Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…If cities can’t fix their schools, and can’t fix their NIMBY problems, and are super expensive, and don’t produce enough human beings, isn’t there a funny second-best defense of “let’s keep people out of the cities”? The NIMBY is okay, keeps them in the suburbs, better for them anyway. There’ll be a higher birth rate. You need to have someone keep those cities going, but write them off a bit. Maybe they’re just not fixable. Remember, I’m an economist, which means that, like you, I believe that the real desiderate is choice. What we want is to make sure that people have options. And there are some Americans that want to live in cities, and some are going to want to live in suburbs, and some are going to want to live in low-density rural areas, and that’s just great. We don’t, in any sense, want to do away with any of that. I don’t want to give any sense in which that’s not at the heart of what I believe. At the same time, I think that cities — lots of areas are doing a crappy thing by making it too difficult to build. I think there are social welfare benefits by freeing up developers. I think, in general, it’s awful that cities aren’t doing a better job with their schools, and we should fight against those things. We’re not doing it just so that more people will come to cities, or that that would be the right result. We’re doing it primarily because the kids who are going into the schools are getting a raw deal, and we want them to get a better deal. In general, one of the themes of the book is America has done an amazing job over the last 40 years of protecting its insiders at the expense of its outsiders. Schooling, NIMBYism are all examples of cases in which our cities have become — and our suburbs — machines for protecting entrenched interests of middle-aged, middle-class people, and making it difficult for the people who come and start with less to find a brighter future. What’s your underlying political model of why so many cities, especially coastal ones, have become so politically clustered along some particular dimensions. It didn’t use to be this way, right?…

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