great. The urban economist Edward Glaeser wrote that simply rejecting denser, taller development creates more problems if the overall number of available homes doesn’t keep pace with population growth. “When the demand for a city rises, prices will rise unless more homes are built. When cities restrict new construction, they become more expensive.” Expensive like San Francisco, where antidevelopment policies have greatly limited new market-rate home building in the hope of preserving affordability.

It’s Not Where You Think,” Yale Environment 360, October 2009, accessed August 5, 2015. three quarters of the nation’s economic: Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013), 1. 1 million people in New York City: City of New York, PlaNYC, 4. nationwide by 2050: United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects, 24. “they become more expensive”: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Group, 2011), Kindle Edition, Locations 238–41.

We invite you to view something you experience every day in ways that you might never have imagined. We hope it inspires city officials, planners, and all other city residents to initiate changes in their cities around the world. The new operating code for streets we reveal in this book is already being translated into projects in global cities, from pocket parks and plazas in Mexico City and San Francisco to pedestrian- and transit-friendly road redesigns in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, to parking-protected bike lanes in Chicago and Salt Lake City and reclaimed streets for pedestrians near the Colosseum in Rome. If it can happen in New York City, according to the Sinatra model of transportation theory, it can happen anywhere.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

ie=UTF8&node=6442600011. 12825,000 “milk floats,” tiny delivery carts with open sides: Bonnie Alter, “Electric Milk Trucks Still Working in Jolly Old England,” TreeHugger, April 12, 2012, https://www.treehugger.com/cars/electric-milk-trucks-still-working-jolly-old-england.html. 128“Short ranges and low top speed”: “Opportunities Are Opening for Electrified Commercial Vehicles,” The Economist, February 15, 2018, https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/15/opportunities-are-opening-for-electrified-commercial-vehicles. 128bulking up reduces per-unit delivery costs significantly: McKinsey & Company, An Integrated Perspective, 4. 129more lucrative to rent night mules out as energy storage: Henning Heppner, interview with author, November 9, 2018. 130“There is little reason to doubt”: Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase, “Cities, Regions, and the Decline of Transport Costs,” Papers in Regional Science 83 (2004): 197–228. 130each promise huge cost savings: McKinsey & Company, An Integrated Perspective, 22. 132“They’re not waiting for a package”: National League of Cities, “Jobs and Economy: A Human Touch for Robot Delivery,” Autonomous Vehicles: Future Scenarios, accessed February 26, 2019, http://avfutures.nlc.org/jobs-and-the-economy. 132“Amazon Day” promotion: Taylor Nicole Rogers, “Amazon’s New Waste-Reduction Strategy: Deliver Only Once a Week,” CNN, February 28, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/tech/amazon-day/index.html. 133most often impatient, high-spending young shoppers: McKinsey & Company, Parcel Delivery: The Future of Last Mile (September 2016), 6. 6.

When Atoms Move Like Bits The battle to conquer last-mile distribution, waged by robot armies, will be one of the great business stories of the next decade. It will certainly be won. In the twentieth century, the cost of moving freight declined by 90 percent, according to a study published in 2004 by Harvard University economists Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase, who assembled a mountain of historical data on American manufacturers’ shipping costs. “There is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue,” the Harvard professors concluded. But how far down can shipping costs fall? The three last-mile innovations we explored (unmanned AVs, package lockers, and night delivery) each promise huge cost savings, according to analysts—50 percent, 35 percent, and 40 percent, respectively.

A printed page, he argued, “if it is legible, can be visually grasped as a related pattern of recognizable symbols.” Cities should work the same way, Lynch believed. By simply looking at what’s around them, people should be able to easily identify important places, their purpose, and how they connect to one another. The Image of the City laid out an elegant and useful vocabulary of five basic, universal components of city form—paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Master this intuitive geometric shorthand and you can read any city like a book. For Lynch, legibility was the make-or-break factor in a city’s success or failure. Most cities possessed the basic pieces, but whether or not those parts connected up into memorable patterns—this was what separated great cities from the bad, or merely good, ones.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

See Guido Imbens, Donald Rubin, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Estimating the Effect of Unearned Income on Labor Earnings, Savings, and Consumption: Evidence from a Survey of Lottery Players,” American Economic Review 91, no. 4 (2001): 778–94; Djaved Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammad Mostafavi-Dehzooei, “Cash Transfers and Labor Supply: Evidence from a Large-Scale Program in Iran,” Journal of Development Economics 135 (2018): 349–67; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, David Joulfaian, and Harvey Rosen, “The Carnegie Conjecture: Some Empirical Evidence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108, no. 2 (1993): 413–35; Damon Jones and Ioana Marinescu, “The Labor Market Impact of Universal and Permanent Cash Transfers: Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund,” NBER Working Paper No. 24312 (February 2018). 48.  Jon Elster, “Comment on Van der Veen and Van Parijs,” Theory and Society 15, no. 5 (1986): 709–21. 49.  Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir, and William Easterly, “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 4 (1999): 1243–84. 50.  Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2001). 51.  John Lloyd, “Study Paints Bleak Picture of Ethnic Diversity,” Financial Times, 8 October 2006. 52.  Tom Bartlett, “Harvard Sociologist Says His Research Was ‘Twisted,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 August 2012. 53.  

“Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 4 (1999): 1243–84. Alesina, Alberto, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch. “Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?” Journal of Public Economics 88, nos. 9–10 (2004): 2009–42. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (2001). Aletras, Nikolas, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, and Vasileios Lampos. “Predicting Judicial Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: A Natural Language Processing Perspective.”

As anthropologist James Suzman puts it, “the evidence of hunting and gathering societies suggests … we [human beings] are more than capable of leading fulfilled lives that are not defined by our labor.”18 Figure 12.1: Male Labor Hours per Day, Hunter-Gatherers and the UK Today17 The attitudes were different in the ancient world, too. Back then, work was often thought to be degrading rather than meaningful.19 In the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, the law stipulated that nobody could hold office unless he had kept away from trade for ten years.20 Handling goods in the market was considered to be a prohibitively grubby affair. In Sparta, the warrior city-state of Greece, citizens were raised to fight and kept away from productive work by law. Trade was left to noncitizens, and manual labor to the “helots,” a vast state-owned population of slaves.21 When Plato set out his blueprints for his ideal state, he confined certain workers to their own “artisan class,” denying them a chance to run state affairs.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Labor Market,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 25, no. 2 (1994): 217–72. 15 See Goldin and Katz, The Race between Education and Technology; Lindsey, “Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics.” 16 See, for example, Nolan McCarthy, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 17 See Lindsey, “Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics,” 10. 18 See, for example, A. Alesina and E. LaFerrara, “Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities,” NBER Working Paper 8267, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2001. 19 See Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61. 20 Ibid. 21 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 53. 22 Robert J. Samuelson, “Indifferent to Inequality,” Newsweek, May 7, 2001, 45. 23 The quote is from a description by Jennifer Hochschild on what her survey respondents believe, from What’s Fair?

Louis Review 87, no. 4 (July–August 2005): 555–80. 7 Schreft, Singh, and Hodgson, “Jobless Recoveries.” 8 Louis Uchitelle, “Labor Data Show Surge in Temporary Workers,” New York Times, December 20, 2009. 9 Study by the U.K. National Council for Volunteer Organizations and United for a Fair Economy, cited in Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 45. 10 See, for example, Joe Peek and Eric S. Rosengren, “Unnatural Selection: Perverse Incentives and the Misallocation of Credit in Japan,” American Economic Review 95, no. 4 (September 2005): 1144–66; Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap, Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 11 See “A Fork in the Road,” Financial Times, December 11, 2009. 12 See, for example, Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2003). 13 National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators, chapter 5, Appendix Table 5–43, National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/c5/ c5s4.htm, accessed March 10, 2010. 14 Alesina and Glaeser, Fighting Poverty, 19. 15 Talkin’ ’bout My Generation: The Economic Impact of Aging U.S.

If, however, the only difference between the rich and the poor countries is physical capital, the obvious question, posed by the University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert Lucas in a seminal paper in 1990, is, Why does more money not flow from rich countries to poor countries so as to enable the poor countries to buy the physical capital they need?2 After all, poor countries would gain enormously from a little more capital investment: in some parts of Africa, it is easier to get to a city a few hundred miles away by taking a flight to London or Paris and taking another flight back to the African destination than to try to go there directly. Commerce would be vastly increased in Africa if good roads were built between cities, whereas an additional road would not make an iota of difference in already overconnected Japan. Indeed, Lucas calculated that a dollar’s worth of physical capital in India would produce 58 times the returns available in the United States.


pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

This well‑educated ‘creative class’ fosters an environment that attracts more creative people and the businesses where they work. Edward Glaeser emphasises ‘agglomeration economics’, which refers to increases in productivity associated with urban proximity: larger pools of skilled staff to draw upon, suppliers and customers close to hand, and spillovers of technical know‑how so that ideas diffuse rapidly—both through organised discussion amongst those with similar expertise and in gossip. Agglomeration is why people choose to live in cities—things work better there. Cities reduce the space between people—less space and more people mean greater opportunities for productive interaction.

These new transport services allowed the city to spread and the population to grow. Further development of railways, trams and trunk roads allowed expansion of London in the inter-war years, so that the built‑up area became five times what it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century. For each successive development of transport technology, there has been a corresponding kind of city. However, the previous growth of the city generally shaped and constrained the subsequent transport options. Only rarely was a city restructured, as when Baron Haussmann imposed a network of large avenues on the medieval city structure of Paris in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Average travel time remained broadly constant through this evolution of urban transport systems and has been a contributing factor to the shaping of cities. The successive innovations in transport technology that permitted higher speeds allowed people to travel greater distances in the time available, and lower population densities ensued. ‘Walking cities’ were the major urban form for eight thousand years and substantial parts of the central areas of many major cities retain this character—dense mixed‑use areas no more than 5 km across. ‘Public transport (‘Transit’ in the US) cities’ developed from 1850 to 1950 based on trams and trains, allowing spreading from dense centres 20‑30 km along rail corridors. ‘Automobile cities’ from the 1950s onwards could spread further at low density to 50‑80 km.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Being extra fretful and cautious around a newborn is a good thing for most parents: Babies are fragile. It’s worth the tradeoff. Similarly, living in cities—with their cramped dwellings and pounding noise—stresses us out on a straightforwardly physiological level and floods our system with cortisol, as I discovered while researching stress in New York City several years ago. But the very urban density that frazzles us mentally also makes us 50 percent more productive, and more creative, too, as Edward Glaeser argues in Triumph of the City, because of all those connections between people. This is “the city’s edge in producing ideas.” The upside of creativity is tied to the downside of living in a sardine tin, or, as Glaeser puts it, “Density has costs as well as benefits.”

His work is also described in Anna Abramson and Dawn Rouse, “The Postpartum Brain,” Greater Good (Spring 2008), accessed March 19, 2013, greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/postpartum_brain/. living in cities . . . stresses us out on a straightforwardly physiological level: Clive Thompson, “The Ecology of Stress,” New York, January 24, 2005, accessed March 19, 2013, nymag.com/nymetro/urban/features/stress/10888/. makes us 50 percent more productive: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011), Kindle edition. “the city’s edge in producing ideas”: Ibid. “Density has costs as well as benefits”: Ibid.

Keith Bradsher, “Bolder Protests against Pollution Win Project’s Defeat in China,” The New York Times, July 4, 2012, accessed March 24, 2103, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/world/asia/chinese-officials-cancel-plant-project-amid-protests.html; Mark McDonald, “Taking It to the Street in China,” The New York Times, July 29, 2012, accessed March 26, 2013, rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/taking-it-to-the-street-in-china/; Ben Blanchard, “China Stops Copper Plant, Frees 21 after Protests,” Reuters, July 4, 2012, accessed March 26, 2013, uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/04/us-china-pollution-protest-idUKBRE86205C20120704; Choi Chi-yuk, “Post-90s Generation Speaks Up; Young People in Sichuan Led the Recent Opposition to a Heavy-Metal Plant, Causing Some to Hope They’ll Fight for Other Causes, Including Greater Democracy,” South China Morning Post, July 14, 2012; Brian Spegele, “Planned China Metals Plant Scrapped,” The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2012, accessed March 24, 2013, online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304211804577504101311079594.html; Alia, “Traces on Weibo: How a NIMBY Protest Turned Violent in a Small Sichuan City?” Offbeat China, July 2, 2012, accessed March 26, 2013, offbeatchina.com/traces-on-weibo-how-a-nimby-protest-turned-violent-in-a-small-sichuan-city; Emily Calvert, “The Significance of Shifang: Environmental Activism in China,” China Elections & Governance (blog), July 19, 2012, accessed March 26, 2014, chinaelectionsblog.net/?p=20482. rivers run in different colors: Wendy Qian, “Han Han: The Liberation of Shifang,” China Digital Times, July 3, 2012, accessed March 26, 2103, chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/07/han-han-the-release-shifang/.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Third, a proper measure of freight costs over time would have to account for changes in service quality, such as faster ocean transit and reduced cargo theft, and no freight cost index does this. Fourth, a large number of freight shipments occur either within a large company or at prices privately negotiated between the shipper and transportation carriers, so the information required to measure costs economywide often is not publicly available. Edward L. Glaeser and Janet E. Kohlhase, “Cities, Regions, and the Decline of Transport Costs,” Working Paper 9886, NBER, July 2003, p. 4. 7. U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Discriminatory Ocean Freight Rates and the Balance of Payments, November 19, 1963 (Washington, DC, 1964), p. 333; John L. Eyre, “Shipping Containers in the Americas,” in Pan American Union, “Recent Developments in the Use and Handling of Unitized Cargoes” (Washington, DC, 1964), pp. 38–42.

A trucker can deposit a trailer at a customer’s loading dock, hook up another trailer, and drive on immediately, rather than watching his expensive rig stand idle while the contents are removed. All of those changes are consequences of the container revolution. Transportation has become so efficient that for many purposes, freight costs do not much effect economic decisions. As economists Edward L. Glaeser and Janet E. Kohlhase suggest, “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.” Before the container, such a statement was unimaginable.6 In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.

This would have been no small undertaking: the amount involved, the equivalent of almost $900 million in 2004 consumer prices, was more than the city had spent on its docks over decades. The proposal quickly encountered heavy fire. The ILA was opposed. So was the city’s Department of Marine and Aviation, which ran the docks; it had waged a bitter and unsuccessful battle to keep the Port Authority from taking over the city’s two main airports in 1947, and it did not want to give up another of its functions. Most of all, city politicians did not want the Port Authority on their turf. City officialdom was convinced that the piers were a potential gold mine, not a badly outdated piece of infrastructure.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

The agreement may be found at http://allafrica.com/peaceafrica/resources/view/00010926.pdf. CHAPTER 11: ECONOMIC SECURITY IN A CHANGING WORLD 263 heavy investors both in R & D: Data on R & D expenditure, investment in knowledge, and tertiary attainment are available from the OECD Factbook 2006: Economic and Social Statistics. 265 seem to be much less likely: Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the US Have a European-Style Welfare System?” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 8524 (October 2001). Available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w8524. 265 “Racial discord plays”: Ibid., p. 4. 267 the Iraq War costs: Peter Orszag, Director of Congressional Budget Office, Statement before the Committee on the Budget of the U.S.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, no. 29, 2005. Alesina, Alberto, and George-Marios Angeletos. “Fairness and Redistribution: U.S. versus Europe.” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 9502, February 2003. http://www.nber.org/papers/W9502. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. “Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have a European-Style Welfare System?” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 8524, October 2001. http://www.nber.org/papers/w8524. Alley, Richard. “Wally Was Right: Predictive Ability of the North Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Hypothesis for Abrupt Climate Change.”

Therefore, unless pollution is controlled through appropriate technologies and policies, cities can become sites of untold ecological destruction. Also, by bringing millions of people into proximity, cities have long been host to infectious diseases that depend on large populations of susceptible individuals to sustain the long-term transmission of the disease. Moreover, the rising populations of large cities will be vulnerable to other natural hazards, including floods, landslides, and earthquakes. This is especially the case because the world’s cities have been heavily concentrated along the coastlines to take advantage of access to global trade, fisheries, and the amenities of coastal life.


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

It says that the creditors of the partnership and of the partners first have to enforce against the assets of their contractual partner before partnership creditors can seize the assets of the partners, or partners’ creditors can seize the assets of the partnership. 25. Hansmann, Kraakman, and Squire, “Law and the Rise of the Firm,” p. 1371. 26. Those who bought close to the peak of the bubble, say in 2006, saw the value of their houses decline by as much as 36 percent, on average. See Edward Glaeser, “A Nation of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation and American History,” American Economic Review 103, no. 3 (2013):1–42, who offers a long-term historical review of real estate speculation in the United States. 27. See Abatino et al., “Depersonalization.” 28. Katharina Pistor et al., “The Evolution of Corporate Law: A CrossCountry Comparison,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Economic Law 23, no. 4 (2002):791–871. 29.

Silver also reports that nearly 30 percent of all persons who sit for the New York bar exam have a foreign legal background. Ibid., p. 22. 24. The reference to the “old comparative economics” is to the comparison of capitalism and socialism. After socialism’s demise, it now seemed time to compare different capitalist systems, but with a focus on law and legal institutions. See Simeon Djankov, Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The New Comparative Economics,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, no. 4 (2003):595–619. 25. Rafael La Porta, Francesco Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Law and Finance.” n ote s to c h a P te r 7 267 26.

The earliest example of a general legal statute that assured all craftsmen full legal protection was a decree the Senate of the city of Venice passed in 1474.40 It required artisans to register “new and ingenious devices, not previously made in our jurisdiction” with the local authorities. Once registered, everyone else was prohibited from using the same device. Its holder could file a case against the violator “before every office of this city, by which office the aforesaid infringer would be compelled to pay one hundred ducats and his artifice would be immediately destroyed.” The city itself, however, was free to use it “for its own use and needs.”41 The Senate, it seems, was unwilling to extend legal privileges without reserving the right for the city to access it, making sure that private privileges would not crowd out their public use and benefits.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

PLOS One 5, no. 12 (2010); Jonah Lehrer, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” New Yorker, January 30, 2012; Greg Lindsay, “Engineering Serendipity,” New York Times, April 7, 2013; Michelle Young, “Googleplex, Mountain View: Designing Interior Spaces at an Urban Scale,” Untapped Cities, January 2, 2012, http://​untappedcities.​com/​2012/​01/​02/​googleplex-​mountainview-​designing-​interior-​spaces-​at-​an-​urban-​scale/; Paul Goldberger, “Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built from Scratch Googleplex,” Vanity Fair, February 22, 2013. Another social scientist who has written persuasively about physical proximity as a catalyst for ideas and economic growth is Edward Glaeser, who writes: “The most important communications still take place in person, and electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual movement.”

Another social scientist who has written persuasively about physical proximity as a catalyst for ideas and economic growth is Edward Glaeser, who writes: “The most important communications still take place in person, and electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual movement.” Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011). 10. Sheldon Cohen, “Social Relationships and Susceptibility to the Common Cold,” in Emotion, Social Relationships, and Health, ed. Carol D. Ryff and M. Burton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts, “Can We Improve Our Physical Health by Altering Our Social Networks?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4, no. 4 (2009). 11. Cohen and Janicki-Deverts, “Can We Improve Our Physical Health”; L. F. Berkman, “Tracking Social and Biological Experiences: The Social Etiology of Cardiovascular Disease,” Circulation 111, no. 23 (2005); L.

“I was reading about it, I called my doctor friends, I got together with them, and I got all this information from people I knew,” she told me. I asked who had helped her the most. “Friends,” she replied, without so much as a pause. “I called my good friend Mona, who lives in another city and is married to an oncologist. I then talked to her husband for three hours, even though we weren’t really friends as two couples. She was my friend when I lived in that city, so her husband helped me. And I had Celeste. Celeste helped because she’s totally organized and very businesslike, and she’s a nurse and has been in this medical world forever. And she said okay, you’re going to this doctor, because she’s the best surgeon in town, and you’re going to do this and you’re going to do that.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Unlike Barcelona, where Joan Busquets was encouraging increased density in a traditionally dense community, the people of Detroit do not have a history of living close together. As some critics point out, even a depopulated Detroit is more dense than many of the sun-belt cities like Phoenix or Houston, therefore the issue might not be density alone. Others, like economist Ed Glaeser, say the problem is not just about bringing people together but also providing them with something to do, as well as the education and social tools that might encourage them to want to be there. Still others have complained about how one could effectively conduct this ‘right-sizing’ which would force people to leave their houses, and close services and neighbourhoods.

The movement to Houston alone will represent 80 per cent of the population shift in the US between 2000 and 2030, doubling the city size from 2.1 million to 5 million. Why are so many people moving there? As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser calculates, while the average middle-class family might earn less than in Manhattan or the Bay Area, the quality of life is much higher in Houston: house prices are cheaper, tax is lower, schools and infrastructure are good, the daily commute is not too arduous. In the end Texans are a surprising 58 per cent better off than New Yorkers, and live in quiet suburban communities with low crime rates, little interference and consistent climate. What is not to like about this scenario? For many it is the definition of a perfect life.

Singapore has been called many things, from ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’10 to ‘one of the cleanest, safest, richest and dullest cities in the world’,11 but there is no question that, in its first fifty years, it became one of the great global cities of our times. This confused picture is reflected in Singapore’s standing within the many rankings that now catalogue the different faces of the world’s cities. In 2011 it ranked first in the Mercer Consulting Best City for Infrastructure and the Ericsson Networked Society list; Forbes magazine called it the ‘World’s Smartest City’; it came third in the ranking for the Euromonitor Top City Destination and fifth in both the Global Power City Index and the Cities of Opportunity.12 Across the board the city had risen into the top five for business; however, in the Economist Liveability rankings, it came an unimpressive fifty-second, brought down by the categories of environment and freedom.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

“The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class.” Global Economy and Development. Working Paper 100, February 2017. www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf. 22. Fuller, Brandon and Paul Romer. “Urbanization as Opportunity” in Rethinking Cities: A Roadmap Toward Better Urbanization for Development. Edward Glaeser and Abha Joshi-Ghani, eds., World Bank, 2014. paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Urbanization-As-Opportunity-Marron-Version.pdf. 23. Mallaby, Sebastian. “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty.” The Atlantic, July/August 2010. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/308134/. 24.

Here we turn to a solution that ought to appeal to the great many Americans who admire the pioneering spirit of their forebears: We ought to promote the creation of entirely new cities, which can offer a much higher quality of governance than is now found in much of Africa and South Asia. As fanciful as this may sound, we really have no choice.The urban population of the developing world is expected to grow from 2.6 billion to 7.8 billion over the next hundred years.22 Much of this growth will be met by the expansion and densification of existing cities. Yet there is no question that entirely new cities will arise, as they have in earlier eras. Growing an existing city has its advantages, and many of the world’s most ambitious new cities have been failures, especially when they’ve been built to glorify a country’s rulers rather than to exploit new economic opportunities.

Still, these special economic zones wouldn’t be charter cities as Romer envisioned them. Getting there will take time and confidence on the part of host countries that their sovereignty won’t be unduly compromised and that their own citizens will benefit. It’s time for Americans to roll up their sleeves and help. Eventually, charter cities could achieve the same size and scale of a city like Shenzhen, which has grown from a population of 30,000 in 1980 to more than ten million today. If English settlers could lay the foundations for great cities with new, more responsive systems of government centuries ago, why wouldn’t we expect that today’s migrants could do much the same if given the chance?


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 77 Bartels, “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952–1996”; Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, “Myths and Realities of American Political Geography,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 119–44, doi:10.1257/jep.20.2.119; Bafumi and Shapiro, “A New Partisan Voter”; Samuel J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “ ‘The Big Sort’ That Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” PS: Political Science & Politics 45, no. 2 (April 2012): 203–10, doi:10.1017/S1049096512000017; Ron Johnston, Kelvyn Jones, and David Manley, “The Growing Spatial Polarization of Presidential Voting in the United States, 1992–2012: Myth or Reality?”

Miller, Rich Man, Poor Man (New York: Crowell, 1964), as cited in Charles Willie, “The Inclining Significance of Race,” Society 15, no. 5 (1978): 14, doi:10.1007/BF02701608. 66 Trevon D. Logan and John M. Parman, “The National Rise in Residential Segregation, Journal of Economic History 77, no. 1 (March 2017): 127-170. 67 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017). 68 See: David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser, and Jacob L. Vigdor, “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto,” Journal of Political Economy 107, no. 3 (June 1999): 455–506, doi:10.1086/250069. The authors suggest that there are basically three possible ways that segregation can develop: a “port of entry” model, in which black residents prefer to live in majority-black neighborhoods; “collective action racism,” in which white residents use formal barriers to restrict black access to certain neighborhoods; and “decentralized racism,” in which white residents pay a premium to live in majority-white neighborhoods, generating white flight and pricing black residents out.

As a result, growth in the African American population in Northern cities was rapid and dramatic. The number of blacks in Cleveland, to take one typical example, was just under 8,500 in 1910. By 1920 it had jumped to almost 35,000, and by 1930 had reached nearly 72,000.73 Though the prospects for blacks in Northern cities were in no way equal to those of whites, for those who migrated the difference from the rural South was stark. Consider the experience of Price Davis, an African American who moved from North Carolina to New York City during the Great Migration: Everything changed. The whole atmosphere changed.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

By 2025, it looks as if there will be five billion people living in cities (and rural populations will actually be falling fast), and there will be eight cities with more than twenty million people each: Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, São Paolo, Mexico City, New York and Calcutta. As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers. The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ‘Urban sprawl’ may disgust some American environmentalists, but on a global scale, the very opposite is happening: as villages empty, people are living in denser and denser anthills. As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth.

Harris, R. 2007. Let’s ditch this nostalgia for mud. Spiked, 4 December 2007. p. 190 ‘people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other in glass towers to do their exchanging’. Jacobs, J. 2000. The Nature of Economies. Random House. p. 190 ‘As Edward Glaeser put it’. Glaeser, E. 2009. Green cities, brown suburbs. City Journal 19: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_greencities.html. p. 190 ‘the ecologist Paul Ehrlich had an epiphany’. Ehrlich, P. 1968. The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books. Chapter 6 p. 191 ‘The great question is now at issue’. Malthus, T. R. 1798. Essay on Population.

Rome declined from a million inhabitants in 100 BC to less than 20,000 in the early Middle Ages. Since people have generally done more dying than procreating when in cities, big cities have always depended on rural immigrants to sustain their numbers. Just as agriculture appeared in six or seven parts of the world simultaneously, suggesting an evolutionary determinism, so the same is true, a few thousand years later, of cities. Large urban settlements, with communal buildings, monuments and shared infrastructure, start popping up after seven thousand years ago in several fertile river valleys. The oldest cities were in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Their emergence signified that production was becoming more specialised, consumption more diversified.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Helping to build the hydrogen bomb—only the single most destructive invention in human history still to this day. 3∗Americans work an average of 25.1 hours per week (averaged across all working-age persons) in contrast to Germans, for instance, who average 18.6 hours. We work over 6 more weeks than the French per year. See Alberto Alessina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?” Working Paper no. 11278, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. One Plus a Hundred Zeros Welcome to Your (N)Office If there is any “center” or “downtown” to our new economy (and to Elsewhere, U.S.A., for that matter) it is just off the 101 Freeway in Mountain View, California.

In the 1970s, that trend would strengthen to the point that twice as many folks moved to Dixie than quit it. As Jones says, “Walk down the street of a Southern or Southwestern city at night, and there’s no one out. All you can hear is the sound of the heat pump on the side of the house; all you can see is the blue glow behind the living-room curtains.”12 Gone were seersucker suits. Southern fashion looked not much different from what was worn in Pennsylvania or Illinois. Sunbelt cities—if you could actually call them cities—were thriving; but they were so low density sprawling and absent any economic center, that they were really more like suburbs connected by freeway arterioles.

Perhaps it is ironic, then, that New York City tries to enforce a law against panhandling on the subway, arguing that it’s constitutional to protect people from hawkers or beggars in an enclosed (albeit public) space, when the city itself sells every inch of the wall space of those very same subway cars (and its buses) to corporate advertisers. The very concept of public space is collapsing before our eyes (albeit in slow motion). First of all, there is the issue of the technologies themselves— the increase in people chattering away to “elsewhere” while walking down a city street or sitting in a park or driving down the interstate.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Akerlof and Rachel E. Kranton Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution,” American Economic Review 95, no. 4 (2005): 960–80; Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 2 (2001): 187–254; Raquel Fernandez, “Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century,” American Economic Review 103, no. 1 (2013): 472–500; Roland Bénabou, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni, “Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy of Science, Religion, and Growth” (unpublished paper, Princeton University, December 2013). 4.

He found that men who had served in the early 1970s ended up earning about 15 percent less a decade later than men who had never served.15 Columbia University economists Donald Davis and David Weinstein used the US bombing of Japanese cities during the Second World War to test two models of city growth. One model was based on scale economies (decline in production costs as urban density increased), and the other was based on locational advantages (such as access to a natural seaport). Even though the bombing was obviously not random, it created a natural way to test whether cities that had been badly destroyed would remain depressed or bounce back to their original position. The model based on scale economies suggested that cities would not recover after being sharply reduced in size, whereas the locational-advantage model predicted otherwise.

The system was eventually undermined in the 1970s by the growth of speculative capital flows, which Keynes had warned against. But it remained the standard for global institutional engineering. Through each successive upheaval of the world economy, the rallying cry of the reformers was “a new Bretton Woods!” In 1952, a Columbia University economist named William Vickrey proposed a new pricing system for the New York City subway. He recommended that fares be increased at peak times and in sections with high traffic, and be lowered at other times and in other sections. This system of “congestion pricing” was nothing other than the application of economic supply-demand principles to public transport. Differential fares would give commuters with more-flexible hours the incentive to avoid peak travel times.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

As presently constituted, our continued success requires the supply of coal, gas, oil, fresh water, iron, copper, molybdenum, titanium, ruthenium, platinum, phosphorus, nitrogen, and much, much more to be available at an exponentially increasing rate. 2. CITIES, URBANIZATION, AND GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY Perhaps our greatest invention has been the very stage upon which this panoply of socioeconomic interactions, mechanisms, and processes that drive exponential expansion has been played out, namely the city. This is the view expressed by the urban economist Edward Glaeser in his book The Triumph of the City.1 For concomitant with the population explosion over the past two hundred years has been the exponential urbanization of the planet. The city is the ingenious mechanism we have evolved for facilitating and enhancing social interaction and collaboration, two necessary components of successful innovation and wealth creation.

Almost fifty years after Jane’s hypotheses about the primacy of cities in national economies were articulated, many of us who have come to study cities from a variety of perspectives have arrived at some version of her conclusions. We live in the age of the Urbanocene, and globally the fate of the cities is the fate of the planet. Jane understood this truth more than fifty years ago, and only now are some of the experts beginning to recognize her extraordinary foresight. Many writers have picked up this theme, including the urban economists Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, but none has been as forthright and bold as Benjamin Barber in his book with the provocative title If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.5 These are indicative of a rising consciousness that cities are where the action is—where challenges have to be addressed in real time and where governance seems to work, at least relative to the increasing dysfunctionality of the nation-state. 3.

THE REMARKABLY REGULAR STRUCTURE OF MOVEMENT IN CITIES The extraordinary diversity and multidimensionality of cities has led to a host of images and metaphors that try to capture particular instantiations of what a city is. The walking city, the techno-city, the green city, the eco-city, the garden city, the postindustrial city, the sustainable city, the resilient city. . . and, of course, the smart city. The list goes on and on. Each of these expresses an important characteristic of cities, but none captures the essential feature encapsulated in the rhetorical Shakespearean question “What is the city but the people?” Most images and metaphors of cities conjure up their physical footprint and tend to ignore the central role played by social interaction.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

For the role of governance in development, see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origin of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). 10 This hypothesis, often attributed to Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, has been the focus of several analyses. See, for example, Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière, “Inequality, Leverage and Crises,” IMF Working Paper, no. 10/268, 2011). For a critique of this hypothesis, see Edward Glaeser, “Does Economic Inequality Cause Crises?”, New York Times, Economix Blog, 2010. A recent synthesis of the debate is put forward by Till van Treeck, “Did Inequality Cause the U.S. Financial Crisis?”, Journal of Economic Surveys, 10.1111, 2013. 9 Globalization and Costly Inequality137 and the rising income inequality observed over the two or three decades before the crisis would be accompanied by a decrease in consumption and therefore a drop in economic activity.

A good example of this is the cost of the endemic violence afflicting certain countries or cities. Without any hope of ever joining the middle class, some youth in Brazilian favelas, Colombian poblaciones, and even the poor neighborhoods or banlieues of certain large cities in developed countries will try to make money from criminal activity: theft, assault, kidnapping, drug trafficking. The rest of the population is then obliged to allocate a significant part of their income to security in order to protect themselves. Anyone who has walked through Rio, Bogotá, or Mexico City will have been struck by the walls, bars, and security personnel—often heavily armed—that guard apartment buildings, stores, banks, and company headquarters.

At the macroeconomic level, the disinflation that took place at the beginning of the 1980s re-­energized financial markets by eliminating a major source of uncertainty about the cost of and the real return on capital. This disinflation occurred alongside the deregulation of financial market operations, based on re-­establishing competition among operators of all kinds and the computerization of markets, and led to the 1986 “Big Bang” of the City in London. The success of these reforms, which could be seen in the impressive development of the City, led to them being adopted first in the United States and then in continental Europe, where they were facilitated by the growing openness of international financial markets. This change was particularly conspicuous in France, where, until the late 1980s, financial mechanisms remained constrained by very rigid regulatory systems based on a few large nationalized banks and the strict regulation of foreign exchange operations.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

But the truth is that even with modern computers, many complex interactions remain too subtle to be performed via technology. As Harvard University’s distinguished economist Edward Glaeser pointed out at the time, digital and in-person communication are best seen as complements rather than substitutes for each other.27 More efficient information technology has made it possible to maintain a greater number of relationships, which increases the number of in-person contacts. Though the computer revolution rendered New York’s advantages as a manufacturing city obsolete, it amplified its competitive edge in innovation. Cities specializing in knowledge work (that is, developing and exporting ideas) became more productive.

The economists Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser, and Lawrence Summers recently conducted a detailed study of the geography of joblessness among men in their prime. Some of the authors’ findings may not come as a surprise. One is that on average, men are more likely to go to work in places where educational attainment is high.39 Another is that men are less likely to go to work if durable manufacturing was historically a key source of employment in the area where they live. Indeed, as noted above, since the dawn of the computer revolution, new jobs have overwhelmingly appeared in cities with skilled populations.

People began using their cars to go shopping, visit friends and relatives, and drive out to the countryside on the weekends to escape the noise of the city. By changing the way people worked and lived, the automobile changed the face of the North American continent. With better and cheaper transportation, cities were no longer merely a great congregation of people. Cities developed special areas for factory work, shopping districts, and suburban neighborhoods for living. They were subdivided into areas of work, consumption, and living. And many of those working in the city no longer had to live within its limits. In the words of Ralph Epstein, writing in 1927: “The countryside is not only brought nearer the city; the city itself becomes, in all but its corporate name, indeed a part of the surrounding country.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Patricia Cohen, “Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard,” New York Times, May 24, 2015. 31. Noam Scheiber, “Pension Cuts Exempt Police and Firefighters,” New York Times, March 19, 2015; Alyssa Battistoni, “The Dirty Secret of Public-Sector Union Busting,” Salon, February 24, 2011. 32. Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, “Why Are Welfare States in the U.S. and Europe So Different?” Horizons Stratégiques, February 2006, at http://www.​cairn.​info/​zen.​php?​ID_​ARTICLE=​HORI_002_​0051. 33. Ibid. 34. Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, pp. 25–61. Chapter Seven: The Sleeping Giant Stirs 1. Workers Defense Project, “Build a Better Texas: Construction Conditions in the Lone Star State,” January 2013, at http://www.​workers​defense.​org/​Build%20a​%20Better%20​Texas_​FINAL.​pdf. 2.

The fact that in the United States workers have to advocate and lobby for the right to take a day off when they’re sick or their child is sick without losing pay is indicative of the long slide in labor standards for the new working class and the lack of bargaining power to secure basic benefits. San Francisco was the first city to pass paid-sick-days legislation, followed by a string of major cities and Connecticut in 2011. But the fight for this basic benefit was nothing short of a political showdown in New York City. After five years of activism and lobbying, the City Council passed a fairly weak version of paid sick days that covered about 1 million workers. Then the WFP ran a progressive slate of candidates for the City Council in 2012, and they all won their seats. As Cantor told me, with the new City Council in place, it took only about three hours to amend the law to cover another 300,000 to 500,000 workers.

Missouri Jobs with Justice, along with the Fight for $15 campaign, SEIU, and others, fought hard for the $13 minimum wage that the Kansas City council passed in July 2015. The law isn’t perfect, because it includes a young person’s exemption, which allows employers to pay subminimum wage to younger workers. The law also doesn’t have an automatic cost-of-living adjustment. But its passage was significant not only for workers in Kansas City but potentially for workers across the state. When Kansas City passed its law, it created a domino effect: Kansas City County, St. Louis, and the state legislature are all now actively considering minimum-wage increases to at least $13 an hour, despite claiming that they couldn’t do it just weeks before the city council in Kansas City passed its bill.


pages: 303 words: 75,192

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

“Liberalizing Reforms and the European Union: Accession, Membership, and Convergence,” Southern Economic Journal 83, no. 4 (2017): 932–951. 8. Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty? First Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–174. 9. Edward L. Glaeser, David I. Laibson, Jose A. Scheinkman, and Christine L. Soutter, “Measuring Trust,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 3 (2000): 811–846. 10. Jonas Hjort, “Ethnic Divisions and Production in Firms,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 4 (2014): 1899–1946. 11. Patrick Joseph O’Brien, Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom (John C.

Cities can have elections to decide whether the city treasurer should be appointed by the city government; the default is that they’re elected. Whalley checks to see which kinds of cities have lower borrowing costs: ones with appointed treasurers or elected ones. The interest rate paid on a city’s debt is a useful index of how well the city is running its finances. Managing a city’s borrowing costs is complicated. Making your case to the financial system that your city is a good credit risk means focusing on a lot of details, and there are a lot of financial institutions that would love to make a California city pay high interest costs. If you can bring your city’s borrowing costs down by just a few tenths of a percent each year, you’re doing a great job.

But in the case of city treasurers, it’s easy to measure (much of) the job the treasurer is doing: just look at the interest rate on the city debt. But even when such a key quality index is so easy to measure, voting citizens do an awful job of keeping the city treasurer accountable. The better option is to let other city officials—the elected mayor, the city council, or maybe the appointed city manager—pick a treasurer and then keep an eye on the job she’s doing. Those city officials will surely notice if the treasurer is saving the city over $200,000 a year, even if voters are too preoccupied watching cat videos to do the job. This brings me to my childhood home, to Orange County, California, home to Disneyland, In-N-Out Burger, and the Nixon Presidential Library.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

This finding is generally confirmed by Daniel Ben-David and L. Alan Winters, ‘‘Trade, Income Disparity and Poverty,’’ World Trade Organization Special Study No. 5 (Geneva: World Trade Organization, 1999), http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/disparity_e.pdf. It is also supported by Alberto F. Ades, and Edward L. Glaeser, ‘‘Evidence on Growth, Increasing Returns, and the Extent of the Market,’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 3 (August 1999). One argument against free trade bringing growth is that growth was higher during the early postwar decades than it is today, in the age of globalization. But this objection ignores the fact that growth is quicker when huge tariffs begin to come down.

A man from Prague was sometimes visited by Czech friends who had settled abroad. They deplored McDonald’s having come to Prague, because it threatened the city’s distinctive charm. This response made the man indignant. How could they regard his home city as a museum, a place for them to visit now and then in order to avoid fast food restaurants? He wanted a real city, including the convenient and inexpensive food that these exile Czechs themselves had access to. A real, living city cannot be a ‘‘Prague summer paradise’’ for tourists. Other countries and their populations do not exist in order to give us picturesque holiday experiences.

When growth in a very poor country gathers speed and the chimneys begin belching smoke, the environment suffers. But when prosperity has risen high enough, the environmental indicators show an improvement instead: emissions are reduced, and air and water show progressively lower concentrations of pollutants. The cities with the worst problems are not Stockholm, New York, and Zu¨rich, but rather Beijing, Mexico City, and New Delhi. In addition to the factors already mentioned, this is also due to the economic structure changing from raw-material-intensive to knowledge-intensive production. In a modern economy, heavy, dirty industry is to a great extent superseded by service enterprises.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

Alesina, Alberto, and Roberto Perotti (1996) “Income Distribution, Political Instability, and Investment,” European Economic Review, 40, 1203–25. Alesina, Alberto, and Dani Rodrik (1994) “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 109, 465–90. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote (2001) “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2001, 187–278. Alesina, Alberto, and Edward Glaeser (2004) Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference; New York: Oxford University Press. Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba (1963) The Civic Culture; Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations; Princeton: Princeton University Press.

In Essex and Hertfordshire counties, the rebels were dealt with severely – many of the main leaders of the revolt were already dead; those who had survived were executed. As a chronicler at the time put it: Afterwards the King sent out his messengers into divers parts, to capture the malefactors and put them to death. And many were taken and hanged at London, and they set up many gallows around the City of London, and in other cities and boroughs of the south country. At last, as it pleased God, the King seeing that too many of his liege subjects would be undone, and too much blood spilt, took pity in his heart, and granted them all pardon, on condition that they should never rise again, under pain of losing life or members, and that each of them should get his charter of pardon, and pay the King as fee for his seal twenty shillings, to make him rich.

After 1891, the Unión Cı́vica Radical (Radicals), under the leadership of Hipólito Yrigoyen, launched revolts in 1893 and 1905. However, despite the continuation of regimes based on the control and coercion of the electorate, Argentine elites were becoming aware of the unfolding similarities between Western European societies and their own, with the growing cities and the emergence of new social classes. Democracy’s attractiveness lay in its promise of protecting political stability, for if political exclusion were maintained . . . the nation risked a repetition of the upheavals of the early 1890’s. (Rock 1987, pp. 184–5) In 1910, Roque Sáenz Peña, one of the leading advocates of political reform, became president.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Simon Kuper, “Priced Out of Paris,” Financial Times Magazine, June 14, 2013; Sarah Kendzior, “Expensive Cities Are Killing Creativity,” Al Jazeera, December 17, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/12/expensive-cities-are-killing-creativity-2013121065856922461.html. 19. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 344. 20. Sarah Maslin Nir, “The End of Willets Point,” New York Times, November 24, 2013. 21. Kuper, “Priced Out of Paris”; Kendzior, “Expensive Cities”; Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Ronni Pavan, “Inequality and City Size,” Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 95, no. 5 (December 2013): 1535–48; Edward L. Glaeser, Matt Resseger, and Kristina Tobio, “Urban Inequality,” working paper, Harvard Kennedy School, Taubman Center for State and Local Government, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 22.

Joel Kotkin, “The Cities Where a Paycheck Stretches the Furthest,” New Geography, July 9, 2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002950-the-cities-where-a-paycheck-stretches-the-furthest. 33. Richard Florida, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Washington Monthly, May 2002, pp. 15–25. 34. Francis Wilkinson, “Why Are Liberal Cities Bad for Blacks?” Bloomberg View, April 9, 2014, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-09/why-are-liberal-cities-bad-for-blacks. 35. Aaron M. Renn, “The White City,” New Geography, October 18, 2009, http://www.newgeography.com/content/001110-the-white-city; Urban Institute, “How Do the Top 100 Metro Areas Rank on Racial and Ethnic Equity?”

If Manhattan were a country, it would rank sixth highest in income inequality in the world out of more than 130 for which the World Bank reports data.24 Amid the upper-tier affluence, in part due to the impact of bailouts of the great financial institutions concentrated in the city, New York’s wealthiest one percent earn a third of the entire city’s personal income—almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.25 This makes all the more understandable how, despite the city’s relatively strong recovery from both 9/11 and the recession, the strident populist campaign of Mayor Bill de Blasio was so strongly supported.26 The same patterns can be seen, albeit to a lesser extent, in other major cities, notes a recent analysis of 2010 Census data by the Brookings Institution. In many of these core cities, notes Brookings, the percentage of middle-income families has been in a precipitous decline for the last thirty years.27 Using more recent data, University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill has demonstrated that the highest levels of inequality tend to be in larger metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami.28 The role of costs is critical here.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Available from http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_1-50/WP36.pdf (accessed July 23, 2009). Aguiar, Mark, and Erik Hurst. 2007. Measuring trends in leisure: The allocation of time over five decades. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122:3: 969-1006. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2005. Work and leisure in the US and Europe: Why so different? NBER Working Paper 11278. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research. Alperovitz, Gar. 2005. America beyond capitalism: Reclaiming our wealth, our liberty, and our democracy. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Individuals are planting vegetable plots, community gardens are sprouting, and in a number of major cities, efforts to grow healthy organic food for inner-city residents are thriving. Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago all have large-scale organizations that are reshaping residents’ food habits. Farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, local sourcing by restaurants, Slow Food chapters, school-yard gardens, and related initiatives are on the rise. Practices are expanding from simple vegetable plots to urban homesteading. People are growing mushrooms, keeping bees, and raising livestock. A chicken underground has sprung up in cities with laws against backyard poultry, and urban poultry households stretch from Los Angeles to South Portland, Maine.

Self-provisioning has become one leg of the stool for living smart and sustainably. Sound far-fetched, especially for urban households? The merger of sustainability and self-sufficiency has created an explosion of activity and creativity inside and outside cities. The best known of the trends is food cultivation, through organic gardening, urban homesteading, gleaning, and even a movement to grow fresh food “in small places,” such as crowded city apartments. Urbanites are moving far beyond herbs and vegetables, by planting fruit trees, putting chickens in their backyards, and keeping bees. People are also going off the grid, with solar panels and passive solar design, geothermal pumps, windmills, and wood pellet and corncob stoves.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

See Joseph Henrich et al., “Group Report: What Is the Role of Culture in Bounded Rationality?,” in Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, ed. Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 353–54, for an entertaining outline in connection with food choice decisions. 22. Edward Glaeser, “Psychology and Paternalism,” University of Chicago Law Review (2001): 133. 23. On some of the technical complexities, see Christian List and Robert E. Goodin, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 283–88, 295–97. 24. Ibid. 25.

SUNSTEIN / Infotopia / How Many Minds Produce Knowledge / 1 2006 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved.

With respect to questions with definite answers, deliberating groups tend to do about as well as or slightly better than their average member, but not as well as their best members.22 One study does find that The Surprising Failures of Deliberating Groups / 59 when asked to estimate the populations of U.S. cities, groups did as well as their most accurate individual member;23 but in the vast majority of studies, this does not happen.24 Hence it is false to say that group members usually end up deferring to their internal specialists. Deliberating groups and statistical groups often do about equally well (or poorly).


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline”: Richard Florida, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” The Atlantic, March 2009. “Bring on more gentrification”: Steve Neavling, “‘Bring on More Gentrification’ Declares Detroit’s Economic Development Czar,” Motor City Muckraker, May 16, 2013. In 2010, the city’s mayor, Dave Bing, proposed: Edward Glaeser, “Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness,” New York Times, Economix blog, March 16, 2010. “a gleam of renewal in struggling Detroit”: Julie Alvin, “A Gleam of Renewal in Struggling Detroit,” New York Times, June 17, 2014. Research by Wayne State University grad student Alex B.

Massey and Denton measure the racial dissimilarity of US cities’ neighborhoods through an “index of dissimilarity,” calculating the percentage of black Americans who would have to move within a given city for every neighborhood to accurately mirror the overall demographics of the entire city. The higher the percentage, the more segregated a city is. The researchers found that before the 1900s, American cities were relatively integrated. In 1860 in the biggest cities outside the South—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and a couple of others—the average dissimilarity index was 45.7, meaning about 46 percent of African Americans would have to move into different neighborhoods in order for each city to be well integrated. The biggest southern cities were actually more integrated in 1860—their average index was 29.

The biggest southern cities were actually more integrated in 1860—their average index was 29. But by 1910, northern cities had an average dissimilarity index of nearly 60, and southern cities had one of nearly 40. Cities were becoming more segregated. By 1940, dissimilarity in southern cities had reached 81; in northern cities it had reached 89.2. In other words, by 1940, 89.2 percent of black people in northern cities would have had to move in order to achieve a truly integrated city. By 1970, the dissimilarity index in the United States as a whole had reached an all-time high at 79 percent. It’s worth pointing out the increase in segregation in the North came as black Americans were moving by the millions from the South to find industrial jobs in northern cities.


pages: 290 words: 84,375

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

the subprime mortgage crisis: “The Critical Issue: China and China Plays,” Global Equity Strategy, Credit Suisse, July 2015, 6. the urban population: Edward Glaeser, Wei Huang, Yueran Ma, and Andrei Shleifer, “A Real Estate Boom with Chinese Characteristics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 1 (2017): 93–116, http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shleifer/files/chinaboom_final.pdf. China’s smaller cities: Andy Rothman, “Sinology: Does China Have a Housing Bubble?,” Matthews Asia, November 2016, https://institutional.matthewsasia.com/sinology-china-housing-bubble/. losses for years: “74 New Airports to Be Completed by 2020: Trips to Small Cities Easier,” State Council of the People’s Republic of China, February 19, 2017, http://english.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2017/02/19/content_281475571877834.htm.

In 2006, Dongfeng’s joint venture with Nissan Motors left Shiyan for Wuhan as well, but the Shiyan authorities decided that their city’s problem wasn’t its poor location. According to the Shiyan Bureau of Land and Resources, before moving, Dongfeng had asked for about eighty acres of land, which the city couldn’t provide. “After Dongfeng decided to move the headquarters of two of its units, it looked as though the motor city could become an abandoned city,” the bureau said in a fax it sent me. Clearly, if only Shiyan had more land—land that could be built on—then the city could avoid this situation happening again. In 2007, the city government settled on a plan to create four hundred square kilometers of new, flat land—more than doubling the city’s original footprint—by getting rid of the hills.

Over the last decade, building new cities—and adding entire new “districts” to the outskirts of existing cities—has become business as usual in China. A survey of twelve provinces in 2013 by the China Center for Urban Development, an in-house think tank for the central government’s National Development and Reform Commission, found that the capital cities of those provinces were each building an average of 4.6 new districts (which are often indistinguishable in size and ambition from new cities) or new cities in their immediate orbit. The sample’s 144 prefecture-level cities (China has more than three hundred prefectures, which are the next administrative level down from provinces) were building, on average, 1.5 each.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

“Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment.” University of Michigan Law and Economic Research Paper 16-012. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795795. Accessed September 20, 2016. Agee, James, and Walker Evans. 1941. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote. 2001.“Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall): 187–278. Also available as NBER Working Paper No. 8524. Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Industrial cities found that people were less mobile than jobs, and urban prosperity was replaced by urban joblessness. Black workers moved to Northern cities to find jobs in the Great Migration, only to find that the jobs had disappeared. The Great Migration, which as noted earlier ended in 1970, did not lead to integrated housing in the North. As soon as Southern black workers appeared in Northern cities, white families began to move out of the cities. White flight was responsible for one-half of the increase in segregation in the 1930s. Prosperous white urban residents continued to leave cities for the suburbs after the Second World War, avoiding newly integrated schools.

They extended Lewis’s assumption of economic rationality from the capitalist to the subsistence sector. They argued that a farmer thinking of moving to the city was attracted by the wage available in the city, which was substantially higher than the wage he was earning in the countryside. He would leave if his expected wage in the city would be larger; the expected wage is the product of the wage differential and the probability that the worker would find a high-paying job in the city. The farmer was assumed to anticipate both the higher wage and the difficulty of obtaining a job that paid this wage.7 The economists recognized that the effort to transfer into the capitalist sector was neither certain nor swift.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

These include Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel prize- winner and a former chief economics at the IMF; Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Francesco Saraceno of the Paris-based Centre for Economic Research; Professor Raghuram Rajan, another former IMF chief economist; Gerry Holtham, a former City fund manager and co-director of the Investment Management Resource Centre at Cardiff University; the American economist Ravi Batra; and Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière, two IMF research economists.242 The latter, for example, have argued that ‘The crisis is the ultimate result, after a period of decades, of a shock to the relative bargaining powers over income of two groups of households, investors who account for 5 per cent of the population, and whose bargaining power increases, and workers who account for 95 percent of the population (and whose bargaining power has fallen).’243 Although these are the views of a small minority and remain highly controversial, they have prompted an ongoing debate. Reviewing some of the evidence, Harvard economist David Laibson concluded, ‘income inequality was not a major contributor’.244 In January 2011, in a spirited debate at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Denver, two economists—Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Edward Glaeser of Harvard took on Chicago’s Raghuram Rajan, with Glaeser concluding that ‘Inequality seems as if it was only a small part of the story.’245 Then in February, in the first attempt at a systematic analysis of the relationship between rising inequality and banking crises, two Oxford academics, including the distinguished economist, Tony Atkinson, concluded that ‘at first sight this does not provide overwhelming evidence for the increase [in inequality] hypothesis’.

See Buchanan et al, Undisclosed and Unsustainable, Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, Manchester University, 2009. 130 Centre for Cities, Cities Outlook, 2009. 131 Centre for Cities, Public Sector Cities, Trouble Ahead, July 2009. 132 Buchanan et al, op. cit. p 22. 133 J Hills et all (eds), Towards a More Equal Society, Policy Press, 2009, p 2. 134 Ibid. p 28. 135 Lansley, Life in the Middle, op. cit. figure 8. 4 A FAUSTIAN PACT In early January 1998, a large group of London traders, fund managers and financiers braved the pouring winter rain to gather at the Mansion House, the grand official residence of the Mayor of the City of London. The group—gathered in the very heart of the old financial sector known as the Square Mile—had been invited to debate the motion ‘This house believes that City salaries are totally fair and justified’.

The only voices that came to count, it seemed, were those coming from corporate boardrooms and City offices. The Treasury itself became little more than an outpost of the City. A torrent of City lobbying secured Treasury support for the idea that financial innovation was good for the economy, that the City was a key generator of social value and should be the central engine of economic growth. As Manchester University academics have described it, ‘The new Treasury doctrine is the impossibility of upsetting the City.’260 The forces that drove economic instability were not external shocks that could not have been foreseen, but ones implicit to the great shifts in policy direction instituted from the late 1970s.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In fact, the United States lags behind all industrialized nations when it comes to direct government funding of health care, family leave, child care, and unemployment benefits. In an influential 2004 book, Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference, Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser attributed most of the gap in social spending between western Europe and the United States to our unrivaled mix of racial and ethnic groups and the distrust that engendered. Now, when you add in American social spending on public education, which used to be the highest in the world, as well as employer-provided social supports subsidized by government with tax breaks—health insurance and 401(k)s, to name two big examples—the US welfare state isn’t necessarily smaller than that of a lot of industrialized nations.

The exhibit culminated in the city of the future, and Futurama seemed to be trying to reassure us that the urban experiment would work out in the end. “Its traditions and its faiths preserved, there is a new beauty and new strength in the city of tomorrow,” the confident narrator told us. And we believed him. At the end of the day my parents, my little brother, and I climbed into a tiny, swaying carriage and rode in an enormous Goodyear tire, a giant Ferris wheel that was, like Futurama, a great big ad. From there, we could see Shea Stadium, the brand-new home of the Mets. We had a panoramic view of the city we loved.

Liberals tend to admire him as an urban innovator who did his best to make the city live up to its promise of opportunity for everyone. Conservatives despise him as someone who caved to black “militants,” as well as to white union leaders, and destroyed New York. Some see him as a dangerous naïf rolled by the city he was supposed to govern. Liberal journalist Jack Newfield, who loved him, summed it up this way in a Lindsay obituary in 2000: “Lindsay was great on race, but not so great on class. He lacked a certain empathy for the white ethnic communities of the city. . . . The mayor who wanted reconciliation so deeply accidentally created contention and white backlash.”


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter,” VoxEU, 6 February 2018, https://voxeu.org/article/revenge-places-dont-matter. 6. Rodríguez-Pose. 7. Sarah O’Connor, “Left Behind: Can Anyone Save the Towns the Economy Forgot?,” Financial Times, 16 November 2017, https://www.ft.com/blackpool. 8. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “Urban Decline and Durable Housing” (NBER Working Paper No. 8598, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, November 2001), http://www.nber.org/papers/w8598; Martin Sandbu, “Economic Lessons from a Left-Behind Town,” Financial Times, 17 November 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/21ecb032-cad8-11e7-aa33-c63fdc9b8c6c. 9.

In the heyday of Western growth, the greater prosperity of the cities showed up in wages that were higher than in smaller towns and the countryside for all skill levels. More recently, this “city premium” in low-skill wages has largely disappeared—indeed, it can be worse than that because of high urban housing costs. Low-skilled people no longer have the opportunity to better their condition by moving to the big city. Meanwhile, high-skill incomes have soared ahead in the big cities—but not elsewhere. This means two things: inequality between high-skill and low-skill pay within big cities is high, as is the inequality in high-skill pay in the big cities compared with elsewhere.

If the world today offers much less than it once did to routine workers with only basic schooling or training, it is because they are less useful to the modern economy. * * * 2. The triumph of cities. Until a generation ago, prosperity spread across the land both in the United States and across Western Europe. Poorer areas grew faster than richer ones, so the countryside and small-town periphery were catching up with the big central cities economically. But around 1980 this changed on both sides of the Atlantic. Since then, the richer cities have pulled away from a small-town and rural hinterland where incomes have increasingly fallen behind and economic opportunities have become more limited (I discuss this at greater length in chapter 11).


pages: 303 words: 83,564

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

In 1991 a substantial majority of Britons—58 percent—agreed that government should spend more on welfare benefits even if it led to higher taxes; by 2012 this had fallen to an inconsequential minority—28 percent. The argument that cultural diversity reduces the willingness to redistribute income has been formalized and investigated by two highly distinguished Harvard professors, Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser.23 They posed the question of why there has been so much greater willingness to accept redistribution in Europe than in the United States. Their explanation was that the distinctive attitudes of the typical European country were grounded in its greater cultural homogeneity. There is also some evidence that what erodes the willingness to redistribute is the rate at which diversity increases rather than simply its level.

Some of the conditions that determine whether cities succeed in this function are determined at the level of the nation, but others are determined by the city itself. Some cities provide much more effective ladders for migrants than others. Issues of zoning and local transport can make a major difference.22 Although Paris is a high-productivity city, the suburbs in which migrants from rural areas of poor countries were encouraged to congregate have been dysfunctional. They are zoned so as to permit only residential uses yet have very poor transport connectivity to centers of employment. In contrast, cities such as Istanbul have attracted migrants to districts in which high-density residence and enterprise are intermingled.

My grandfather migrated from a poverty-stricken village in Germany, Ernsbach, to what was then the most prosperous city in Europe: Bradford. That move, not just country to country but village to city, typifies modern migration from poor countries to rich ones. But once he arrived in Bradford, my grandfather’s sense of youthful adventure reached its limit: he went straight to a district already so packed with other German immigrants that it was known as Little Germany. The same limits to adventure characterize today’s migrants. A century on, Bradford is no longer the most prosperous city in Europe: in a reversal of fortunes it is now far less prosperous than Ernsbach. It has remained a city of arrival, and it has remained a city of tensions.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

We’d like to thank the following people who read the manuscript, or parts of it, or who graciously agreed to talk with us about ideas in the book: George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Pierre Azoulay, Seth Dicthick, Frank Dobbin, Ben Edelman, Teppo Felin, Ronald Findlay, Todd Fitch, Margo Beth Fleming, Walter Frick, Joshua Gans, Ed Glaeser, Andrei Hagiu, Matthew Kahn, Judd Kessler, Barbara Kiviat, Scott Kominers, Ilyana Kuziemko, Kevin Li, Roger Martin, Eric Maskin, Dan McGinn, Ben Olken, Joel Podolny, Jeff Pontiff, Canice Prendergast, Paul Romer, Marc Rysman, Peng Shi, Paolo Siconolfi, Paulo Soumaini, Michael Spence, Kendall Sullivan, Morgan Sword, Steve Tadelis, Jonas Vlachos, Ania Wieckowski, and Feng Zhu.

It was one that treated each type of market—along with its own particular defects and failures—as a largely independent exercise. You would never, for example, build a generic scale model of “City” to try to understand the urban landscapes of Cairo, Mexico City, Amsterdam, and New York. This new generation of economists wasn’t going to abandon models altogether; they were necessary to understand any general issue—if you want to understand traffic patterns in Amsterdam, you would stop well short of building a full-scale model of the city. MIT economist Evsey Domar—who rose to prominence as a mathematical economist in the 1940s and ’50s—drew a comparison to the writing of a novel or play.

Out-of-town collectors had to mail in their bids, and auction houses needed to come up with a way of allowing mail-in bids to compete alongside live participants. One stamp dealer, William P. Brown of New York City, described the process they devised: That out-of-town collectors may have equal facilities for purchasing with city collectors, bids may be sent to the auctioneers, Messrs. Bangs & Co., or to William Erving, P.O. Box 3222, N.Y. City, who will either of them represent their bids the same as though they were personally present, and without charge. Thus, supposing either of these parties receives two bids on one lot of 20 and 25 cents apiece, they would start the lot at 21 cents, at which price it would be given to the person sending the 25 cent order, unless some one present advanced, when they would continue to bid, stopping at the limit of 25 cents . . .


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

This makes the framework of individual utility maximisation rather doubtful, as it assumes fixed preferences known to the individual. Yet in this theoretical world, advertising would not work and impulse purchases could not occur. Some economists incorporate social influences on choice in their work, such as Ed Glaeser, in his research on ‘non-market’ phenomena such as crime waves or obesity (Glaeser and Scheinkman 2000). George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton look at people’s decisions from the perspective of personal identity: Men and women in the United States smoked cigarettes at vastly different rates at the beginning of the twentieth century, but these rates largely converged by the 1980s.

The monetarism originating with Milton Friedman’s work in the 1960s and implemented during the inflationary economic crises of the 1970s was the policy orthodoxy. We were also closely involved in the preparations for ‘Big Bang’, the removal of long-standing regulations governing the financial markets in the City of London. These 1986 deregulatory changes gave birth to the financial system that eventually delivered the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008–9, including the explosive growth of derivatives markets. (One of my tasks in the Treasury was writing an explainer about derivatives for senior officials and ministers, which was certainly an education for me too.)

Although majority public opinion continues to support a market-based economy, there is little popular enthusiasm for how the players in these markets have been behaving (YouGov 2011). Thanks to them, capitalism in the early twenty-first century has brought inequality, unemployment or precarious jobs, and austerity. Public dissatisfaction was strong enough by 2012 to get a fair number of people out onto the streets to ‘Occupy’ the commanding heights of the global economy in the City of London and on Wall Street. In 2019 polling in the United States by RealClear Opinion found more than a quarter of respondents saying capitalism and free markets are broken and another 15 percent saying they would like more government regulation of the economy.2 Liberal intellectual opinion has been shrill in its denunciations of economics.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Patrick Simmons, “Many Starter Homes Have Shifted from Owner-Occupancy to Rentals,” Fannie Mae Economic and Strategic Research Group: Housing Insights, October 17, 2018. 19. Jordan Rappaport, “The Large Unmet Demand for Housing,” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City: Main Street Views, April 12, 2017. 20. Choi, Zhu, Goodman, Ganes, and Strochak, “Millennial Homeownership.” 21. Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven E. Saks, “Why Have Housing Prices Gone Up?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 11129, February 2005. 22. Author’s own calculations from data presented in Christopher Mazur and Ellen Wilson, “Housing Characteristics: 2010,” 2010 Census Briefs, US Census Bureau, October 2011. 23.

This suggests that the supply of housing is falling further and further behind demand.19 And there’s a direct connection between where houses do and don’t get built, and where Millennials need to live to be near jobs. It’s possible to gauge in which cities it’s easiest to build new housing and where it’s hardest.§ And when researchers compare cities where the limitations are the tightest to the cities experiencing the greatest inflow of Millennials, they discover we’re more likely to live in cities that will produce the least new housing to accommodate us.¶20 Millennials aren’t flooding into supply-constrained cities out of sheer bloody-mindedness or stupidity, but because those are the areas where the jobs are, especially at the most highly educated, highly skilled end of the job market.* Boomers are capitalizing on that labor-market trend by limiting housing supply so that they can profit from soaring Millennial rents and the high prices Millennials pay to Boomer sellers in order to buy in these areas.

The paradox for Millennials is that while daily life is now safer and more comfortable than ever before, long-term security feels much more elusive than it was for our parents, even as those parents didn’t always have such an easy time either. We can have that avocado toast, or vegan granola, or a tall skinny chai latte, on our way to work. But that work is more likely to be a contract position with fewer benefits than our parents had. We can live among the bright lights, constant stimulation, and modern conveniences of the big city. But good luck affording our first house or apartment. We can stash away some spare change—perhaps from eating less avocado toast—in an online bank account whose balance we can check on our smartphones, but how much will we need for a comfortable retirement, and will we ever be able to save up that much spare change?


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

,” Daily Signal, May 18, 2014, http://dailysignal.com/2014/05/18/union-oppose-higher-pay-members/ (accessed May 12, 2015). 30. Christina D. Romer, “The Business of the Minimum Wage,” New York Times, March 2, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/business/the-minimum-wage-employment-and-income-distribution.html (accessed May 12, 2015). 31. See, for instance, Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “Zoning’s Steep Price,” Regulation, Fall 2002, http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2002/10/v25n3-7.pdf (accessed May 12, 2015) and Sandy Ikeda, “Shut Out: How Land-Use Regulations Hurt the Poor,” The Freeman, February 5, 2015, http://fee.org/freeman/detail/shut-out-how-land-use-regulations-hurt-the-poor (accessed May 12, 2015). 32.

Emberson and Lindstrom, Pursuing Liberty: America through the Eyes of the Newly Free, pp. 165, 167, 175. 4. Quoted in Peter Schwartz, “Cuba’s Boat People, Socialism, and Double Standards,” The Intellectual Activist, Volume 1, Number 14, May 15, 1980. 5. Sánchez, “Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba.” 6. Quoted in Michael J. Totten, “The Last Communist City,” City Journal, Spring 2014, http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_havana.html (accessed May 20, 2015). 7. Ibid. 8. Sánchez, “Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba.” 9. Frances Robles, “In Rickety Boats, Cuban Migrants Again Flee to U.S.,” New York Times, October 9, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/us/sharp-rise-in-cuban-migration-stirs-worries-of-a-mass-exodus.html (accessed May 20, 2015). 10.

The Liberated Economy A few years ago, one of us (Don) was visiting San Francisco with his wife, Kate, and although they had driven up from Southern California without any difficulty, they were warned by the hotel staff not to bother trying to drive around the city. Searching for parking in San Francisco is like trying to find chastity in a brothel. Anyway, it turns out that there are only about four cabs in the entire city, and on their first outing, Don and Kate found themselves standing around for close to an hour before they could hail a taxi, which was driven by an irritated cabbie who reeked of cigarette smoke. Then they discovered Uber.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

converged between 1950 and 1970: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 130. Hereafter cited as Bishop, The Big Sort. See also Christopher Berry and Edward Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities,” Papers in Regional Science 84, no. 3 (2005): 407–44, accessed July 26, 2018, www.nber.org/papers/w11617. Hereafter cited as Berry and Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital.” even within cities: See also Berry and Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital.” Americans bought 90 percent: In 1965, Americans bought 90.7 percent of their cars from these three companies.

between 1945 and 1979: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.” the country’s twenty-five richest metro areas included: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.” relatively evenly across cities: Bishop, The Big Sort, 130. a “single American standard of living” emerged: Longman, “Bloom and Bust.” knowledge spillovers: See Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 138–44. Hereafter cited as Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs. Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2012). resegregating by income: See Matthew P.

Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Selected Economic Characteristics, St. Clair Shores city, Michigan, and Palo Alto city, California, accessed July 19, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF. According to the Census Bureau, median house prices in Palo Alto and St. Clair Shores, for the period between 2012 and 2016, were $1,702,100 and $102,400 respectively. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates 2012–2016, Selected Housing Characteristics, St. Clair Shores city, Michigan, and Palo Alto city, California, accessed July 19, 2018, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Today 54 percent of the world’s: “World’s Population Increasingly Urban with More Than Half Living in Urban Areas,” United Nations, July 10, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html; Parag Khanna, “Beyond City Limits,” Foreign Policy, August 16, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/08/16/beyond_city_limits?page=0,0. Cities are incubators of growth: Andrew F. Haughwout and Robert P. Inman, “How Should Suburbs Help Their Central Cities? Growth and Welfare Enhancing Intra-metropolitan Fiscal Distributions,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 2004, http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/economists/haughwout/suburbs_help_central_cities_haughwout.pdf. Talent can be more effectively: Edward L. Glaeser, “Cities, Information, and Economic Growth,” Cityscape 1, no. 1 (1994): 9–47, http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/cityscpe/vol1num1/ch2.pdf.

Wells, “Adapt or perish.” CITIES AS INNOVATION HUBS The geographic foci for innovation are almost always cities. Why are cities growing so rapidly even as network technologies allow us to be more distributed, to do more at a distance? Three percent of the world’s population lived in cities in 1800. Today 54 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, and just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world economy. In some respects, cities have always been drivers of a society’s growth, even when 97 percent of the population lived in rural areas. Empires have always been powered by their cities. Baghdad led the Abbasids to greatness.

The British colonized and established a chain of cities that linked their empire together, including Cape Town (colonized in 1814), Singapore (1824), and Hong Kong (1842). Today these key cities serve as their respective countries’ and regions’ links to the world, much as they did for the British Empire. Cities are incubators of growth because they produce positive externalities, or spillover effects. They allow ideas, labor, and capital to flow rapidly and efficiently. Talent can be more effectively coordinated, and markets can become more specialized. The most important cities from an economic standpoint are so-called alpha cities, for example, Shanghai, London, New York, and Tokyo.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

See, for example, Sue Kovach Shuman, “At the Market: How to Sniff Out Where Your Garlic Came From,” Washington Post, June 20, 2007, F07. CHAPTER NINE: THE DOUBLE-HEADED DRAGON 189 so cheap as to be essentially free: Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). In this remarkable book, Levinson quotes economists Edward L. Glaeser and Janet E. Kohlhase: “It is better to assume that moving goods is essentially costless than to assume that moving goods is an important component of the production process.” 189 China and the containers they carry: Joseph Tarnowski, “NONFOODS: HBC/GM: Dueling for Dollars,” Progressive Grocer, September 15, 2006. 189 the vast bulk of them from China: See “About the Port,” Web site: the Port of Los Angeles at http://www.portoflosangeles.org. 190 only one-twentieth of the world’s manufactured goods: Ted.

FERKAUF pulled a low-margin, low-service, high-turnover, down-and-dirty discount model out of the shadows and onto the cover of Fortune magazine. Many others were to follow. Upstarts such as Two Guys, G.E.M. G.E.X., Zayre, Spartan, FedMart, and Bargain City built sprawling 70,000-to 200,000-square-foot discount stores in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago, and in medium-sized cities such as Canton, Mississippi, and Yakima, Washington. Like Ferkauf many of these operators leased their land and buildings. This freed up capital and made it easy to pick up and move when and where the shoppers did. These stores were free agents without loyalty to any particular community, and they held no loyalty to any particular supplier.

The impact of the low-price juggernaut in the post-Sputnik era is difficult to overstate. Discounters shuffled the American demographic, abetting the further decline of already troubled city centers by luring still more customers to the suburbs and beyond. Department stores had for some time felt the pinch of urban flight, but many could at least rely on their suburban branches to sputter some revenue back into their city locations. Typically, these suburban stores were expensively constructed and carried merchandise priced at least as high as downtown stores. Discounters undercut prices at both the urban and suburban locations, and choked off the money flow.


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

., “At the Nexus of Labor and Leisure: Baseball, Nativism, and the 1919 Black Sox Scandal,” Journal of Social History, vol. 36(4), pp. 941–962 (2003) Derickson, Alan, “Making Human Junk: Child Labor as a Health Issue in the Progressive Era,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 82(9), pp. 1280–1290 (1992) Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (Cambridge Ed.), Matthew J. Bruccoli (Ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1991) Law, Marc T., & Gary D. Libecap, “The Determinants of Progressive Era Reform: The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906,” In: Edward L. Glaeser & Claudia Goldin (Eds.), Corruption & Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2006) Nathan, Daniel A., “The Big Fix,” Legal Affairs, http://bit.ly/ON0yDA (2004) Panacy, Peter, “Major League Baseball Finds Its Roots in Progressive America,” Bleacher Report, http://bit.ly/fUpsZ0 (4/11/2011) Pietruska, David, Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series, New York: Basic Books (2011) Riess, Steven A., “Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era,” NASHH Proceedings, pp. 40–41 (1975) Rosenberg, Norman L., “Here Comes the Judge!

Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2012–13 Edition, Computer Programmers, http://1.usa.gov/Lc3sCX Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2012–13 Edition, Data for Occupations Not Covered in Detail, http://1.usa.gov/PRj1AF Catanese, David, “GOP Poll: Emerson Dominant,” Politico, http://bit.ly/T0q0Yt (4/22/2010) “City Councils,” National League of Cities, http://bit.ly/KqWUNS (u.d.) Conway, M. Margaret, “Women’s Political Participation at the State and Local Level in the United States,” Political Science & Politics, vol. 37(1), pp. 60–61 (2004) Deckman, Melissa, “Gender Differences in the Decision to Run for School Board,” American Politics Research, vol. 35(4), pp. 541–563 (2007) “Echoing Beck, Limbaugh Claims Landrieu ‘May Be the Most Expensive Prostitute in the History of Prostitution,’ ” Media Matters, http://bit.ly/PDenSA (11/23/2009) Eller, Jeffrey, Interview with Author (2011) “Fast Facts,” Center for American Women and Politics, http://bit.ly/hKFGRb (2012) Fox, Richard L., & Jennifer L.

What’s overlooked, though, is that even in business—even in industries with a large N of competitors—feelings of rivalry intensify competitive effort. The rivalry effect has been studied in many arenas, including Scottish knitwear companies, Norwegian groceries, video game producers, and banks. But it’s in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy that local rivalries are producing economic value in surprising ways. Around the historic city of Bologna, a new, modern industry has sprouted up and managed recently to dominate the $28.6 billion world market—for packaging machinery. This region has earned the nickname “Packaging Valley.” That plastic clamshell your phone charger came in, or the foil blister pack your heartburn pill pops out of, or the six-pack box of bouillon-cube dice in your pantry—there’s a good chance the machine that pressed it came from Packaging Valley.


Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, company town, congestion charging, Edward Glaeser, invisible hand, market clearing, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Economic Geography, profit maximization, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, urban sprawl

Extending the public-sector analysis of chapter 8, section 10.4 addresses a crime-related resource allocation problem: how to divide a city’s police force between its rich and poor neighborhoods. 10.2 The Economic Theory of Crime 10.2.1 A simple model In order to develop a clear picture of how economic factors determine the level of crime in a city, a simple model is useful. This model builds on the work of Gary Becker (1968) but uses elements of a framework sketched by Edward Glaeser (1999). The approach is to focus on the “occupational choices” of individuals, asking whether they become legitimate workers or criminals.

Finally, the rise in q and decline in building height as x increases imply that D falls with x. 42 2.7 Chapter 2 Intercity Predictions As was explained earlier, the model also generates intercity predictions that match observed regularities. For example, the model predicts that large cities will have taller buildings than small cities. To generate these predictions, it is necessary to analyze what might be called the “supplydemand” equilibrium of the city. Basically, the equilibrium requirement is that the city fits its population, or that the “supply” of housing equals the “demand” for it. The size of the land area occupied by a city determines how much housing the city contains. The city’s land area is, in turn, the result of competition between housing developers and farmers for use of the land.

Since these adjustments can be used to predict differences between cities with small and large populations at a given point in time, the following conclusions emerge. The larger city occupies more land than the smaller city. At a given distance from the center, the larger city has taller buildings, smaller dwellings, a higher housing price per square foot, higher land rent, and higher population density than the small city. These predictions match many of the observed differences between large and small cities in the real world.16 16. Empirical tests of the predicted effects of L, y, rA, and t on city land areas have been carried out.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

., 22. 101 developed a master plan for the city: Arif Hasan, Understanding Karachi (Karachi: City Press, 1999), 28. 101 a population of 5.4 million by 1981: Arif Hasan and Masooma Mohib, “The Case of Karachi, Pakistan,” p. 3, from The Challenge of Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2003). 102 539 irregular neighborhoods... 2.5 million people: Interview with Rafique Engineer, March 2010. 103 Doxiadis... had proposed to demolish: Constantinos Doxiadis, Between Utopia and Dystopia (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1966), 63. 103 “had no tangible results”: Leslie Green and Vincent Malone, “Urbanization in Nigeria: A Planning Commentary” (New York: Ford Foundation, 1972–73), 31. 103 “Chaotic traffic conditions”: Ibid., 14–15. 103 A more recent study: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011), 73. 105 “Everybody says land mafia”: Interview with Perween Rahman, March 2010. 105 “Now everybody is a land supplier”: Ibid. 106 “I was designing a hotel”: Interview with Perween Rahman, May 2008. 106 “It was the start of a land grab”: Interview with Perween Rahman, July 2010. 107 “He was a man who would say”: Interview with Perween Rahman, May 2008. 107 grants from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International: Akhtar Hameed Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 49. 107 “I became a state within a state”: Interview with Shamsuddin, March 2010. 108 “They are redundant”: Interview with Perween Rahman, March 2010. 109 “What we do”: Interview with Wahab Khan, May 2008.

POPULATION OF SELECTED INSTANT CITIES Urban areas (cities and contiguous suburbs) estimated by UN Population Division. A NOTE ON POPULATION FIGURES Cities in this book are usually discussed in terms of their metropolitan areas—the central city plus suburbs and other outlying areas linked by commuting. New York, for example, is not described as a city of 8.2 million (the approximate number within the city’s legal boundaries) but as a city of about nineteen million. The metropolitan area is the best definition of a city in the age of the automobile. The United Nations Population Division measures each city as an “urban agglomeration,” which is more compact than a metropolitan area, but both terms encompass the great bulk of a modern city and are used almost interchangeably in this book.

He was only referring to the California décor, but considering that an American executive of a Dubai company was doing business with the Pakistani government at a location that until recently lay under the Arabian Sea, McCartt was saying more than he knew. He represented a global flow of money and ideas from one instant city to another. Just as McCartt was building an entire upscale neighborhood on new land that was largely segregated from the rest of the city, many proposals in other cities seemed to focus less on improving an existing city than on starting fresh. Officials in Mumbai planned to demolish one of the city’s famous slums to make room for upscale towers. They were actually building an entire satellite city of the metropolis, called Navi Mumbai, or New Mumbai, which quickly grew to a population of two million.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Those who voted leave earning less than £20,000 were only 10 points ahead of those voting leave who earn over £60,000 while nearly 50 points separated those with no qualifications and those with higher degrees: Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath, ‘Brexit vote explained; poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 31 August 2016, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities 4.Dame Louise Casey, ‘The Casey Review: A Review into Opportunity and Integration’, December 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/575973/The_Casey_Review_Report.pdf 5.See for example Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; also Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 6.Gillian Tett, ‘Did Obamacare Help Trump?’, Financial Times, 2 December 2016. See also http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/support-for-the-affordable-care-act-breaks-down-along-racial-lines/431916/?

But many of the new jobs replacing those in manufacturing have been in sectors like retail where the average wage is below £9 an hour. Nearly 1 million jobs were created in British cities between 2010 and 2014 but urban wages fell by 5 per cent over the same period. There is a geographic aspect to this too—eight out of the top ten high-wage low-welfare cities are located in the South East, while nine of the bottom ten low-wage cities are in the North or the Midlands.4 Outside the bigger cities job prospects can be even worse. Many of the peripheral towns around Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds have lost their industries but do not have the transport links to deliver their inhabitants to the newer industries in those relatively buoyant urban centres—it was only in 2015 that a direct rail link between Burnley and Manchester was finally re-established after almost fifty years.

In 2011 it had fallen to 45 per cent, down from 58 per cent in 2001. Nobody expected London to become a ‘majority-minority’ city as soon as the 2011 census. Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor, told me in an interview with Prospect in 2007 that London would not become a majority-minority city in my lifetime.46 It had probably already become one as he was speaking. White British net migration from London (around 500,000 a decade) has actually been pretty constant since the 1970s. Yet there was no white British ‘return’ when the city began to thrive once more in the 1980s after a long period of decline. There are a few places in outer London like Barking and Dagenham, where the speed of change suggests a strong element of hostile ‘white flight’ from diversity, but in general the reasons for white exit are many and complex, to do with wanting fresh air and greater space to bring up children as well as discomfort with rapidly changing neighbourhoods.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

However, she was reacting to much earlier uses of the line, whose true origins we have been unable to trace. 2. Schank and Abelson (1977, 1995). 3. Taleb (2001). 4. Sternberg (1998). 5. Harmon (2006). 6. Polti (1981 [1916]). 7. Tobias (1993, pp. iii–iv). 8. The role of politicians in spreading stories has been emphasized by Edward Glaeser (2002). 9. Finnel (2006). 10. Colburn (1984). 11. Finnel (2006). 12. Shiller (2000, 2005). 13. Shiller (2000, 2005) identified the biggest national stock price increases around the world in recent decades and undertook a media search for the stories in their respective national news media interpreting the increases.

The maximum price for a Denman seven-row style brush was almost seven times the minimum.4 This study reminds us that while we often do search for the lowest price (sometimes aggressively so), we also often do not make our purchases at the cheapest store (sometimes knowingly so). If there are significant differences in prices for the same good in the same city, it should then not come as much of a surprise that different firms pay different wages for what would seem to be exactly the same labor, even in the same city. Early evidence came from a striking table published by John Dunlop. Dunlop was one of that crusty breed of applied economists who want to know how the labor market really works. He was as much at home with union leaders as in the halls of Harvard (where in due course he became dean of the faculty).

In contrast, John Maynard Keynes sought to explain departures from full employment, and he emphasized the importance of animal spirits. He stressed their fundamental role in businessmen’s calculations. “Our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence of a railway, a copper mine, a textile factory, the goodwill of a patent medicine, an Atlantic liner, a building in the City of London amounts to little and sometimes to nothing,” he wrote. If people are so uncertain, how are decisions made? They “can only be taken as a result of animal spirits.” They are the result of “a spontaneous urge to action.” They are not, as rational economic theory would dictate, “the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”2 In the original use of the term, in its ancient and medieval Latin form spiritus animalis, the word animal means “of the mind” or “animating.”


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Economists Ed Glaeser and Matthew Resseger find that skilled cities get more productive as they grow, while other places don’t.4 This link, they posit, seems to be a result of the fact ‘that urban density is important because proximity spreads knowledge, which either makes workers more skilled or entrepreneurs more productive’. Big, skilled places are good at making workers more productive. Workers in places like Silicon Valley earn a hefty wage premium over similar workers in other cities, but new arrivals don’t get the premium all at once. Instead it builds over time: evidence that the city is contributing to the knowledge and employability of the workers within it.

So, as social capital loomed larger within rich economies, it became clear that firms were not the only context in which social capital took on new salience. Its rise also boosted the fortunes of big cities with lots of skilled workers. By the end of the 1970s, deindustrialization and suburbanization had many of the rich world’s great industrial cities on the ropes. Populations were crashing. In 1975, New York City very nearly went bankrupt. Popular cinema was filled with dystopian visions of the urban future, in which street punks ruled the streets of gutted cities. But from the 1980s onwards, a turnaround was apparent in some of those very same distressed cities. Big cities that had retained a sizable population of highly skilled individuals began to thrive, and then to boom.

The New York metropolitan area, which itself reached the 1 million person threshold around 1860, was home to more than 15 million people just 100 years later; its population is just over 20 million today and continues to rise.3 Technology allowed humanity to live in ever-larger cities; which would be impossible without steel and electricity, to say nothing of modern agriculture. But big cities are not just curious side effects of the industrial revolution. They are a technology in and of themselves, without which we would all be much poorer and less productive. Cities thrive and grow because of what economists call increasing returns to scale: the larger a city grows the more productive it becomes. Without increasing returns, cities could not get very big: new arrivals would make the city more crowded and unpleasant but wouldn’t make the local economy more productive. Living standards would fall and people would eventually say to hell with it and move out.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

the National Bureau of Economic Research: Edward L. Glaeser and Wentao Xiong, “Urban Productivity in the Developing World,” National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017. See: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23279.pdf. London and Paris: Ibid. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West: Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, December 17, 2010. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html. 2018 McKinsey study: Katie Johnson, “Environmental Benefits of Smart City Solutions,” Foresight, July 19, 2018. See: https://www.climateforesight.eu/cities-coasts/environmental-benefits-of-smart-city-solutions/.

By 2007, the globe had crossed a radical threshold: Half of us now lived in cities. Along the way, we got cities on steroids. In 1950, only New York and Tokyo housed 10 million residents, which is the figure required for “mega-city” status. By 2000, there were over eighteen mega-cities. Today, it’s thirty-three. Tomorrow? Tomorrow is when the numbers go crazy. In fact, we have a new word for the crazy, a “hyper-city,” a locale with a population above 20 million. By comparison, during the French Revolution, the world’s entire urban population was less than 20 million. By 2025, Asia alone will house ten, maybe eleven hyper-cities. And we’re going to need ’em.

In fact, in West’s research, no matter the city studied, as population density increases, so do wages, GDP, and quality-of-life factors like the number of theaters and restaurants. And, as cities grow, they require less, not more, resources. Double the size of a metropolis, and everything from the number of gas stations to the amount of heat needed in the winter—only increases by 85 percent. Turns out, larger, denser cities are more sustainable than smaller cities, small towns, and suburbs. Why? Travel distances drop, shared transportation rises, and less infrastructure—hospitals, schools, garbage collection—is required. The result is that cities are cleaner, more energy efficient, and emit less carbon dioxide. And smart cities could take this further. A 2018 McKinsey study found smart city solutions could reduce urban greenhouse gases some 15 percent, solid waste by 30 to 130 kilograms per person per year, and save water—some twenty-five to eighty gallons per person per day.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Credit’, Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2008. 64 Economic Report of the President 2007, tables B-77 and B-76: http:// www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/. 65 George Magnus, ‘Managing Minsky’, UBS research paper, 27 March 2008. 66 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (London, 2001). 67 Idem, ‘Interview: Land and Freedom’, New Scientist, 27 April 2002. 68 Idem, The Other Path (New York, 1989). 69 Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky, ‘The Formation of Beliefs: Evidence from the Allocation of Land Titles to Squatters’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122, 1 (February 2007), pp. 209-41. 70 ‘The Mystery of Capital Deepens’, The Economist, 26 August 2006. 71 See John Gravois, ‘The De Soto Delusion’, Slate, 29 January 2005: http://state.msn.com/id/2112792/. 72 The entire profit is transferred to a Rehabilitation Fund created to cope with emergency situations, in return for an exemption from corporate income tax. 73 Connie Black, ‘Millions for Millions’, New Yorker, 30 October 2006, pp. 62-73. 74 Shiller, ‘Recent Trends in House Prices’. 75 Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, ‘Housing Dynamics’, NBER Working Paper 12787 (revised version, 31 March 2007). 76 Robert J. Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton, 2003). 6. From Empire to Chimerica 1 Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with the BRICs: The Path to 2050’, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 99 (1 October 2003).

In aggregate, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, at least 40 per cent of the built-up areas of more than sixty cities had been destroyed; 2.5 million homes had been lost, leaving 8.3 million people homeless.37 Practically the only city to survive intact (though not wholly unscathed) was Kyoto, the former imperial capital - a city which still embodies the ethos of pre-modern Japan, as it is one of the last places where the traditional wooden townhouses known as machiya can still be seen. One look at these long, thin structures, with their sliding doors, paper screens, polished beams and straw mats, makes it clear why Japanese cities were so vulnerable to fire. In Japan, as in most combatant countries, the lesson was clear: the world was just too dangerous a place for private insurance markets to cope with.

According to Graham Allison, of Harvard University’s Belfer Center, ‘if the US and other governments just keep doing what they are doing today, a nuclear terrorist attack in a major city is more likely than not by 2014’. In the view of Richard Garwin, one of the designers of the hydrogen bomb, there is already a ‘20 per cent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included’. Another estimate, by Allison’s colleague Matthew Bunn, puts the odds of a nuclear terrorist attack over a ten-year period at 29 per cent.82 Even a small 12.5-kiloton nuclear device would kill up to 80,000 people if detonated in an average American city; a 1.0 megaton hydrogen bomb could kill as many as 1.9 million.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

The impact of The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPfAR) beyond HIV and why it remains essential. Clinical Infectious Diseases 50(2):272–275, http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/2/272.full. Wallis, John Joseph. (2006). The concept of systematic corruption in American history. In Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s Economic History. University of Chicago Press. Wall Street Journal. (2009). Sarkozy adds to calls for GDP alternative. Wall Street Journal blog, Sept. 14, 2009, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/09/14/sarkozy-adds-to-calls-for-gdp-alternative/.

This is exactly what Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson’s 2013 study of laptops in the home shows: If you provide an all-purpose technology that can be used for learning and entertainment, children choose entertainment.34 Technology by itself doesn’t undo that inclination – it amplifies it. Amplifying Power Back in Bangalore, I once hosted a political science professor, whom I’ll call Padma. She was interested in technology and governance. Padma was in the city to study a program that made the municipal government’s finances transparent to the public. A nonprofit group had convinced the government to set up a tool that let anyone with Internet access see how city money was spent. Citizens were able to see, for example, that 5,000 rupees (~$100) was spent repairing a pothole (expensive, but not unreasonable) or that 500,000 rupees ($10,000) was spent cutting down a tree (not likely; a sign of kickbacks).

The global gender gap report 2013, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2013.pdf. World Health Organization. (2011). Annual report 2011. Global Polio Eradication Initiative, www.polioeradication.org/Portals/0/Document/AnnualReport/AR2011/GPEI_AR2011_A4_EN.pdf. ———. (2014). Ambient (outdoor) air pollution in cities database 2014, www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/. World Values Survey. (2005). WVS 2005–2006 wave, OECD-split version (Ballot A), www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/survey_2005/files/WVSQuest_SplitVers_OECD_Aballot.pdf. ———. (n.d.). Findings and insights, www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

., Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000); Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (2009); Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (2012); Richard Florida’s three books: The Great Reset: How the Post-crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (2011), The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (2012), and Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (2008); Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (2013); Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011); Ryan Gravel, Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities (2016); Richard J. Jackson, Designing Healthy Communities (2012); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961); Alyssa Katz, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (2009); Joel Kotkin, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (2010); John Kromer, Fixing Broken Cities: The Implementation of Urban Development Strategies (2010); Christopher B.

Its success will reflect a remarkable turn of events, since the BeltLine’s rail beds once served to segregate the city by race. Yet, as with all massive social endeavors, the BeltLine has faced countless obstacles and fierce critiques, including from those who fear that the project will displace the city’s poorer black residents with wealthier white ones. City on the Verge dives deep into Atlanta’s history but focuses on the BeltLine’s evolving struggles as emblematic of the greater forces sweeping through the city and country at large. This potential “emerald necklace,” as architect and city planner Alexander Garvin (who helped plan its new parks) has called it, could rejuvenate the heart and soul of the city.

This potential “emerald necklace,” as architect and city planner Alexander Garvin (who helped plan its new parks) has called it, could rejuvenate the heart and soul of the city. The Atlanta BeltLine also provides a wonderful lens for viewing the disparate areas of the city, north, east, south, and west, rich and poor, white and black. In literally encircling the city it provides a metaphorical narrative hoop on which to organize the book, with forays into the inner city as well as the outlying suburbs. The success of the Atlanta BeltLine is key to the city’s rejuvenation, helping to reverse the late-twentieth-century “white flight” into the suburbs, which produced some of the worst sprawl in the country.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Now that we can work anywhere, the anywhere we mostly want – at least when we are young – is the densest, most high-rise, most hectic of spots. And we are prepared to pay a premium for it. Cities that encourage tall residential buildings in their centres, like Hong Kong or Vancouver, thrive, while those that insist on low-rise profiles, like Mumbai, struggle. The point is that these are not trends that human beings have chosen consciously as policy. The continuing evolution of the city is an unconscious and inexorable momentum. The same process is continuing all over the world. There is, as Edward Glaeser has observed, an almost perfect correlation between prosperity and urbanisation: the more urbanised a country, the richer it is.

There is also a consistent 15 per cent saving on infrastructure cost per head for every doubling of a city’s population size. The opposite is true of economic growth and innovation – the bigger the city, the faster these increase. Doubling the size of a city boosts income, wealth, number of patents, number of universities, number of creative people, all by approximately 15 per cent, regardless of where the city is. The scaling is, in the jargon, ‘superlinear’. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, who discovered this phenomenon, calls cities ‘supercreative’. They generate a disproportionate share of human innovation; and the bigger they are, the more they generate.

When corrected for age, education and marital status, city-dwellers are 44 per cent more likely to visit a museum and 98 per cent more likely to go to a movie theatre than rural Americans. The sociologist Jane Jacobs was the first to realise that the density of urban living, ‘far from being an evil, is the source of its vitality’ (in John Kay’s words). In her successful opposition to New York’s city planners with their utopian schemes, she championed the unplanned, organic nature of the cities that people love, in contrast to the sterile spaces of planned cities like Brasilia, Islamabad or Canberra. As Nassim Taleb quips, nobody would buy a pied-à-terre in Brasilia the way they would in London.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Rickman, “The Grain Trade under the Roman Empire,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 36 (1980): 261–75. 16. Jad Mouawad and Christopher Drew, “Airline Industry Is at Its Safest Since the Dawn of the Jet Age,” New York Times, February 11, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html. 17. Simeon Djankov, Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The New Comparative Economics,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, no. 4 (2003): 595–619. 18. Shleifer, “Understanding Regulation.” 19. KPMG, “China 360: E-Commerce in China, Driving a New Consumer Culture,” https://www.kpmg.com/CN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Newsletters/China-360/Documents/China-360-Issue15-201401-E-commerce-in-China.pdf. 20.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the leading examples is the city of San Francisco, perched at the northern end of Silicon Valley. The city’s Open Data policy, originally launched in 2009 for implementation through the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, is designed to promote the sharing of city data through an open-access portal, the creation of public–private partnerships to facilitate the development of value-creating tools that citizens and companies can use, and the promotion of data-based initiatives intended to improve the quality of life for everyone living in and around the San Francisco Bay area. The city’s data platform, dubbed DataSF, contains a vast array of information about the city, gleaned from both public and private sources, as well as an application programming interface and tips for outside developers who want to use the data to create apps.

They included Neighborhood Score, a mobile app that provides a block-by-block health and sustainability score for every area of the city; Buildingeye, a map-based app that makes building and planning information easily accessible; Project Homeless Connect, which uses mobile technology to help people without shelter find the resources they need to get off the streets and into decent housing; and House Fax, a “Carfax for houses,” that allows homeowners and residents to access the maintenance history of a particular building.12 Ongoing efforts to apply platform thinking to San Francisco city government include a number of other initiatives, including the creation of a single central portal where local businesses can manage all the licensing, regulation, and reporting requirements associated with operating in the city; the Universal City Services Card, which provides a one-stop location for accessing San Francisco services ranging from marriage licenses to golf course discounts; and a partnership with Yelp, the restaurant-rating platform, that will incorporate city health department scores for local eateries into their online Yelp profiles.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Mississippi isn’t an isolated case. As a new paper by Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser, and Lawrence Summers documents, regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption. An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the non-white inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors—specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs.

-based economists invoked that theory and argued that given the realities on the ground the euro was a bad idea. But the Europeans were too enamored of their vision—too romantic, I would say—to listen. The treaty that set Europe on the road to the euro was signed in 1992, in the Dutch city of Maastricht. I remember joking that they had picked the wrong Dutch city; they should have chosen Arnhem, site of the famous military disaster portrayed in the film A Bridge Too Far. Unfortunately, the travails of the euro have confirmed those worries, with some new problems—like the problems of having a unified currency without a shared safety net for banks—also emerging.

Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared. And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump. I’m not saying that everything is great in coastal cities: many people remain economically stranded even within metropolitan areas that look successful in the aggregate. And soaring housing costs, thanks in large part to Nimbyism, are a real and growing problem.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122–23. 7. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 18. 8. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 70–78. 9. Quoted in Peter Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 23. 10. Easterly et al. with “A Long History of a Short Block.” 11. Peter Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters, 318–19. 12. Easterly et al., “A long history of a short block.” 13. Edward L. Glaeser, “Urban Colossus: Why New York Is America’s Largest City,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review 11, no. 2 (2005): 7–24. 14.

By the twelfth century, the word republic (meaning “public thing”) was often used to refer to these citizen-run city-states.12 Not all Italian cities were free. Inhabitants of cities that were still in the territory of an absolute ruler lacked the rights of free-city citizens. The Normans had invaded Italy south of Rome and established a monarchy over southern Italy between 1061 and 1091. Before the emergence of free cities, the Normans’ Kingdom of Sicily was one of the richest parts of Europe.13 Its capital Palermo was the largest city in Europe in 1200. But the future belonged to the free cities. Population growth of free cities throughout Western Europe systematically outpaced that of cities under absolute rule. Freedom in a particular region led to the emergence of more new cities, as individuals accustomed to freedom in their original cities came together to form new cities.

Freedom in a particular region led to the emergence of more new cities, as individuals accustomed to freedom in their original cities came together to form new cities. The statistical results indicate that, on average, a region developed two new cities (of population greater than 30,000) for every century that it had been free of absolute rule—and the already existing cities in free regions grew much more in population than those in unfree regions.14 We see this nowhere more clearly than in Italy itself. While the Italian North had escaped the Holy Roman Empire after 1176, the Italian South would remain under autocratic rule for another seven centuries.


pages: 455 words: 133,719

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan, “How Mothers and Fathers Share: A Cross-National Time-Use Comparison,” American Sociological Review 76, no. 6 (December 2011): 834–61. 2. “Maternal Employment Rates,” OECD Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, May 13, 2012, www.oecd.org/els/familiesandchildren/38752721.pdf. 3. Alberto F. Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different?” in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005, vol. 20 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 4. “Directive 2003/88/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 November 2003 Concerning Certain Aspects of the Organisation of Working Time,” Official Journal of the European Union, November 18, 2003, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?

“There are paid family leave policies in over 170 countries and no two are alike,” Rowe-Finkbeiner said. “We’re not arguing to import something from somewhere else. We want to come up with our own policies that work for our nation.” How? By starting small. Rather than seeking sweeping federal legislation, MomsRising has been involved in efforts to get city councils and state governments to pass paid sick days bills, like the ones in the cities of Seattle, Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, New York, and San Francisco, and the state of Connecticut.11 They’re writing letters and e-mails in support of local paid family leave laws and local telecommuting policies like those actively promoted in Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Chicago.12 They’re hoping that once people see that the changes are easing the overwhelm for everyone, the movement will catch on.

And all that bright, zingy addictive technology we give them to make them happy, to keep them quiet when we’re busy, that we ourselves are addicted to, is making us all more impatient, impulsive, forgetful, and self-centered.4 “We’re exhausting ourselves,” pediatrician and parenting educator Kathy Masarie had told me, “and creating an inferior product.” For years, Suniya Luthar, a psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and her colleagues have been tracking groups of children, from both the impoverished inner city and the affluent suburbs of New York City. What she found came as a shock: Affluent kids are two to three times more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and high levels of distress than kids living in harsh urban poverty. And wealthy kids were more likely to use drugs and alcohol.5 “I’m one of these parents,” she admitted.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hansmann, Henry. 1990. “Why Do Universities Have Endowments?” Journal of Legal Studies 19:3–42. Hansmann, Henry, Daniel Kessler, and Mark McClellan. 2003. “Ownership Form and Trapped Capital in the Hospital Industry.” In Edward Glaeser, ed., The Governance of Not-for-Profit Organizations, 45–70. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harbough, William T. 1998. “The Prestige Motive for Making Charitable Transfers.” American Economic Review 88(2):277–88. Harriss, C. Lowell. 1951. History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.

Governments also have need to borrow, notably when they too are young and at other times as well, when they foresee greater needs ahead. For example, a new city may need to build roads and a sewage system in expectation of a later population in ux, since putting the whole system in place at once is the most e cient approach. It would be sensible for the city government to nance these infrastructure needs by borrowing: the current population of the city cannot a ord them, and they ought to be paid for by the subsequent residents, who will actually use them and be resident in the city when the debt comes due. Governments may also need to borrow during an economic crisis, again in expectation of better times ahead.

Financial innovations emanating from Amsterdam, London, and New York are developing further in Buenos Aires, Dubai, and Tokyo. The socialist market economy, with its increasingly advanced nancial structures, was introduced to China by Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978, adapting to the Chinese environment the examples of other highly successful Chinese-speaking cities: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei. The economic liberalization of India, which allowed freer application of modern nance, was inaugurated in 1991 under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao by his nance minister (later prime minister) Manmohan Singh, who was educated in economics at Nu eld College, Oxford University.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Pestritto and Atto, American Progressivism, 215, quoting Roosevelt’s “The New Nationalism,” Oct. 1910. 6. McCormick, “The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics,” 247, 265. 7. Speech of Theodore Roosevelt, April 14, 1906, available at link #2. 8. John Joseph Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History,” in Edward Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 21 and 23, available at link #3. Professor Michael Johnston is the dean of corruption studies. His Syndromes of Corruption (2005) captures better the dynamic of corruption that I am describing. While his work is comparative, and addresses the full range of corruption, including quid pro quo corruption, the mechanism he describes in a number of nations is close to the conception of “dependence corruption” described later.

And anytime a significant gap develops, the relationship evinced by the gifts gets strained. Against this background, we can understand Washington a bit better. In the days of wine, women, and wealth, Washington may well have been an exchange economy. I doubt it, but it’s possible. Whatever it was, however, it has become a gift economy.59 For as the city has professionalized, as reformers have controlled graft more effectively and forced “contributions” into the open, the economy of D.C. has changed. If the law forbade D.C. from being an exchange economy, it could not block its becoming a gift economy. So long as the links are not expressed, so long as the obligations are not liquidated, so long as the timing is not too transparent, Washington can live a life of exchanges that oblige without living a life that violates Title 18 of the U.S.

Nine of Washington’s suburban counties are now listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per capita income.90 As former labor secretary Robert Reich describes, When I first went to Washington in 1975, many of the restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue featured linoleum floors and an abundance of cockroaches. But since then the city has become an increasingly dazzling place. Today, almost everywhere you look in downtown Washington you find polished facades, fancy restaurants, and trendy bistros. There are office complexes of glass, chrome and polished wood; well appointed condos with doormen who know the names and needs of each inhabitant; hotels with marble-floored lobbies, thick rugs, soft music, granite counters; restaurants with linen napkins, leather-bound menus, heavy silverware.91 There are many in the lobbying profession, of course, who deplore the state of the industry.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

d=67&s =6&mode=transcript. 5 “skyline on crack”: Nick Tosches, “Dubai’s the Limit,” Vanity Fair, June 2006, 156. 5 96 percent of its population: Christopher Davidson, Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 190. 5 37 percent are immigrants: “New York (City), New York,” U.S. Census Bureau, last modified January 31, 2012, accessed April 20, 2012, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html. 5 “everyone and everything in it”: John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 290. 10 five million people move: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin, 2011), 1. 12 90 percent owned by an Emirati sovereign wealth fund: Charles Bagli, “Abu Dhabi Buys 90% Stake in Chrysler Building,” New York Times, July 10, 2008. 12 “the most abstract and intentional city”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, chapter 2.

Culturally, such malls are just multi-million-dollar exercises in psychological overcompensation for the least Arab city in Arabia. As the late Arab-American journalist Anthony Shadid wrote in The Washington Post, Dubai’s globalization strategy is to “[bring] success to an Arab city by shearing away the qualities that have long defined it as Arab.” Indian expats knowingly call Dubai “the best city in India” while Iranians dub it “the best city in Iran.” Even as the state-backed real estate companies pander to the locals with Arab pride malls, de-Arabianizing Dubai to further open the city to the world remains an obvious if unstated policy goal. English is more than just the city’s lingua franca; it is a semienforced official language.

As with the great East-meets-West cities before it, ultramodern metropolises built by dictatorial fiat with coolies and serfs, Dubai has assembled a stunningly diverse cast of characters who can seize the reins and build a true city of the future. The true city of the future is not simply the city with the tallest tower or the most stunning skyline but one that is piloted by the diverse, worldly, intelligent people it assembles and forges. As a British statesman sagely observed in an 1870 lecture in London, “We were very apt to decry our own City of London as inferior to the capital cities of the despotic powers of Europe, but in London was to be seen the impress of an architecture that grows from within—an architecture that expresses what the people think, and feel, and mean, and not what they are told to think, feel, or mean, as was too often the case in despotic capitals of Europe.”


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

You might have thought that the advent of the Internet would have eroded the connection between place and talent, but in fact the opposite is happening. Bright people gather in university cities such as Boston and San Francisco, or in technology hubs such as Austin, Texas, or Redmond, Washington, or in rural idylls such as Camden, Maine, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the simple reason that they feed off each other’s intellects. Christopher Berry, of the University of Chicago, and Edward Glaeser, of Harvard, have studied the distribution of human capital across American cities. They found that in 1970 about 11 percent of people over age twenty-five had a college degree, and that they were fairly evenly distributed throughout the country.

The inexpensive phones are sold through a vast network of local outlets, such as mom-and-pop stores and rural markets, and the upmarket models through shops in fashionable city centers. The aim is to create a brand that is at once universal and aspirational. Miracle Grow The view from the 87th-floor lobby of Shanghai’s Grand Hyatt hotel is a wonder to behold (if you can behold it through the ever-threatening smog). Lesser skyscrapers glow with the logos of global giants such as Citi and HSBC. The river carries ships loaded with the riches of the world’s workshop. High-rise housing projects stretch into the distance: the city’s population, already 19 million, is forecast to grow to 45 million by 2025.

The skylines of Shanghai and Delhi are punctured by the same neon signs as the skylines of London and New York, for Accenture as well as HSBC, PriceWaterhouseCoopers as well as Citi. McKinsey’s Mumbai office is its fastest-growing branch. As the younger business school–educated generation of Asians takes over from their school-of-hard-knocks fathers, the consultants can expect a bonanza. So has the guru business. Step into a bookshop in Beijing or Shanghai and you are immediately confronted with piles of management books. Venture farther into the business sections and you find crowds of students religiously taking notes. Some Western gurus have taken to adding a couple of Asian cities to their speaking tours in much the same way that aging rock stars do the same thing: the money is good, the audience is large and polite, and you can use an Asian anecdote to spice up your performances back home.


pages: 500 words: 145,005

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard H. Thaler

3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, impulse control, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, late fees, law of one price, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, Mason jar, mental accounting, meta-analysis, money market fund, More Guns, Less Crime, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, New Journalism, nudge unit, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, presumed consent, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

See also World Bank (2015). 353 repeatedly and rigorously tested: See Post et al. (2008) and van den Assem, van Dolder, and Thaler (2012) on game shows, Pope and Schweitzer (2011) on golf, Barberis and Thaler (2003) and Kliger, van den Assem, and Zwinkels (2014) for reviews of behavioral finance, and Camerer (2000) and DellaVigna (2009) for surveys of empirical applications of behavioral economics more generally. 353 intriguing finding by Roland Fryer: Fryer (2010). 354 The team of Fryer, John List, Steven Levitt, and Sally Sadoff: Fryer et al. (2013). 354 a recent randomized control trial: Kraft and Rogers (2014). 355 Field experiments are perhaps the most powerful tool we have: Gneezy and List (2013). 356 “If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist”: Ginzel (2014). 356 his recent book The Checklist Manifesto: Gawande (2010), pp. 176–77. 356 Into Thin Air: Krakauer (1997). 357 99% of the work is done by the choice architecture: Another example is Alexandre Mas who (sometimes collaborating with Alan Krueger) has shown that after labor disputes that go badly for workers, the quality of work declines. See Mas (2004) on the value of construction equipment after a dispute, Mas and Krueger (2004) on defects in tires after a strike, and Mas (2006) on police work after arbitration. One other example of mainstream economists doing research with a behavioral economics bent would be Edward Glaeser (2013) on speculation in real estate. 358 improve our understanding of public policy: See Chetty’s (2015) Ely lecture delivered at the American Economic Association Meeting that I organized in January 2015. In this case you can literally see it by going to the AEA website: https://www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/2015/Ely.php.

. ———. 2014. “A Five-Factor Asset Pricing Model.” Working paper, Fama–Miller Center for Research in Finance. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract= 2287202. Farber, Henry S. 2005. “Is Tomorrow Another Day? The Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers.” Journal of Political Economy 113, no. 1: 46. ———. 2008. “Reference-Dependent Preferences and Labor Supply: The Case of New York City Taxi Drivers.” American Economic Review 98, no. 3: 1069–82. ———. 2014. “Why You Can’t Find a Taxi in the Rain and Other Labor Supply Lessons from Cab Drivers.” Working Paper 20604, National Bureau of Economic Research. Farnsworth, Ward. 1999.

My objective is to explain what my colleagues and I learned along the way, so that you can use those insights yourself to improve your understanding of your fellow Humans. But there may also be useful lessons about how to try to change the way people think about things, especially when they have a lot invested in maintaining the status quo. Later, we turn to more recent research endeavors, from the behavior of New York City taxi drivers, to the drafting of players into the National Football League, to the behavior of participants on high-stakes game shows. At the end we arrive in London, at Number 10 Downing Street, where a new set of exciting challenges and opportunities is emerging. My only advice for reading the book is stop reading when it is no longer fun.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, 507-510. 8 The key events in computer technology were the introduction of the first standardized IBM personal computers and Intel microprocessors in 1983, the addition of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the Apple Macintosh in 1984, the Windows GUI by Microsoft in 1986, and the release in 1990 of Windows 3.0, a much improved GUI developed for the IBM 386 computer. 9 See, for example, Edward Glaeser and Janet Kohlhase, “Cities, Regions and the Decline of Transport Costs,” and Nils-Gustav Lundgren, “Bulk Trade and Maritime Transport Costs: The Evolution of Global Markets,” Resources Policy 22:1-2 (March-June 1996): 5-32. 10 Jeffrey Frankel, “The Japanese Cost of Finance: A Survey,” Financial Management 20:1 (Spring 1991).

As Smith said: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”3 The miraculous efficiency of the market system, taken for granted everywhere today, was far from obvious to half of humanity just a few decades ago, as illustrated by the famous, though probably apocryphal, anecdote about Nikita Khrushchev’s first trip to the United States. The Soviet leader, after visiting some supermarkets in Manhattan and finding them filled with fresh food, in contrast to the empty shelves of Moscow, turned to his host, Vice President Richard Nixon, and asked, “Who is responsible for the supply of bread to New York City? I want to meet this organizational genius.” In The Company of Strangers, a brilliant book about the roots of economic cooperation in the biology of human evolution, the Anglo-French economist Paul Seabright delightfully describes the wonder that market forces ought to inspire: This morning I went out and bought a shirt.

The cycles of finance and economic activity were treated as forces of nature, which politicians could no more moderate than they could influence the tides. Even the interventions of the Bank of England to quell panics in the money markets were seen mainly as private matters, motivated by the self-interests of the City of London and British finance, rather than a core responsibility of the state.16 Prime Minister Gordon Brown has described in several speeches a document in the Treasury archives that shows the government’s reaction to Keynes’s early proposal to lift the British economy out of the Great Depression.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 16. Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Behavioral Law and Economics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. Aditya Chakrabortty, “From Obama to Cameron, why do so many politicians want a piece of Richard Thaler?” Guardian, July 12, 2008, 16. 18. Edward Glaeser, “Paternalism and Psychology,” University of Chicago Law Review (2006): 133–56. 19. Told to me by William Sharpe. 20. The first criticism is in Paul Zarowin, “Does the Stock Market React to Corporate Earnings Information?” Journal of Finance (1989): 1385–99, the second in K. C. Chan and Nai-fu Chen, “Structural and Return Characteristics of Small and Large Firms,” Journal of Finance (1991): 1467–82. 21.

Just after World War I, a conservative AT&T statistician and a socialist economist approached Mitchell with a proposal to settle some of their arguments over economic policy by improving the quality of economic statistics.10 The result was the National Bureau of Economic Research, which opened its doors in New York in 1920 and went on to revolutionize the collection, dissemination, and understanding of economic data in the United States. Gross national product was one of the many measurement innovations it spawned. Mitchell exerted a powerful attraction on younger economists. He was a New York City progressive intellectual of the first order, living in a Greenwich Village townhouse, married to a famed proponent of educational experimentation (Lucy Sprague Mitchell, founder of the Bank Street College of Education), and himself a cofounder of the New School for Social Research. When young Austrian Friedrich Hayek arrived in the United States for the first time in 1923, he was shocked to discover that his American peers no longer cared about Fisher or any of the country’s other neoclassical greats.

It was “particularly unfortunate,” Prais concluded, that Kendall had chosen such markets to investigate rather than something more significant. (Years later, Prais still complained that Kendall’s paper “seems to have become more important than it should be.”) This was the postwar British mindset. Government controlled the commanding heights of the economy, and the markets of London’s City simply didn’t seem all that important. Just as Oxford’s A. D. Roy failed to pursue the portfolio selection theory he unveiled the same year, Kendall soon dropped the subject. If the beguiling idea of a “demon of chance” at work in the market were to resonate, it would have to do so where financial markets mattered—in the United States.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

(Sacramento: Public Policy Institute of California, June 1997), p. v, http://www. ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_697SSR.pdf. 90. Ibid., p. 51. 91. California Department of Housing and Community Development, “Pay to Play: Residential Development Fees in California Cities and Counties,” Sacramento, August 2001, p. 2, http://www.hcd.ca.gov/hpd/pay2play/fee_rpt.pdf. 92. Edward L. Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven E. Saks, “Why Have Housing Prices Gone UP?”American Economic Review 95 (2005): 329–33, http://papers.ssrn. com/soL3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=658324; and “Sheltered Market,” The Economist, February 10, 2005, http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?

George Lefcoe, “The Regulation of Superstores: The Legality of Zoning Ordinances Emerging from the Skirmishes between Wal-Mart and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union,” Arkansas Law Review 58 (2006): 842; Ted Balaker, “Ban Wal-Mart, Hurt Families,” Los Angeles Daily News, January 26, 2004; Julian Sanchez, “The Wal-Mart Crusade: Big-Boxing a Mega-Retailer’s Ears,” Reason, March 2006; and RiShawn Biddle, “Sam’s Curse: Will Wal-Mart Superstores Really Devastate the City of Angels?” Reason.com, March 18, 2004, http://reason. com/archives/2004/03/18/sams-curse. 86. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. City of Turlock, 138 Cal. App. 4th 273, 283 (2006). 87. Ibid. at 301. 328 Notes for Pages 161–165 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. at 303. 90. Minutes of Hanford City Council, March 4, 2003 (on file with author). 91. Minutes of Hanford City Council, April 15, 2003 (on file with author). 92. Letter from Rusty C. Robinson to Hanford City Council, March 4, 2003 (on file with author). 93. Minutes of Hanford City Council, March 4, 2003 (on file with author). 94. Hernandez v. City of Hanford, 41 Cal. 4th 279, 296 (2007). 95.

For example, an ordinance designed to prevent a Wal-Mart Supercenter from opening in Los Angeles was recently estimated to cost neighborhood families an average of $482 per year because the cheaper groceries that the store would have provided were kept out of the market.85 Unfortunately, two recent cases from California illustrate the way courts turn a blind eye on laws that injure consumers for the benefit of private industries. In 2004, the city of Turlock adopted an ordinance relegating “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart to a specified area of the city and prohibiting them anywhere else. City officials were quite explicit in their protectionist motive: the ordinance declared that a Wal-Mart would “negatively impact the vitality and economic viability of the city’s neighborhood commercial centers by drawing sales away from traditional supermarkets located in these centers”86—in other words, it would be cheaper than “traditional” supermarkets, and customers would want to shop there. The city’s staff went even further: “While any large-scale retail store can draw customers with low prices and a wide selection of goods,” they wrote, “the big box grocers present a unique threat because of the inclusion of discount retail and full-service grocery under a single roof.”87 Customers would call this “threat” by another name: “convenience.”


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Camarota, “Immigration from Mexico: Assessing the Impact on the United States,” Center for Immigration Studies, 2001. 25. David Rieff, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (New York: Touchstone Books, 1992). 26. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 27. Alberto F. Alesina, Edward L. Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have a European-Style Welfare State?” Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Discussion Paper no. 1933, October 2001. 28. Michael Ignatieff, “The Broken Contract,” New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2005, 16. 29. Richard G. Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (London: Routledge, 2005). 30.

New districts have sprouted that resemble Swiss villages or British towns to appeal to middle-class Chinese—whose empire imports the world to itself. Shanghai is also the hub of a massive city-region of rising prosperity stretching to Nanjing and encompassing multiple cities of five million people each. Once the city of bicycles, Beijing now seems to have more cars—while bicycles are being recycled. Dozens of five-star hotels and gated communities of full-service condominiums now augment what has always been a city of ancient palaces and sprawling parks whose grandeur was awe-inspiring as far back as Marco Polo. Elderly couples learn to tango at night by the illuminated Ming-era city walls. Although, as in Shanghai, many old neighborhoods are being cleared for modern developments, numerous old hutong are refurbished and capitalize on the constant tourist influx.

At the same time, it is the site of over $40 billion in planned industrial renovations, making it the hub of an economic zone that encompasses thirty-five cities and one hundred million people—larger than any European country. There are now more than one hundred midsize Chinese cities with over a million residents, many with skylines starting to resemble Frankfurt’s. (By contrast, America has only ten cities of greater than one million people, and Europe about thirty.) Most Americans have never heard of cities like Wuxi, which will soon be as wealthy as some of their own cities—but with a population of seven million. It’s no surprise that although China produces far more steel than any other country (a third of the world’s total) and consumes twice as much as the United States or the EU, it still requires more.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Robinson (2006) ‘Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective’, American Political Science Review 100 (1): 115–31. 6 Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast (2006) ‘A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History’, NBER Working Paper No. 12795, p. 32. 7 Cited in Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer (2003) ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State’, NBER Working Paper No. W8650. 8 David Warsh (2006) Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, W. W. Norton. Chapter Six: Blind Capital 1 John Major (1999) The Autobiography, HarperCollins, p. 311. 2 Recounted in Andrew Rawnsley (2000) Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour, Penguin Press. 3 Margaret Cook (1999) A Slight and Delicate Creature: The Memoirs of Margaret Cook, Orion. 4 Alastair Campbell (2007) The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries, Hutchinson, p. 78. 5 Philip Gould (1999) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, Abacus. 6 For a good introduction to Brown’s political and economic philosophy, see Simon Lee (2009) Boom and Bust: The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown, OneWorld. 7 CRESC (2009) ‘An Alternative Report on UK Banking Reform’, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester. 8 See Brown’s foreword in Iain McLean’s (2006) Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: An Interpretation for the 21st Century, Edinburgh University Press. 9 Gertrude Himmelfarb (2004) The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and America Enlightenments, Alfred A.

When the Treasury wants to publish a report on financial services it populates the inquiries almost solely with City people. For instance, the members of the Bischoff Inquiry into the City’s international competitiveness (which shamelessly argued that it should remain a policy priority, despite the crash) had 662 years of work experience between them, 75 per cent of which had been spent in City occupations or servicing City needs.11 Sir Win Bischoff himself was an ex-chair of Citigroup and would later become chair of the enlarged Lloyds Group, so he could hardly be termed disinterested. By contrast, earlier inquiries into the City – such as the 1931 Macmillan Committee or 1980’s Wilson Committee – drew their memberships from across British business, academia and even the trade unions.

British bankers took the opportunity afforded by the abolition of exchange and capital controls, globalisation, Britain’s historic strength in financial services and the prevailing free-market ideology to build a position of influence in the British state that was much more formidable than any that had been enjoyed by the trade unions. The City reclaimed ancient privileges to restore its nineteenth-century position as an international financial centre, although this was now built upon proprietary trading in financial derivatives and securitisation. This was the purposeful, positive use of power to achieve a feasible aim – a dominant City of London. Light-touch regulation became as important a mantra to the City as free collective bargaining had been to the unions. Equally, the freedom to exploit tax havens and relieve foreign nationals from their tax obligations was as pivotal to City power as the unions’ insistence on legal immunity from damages in industrial disputes had been to theirs.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Gunnar Myrdal, “Population Problems and Policies,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 197 (May 1938): 200. 15. Linder, Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy, esp. preface. 16. Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 17. For example, see Gary S. Becker, Edward L. Glaeser, and Kevin M. Murphy, “Population and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 89 (May 1999): 145–49. 18. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005), explores demographically induced calamity in Rwanda (chap. 10). 19. The Economist, July 28–August 3, 2007. 20.

At the intermediate level, many residents of Charlottesville, Virginia, and Manhattan, Kansas (the small college cities where I wrote this study), have welcomed explosive growth in their communities during the past few decades in part because housing values have soared. Conversely, a barber in the stagnant upstate New York city of Gloversville, where my mother grew up, lamented to me that post–World War II population loss meant “ten thousand fewer haircuts every year.” Many individuals who write about environmental problems prefer to live in growing cities teeming with people and ideas. But at the macro level, global population growth makes it difficult to address climate change, species extinction, and lack of availability to clean water.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a regionalist movement embracing local traditions in response to the centralizing, industrializing, and allegedly homogenizing effects of American capitalism and culture provided additional intellectual impetus for the goal of slowing migration to the cities.140 American economists had fretted since the First World War about the supposed disequilibrium between the locations of people and industry, for example, in the cut-over lands in the northern Great Lakes states. Three Depression-specific developments reinforced momentum for population redistribution. The first was a modest migration of Americans from the cities to the countryside.141 This seemed at first glance a welcome development because it reversed the decades-old trend of movement from the farms to the cities. Yet at the same time, experts bemoaned the fact that this “depression migration” was often to poor areas with even poorer soil; one scholar called 1930s migration patterns a “back-to-theworst-land movement.”142 The second development was the modest “decentralization” of industry from city centers to the surrounding counties—today’s “exurbs”—which seemed to demand that populations move in tandem.143 Finally, New Dealers often thought about the population issue in regional terms and were especially concerned about poor populations in economically depressed regions, such as in Appalachia and much of the South.


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Barsky, Robert, and Bradford DeLong, 1991. "Forecast Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect and the Gold Standard." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106, pp. 815-836. Bayoumi, Tamim, Barry Eichengreen, and Mark Taylor, eds., 1996. Modern Perspectives on the Gold Standard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Gary S., Edward Glaeser, and Ken Murphy, 1999. "Population and Economic Growth." American Economic Review, 89, no. 2 (May), pp. 145-149. Bernstein, Peter L., 1968. A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold, 2nd edition. New York: Random House. Bernstein, Peter L., 1970. Economist on Wall Street. New York: Macmillan. Bernstein, Peter L., 1996.

Cyrus, aware of Croesus's intentions, hurried toward Sardis, forcing Croesus to face him on the great plain that lies before the city. When Cyrus saw that Croesus had placed his powerful cavalry in the front ranks, he transferred his own horsemen to the camels usually employed in carrying food and equipment. Horses are afraid of camels and cannot stand the sight or the smell of them. The Lydian cavalry was thrown into confusion by the camel charge and the whole Lydian army had to retreat into the city, where they suffered a siege that lasted fourteen days before the Persians finally broke through and claimed victory.

Cyrus was so moved by what Croesus told him about Solon's visit that he ordered the fire put out and Croesus untied. As they sat together as friends, Cyrus pointed out to Croesus that the crowd they could see in the distance was "looting [his] city and carrying off [his] wealth." Croesus still had his wits about him, despite all he had been through. "It's not my city or my wealth they are looting," he pointed out. "None of it is mine anymore. What they are looting and leading away belongs to you."" With those poignant words, Croesus fades from view. The most challenging feature of the Croesus story is in its curious intermixture of luck and skill.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

(CSW), was launched with former Yale student Allan Weiss in order to commercialize their house price models and produce a variety of home price indices.77 In 2002, Fiserv, an information management company, bought the firm, later joining with Standard & Poor’s to develop tradable indices based on their work. According to Harvard professor of economics Edward Glaeser, “What Case and Shiller put together is really the gold standard for price changes in the housing market. It has the beauty of being both transparent and reliable.”78 FIGURE 9.2: This chart is reprinted from “Online Data Robert Shiller,” Yale University, http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm. In 2003, Case and Shiller surveyed homebuyers and analyzed house prices in selected U.S. cities in order to highlight the potential dangers of house price declines. “You just look at the picture [U.S. house prices adjusted for inflation, since 1890], and anyone I showed the picture said, ‘Wow!

There’s nothing plausible except bubble.”79 Writing for a Brookings Institution publication, they focused on what was happening in individual markets compared to nationwide house prices and concluded that despite what they saw, while a bubble existed in some cities and price declines were to be expected, “a nationwide drop in real housing prices is unlikely, and the drops in different cities are not likely to be synchronous.”80 By 2005, however, Shiller was highlighted in Barron’s magazine for his forecast that U.S. real estate prices might decline by 50 percent over the next decade adjusting for inflation, or 20–25 percent in nominal terms.81 His prediction turned out to be spot on.

The first known derivatives contracts—what today would be called futures contracts—were written in Mesopotamia in cuneiform script on clay tablets and involved the future delivery of goods, often combined with loans. One such contract was between a merchant, Magrattum Akshak-shemi, and his client, Damqanum, agreeing to the future exchange of thirty planks of wood of specified lengths.6 When famed archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the Mesopotamian city of Ur, one of his startling discoveries was of the earliest known financial district, along with the possible birth of the bond trading market. Woolley discovered that in 1796 BCE an educated businessman named Dumuzi-gamil along with his partner, Shumi-abiya, borrowed five hundred grams of silver from another businessman, Shumi-abum.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Brooks, Rob. “China’s Biggest Problem? Too Many Men.” CNN, March 4, 2013. Butler, William. “Women in the Economy: Global Growth Generators.” Citigroup Research, May 2015. Cates, Andrew, Bhanu Baweja, and Sophie Constable. “Globalization’s Challenges.” UBS Research, July 21, 2015. Chatterji, Aaron, Edward Glaeser, and William Kerr. “Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper no. 19013, May 2013. Chaudhary, Latika, Aldo Musacchio, Steven Nafziger, and Se Yan. “Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China.”

One way a turnaround in the economic prospects of France will likely manifest itself is in the emergence of large cities other than Paris. By virtue of their size, countries with a population of more than 100 million will have many large cities, and so the relative size of the second city does not tell me much about the country. To get a sense of which countries in that cohort have dynamically growing regions leading to more balanced growth, I look at the broader rise of second-tier cities—meaning cities with more than a million people. The broad rise of second-tier cities is particularly important for the largest countries because, due to their size, they should be able to generate a number of rapidly growing urban areas.

Though the once all-powerful government in Delhi has in recent decades ceded significant spending authority to chief ministers in India’s twenty-nine states, that power has not filtered down to the mayoral level, and it shows. Smaller cities struggle to grow, and when rural Indians do move to urban areas, they tend to choose the four megacities, with populations of over ten million: Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Bangalore. If China is a nation of boom cities, India is a land of creaking megacities, surrounded by small towns and not enough vibrant second cities. The Service Cities The rise of cities along trade routes that carry hard goods is today accompanied by the rise of cities at the center of various service industries. When the Internet first started to revolutionize communications in the 1990s, experts thought it would allow people to do most service jobs just about anywhere, dispersing these businesses to all corners of every country and making location irrelevant.


pages: 1,797 words: 390,698

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan by Lynne B. Sagalyn

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

Kelly, “The New York Regional and Downtown Office Market: History and Prospects after 9/11,” report prepared for the Civic Alliance, Economic Development Working Group, August 9, 2002, 5. Also see Franz Fuerst, “The Impact of 9/11 on the Manhattan Office Market,” in Resilient City: The Economic Impact of 9/11, ed. Howard Chernick (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005), 62–96. 27 Kelly, “The New York Regional and Downtown Office Market,” 69. 28 Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse L. Shapiro, “Cities and Warfare: The Impact of Terrorism on Urban Form,” Journal of Urban Economics 51 (2002): 205–224, at 222. The policy stimulus behind the steady conversion of buildings to residential use, the so-called 421-g tax incentive program of real estate tax exemptions and abatement, in effect from 1995 to 2006, spurred more than 15 million square feet of conversions, producing 8,225 apartments (rental and condominium units) by the end of 2006.

Others found reasons for optimism in the lack of any clear signs of lasting economic damage to Manhattan’s strong historic draw as a prime office location (Jason Bram, Andrew Haughwout, and James Orr). Still others saw no viable economic future for the downtown office district. Writing in 2002, Harvard economists Edward L. Glaeser and Jesse L. Shapiro considered Manhattan’s downtown financial district, even before 9/11, as an “anachronism,” artificially “propped up by government subsidies, most spectacularly in the building of the World Trade Center itself.” They were “gloomy” about downtown’s future prospects relative to the stronger midtown business district.

See also specific city agencies, officials, and street names civic groups, 61–62, 88, 144–151 fiscal conditions, 22–25, 762n33 global aspirations, 5–14, 707–708 office rental market, 428–429, 458, 563, 590, 682–683, 824n54 ownership of streets within WTC site, 249 relations between mayor and governor, 76–90, 158, 190–192, 197, 199, 210–217, 413, 419–422, 432, 448, 636, 685, 710, 784n61, 846–847n57 New York City Arts Coalition, 304 New York City Central Labor Council of AFL-CIO, 149 New York City Council, Committee on Lower Manhattan Redevelopment, 302, 348, 429 New York City Department of Building, 533 New York City Department of City Planning (DCP), 64, 66, 142, 201, 247–248, 251–253, 561 New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, 302 New York City Department of Transportation, 291 New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), 156, 363, 408, 423, 630–631, 635, 761n26 New York City Investment Fund, 860n45 New York City Opera, 299–300, 302–304 New York City Planning Commission, 56, 64–65, 66, 141, 183–185, 247–248, 366, 761n26 New York City’s Vision for Lower Manhattan (2002; Bloomberg plan), 162–163, 247, 410 New York Fire Department (NYFD), 233, 290, 672 Engine 10−Ladder 10 fire station bronze bas relief, 349f New York New Visions (NYNV): Principles for the Rebuilding for Lower Manhattan (2002), 144–146, 201 New York Police Department (NYPD), 42, 265, 275–281, 286–291, 294, 504, 563, 575, 609, 668t, 696, 718, 800n60 New York State Council on the Arts, 297, 302 New York State Department of Transportation, 109, 111, 291 New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, 818n4 New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), 496 Programmatic Agreement (2004), 499–500 New York State Office of General Services, 459 New York Stock Exchange, 53, 192, 798n41 New York University, 60 Real Estate Institute, 56 9/11 anniversaries, 560, 674 first anniversary, 560 tenth anniversary as goal, 548, 559–561, 567 tenth anniversary opening of Memorial Plaza, 336, 665 thirteenth anniversary, 707 9/11 families ideas about a memorial, 224–229, 306–318, 313f, 321, 322–327, 345, 347f, 368, 676, 805n65, 858n19 press role and, 713 role of activist families, 229–234, 676.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 1656 he was excommunicated by his Jewish community, who, with memories of the Inquisition still fresh, were nervous about making waves among the surrounding Christians.145 It was no tragedy for Spinoza, as it might have been if he had lived in an isolated village, because he just picked up and moved to a new neighborhood and from there to another tolerant Dutch city, Leiden. In both places he was welcomed into the community of writers, thinkers, and artists. John Locke used Amsterdam as a safe haven in 1683 after he had been suspected of taking part in a plot against King Charles II in England. René Descartes also changed addresses frequently, bouncing around Holland and Sweden whenever things got too hot. The economist Edward Glaeser has credited the rise of cities with the emergence of liberal democracy.146 Oppressive autocrats can remain in power even when their citizens despise them because of a conundrum that economists call the social dilemma or free-rider problem.

Joseph Shusko, Richard Shweder, Thomas Sowell, Håvard Strand, Ilavenil Subbiah, Rebecca Sutherland, Philip Tetlock, Andreas Forø Tollefsen, James Tucker, Staffan Ulfstrand, Jeffrey Watumull, Robert Whiston, Matthew White, Maj. Michael Wiesenfeld, and David Wolpe. Many colleagues and students at Harvard have been generous with their expertise, including Mahzarin Banaji, Robert Darnton, Alan Dershowitz, James Engell, Nancy Etcoff, Drew Faust, Benjamin Friedman, Daniel Gilbert, Edward Glaeser, Omar Sultan Haque, Marc Hauser, James Lee, Bay McCulloch, Richard McNally, Michael Mitzenmacher, Orlando Patterson, Leah Price, David Rand, Robert Sampson, Steve Shavell, Lawrence Summers, Kyle Thomas, Justin Vincent, Felix Warneken, and Daniel Wegner. Special thanks go to the researchers who have worked with me on the data reported in these pages.

The ratio of the largest municipality to the smallest is 150,000, which is very different from the less-than-fivefold variation in the heights of men. Also, the distribution of sizes of municipalities isn’t curved like a bell. As the black line in figure 5–10 shows, it is L-shaped, with a tall spine on the left and a long tail on the right. In this graph, city populations are laid out along a conventional linear scale on the black horizontal axis: cities of 100,000, cities of 200,000, and so on. So are the proportions of cities of each population size on the black vertical axis: three-thousandths (3/1000, or 0.003) of a percent of American municipalities have a population of exactly 20,000, two thousandths of a percent have a population of 30,000, one thousandth of a percent have a population of 40,000, and so on, with smaller and smaller proportions having larger and larger populations.59 Now the gray axes at the top and the right of the graph stretch out these same numbers on a logarithmic scale, in which orders of magnitude (the number of zeroes) are evenly spaced, rather than the values themselves.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

The tepid response of the profession is documented in Cooke and Flitter, “Economists Display Little Interest in Ethics Code.” I leave it to some future historian to document the deliberations of the Ad Hoc Committee headed by Robert Solow, first convened in January 2011. Instead of carrying out its deliberations in public, as per normal, the AEA committee discussions were themselves secret. 140 Edward Glaeser, “Where to Draw a Line on Ethics,” Economix blog, April 1, 2011, at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/where-to-draw-a-line-on-ethics/. This confession of administrative responsibility for neutralizing conflict-of-interest policies is another example of how neoliberal economists actively push universities such as Harvard in a more neoliberal direction. 141 For the text, see www.aeaweb.org/aea_journals/AEA_Disclosure_Policy.pdf. 142 Davies and McGoey, “Rationalities of Ignorance,” p. 77. 143 Posner, Public Intellectuals. 144 Proctor and Scheibinger, Agnotology.

Leon Festinger and his colleagues illustrated these lessons in his first book (When Prophecy Fails) by reporting the vicissitudes of a group of Midwesterners they called “The Seekers,” who conceived and developed a belief that they would be rescued by flying saucers on a specific date in 1954, prior to a great flood coming to engulf Lake City (a pseudonym). Festinger documents in great detail the hour-by-hour reactions of the Seekers as the date of their rescue came and passed with no spaceships arriving and no flood welling up to swallow Lake City. At first, the Seekers withdrew from representatives of the press seeking to upbraid them for their failed prophecies, but soon reversed their stance, welcoming all opportunities to expound and elaborate upon their (revised and expanded) faith.

One index is the willful catch-22 character of the official determinations tendered along with the torment: In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance. One person who fits that description is Al Szekeley. A grizzled sixty-two-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C.—the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

The persistence or worsening of these problems may produce disequalizing consequences for the societies in question. Moreover, the growth of communities of first-generation immigrants and those of recent foreign-origin family background has the potential to affect attitudes and policies regarding social welfare and redistributive spending. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have argued that welfare policies are correlated with ethnic homogeneity, which helps explain why the United States developed a weaker welfare state than European countries. They anticipate that growing immigration will undermine the generosity of European welfare states and that anti-immigrant sentiment may be used to dismantle redistributive policies and “eventually push the continent toward more American levels of redistribution.”

The consequences of collapse differed greatly from those of conquest that preserved the scale and characteristics of earlier state structures: whereas the Norman conquest of England preserved or even briefly increased wealth inequality, the fragmentation of a previously very large sphere that had been exploited by a small central ruling class had very much the opposite effect.15 ”MANY OF THE TOWNS OF THAT PERIOD DO NOT SEEM TO US TODAY TO BE PARTICULARLY IMPOSING”: SYSTEMS COLLAPSE IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICAS By the thirteenth century BCE, the eastern Mediterranean had turned into a system of powerful states interconnected by diplomacy, war, and trade: Ramesside Egypt and the Hittite empire in Anatolia were vying for supremacy, the Middle Assyrian empire expanded in Mesopotamia, city-states flourished in the Levant, and the Aegean was dominated by large palaces that managed economic production and distribution. Nobody would have predicted the rapid collapse of this state system in the decades after 1200 BCE. All over the region cities suffered damage or wholesale destruction—in Greece, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine. Just after 1200 BCE, the Hittite empire failed, and its capital city Hattuša was partly destroyed and abandoned. The important city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast was wiped out a few years later, as were other sites farther inland. Cities such as Megiddo (in the plain of the biblical “Armageddon”) followed suit.

Indeed, the closer they came to this outcome, as the Flemish peasant movement of the 1320s may arguably have done, the stronger the countervailing forces they were bound to unleash.28 ”LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE AND DEATH TO THE WOLVES”: REVOLT IN CITIES AND CITY-STATES What was true of rural revolts applied even more to urban risings. In most historical settings, cities were embedded in vast rural landscapes, their populations greatly outnumbered by the peasantry. Rulers and nobles could draw on soldiers, arms, and resources from surrounding areas to bring rebellious towns to heel. The bloody crushing of the Paris commune in 1871 is merely one relatively recent example. If urban revolts had any prospect of success, it would have been in self-governing city-states whose local elites could not readily fall back on external resources of repression.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Along the way, I benefited from conversations in interactions with many researchers and authors, including Dan Smail, Rob Boyd, Kim Hill, Sarah Mathew, Sascha Becker, Jared Rubin, Hans-Joachim Voth, Kathleen Vohs, Ernst Fehr, Matt Syed, Mark Koyama, Noel Johnson, Scott Atran, Peter Turchin, Eric Kimbrough, Sasha Vostroknutov, Alberto Alesina, Steve Stich, Tyler Cowen, Fiery Cushman, Josh Greene, Alan Fiske, Ricardo Hausmann, Clark Barrett, Paola Giuliano, Alessandra Cassar, Devesh Rustagi, Thomas Talhelm, Ed Glaeser, Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Dan Hruschka, Robert Barro, Rachel McCleary, Sendhil Mullainathan, Lera Boroditsky, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, Mike Gurven, and Carole Hooven, among many others. Several people supplied me with data, and I’ve tried to specifically thank them for that in the endnotes.

Here, we first assume that each person can interact with the entire population of their home city. In addition, we assume that each person can interact with, or at least learn from, those in other cities, but that the ability to do so is dependent on the cost of travel between city pairs. So, we divide the populations of other European cities by the cost of travel between city pairs, and add this to the population of the home city in order to yield overall interconnectedness scores. We then aggregate and average the interconnectedness to the country level. Urbanites get more interconnected as their home cities grow, nearby cities expand, and travel costs decline.39 The impact of Europe’s expanding collective brain manifested in rising economic productivity.

By combining our database on the spread of bishoprics through Europe (Chapter 7) with century-by-century data on the population size and governance of cities from 800 to 1500 CE, Jonathan Schulz asked two questions: Do cities with longer exposure to the Church due to nearby bishoprics (within 100 km [62 mi]) grow faster than less exposed cities? And are cities with longer Church exposure more likely to develop participatory or representative governments? Keeping in mind that the Church arrives in different parts of Europe at different times, a dataset like this is nice because you can compare the same city with itself through time while holding constant both longer-term trends and century-specific shocks like plagues or famines.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Metrick, “Securitization” (2011), in Handbook of the Economics of Finance, ed. G. Constantinides, M. Harris and R. Stulz (North Holland: Elsevier, 2012); and T. Santos, “Antes del Diluvio: The Spanish Banking System in the First Decade of the Euro,” in After the Flood: How the Great Recession Changed Economic Thought, Edward L. Glaeser, Tano Santos and Glenn Weyl, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 38. Schelkle, Political Economy of Monetary Solidarity, 180–185. 39. Storm and Naastepad, “Myths, Mix-ups and Mishandlings.” 40. P. R. Lane, “The Funding of the Irish Domestic Banking System During the Boom,” Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland 44 (2014), 40–71. 41.

That came on top of lost tax revenues of $300 million.4 None of this could the city afford. Detroit appointed an emergency manager who in June 2013 filed for bankruptcy, with debts owing between $18 billion and $20 billion. It was the biggest city bankruptcy in American history.5 As viewers of Dylan’s Chrysler spot knew, Detroit was an extreme case, but it was not alone. Former industrial cities and towns across America were struggling. A few went bankrupt. In 2011 Jefferson County, Alabama, which included the steel city of Birmingham, had filed. In 2012 it was the turn of Stockton and San Bernardino, California.

Financial services were no longer part of Britain’s narrative of national success. But unlike in the case of Wall Street, tightening the regulation of British banks is not the same as curbing the City of London. The City is not first and foremost a national financial center. Its main business is global. The conference in London on July 26, 2012, at which Draghi made his famous speech was an event for global investors designed to showcase the City. Ahead of the Olympic Games, Bank of England governor Mervyn King had sport on his mind. The City of London, he remarked, was like the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, the hosts of Wimbledon.3 The setting is quintessentially English.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Patent laws have expanded too far by protecting software and business methods.15 Morris Kleiner has calculated that the percentage of jobs subject to occupational licensing has expanded from 10 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 2008.16 Licensing reduces opportunities for employment, limits the ability of new entrants to create small businesses, and restricts upward mobility for lower-income individuals. By contributing to a reduction in the rate of entry of new firms, licensing is one of the sources of the decline in “business dynamism” noted in the literature cited in chapter 17. Edward Glaeser has called restrictive zoning and land use regulations a “regulatory tax” that transfers wealth from the less affluent to more affluent and promotes housing segregation by keeping poor people away from rich people and that, by inflating housing prices, encourages potential residents to move away from the most productive metropolitan areas to less productive areas, where housing is cheaper.17 All these instances of excessive regulation are relevant to inequality, for they redistribute income and wealth to those who are protected by their copyrights, patents, licenses, and land-use restrictions.

The impression which this comfort and plenty makes is heightened by the brilliance and keenness of the air, by the look of freshness and cleanness which even the cities wear. The fog and soot-flakes of an English town, as well as its squalor, are wanting; you are in a new world, and a world which knows the sun.27 Bryce was viewing the American city of the mid-1880s in contrast with crowded and sooty English cities of the same era. Others noted the lower density of American cities than in Europe. Adna Weber in 1899 calculated that the population density of fifteen American cities was twenty-two persons per acre as compared to 158 for thirteen German cities. Gradually, between 1840 and 1870, the suburban ideal became based on the virtues of separation rather than physical connections between adjacent dwellings.

Spurred on by growing family sizes during the baby boom, middle-class parents fled the central city, leaving central cities in which residential segregation in some cities isolated the African American population in what became known as urban ghettoes. The distinction between the city and the suburb can be overdone. Adjectives to describe each exaggerate the differences. Cities can be described as bad (dangerous, polluted, concrete) or good (diverse, dense, stimulating), and so can suburbs (homogeneous, sprawling, and dull vs. safe, healthy, and green).54 In fact, many areas within the city limits closely resemble suburbs, such as Chicago’s bungalow belt, built largely in the 1920s.


The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

Lockwood, Drew's secretary, asking him to show the letter to Drew; fol. vol. 2, CFP. 25 NYTr, October 31, 1844. 26 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 570–612; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 530–3; Howard Bodenhorn, “Bank Chartering and Political Corruption in Antebellum New York: Free Banking as Reform,” in Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 231–57; Richard R. John, “Private Enterprise, Public Good? Communications Deregulation as a National Political Issue, 1839–1851,” in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W.

“Well-founded alarm prevails through every part of this city,” the New York Evening Post reported on August 26, 1822, as hundreds grew sick and died. Though none knew it at the time, it was the natural scourge of a primitive city of backyard wells and privies, of filthy streets of standing water where mosquitoes bred and fed. Scores of businesses relocated outside the city and Vanderbilt began to run the Bellona to a dock far up the North River. Every day he went into town to search for William, who finally surfaced, sick but recovering, like the city itself.53 The epidemic threw more light on Vanderbilt's character in these changing times.

Even Tammany itself was split between Tweed's crowd and the wealthy circle around Horace Clark, Augustus Schell, and August Belmont.27 The “George Law” bill threatened to further erode the city's power over its own streets, and deny it any revenue from a potentially lucrative franchise. City hall, torn by its internal feuding, looked unlikely to come up with an effective response. But there was one force that could unite the bitterest enemies in New York: money. Someone conceived a plan to have the city preempt the Law company, by granting the Harlem the right to run a streetcar line down Broadway. If the city fathers must have a Broadway railroad, they thought, they should at least keep control of it—and its proceeds.