Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I was in Mumbai earlier this year, and I visited Dharavi, which is the biggest slum in Asia. And it’s a pretty safe place for a slum. Why are slums in different countries? Why do they often have different levels of how safe they are? What is the reason? I, too, have been in Dharavi and felt perfectly safe. It’s like walking around Belgravia and London in terms of it. I think my model of Dharavi is the same model as Jane Jacobs's model of Greenwich Village in 1960, which is this is just a well-functioning community. People have eyes on the street. If you’re a stranger in these areas, they’re going to be looking at you, and it’s a community that just functions. There are lots of low-income communities throughout the world that have this. It requires a certain amount of permanence. So if the community is too much in flux, it becomes hard to enforce these norms and hard to enforce these sort of community rules. It’s really helpful if there aren’t either a massive number of guns floating around or an unbelievably lucrative narcotics trade, which is in the area. Those are both things that make things incredibly hard. Furthermore, US drug policy has partially been responsible for creating violence in some of the poor parts of Latin American cities. Maybe you don’t play video games enough to know the answer to this question. But I’m curious, is there any video game, any strategic video game like Civilization or Europa that you feel does a good job representing the economics of cities?…

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