44. Edward Glaeser Explains Why Some Cities Thrive While Others Fade Away

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Reese Witherspoon here checking in to my favorite hotel in Paris. Bonjour.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

Bonjour.

SPEAKER_1 (0:06)

I'm traveling with my Wells Fargo Autograph Journey card, so I earn rewards wherever I book travel.

Five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Phew, that was a lot. I need to lie down. Is the room ready?

SPEAKER_3 (0:24)

Visit wellsfargo.com/autographjourney. Terms apply.

SPEAKER_4 (0:32)

Are you hosting the holidays this year? Better start decorating early at Lowe's with decor for as low as $10.

It's easy to make every room feel festive. Plus, shop viral favorites like the Lowe's Mini Bucket, Cobalt Mini Tool Cabin, and other fun finds they'll love. Big smiles and low prices mean everyone wins this Christmas. The holidays are on now at Lowe's, in-store and online. While supplies last, selection varies by location.

Steve Levitt (1:06)

My guest today, Ed Glaeser, is a Harvard professor and the world's foremost economist of cities. He's the author of the best-selling book, Triumph of the City, and now he's back with a new book co-authored with economist David Cutler called Survival of the City.

SPEAKER_2 (1:23)

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

Steve Levitt (1:32)

Have you ever noticed how all economists sound the same when they talk? We're not especially articulate and we tend to speak using the stilted language of academic writing. We love to talk in great detail about the technical aspects of our research projects, but more often than not, we have a hard time explaining what people should actually care about the work we've done.

Ed Glaeser does not talk like an economist. He's almost poetic and so smart. Whether it's over lunch in the faculty club or walking through favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which I once did with Ed many years ago, he always teaches me things. I think this is going to be a real treat.

So, back in 2008, Ed, you wrote a book called Triumph of the City, and now 13 years later, you've got a new book called Survival of the City. Has your optimism about cities dwindled over the last 13 years, as much as the change in titles would suggest?

Ed Glaeser (2:31)

Probably not. Fundamentally, Survival is also an optimistic book, but it can't be denied that the reappearance of the pandemic has been something of a body blow for urban life. If cities are the absence of physical space between people, then social distancing is like the rapid fire de-urbanizing of the world.

Steve Levitt (2:48)

Now, certainly cities have survived bigger challenges than COVID.

Ed Glaeser (2:53)

Much worse, yes.

Steve Levitt (2:54)

The Black Plague, all sorts of things. Do you think this is a passing fad, or you think there's something more permanent that's going to transform cities by this meaning COVID?

Ed Glaeser (3:04)

I think it's both COVID and the work from home thing, which are sometimes seen as being a double threat to urban life.

Do I think that either of these things mean that face-to-face contact is gone and the cities that enable that contact are irrelevant? No, not at all. This is nowhere near as bad as the 1970s when you had the shock of deindustrialization and suburbanization at the same time, and cities found themselves on the brink of physical disaster. The way that I think about it is not that urban life as a whole is under threat, but that individual cities are more vulnerable than ever, and that competition for global talent is likely to become stiffer because of the ability to move more readily across space.

Steve Levitt (3:45)

So let's go back to the 70s, because we're both old enough barely to remember when New York City was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The New York City blackouts had a big effect on me viscerally. In 1977, the looting and violence spiked with crack cocaine in the late 80s.

There's urban flight and depopulation. I think it was conventional wisdom, was it not back in, say, 1990 that big cities were in trouble? But that prediction turned out to be really far off the mark.

Ed Glaeser (4:15)

Absolutely. My first Journal of Economic Perspectives paper on this was Our Cities Dying, which I answered emphatically no.

And certainly New York had an amazing renaissance over the next 20 years. Now, we should be a little bit nuanced in the sense that Detroit has not had an amazing renaissance, nor has Cleveland, nor has St. Louis. So the comeback is not uniform. And I expect post-COVID that cities, probably including Cleveland and Detroit, will continue to have a tough time reacting. But certainly, we've been in a place in which cities looked like they had far less of a future than they do right now, and cities came back from that.