Edward Glaeser

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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*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.

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*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?

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.”

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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.

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“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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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?”

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.

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.’

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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.

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– 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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., 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.

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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.

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.”

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., “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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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“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).

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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,” 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?”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.’

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?"

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).

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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.

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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.

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.

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, 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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?’

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(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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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., 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?”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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‘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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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‘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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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., “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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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?”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.  

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“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.”

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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.

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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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/.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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?”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

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