Filmed August 26, 2022
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi. I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined today by Ed Glaeser, Chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University, a very distinguished micro economist. I’m stressing that, Ed, since, I don’t know, I think you micro economists have a slight… Disdain’s too strong, but a slight preference for being micro economists to macro economists. Ed is known best perhaps as an economist of urban things and of cities, and a student of cities in ways that go beyond economics. And maybe we’ll touch on that. But a very excellent book that people should read from 2012, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Healthier, and Happier. That’s impressive. And then a book, Survival of the City, about a year ago. And I saw you just wrote a preface that coming up for new edition of Mancur Olson’s…
ED GLAESER:
I did. The Rise and Decline of Nations.
BILL KRISTOL:
…which is coming out in September, so people should look at that. But we can even get to talk about that. That book influenced me some in grad school, I think; and had a big influence in political science, maybe more than in economics, I don’t know. Anyway, Ed, thank you for joining me.
ED GLAESER:
Oh, Thank you so much for having me on.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s great to have you. So you’re a fan of the city and the cities and the importance of cities, and you’ve studied them in such an interesting way. Why cities? Could you make the basic case for the fundamental importance of cities?
ED GLAESER:
Absolutely. But I want to make it clear from the beginning that I am not advocating that everyone should live in cities, nor am I advocating that the federal government should artificially subsidize cities. But I think that cities have for thousands of years empowered humanity in ways that are incredibly important. I mean, if you think about us as a species, our greatest talent is our ability to work together. I mean, on our own, we are really puny creatures. I mean, a few of us could take on a bear without external help. But collectively, we’ve done amazing things, and I think we’re continuing to do amazing things. And cities have made that possible. Cities enable young people to learn how to be productive. They enable people to have fun by connecting with other people. They enable us to share joint resources like museums or parks. And they enable companies to find talent and to nurture that talent. So there’s a lot to like about cities. In some sense, the most amazing thing is the comeback of cities since the 1970s. But I assume we’ll talk about that.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, let’s talk about that, because that’s so important, and that’s in all of our memories to different degrees and different amounts of memory. But yeah, I mean, it looked like cities were in terrible decline, and there were a lot of people who thought it was irreversible. And also, people were willing to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter so much anymore. With modern technology, we don’t need cities.” And of course, that’s had a little bit of a resurgence during the pandemic. We don’t need to be close to each other, proximate to each other, in person. Was the decline real, and what are the key policy questions that had to be addressed?
ED GLAESER:
Oh, it was completely real. I was born on the island of Manhattan in 1967, and I lived there for the first 17 years. And for most of that time, it felt like the city was in a tailspin. The starting point for that—and pretty much all of America’s older, colder cities were in trouble—th starting point for that was the industrialization. I mean, if you think about New York city’s past, it was an industrial city. The largest industrial cluster in the United States in the 1950s was not automobile production in Detroit; it was garment production in New York city. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers sewing garments, sewing dresses, sewing coats. Those jobs disappeared by the hundreds of thousands in the 1960s and early 1970s because transportation costs changed.
Garments were in New York because it was the hub of this incredible transportation network, based originally on water, but then also supplemented with rail. And so it was a really cheap place to get fabric, a really natural place to ship the garments from. After World War II, container ships, highways, reductions in the cost of rail, all meant that New York’s one time advantage largely vanished. And so why not move the dress factory down to South Carolina where the labor’s a whole lot cheaper? Why not move it across the ocean where the labor’s cheaper still? And so this happened place and place again to America’s older industrial cities because those transportation cost advantages disappeared.
Then on top of this, you had the perfect storm of having social conditions which kind of went out of control. And the rising crime rates of the sixties and the early seventies; a city that tried to spend its way out of problems. And so New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy by the mid 1970s. As the Bronx burned, it really felt as if New York was headed for the trash heap of history,
BILL KRISTOL:
What were the key policies in turning that around? Let’s get to the policy stuff.
ED GLAESER:
There were policies, but the other key thing that’s critical in this is that the most important thing that turns this around was the rise of finance. The fundamental thing is that what happened was that knowledge became more important. But let’s talk a little bit about policy.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, no, say a word about the finance. And more broadly, maybe, about how much of all this is controllable, and how much of this is just circumstances change, and cities rise and fall in different geographies and somewhat arbitrarily. Perhaps finance starts in one city and their network effects, which we should probably talk about and explain, because that’s such an important part of your book. How much are we talking about a kind of… How do you call it… An order that arises of itself. There’s a term for this I can’t remember. As opposed to anyone planning anything.
ED GLAESER:
That’s of course completely true. I mean, the origins of Wall Street are under the buttonwood tree in the 18th century. It’s people who are investing in boats that are crossing the ocean, and you build this incredible social infrastructure. It’s not at all top down. They’re not policies that lead to it. It’s the relationships between bankers and other investors and companies. Companies like Standard Oil moved to New York, partially to be near that investment community. And it becomes in some sense that, if garments are the low end of New York’s labor market, this, in some sense, is the high end.
Really after World War II, business services, which includes finance, became the linchpin of many of our most successful cities. Before the financial collapse in 2007, 42% of the payroll on the island of Manhattan was in finance and insurance. I mean, it was an unbelievably dominant industry.
I think there’s an even larger point, though, about finance. If you go back to 1980, when Alvin Toffler was writing The Third Wave, he was arguing that all the new technologies, the Zooms of their era, were largely going to make face to face interaction, and the cities that enable that interaction, obsolete. He was looking forward to a world in which Manhattan skyscrapers would be empty, and there’d be a great cavernous wasteland on Wall Street and Midtown. And of course for 40 years, he was completely and totally wrong. I think the main reason that he was wrong is that what new technologies, what globalization did, was they radically increased the returns to being smart. And we are a social species that gets smart by being around other smart people. That’s ultimately what brought people to the maelstrom of New York.
When you think about the trading floors of financial service industries, there’s something weird about them. Here you are with some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and instead of sitting a university dean behind a vast desk inside a huge office—
BILL KRISTOL:
Or like you there, Littauer at Harvard, right?
ED GLAESER:
That’s right. There they are, they’re right on top of each other. They’re yelling at each other. They’re getting guacamole on each other, if Liar’s Poker is to be believed. They’re in the midst of it. And why are they there? They’re there because in their business, knowledge is more important than space. And that’s in some sense why the city came back on a very high level. As you had these changes, that just meant the returns to being smart were so much higher. Knowledge became more important than space, and people were willing to put up the inconveniences of being in the city in order to be close to one another. Of course there were other things that really mattered, like the reduction in crime.
BILL KRISTOL:
You think of the things that are more government caused or government responsive to government policies. Do you think crime was the biggest? And I’m just looking at as we go today. Do you think it’s one of the biggest threats, as you hear a lot of worries about a resurgence of a seventies type situation in New York and elsewhere?
ED GLAESER:
Absolutely. I think crime is almost surely the biggest risk that I see. It’s the biggest risk then that was government created. It’s the biggest risk now, at least outside of New York. I mean, New York is unusual in that it has its own income tax. For most cities, they don’t have the freedom to set higher taxes that would scare people off. So at the state level, this is more of an issue. But at the local level, the city governments officially constrained that it’s really about deterioration in the quality of life for wealthier taxpayers.
I guess the way that I think about this, is that what happened in the seventies is you had a combination of people being more mobile than ever. Highways that had opened up the suburbs, as we discussed earlier. Container ships, trucking, made it easier to relocate the factories. And so you had firms and you had talented people who were incredibly mobile. At the same time, you had a bunch of city mayors like John Lindsay who saw historic inequities. Those inequities were there, but he decided it was the job of city government to end those inequities. He decided he wanted to do it by forcing the rich to pay more.
Now, the problem is, the rich can just flee. They decided they wanted to deal with police brutality by just reducing the amount of policing that was going on, by reducing the amount of public safety that was being created. And this is something that in a world in which the rich or more mobile, as they are more mobile today, partially because of Zoom, if you don’t in some sense create a city that is welcoming to them, they will just leave. And that’s, in some sense, what I worry most about today, is a repeat of the 1970s, where you have progressive dreams, which are many cases entirely laudable, but colliding with the reality that the rich businesses can easily get out.
BILL KRISTOL:
Let’s come back a little bit to, assuming we do okay, on crime. To this sort of underlying case for cities, necessity for cities, and virtues of cities. I mean, I do think this whole network effects thing, which is a term that’s become, I guess, fashionable almost in social science. We used to have a more technical, perhaps, economics basis, I assume. But it’s worth saying a word about it. I’ll just tell one very quick story. So I grew up in New York. We actually went to the same high school, though I was 15 years ahead of you, at least. So I remember in the sixties, before each school year when I was in grade school and middle school, being taken, my sister and I going with my mother, to 34th Street and 7th Avenue right near Penn Station, to buy clothes for the school year. I mean nothing fancy.
As I recall, Macy’s, Gimbels, and Ohrbach’s, these are names from the past, at least in the latter two cases, I guess, were on the three of the four corners. I think I’ve got this right. On 34th and Broadway, or 34th and 7th. I remember as a 12 year old, having vaguely interested, beginning to get interested in things, thinking, “Well, isn’t this a little weird? I mean, shouldn’t stores be spread out? Isn’t this inconvenient? Why are they all one place? It seems contrary to common sense. There should be one at 34th Street, and one at 72nd Street, and one in Brooklyn. And it should be sort of convenient for people.”
I remember asking my father maybe, and he gave me a very simple version of the virtues of congestion, or of similar businesses being in the same place and stuff. To address that, it’s one of those striking things about cities. There are these neighborhoods that have all the same thing in one place, you’d think it’d be more convenient as a retail matter that they’d be spread out.
ED GLAESER:
There are many things that are interesting in that example. One of the starting points for that is that 34th Street is at the heart of the Garment District. So you’re in the place where the Garment District essentially reformed at the start of the 20th century, and it reformed around Penn Station. So Penn Station was the transportation technology that enabled the stuff to get in and the stuff to get out, and the Garment District formed around that.
From there, it becomes fairly natural for stores that specialize in clothing to be near the Garment District. So you have one network effect, which is the upward linkage from the stores to their customers. But there’s more there, which is if you’re going to attract the Kristol family to do their school shopping, it’s convenient for all three stores to be nearby, because maybe you’re going to come down and you’re not going to like what Macy’s has. To remind us of that famous Miracle on 34th Street, where the real Santa Claus in the show tells the family that you should go to Gimbels to buy this. Even if Macy’s isn’t always doing that, they have the capacity to do that, or you have the capacity to do it yourself. So having that cluster there makes it easier for people to know that that’s a destination where you go to search for clothing.
An even more famous example that’s still present in New York is diamonds on 47th Street between 5th and 6th, where there is an unbelievable cluster of diamond merchants who are there, who serve partially the role of having a bunch of institutions that they take advantage of, like the Gem Institute that then certifies your diamonds after you buy it. But it’s also so that couples who are looking for engagement rings have lots of options, and they know this is the destination that they want to go to.
BILL KRISTOL:
These things sort of sprung up spontaneously. It reminds me of the term “spontaneous order” in Hayek. And I mean, the government didn’t decide let’s have a garment district in the 30s or ajewelry street at 47th Street or whatever. Diamond street.
ED GLAESER:
Absolutely. I don’t know whether or not there’s any government involved in jewels. In the garment industry, there are some large developers who play a role in being sort of a first mover who put down a lot of space for garments in the 1920s. There’s a guy who I talk about in Triumph called A.E. Lefcourt, who, it turns out, built more skyscrapers than any other new Yorker did in the 1920s. He comes out of the garment industry. He’s like a cloak manufacturer who starts with nothing, and then starts building these factories for the garment industry. He sort of begins the move to create the new Garment District anchored around Penn Station.
BILL KRISTOL:
The same is true, I guess, of theater and so forth. I mean, they’re just these incredible economies, not of scale, but of, I don’t know what, of compression or something, of being near each other. So if actors want jobs, you can’t always get one in one play, but you’re going to move to the city that has the potential 10 plays and et cetera. If tourists want to come watch plays, they’ll come to one city.
ED GLAESER:
We call these agglomeration economies, the benefits of being around other businesses; sometimes like businesses, and sometimes businesses that are either suppliers or customers.
BILL KRISTOL:
And this is a good thing? That is to say, this is not just— one could say well, this is something that’s developed. I mean, is this good economically? Does it increase growth? Does it attract? I mean, is it something we should welcome, or something we should push back against? Why should five blocks in New York get all the theater, and most of the theater in the US?
ED GLAESER:
I don’t really want to descend into the econ lingo.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s okay.
ED GLAESER:
But these agglomerations are rife with what we call externalities, which means that private market actors don’t necessarily make the right decision for society as a whole. What that means is you can, in fact, have too much concentration, meaning that it would be better if you put some theater somewhere else. But the first theater isn’t going to want to detach. Or, you can have under concentration, because the theater that would move from the Upper East Side to Broadway isn’t internalizing all the benefits that that theater would bring to the other theaters. The problem is very rarely, we can guess pretty well that the private market won’t get it right. But we’re very rarely sure in which direction it’s gotten it wrong. So it’s a similar question at a very large level, which there are externalities from high human capital people living in particular locations. But does that mean I should want to drag more skilled people from West Virginia to Silicon Valley or stop skilled people from moving from West Virginia to Silicon Valley? I can’t tell you the answer to that. And at least for me, I’ve always said that’s another good reason why we probably want a federal government that’s spatially neutral, that doesn’t actually play favorites with one area, doesn’t actually try to create these clusters, but doesn’t try to stand in their way either. I think it’s yet another case for modesty in terms of what we think the federal government should try to do.
BILL KRISTOL:
But actually, historically these cities and these conglomerations, whether it’s New York City or Silicon Valley, do correlate, it seems to be in a very simple minded way with innovation and growth, attracting immigrants, which I think I assume you’d agree would be generally a good thing for economic growth as well. So say a word about that. I mean…
ED GLAESER:
No, I think cities have been an unbelievably key for portion of our economic success as a country and sort of an oddity as Americans. We tend to think of ourselves as sort of rural frontiersmen often, even though most of us are firmly embedded in metropolitan economies. And those economies have played a huge role in terms of making America productive. And even, if you think about the farmers of the Midwest who were so much a part of our wealth in the 19th and early 20th century, they benefited a lot from the fact that Cyrus McCormick moved from Virginia to Chicago to set up his reaper business. And he was right in the middle of the city. He was sending out his scouts throughout all the cities in the Midwest to see what his competitors were doing and constantly upgrading his reaper. This is partially what made us a highly mechanized, highly productive farm economy was that we had cities which could then strengthen those farms.
That continues to be true today, that our cities have often been the wellspring of new ideas, new innovations. And that is very much sort of part of our world. Going back historically, it’s even more obvious. I mean, you see over and over again, these moments of human brilliance, whether or not it’s Athens in the fifth century BC or Florence and the 15th century where connections between one innovator and another. You can watch the chain of ideas as it moves from one person to the next. Brunelleschi figures out the basic mathematics of making two-dimensional areas seem three-dimensional. He passes that along to his traveling companion, Donatello, another Florentine who puts it in low relief sculpture. He passes it along to Masaccio who puts it on the wall of the Brancacci Chapel, that amazing picture of St. Peter finding a silver coin in the belly of a fish. He passes along to that less than saintly monk, Fra Filippo Lippi, pass it along to Boticelli and so forth. A chain of urban brilliance that still lights up our world.
This is what cities do that’s really important, enable us to create amazing stuff and by leveraging the brilliance of others. I mean our ability to be intellectual magpies to borrow or steal ideas from people around us has been central to human success over the last 3,000 years.
BILL KRISTOL:
And so let’s talk about the resistance to cities. I mean, Jefferson was worried about what it would do to the civic virtues and not entirely unreasonable, I suppose though. Well, anyway, I’m more on the Hamilton side of this fight, but I mean, it’s a strain in America, probably a strain, particularly among conservatives. And you’re, I think, generally thought to be on the center, center right of things. You’re a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I mean, A, do you find this? Do you find that conservatives say, “wait a second, what are you praising cities for? We’re sort of pro-rural, pro-suburban and sort of think cities are this either corrupt and/or… you know, it’s bloated inefficient governments and a bunch of decaying businesses propped up by subsidies. And why are you defending city—?” I mean, how much do you find as a political matter, conservatives are open to this argument about cities? And then does it matter? I mean, you want a neutral playing field. You don’t want to necessarily the government to tilt the playing field, but…
ED GLAESER:
Right. So it’s political poison, but I want drivers to pay for their highways. I want users to pay for their infrastructure. That’s true of JFK Airport, but it’s also true of highways. So I don’t want a tax policy that artificially subsidizes mortgages because mortgages are associated with living in suburbs more than cities. But also I just don’t want it to have the government sit there and encourage ordinary Americans to bet on the vicissitudes of the housing market. I don’t think that’s great policy, big policy either. So I think when it gets down to individual policies, it’s easier to connect with conservatives. I mean, that’s the view that our government should be quite sparing with its social engineering. That’s pretty easy.
And I will say my own sort of center rightness, it has its origins in watching the markets and the businesses of Manhattan. I mean, my mom worked for Mobile Oil, which was located on 42nd Street between Third and Lex in New York. That certainly didn’t seem like a left wing organization to me. And it seemed like one that, having some degree of filial affinity for it naturally made me sort of a little wary of Jimmy Carter’s anti-oil company stuff. So I think that had some role to it.
There is a fundamental problem though, which is that big cities do actually require more government than rural areas do. There are these externalities and we’ve been talking about the good ones, the network effects or the ideas hopping from urban genius to urban genius. But there also are bad ones. I mean obviously in today’s world, it’s the spread of disease from person to person. And I mentioned fifth century Athens earlier, but in some sense, the Golden Age of Athens was permanently derailed by the plague that came to that city in 430 BC. I mean, that was partially because of the high density. High density made even denser because of Pericles’ strategy of bringing in all the Athenians behind the walls to protect them from the Spartan hoplites.
But cities are always vulnerable to disease. They have problems with traffic congestion, which needs some degree of moderation. They need dealing with the hygienic aspects of waste and sewers. In our new book, we sort of focus a lot in the third chapter on the 19th century fight to make cities livable. And the cities at the start of the 19th century were extraordinarily vulnerable to those pandemics that spread across the world in that earlier age, yellow fever, cholera. And over the course of the 19th century, urbanites came together and they expanded government around clean water around sewers. And that’s actually a kind of government that I’m okay with. This was sensible, by and large, user fee funded, but not always. And it was an amazing act. In some sense, it’s a moment where governments actually started to save lives instead of taking them.
I mean, most of governments prior to 1800 were really just in the business of killing. I mean, I know we love the fact that Frederick the Great had these erudite correspondences with Voltaire. But look, his main business was stealing Silesia from Maria Teresa. His main business was fighting. But in the 19th century, cities actually expanded their governments enormously. It was mostly about health. And so cities do need more government. And yet of course, as we know, that those governments as they expand, we see their failings pretty clearly. And so I think that’s part of what creates that juxtaposition that between low density and republicanism, at least which gives it some sort of natural roots.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. But it is important to make the point about there are real public goods and real externalities that aren’t captured by individual players making decisions like wastewater or something, and which presumably have to be dealt with collectively, which means government. I mean right now US policy, I mean, net-net, so to speak, is federal policy. What are the biggest things that either help cities or hurt cities? I mean, it’s tilted, I kind of got the impression from what you were saying a minute ago, that some of the biggest policies are tilted towards the suburbs basically.
ED GLAESER:
So I would’ve been more comfortable with that five years ago where it’s federal highway aid and the home mortgage interest reduction, which I think of as the two big ones. We have had a whole bunch of spending for urban transit systems during the COVID response for good or ill. If we end up in that business permanently, then that will slightly level the playing field. I will just say my own preference is that the users, by and large, pay for both of those things, rather than having cross subsidies of urban infrastructure and cross subsidies of rural infrastructure. The only exception of that is I’m okay with some degree of modest support for buses that particularly aid poor people. I think that’s a quite defensive thing because it’s a critical ingredient in their employment. And buses are cheap. They’d be a lot cheaper too if we got rid of the buy American requirements that often inflict high costs on our urban transit systems.
The biggest problem with our cities, of course, is not any federal policy. It’s actually the schools. So that’s a statement of… It’s the hardest one to fix. I’m not at all sure of how to fix it. But the fact that so many parents think they need to suburbanize to get decent schools for their kids, that’s just an incredible tax on urban life.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. That’s such a good point. It’s a kind of an obvious point, I mean, in a way, right? I mean, I’m sitting here in Northern Virginia where we moved basically because they had very good public school. I mean, there are other nice things about living here, but very good public schools and some other amenities but the schools dwarf everything else in importance. And we wouldn’t have been confident in that when we moved down here in DC. So yeah, I mean it is… One sort of takes it for granted is the thing that, well, yes, you go to the suburbs to get the good public schools, whether it’s Westchester or Sugar Heights or Maryland or Virginia. But of course, why is that the case? It needn’t be the case. There’s no intrinsic law about that.
ED GLAESER:
I’ve never heard of a single Frenchman who thought they needed to leave Paris to get better schools for their kids. That just doesn’t happen.
BILL KRISTOL:
But so real education reform, whatever exactly that would be, would really make a difference you think in terms of…
ED GLAESER:
I think so. I think either if you went to a sort of just more widespread voucher system where sort of there’s competition everywhere and where you live doesn’t determine the quality of the school system that you go to. Or I don’t believe America could pull this off, but if we were going to be French and [inaudible French] and actually ensure it’s Tuesday at 4:00 PM, I know what every third grader is being taught everywhere in France. Either direction would level the playing field. It’s just our traditions of American local schooling mean that we have a particular problem in terms of our urban schools.
BILL KRISTOL:
I suppose the way I’m just thinking out the way our immigration happened, cities were the magnets for immigrants. Maybe that’s the case in most of human history. But immigrants come in mostly poorer. And so cities are the raucous, uneducated immigrants and their kids who don’t know English very well, flooding the public schools. And if you’re a middle or upper middle class, non-immigrant who… Fine, that’s good that the city should help those kids. But you know what? I’ll just go to school here in a slightly more sedate and less challenging environment in the suburbs. And that must have something and that’s sort of historical. Is that an accident that cities are so much the magnets for immigrants? Or am I overstating it or…
ED GLAESER:
No. You’re correct. And I want to just add to it, cities also attract poor people because of their public transportation technologies. That in fact, you don’t have to own a car for every adult, which is unfortunately what you actually need to have mobility in much of America’s suburbs to get around. And so whether or not you’re a poor immigrant or just a poor family, cities enable you to access jobs without owning the automobiles. So that’s another force which pulls poor people into cities. Or put conversely, rich people move to the suburbs first because they could afford the cars that were required to make them accessible. And so if cities are going to disproportionately attract poor people, then that’s going to create challenges for the school system that need to be, in some cases, will just lead the rich to exit. And that’s what certainly has happened sometimes.
BILL KRISTOL:
I was struck in one of the books, you’re somewhat critical of Jane Jacobs, who I read as a, I don’t know, high school, early college and sort of liked. I think I was supposed to like that. There was a left-right agreement that Jane Jacobs’ criticism of Robert Moses… and all this. And for me as a more conservative type, it fit into a certain kind of, again, critique of the fatal critique of Robert Moses think he could plan everything. But say a word about what Jane Jacobs argued maybe. It’s a very famous book. I’m not sure it is as famous anymore. It was sort of a big deal when I was in college. But it was called The Life and Death of—
ED GLAESER:
…of American Cities. The Economy of Cities is also good and also influenced me enormously. Life and Death of Great American Cities is in many ways, a great book. Most ways in fact, it is a great book.
BILL KRISTOL:
This is from, what, the early ’60s, I think, the book?
ED GLAESER:
’61 I think is—
BILL KRISTOL:
I think that’s right.
Ed Glaeser:
Its description of the ballet of street life is extraordinary. Its understanding of what’s great about neighborhoods like Greenwich Village is fantastic. Her ability to understand that the Le Corbusier-inspired public housing projects of the 1950s were headed for disaster was great, partially because they just didn’t build on this human scale. They were guilty of one of the two great sins of city building, which is monumentalism, building for the sake of the structures, not realizing that the real city isn’t made of concrete. It’s human flesh. And unless the buildings wrap around humanity’s needs, they’re completely useless. And Jane Jacobs was absolutely peerless on that stuff.
Where she erred, and it’s like a thing which, as an economist, it seems obvious, but as a non economist, maybe it doesn’t, was she was in fact guilty of the other great sin, which is NIMBY-ism, “not-in-my-backyard-ism.” And the reason for that, and she has a chapter which is the chapter that I pick on in triumph is why cities need old buildings.
And she compares old buildings and new buildings, notice that old buildings are cheap and new buildings are expensive, which leads her to conclude that no one should replace old buildings with new buildings. And then she became this sort of advocate of the Greenwich Village Historic Preservation District, which basically froze all development in Greenwich Village in amber. Now the problem with that reasoning of course, is that there’s no repealing the laws of supply and demand. And if you have heavy demand for a neighborhood like Greenwich Village, and you say, we’re not going to build anything, that’s not a recipe for affordability. That’s a recipe for eight million dollar townhouses because you’ve essentially made it impossible for the market to react. And the new buildings may be slightly more expensive, but you make the old buildings cheaper if you put up a 50 story building in the neighborhood to supply more units.
And while she’s certainly right, that Greenwich Village is wonderful space, I grew up in a much taller building than those buildings. I don’t think our street life around the 69th Street and First was so bad. And that also works. And I think using any form of public regulation to say that there’s only one way to build a city just feels like it’s a mistake to me. And while she was right, that her way of her neighborhoods are great, but there are lots of other ways to have great neighborhoods. And some of them can be a lot denser.
Bill Kristol:
And I guess it must have caught on. It must have fit in with the anger, maybe justified, I suspect of the destruction of Penn Station and the total lack of recognition of historical landmarks may have gone too much to the other direction on that. I don’t know, but I take it your form of defer to markets and supply and demand demand doesn’t preclude a certain amount of protecting of great buildings and so forth?
Ed Glaeser:
My father was an architectural historian. I believe that there are many buildings that are as precious to humanity as the works of Masaccio and Botticelli. I just don’t think that every glazed brick building in the Upper East Side of Manhattan is vital to preserve. I think we need to have some serious thoughts about what are the costs and benefits here. And we shouldn’t act as if this is a free lunch, that we get to both preserve architectural heritage and maintain affordability. I think the proposal that I threw out was, let’s just have some fixed set of buildings that we’re going to protect those buildings and maybe a few other extra neighborhoods, and let’s be much more limited about saying a whole vast neighborhood like the Upper East Side of New York is going to be part of a historic preservation district.
Bill Kristol:
And is that the case now? Is that what they’re talking about?
Ed Glaeser:
There are huge amounts of, yeah, there is an Upper East Side historic preservation district.
Bill Kristol:
Just those normal apartment buildings on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue?
Ed Glaeser:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Bill Kristol:
Perfectly nice buildings, yeah.
Ed Glaeser:
There’s a ton of ordinary stuff that is preserved, not just in New York. And it becomes harder in a city like Bruges, where it fits together as an ancient historical thing. So I’m really okay with leaving Bruges intact. Paris, probably we want to preserve larger areas, but it probably still would be good to have more escape valves. La Defense has proven to be one, but I’m okay to [inaudible] slightly more tall buildings closer to the city center. But it’s a balance. And I’m certainly not against historic preservation in any sense. It’s just, we need to recognize that there are costs to it.
Bill Kristol:
I suppose we’ve been very New York centric here, as is appropriate for the two of us in this conversation. But we should say what about the massive growth of the Sunbelt cities, which I don’t know if people really expected that 30 or 40 years ago. I think people might have expected movement to the Sunbelt. I don’t know if they really expected the cities to become so big and city-like for all the sprawl. But say a word about, I guess I was thinking about your historic preservation, there can be cities that have historic preservation and others that don’t, right? And that’s also in a big country probably a good thing to have a certain amount, let New York be New York and let Houston be Houston. But say a word about the general, what about these, what about the Houstons and Atlantas of the world?
Ed Glaeser:
Okay. So first let’s put two facts on the table. One of which is, there is no variable that I know of that better predicts metropolitan area growth over the course of the last 120 years than January temperature. January temperature is the biggest [inaudible] variable. Now, some part of that is just Americans liking warmer weather. And I will say as someone who’s lived in new England for the last 30 years, I think it shows an awful lack of character. But de gustibus non est disputandum, right? There’s no arguing with taste. They are what they are. As an economist, I’m bound to respect it. I respect them. But on top of that, there are other public policies that go along with this.
So if we think about the South in 1950, not California, the South in 1950 is still the Jim Crow South. And you go back and watch In the Heat of the Night, that marvelous movie with Sydney Poitier from the ’60s, this is a movie about a Northern industrialist building—I think it’s a textile plant—in Mississippi. And all sorts of bad things ensue, which suggests some of the things that might have been restricting development of the South. Now, over the past 70 years the South has gone from being relatively anti-business to being relatively pro-business. It’s the place of Right-to-Work states, it’s the places that have … And the work of Tom Holmes of the University of Minnesota looks at counties on different sides of state lines where you have Right-to-Work borders and shows huge added industrial growth after 1947 in those counties, those states that have been pro-business.
Bill Kristol:
And Right-to-Work being a very important part of pro-business, as opposed to taxes or all the other stuff?
Ed Glaeser:
Okay, so we’ve got 50 states. All of them have a cocktail of policies. It is very hard to say that it’s Right-to-Work versus lower taxes versus something else. We know that all of these things tend to go together, but it’s very hard to parse out which is the most valuable. We also have pro-housing policies. You don’t understand why Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix have added so many units since the last 30 years without understanding that they make it incredibly easy to mass produce housing. And that’s part of the magic. The second fact is that if anything, that Sunbelt trend has been magnified over the last two years. So partially because people like being outside, partially because probably the more relaxed attitude towards COVID has appealed to many people. When I look at the data over the 2019 to 2021 period, it feels like it’s the past 40 years on steroids.
We actually, in the paperback edition of that’s coming out this fall, we actually have a list of ranking the 50 metropolitan areas and how they fared over COVID. 17 out of the top 25 are in the Sunbelt, with Austin, Texas leading the pack. And so places like Austin that are both relatively pro-business and really skilled, those are the real winners. And Atlanta falls in that category as well. They also are pretty urban. It’s not as if these are not real metropolitan areas with really dense cores that have real network effects going on in them. Even if your average Houstonian may think of themselves as being a cattle rancher, they really are living in one of the world’s great metropolitan areas, great urban areas.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah. It’s interesting about Austin and Atlanta. The ideal thing is maybe to be a bluish city in a red state with pro-business policies and affordable and easy housing. But if you’re the type of person who wants more of a culturally left, let’s just say experience and environment, you get that too, right? Austin I think is, especially if you’re a university town, that’s one of the things that I never would have predicted, that being a university town, am I wrong about this though? Turns out to be kind of a big plus in economic development.
Ed Glaeser:
Absolutely. For both growth and wages. Enrico Moretti of Berkeley, he pioneered the use of land grant colleges prior to 1940 to look at the impact of having skilled workers. And they’re very predictive of success, having a land grant college prior to 1940. It’s directly skilled workers, but it’s also, after the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 makes it possible to commercially license research that was funded with federal dollars, you have an explosion of businesses around university towns in industries that are related to their traditional research expertise. That’s from work of Naomi Hausman.
Bill Kristol:
That’s so interesting, because I don’t know, I’m trying to remember when I was in high school. Ann Arbor, Madison, we thought they were kind of fun places because they were college towns. And if you’re on the left, they were lefty places. I don’t know that one thought they were particularly going to be the hubs of any great new businesses. It’s interesting if that legislation, which I had never really thought about for a second, made a .. It’s a good case study in how the unanticipated consequences, maybe they were anticipated, I don’t know, but I don’t imagine they really were, when they thought, “Well, people should get a little more of the benefits of this research,” and then it leads to the MIT area, which was a dump certainly, becoming a huge boom area. This wasn’t urban. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this wasn’t an act of urban policy. It was an act of, I don’t know what it was, of letting people monetize their research.
Ed Glaeser:
Yeah. I think there was no question that they thought of it as economic policy as well. I think they thought that it was going to help American growth. I don’t think anyone thought about the urban implications of this, that part of it. And you’re right, MIT is Boston’s land grant college. So it’s the classic example. And there’s no question it has been an economic engine for this region in a big, big way.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah. It’s interesting. And immigration, just while we’re on of my favorite hobbyhorses of our foolish policies, from the point of view of what you study, I take it the cities could use and welcome lots more immigrants of, well, I won’t put words in your mouth, you tell me.
Ed Glaeser:
Absolutely.
Bill Kristol:
And should they be all the PhDs who are being sent back, or could they also be people who want to work hard and start off in restaurants?
Ed Glaeser:
I think immigrants are good for cities and cities are good for immigrants. I think both of these things are true. They’re traditional ports of entry into the US, urban services benefit from having immigrants who may be working but they may end up being entrepreneurs in ethnic products. That’s also a thing which makes cities rich, is having a great cultural landscape, a kaleidoscope of different cuisines. So I think having a more permissive immigration policy would be fantastic. And I agree with you, it’s both at the top end of the skill distribution, but I would do a lot more at the low end as well. And I also am just keenly aware of the incredible privilege of being an American. And just some part of me makes me uncomfortable when I shave my face in the mirror of thinking that I really want to fundamentally deny that privilege to another person. My father came to New York in ’64 from Germany, and I wouldn’t exist if we didn’t allow in immigrants.
Bill Kristol:
Right. No, that’s right. And of course life’s unfair and some people don’t get to grow up as Americans, but if those who really want to come here go through the hoops properly to do so and are willing to work hard, it does seem like more, one would hope, would be better than fewer. And certainly now we do have, if you think it is probably hurting, just in terms of surfaces, the labor shortage, which really is an immigrant shortage to a surprising degree, I think. People haven’t really focused on five years of no immigration, partly because of policies and partly because of COVID. Makes a big dent, right?
Ed Glaeser:
You really see it in the leisure hospitality data. Over the last two years we’ve had first a huge decline in employment, then a modest comeback, and wages are way up in leisure and hospitality, which tells you that we have a real labor supply shortage in this area. And that’s in blue states in particular. In red states actually there’s been less of that, in general there’s been less of a great resignation in red states than in blue states. And immigrants tend to be disproportionately in those industries in blue state cities like New York.
Bill Kristol:
Since you’re an actual real economist in addition to being a specialist in these particular areas, as you mentioned the great resignation, I can’t resist asking you about that since everyone talks about it. What’s your take on the whole question of, what is that really about? Is it temporary? Is it bad? Is it good actually? Why should people who are 62 years old go back to work for three more years?
Ed Glaeser:
They may not ever go back to work. I think there has been two phenomena which are often merged together. One of which is just the fact that people didn’t want to work because of COVID fears in many cases. That’s probably one of the reasons why the blue state where COVID fears were much greater than in red states. And also there was a lot of federal money sloshing around the system that meant that people weren’t broke. Those feel like largely temporary factors. That doesn’t mean that the 62-year-old is necessarily going to go back to work. But it does mean that most of the 35-year-olds are. But I want to put this in a larger 55-year perspective. So when I was born, only 5% of prime aged males were jobless. And of course, prime age is the census definition, which is 25 to 54, which as a 55-year-old I take great offense at.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah, that’s terrible. Right.
Ed Glaeser:
But 5% were jobless. Over the past decade more than 15% of prime aged men have been jobless, that’s a tripling. And it’s not something that’s spatially neutral. It’s actually not a particular urban phenomenon. In fact, cities are relatively good at providing jobs for less skilled Americans, particularly in industries like leisure and hospitality. It’s particularly a phenomenon of America’s eastern heartland, a belt of states that begin down in Louisiana and Mississippi, run up through Appalachia, and ends up in the cities of the Rust Belt. I tend to think that long-term joblessness is much, much worse than working and entering lower wages. I think there’s good data that backs that up. If you look at the happiness data, if you look at suicide data… Long-term joblessness, especially for men, is associated with really bad outcomes. And I think this is, in some sense prior to COVID I was very clear that I thought that this was America’s largest unsolved social problem, and that has not gone away because of COVID.
And typically what happens is you have an increase in joblessness during a downturn and then a partial comeback during the recovery. And I think this is something that we should be worried a lot about, is how to make sure that more of our adults are able to get the things that you get from work, which are not just earning a paycheck, but social connections and a sense of purpose. And all the UBI in the world, all the universal basic income in the world will do nothing to give people a sense of purpose and nothing to give them a sense of social connection that you get from a job. And I understand there are a lot of tech entrepreneurs who have a story about how their uncle gave them a chunk of money and that gave them the freedom to start their startup and now they’re worth $3.5 billion dollars. That’s like two guys, okay?
The normal human beings, when you give them extra money, as we learn from the negative income tax experiments in the 1970s, work less. And that typically means they watch more television unless they’re younger, in which case they do more gaming. So this is not a recipe for economic dynamism, and it does feel like it’s a recipe for just exacerbating this problem of, millions of Americans were detached from the workplace, detached from other human beings, living lives of misery.
Bill Kristol:
I guess the case for work is a mini version of the case for cities. There are these, as it were, positive externalities, both for the individuals themselves in terms of family life and self-respect and opportunities to learn new things, and also for the surrounding areas. It’s not just a matter of you could plausibly through UBI replicate in some macro economic way, you could, they could continue to buy food and have medical care and so forth. Yeah.
Ed Glaeser:
Most of us from working bring benefits to other people that are not entirely monetized for ourselves. So that’s one element to it. We also bring benefits because we pay taxes and we don’t consume public benefits. There’s even the thing that roughly about 35% of long-term jobless men live on their parents’ couches, live with their parents. And so in some sense the parents, most of those parents did not get to be consulted when that person quit their job. And so in some sense you’re helping the parents out as well by being pro-work.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah, that’s good for that. Let’s talk about housing policy as we, last 10, 15 minutes here, since that seems to be one of the key, you’ve mentioned crime and education. Those seem like very big policies, but on the more strictly economic side, I guess, housing policy maybe is the biggest, I don’t know, question mark over cities and just differentiator between cities, and NIMBY and YIMBY. It’s become a pretty live issue just in the last, I don’t know, few years, I feel like. It was a little bit obscure a few a decade ago when we had a financial crisis and everyone was thinking much more about, I don’t know, should the Feds keep zero interest rate policies forever? But how damaging, if they are damaging, are our economic policies, our housing policies? What’s the core mistake, if there is one? Are some cities much better than others, et cetera?
Ed Glaeser:
So historically Americans have moved to places that are more productive. Historically that has been enabled by the fact that no one said that you couldn’t build a log cabin in Iowa in 1880 or put up whatever house you were going to put up there, or stop you from moving to Los Angeles in 1910. Typically, we have made it very easy for people to build housing in productive areas. Americans have moved to places that are more economically dynamic. Over the last 75 years, maybe even a hundred years, if you want to date it back to the single use zoning of the 1920s, so-called Euclidian zoning, we’ve made it easier and easier for neighborhoods and cities to say no to new housing.
What wealthy people, what homeowners, what poor people often want to do, then, is to say no to change. Want to say no to neighborhood change. I think there’s both some economic logic to this, in the sense that to an average homeowner, housing affordability isn’t something to be wished for. Housing affordability means their most valuable asset just got less valuable. So why would you possibly want more affordable housing? Why would you possibly want to expand the housing supply? There’s also just the inconvenience of going through nearby construction. You don’t like that either.
You’ve got two things which mean that you don’t want to have building. Plus there’s probably less rational aspects, which are, I just fear the change. There’s lots of evidence to suggest that human beings think that something bad is going to happen, and then their life is going to be incomparably worse. Yet we are a very adaptive species. At the end of the day, when you put up the new apartment complex at the end of the street, we’re still fine. It didn’t really make much of a difference in our lives. I think both things are going on.
What has happened in community after community, starting typically in the more educated places— Jane Jacobs was an example of this. It started off typically saying no to public projects. The story is often told around Washington Square Park in New York. In fact, this appeared in Mrs. Maisel, it has Jane Jacobs objecting to change in Washington Square Park. Yet she was actually not the central player in that. She was actually, that’s where she got started, and then gradually moved on from blocking, running an expressway through Washington Square Park to blocking all forms of neighborhood change, like in historic preservation districts.
This moved into the suburbs. In cities, it’s historic preservation. It’s the ideology of NIMBYism. In the suburbs, it’s some alleged form of environmentalism. Think about the Save the Bay Foundation, which grew up around San Francisco in the 1960s. They are very much against things which would imperil the local environment. Now, the problem with that from a pure environmental perspective, is you need to think about the global environment as well as the local environment.
It turns out that building in greater San Francisco is one of the greenest things you could do in America, from a global carbon emissions thing, because this is an area with very moderate weather, so you need to heat very little and cool very little, and you have lots of access to public transportation. If environmentalists in San Francisco really want to do good things for the environment, they should be saying, “Don’t develop in Las Vegas, develop here. We’re going to fast track all the high rise buildings you want to make.” Yet of course, that doesn’t happen.
What this means is that the sort of highly educated, highly successful hubs, like San Francisco, like Silicon Valley, like Los Angeles, like New York have been the places where people figured out first, how to stop new construction. And so you’ve frozen their housing supplies in amber— Middlesex County, where I am in Massachusetts, is another example. And so people can’t afford to move in when these places become more productive. This has led to an America that’s much less dynamic, an America that’s much less efficient, because we’ve created these housing frictions that make it impossible to adjust to changing economic circumstances.
Bill Kristol:
I suppose it’s a political matter. How does one overcome that? One would have to have either states come in and impose knockdown restrictions at the local level, or certain localities would have to decide that it’s ultimately hurting them? I don’t know.
Ed Glaeser:
Localities will never decide. You can never get to a case in which you’ll get particularly suburban homeowners communities to agree to lots of extra development. Even if you think that there’s some sort of a bargain here, where the developers could agree to give enough money to all the existing homeowners, I just can’t see a way in which American democracy is rigged up to manage a deal of that complexity.
The natural way to change is at the state legislature level. There are states can either take away zoning power from locality. For example, Chapter 40B in Massachusetts provides a get out of jail free card for developers, if the community basically has no affordable housing, and if the builder wants to build with enough affordable units. That creates a way around. You also can incentivize localities to create more housing.
I was quite keen on trying to bid into the infrastructure bill, the idea that we’re not going to spend infrastructure dollars on places that can’t build to take advantage of that infrastructure. I thought there was some claim that there was going to be a legal problem with that. I can’t see what legal system would say that we’re not going to embed cost benefit analysis in our infrastructure. You get more bang for your buck with infrastructure if you’re in your place that allows building.
It just makes more sense if you’re building in Texas and you know they’re going to be able to build a whole new community around it. You’re going to get a lot more for this infrastructure than you will if you build in San Francisco.
Bill Kristol:
I suppose ultimately, markets should take care of this in some way, because the place that’s cleverly keeping everyone out at some point becomes, I don’t know, not so desirable, because this doesn’t have the most modern amenities. I’m trying to think why. There are some ways in which, and businesses move away because they can’t attract workers because it’s too expensive. And suddenly Silicon—but people have been saying this for a long time—and Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. Maybe some businesses aren’t, well, Austin, I suppose there are some examples where the market gradually has an effect of punishing this kind of behavior.
Ed Glaeser:
It does. It doesn’t actually, the thing is, before Silicon Valley really starts to suffer, it gets cheaper. It hasn’t yet, but if it’s starting to suffer, it gets cheaper and then people can afford living again. The way that America has handled this for most of the last 50 years is people have gone to Texas. We’ve had escape valves, as you say. That’s, in some sense, eased the pressure.
That, of course, does not from a national perspective, having building in or businesses growing in places that are easy to build in, rather than places that are currently productive, that doesn’t create costs. We are better off if we locate in a place that is currently most productive in lots of ways, but you’re right. The less regulated parts of America have been the escape valve. It’s a good thing we have that escape valve.
Bill Kristol:
I suppose, as you say, it might be ultimately slightly less, more efficient in a way to be building where there’s already the good workforce, but you could argue from a national point of view, it’s not such a bad thing to have the exit to places that have heretofore been underdeveloped.
It’s been good for the south to have all these auto plants with high paid jobs. It’s bad for Detroit, but on the other hand, the exit strategy, so to speak, does benefit poor areas, and gives new people opportunities and so forth, I guess. Right?
Ed Glaeser:
That’s right. I believe in competition among firms and I believe in competition among localities as well. I think there’s something very healthy in America that you have this sort of constant competition among places. This actually takes us back to Mancur Olson, who you mentioned.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah. I was just going to end with asking you to say a word about Mancur Olson, who I feel like was a big deal when I was in grad school, I guess it might have been, late seventies, and as a young professor, and maybe he still is, I don’t have the sense people cite it as much. Say what the core argument of the book is, and why you decided to write a new introduction and so forth.
Ed Glaeser:
The core argument of the book is in stable societies you have coalitions, rent seeking groups, to use one of those phrases, that arise, which basically figure out how to use the tools of government to restrict competition and protect what they’ve got. This eventually leads to slower growth and the decline of nations. You have the rise of nations, and then you create this sort of stable prosperity that leads to all these coalitional groups that then stymie future growth, stymie future entrepreneurship.
Bill Kristol:
Stymie innovation, change…
Ed Glaeser:
Absolutely. They’re protecting the status quo. Now, I read this book, I read this book later than you did. I read this book in 1990, rather than in 1980. ‘ Cause I read it in graduate school as well, rather, which is eight years after it was written. To me, that sounded like, okay, maybe that was the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, maybe, but it didn’t feel like Reagan’s America to me. It felt like there was lots of good stuff happening in Texas and other free places, which maybe you had some places that were mired in this regulation, but other places were not.
I would say 30 years later, I think Olson’s a seer. I think he not only identified an important channel that exists in many places. He actually told a story of America, as we’ve seen more and more communities embrace this type of regulation on housing, which is a classic example of existing homeowners protecting what’s theirs by stopping change, by stopping growth, by stopping innovation, but also occupational licensing, the proliferation of rules, it’s stymieing entrepreneurship.
You raise the issue of immigrant entrepreneurs and cities. I think it’s a national embarrassment that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor so much more strictly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich. If you are some Harvard College student who wants to start your internet phenomenon in your Harvard College dorm, you can have a billion users before there’s a regulator that knows you exist. If you want to start a grocery store that sells milk products six blocks away, you’ve got 15 permits to get through.
The less educated tend to innovate in real space as opposed to cyber space. That just makes it much more difficult to evade the regulations. This is, again, a sort of quintessential example where most of those regulations do very little good. They do protect insiders from competition. For example, one of my pet causes on this was freeing the food truck. I love food trucks. I’ve eaten in food trucks outside of my office for the last 30 years. I think it’s a great form of urban entrepreneurship, yet it’s one that’s regulated in city after city.
I remember sometime 15 years ago, I was on an NPR show where there was some woman who had a food truck called the Pink Flamingo! It’s got an exclamation point after the O. She had been trying to start her food truck in Detroit for 18 months. They had the host, they had the woman, then the ombudsman of the city of Detroit on the NPR show. First of all, the fact that Detroit is saying no to any entrepreneur is just crazy. They should be welcoming anyone.
The only constituency that doesn’t want food trucks in Detroit is just the existing restaurant terms. It’s just protecting the existing people. The priceless thing is at the end of the hour, after this poor city ombudsman has been beaten up by the woman, beaten up by me, beaten up by the host, beaten up by every caller. He says, “Look, lady, just go ahead and start your food truck. We’re never going to catch you,” which I thought was…
Bill Kristol:
I guess Olson’s book was later than I realized if it was early eighties. I guess he had written articles that people like me had read. It was sort of a theme almost of a certain type of social science, somewhat neo-conservative, you might say, but also on the left, I’d say, that the stagnation was a threat, and innovation was being stifled. Interest group liberalism, Ted Lowy, some of that stuff was similar to that. Everything was kind of, the whole New Deal structure had become so embedded and stuff.
It’s funny. I was a tiny part of the Reagan administration—not in anything to do with economics— in education, but we all thought we were sort of fighting that. That was kind of the point of Reaganism, in some respects, supply side economics, entrepreneurship, innovation, lower taxes, the whole supply side was sort of a way of trying to get at that pro-immigration, NAFTA, pro-trade. I guess what you’re saying is that did not actually shape the next 30 years in major parts of policy though. Right?
Ed Glaeser:
Well, we don’t know. It could have been much worse, Bill.
Bill Kristol:
No, no I think that’s true. We do have Silicon Valley and stuff. I do think it’s interesting how much certain parts, which, sort of by accident, you might say, weren’t highly regulated. This very much fits with Olson’s thesis though, right?
Ed Glaeser:
Yeah.
Bill Kristol:
If they weren’t existing people, there’s no existing person to block the internet, because there was nothing quite like it if you know what I mean. So they got to develop unimpeded, in a sense, whereas if you wanted to start a new auto company, or build high rise housing, as we’ve been saying, there were plenty, or start food trucks, there were plenty of established interest groups with their connections with the regulators and so forth, who were able to slow things down. Just generally closing on this, do you think it is a big problem today? Olson, it remains a sort of challenge to us as a nation.
Ed Glaeser:
Absolutely. I think of it from my urban lens, but I think we need cities for outsiders. I think very much what we’ve had increasingly are cities that are geared around the existing incumbents within the city, whether they’re homeowners or restaurateurs, or teachers unions. Teachers, which are, this is a quintessential example, the teachers unions get protected, but the people who bear the cost are the kids of poor families.
We need to have cities that are for outsiders, whether or not, and we need a nation that’s for outsiders. The founding document is fundamentally about making this not just a country for people who have what’s theirs. That, to me, means taking on the threats that Olson identified 40 years ago, and fighting, continuing to fight hard as you did in the 1980s.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah. I hope we did a little good. One problem today, I suppose, is politically each party in its own slightly odd way is not really on board this pro-innovation, pro-growth, pro-openness globalism, to use the term, local versions of globalism, innovation kind of agenda. The left’s suspicious of the capitalist side of it, and the right’s suspicious of the innovative side of it. Right?
Ed Glaeser:
Yeah. But ultimately, we’ve got to keep on fighting for this one. We’ve got to keep on fighting for freedom and the ability to innovate.
Bill Kristol:
Yeah. I’m totally with you. Well, we’ll have to have another conversation actually in about the somewhat interesting aspects to this way of thinking about the economy and about the society, really, that I’d love to continue this conversation. Ed, thank you so much for taking the time today. People should go out and read The Triumph of the City, and The Survival of the City, and the new edition of Olson’s book, which you have the preface to, and that’s out just next month, is that right? September 2022. That’s great. So Ed, thank you for taking the time today.
Ed Glaeser:
Thank you, Bill. It was really a complete pleasure.
Bill Kristol:
Oh, great. We really enjoyed it and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
