Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…I’ve seen the 1959 Brazilian movie, Black Orpheus, set in Rio de Janeiro, and the hills are empty and the city is beautiful. Now, if you fast-forward to Rio today, it’s a war zone, and it’s extremely densely populated. Is Brazil a good example of failed YIMBY policy? No, no. I think that those favelas are providing upward mobility for millions and millions of Brazilians. The overall track record of cities as a tool for turning poor farmers into middle-class urbanites is phenomenal. The one failure of Brazil’s cities is that their police have failed, and that’s the one failure that I would say. When you look at the failures of developing-world cities — and there are plenty — there are demons that come with density, as you pointed out. There’s crime; there’s contagious disease; there’s traffic congestion. But the right answer is not to look at those and say, “Oh, better you just stay on the farm.” There’s no future in rural poverty in these places. The right answer is to do battle against the demons that come with density. But think of your own earlier paper on “Urban Giants” from 1995. A major city can be too densely populated for rent-seeking reasons. Mexico City, arguably, is too large. You’d rather have more people in Monterrey and Guadalajara. Rio, arguably, is too large. Shouldn’t Brazil, many other countries, Austria, have a more even distribution of city sizes, more like Zipf’s law, which sometimes they don’t have?…

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