Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:49:59 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Edward Glaeser :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Edward+Glaeser istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-way-we-gentrify-now-derek-hyras-new-urban/84680/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Three years ago, visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared that "the great city of New Orleans will rise again." This was not a new promise, however, but an old refrain. In 1960, President Kennedy went to West Virginia and said "we must encourage — through a program of federal loans and assistance, on a sound economic basis — the long-term industrial development which is the key to West Virginia's future." For decades, Republicans and Democrats with presidential... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/is-geography-destiny/82887/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST A trip to India once meant a saffron-scented experience of the exotic. Today, going to Bangalore means a trip to a First World city built on modern technology. Business travelers can fly from Chicago to Shanghai and experience a pretty homogenous world of identically furnished high-rise offices and business hotels and frequent flyer clubs. And you can always get your preferred breakfast beverage: The sun never sets on the Starbucks mermaid. But the flat world experienced by the globe-trotting... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/its-our-earth-now-what-do-we-do-with-it/82183/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Political movements are often built on literary foundations. Abolitionism owed much to "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Progressivism had Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell. Books, fiction or not, have the power to convince us impressionable readers that we face dire threats, such as unclean meat or pesticides. Political entrepreneurs, promising to protect us from those threats, can then work on the fertile ground of our fears. The environmental movement has been very successful at making America afraid... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/houston-new-york-has-a-problem/81989/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The Southern city welcomes the middle class; heavily regulated and expensive Gotham drives it away. New Yorkers are rightly proud of their city's renaissance over the last two decades, but when it comes to growth, Gotham pales beside Houston. Between 2000 and 2007, the New York region grew by just 2.7%, while greater Houston — the country's sixth-largest metropolitan area — grew by 19.4%, expanding to 5.6 million people from 4.7 million. To East Coast urbanites, Houston's appeal must be... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dividing-lines-bill-bishops-the-big-sort/81466/ Wed, 9 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST America is a land of daunting spatial differences. Per capita income in San Jose, Calif., is more than three times per capita income in McAllen, Texas. The proportion of adults with college degrees is five times larger in the Bethesda, Md., region than it is around Dalton, Ga. According to Pew surveys taken between 1987 and 2003, 56% of adults in Mississippi agree that "AIDS is God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior." Fewer than 20% of Connecticut respondents agree. Seventy-three percent... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/life-of-the-city/76402/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "This book will probably strike many readers as the work of an ill-tempered and mean-spirited fellow." These words begin Edward Banfield's 1970 classic, "The Unheavenly City," one of the most contentious, interesting, and insightful books ever written on urban policy. Banfield was often right, but he was never more accurate than in foreseeing the storm of angry reviews that greeted his book. Banfield described "The Unheavenly City" as "an attempt by a social scientist to think about the... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/age-of-abundance/73672/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Fifty years ago, John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" soared to the top of the best-seller list. The book has ideas and phrases, like "conventional wisdom," that have embedded themselves deeply in our culture. Much of "The Affluent Society" is rooted in the 1950s, but the book's central question remains central today: Should a rich society embrace free-market capitalism and private wealth, or should that society use its wealth for more public purposes like fighting poverty and... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/case-for-mccain/70286/ Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST One year ago, when voters' roundly repudiated Republican representatives and put Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker's chair, it was hard to have much optimism about the future of the Grand Old Party. Not only had the G.O.P. been bested on the hustings, but many loyal Republicans thought that this defeat was deserved. The party of Lincoln that had once stood for able integrity didn't seem all that able or all that honest. Twelve months later, Republicans have more right to be optimistic. The Democrat... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/those-who-do-not-know-the-past/68573/ Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Should developing countries embrace free trade or shelter their nascent industries behind protectionist walls? This debate has been going on for two centuries since Adam Smith faced off against the mercantilists. Ha-Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans" (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $26.95) is a lively addition to the protectionist side of the debate. Readers who believe in free trade will not find much in Mr. Chang that challenges that belief, but the book is well written and far more serious than most... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/just-part-of-the-cycle/67739/ Mon, 10 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Home prices have started to fall in cities throughout America and these declines may augur more serious price drops. While this isn't exactly good news, it isn't entirely bad news either. The real danger is not that the nation's homes will become more affordable, but that the government will do something foolish in a quest to artificially maintain high housing prices. As long as there has been housing, there have been housing cycles. In the 1920s, A. E. Lefcourt was the greatest developer in... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/why-i-write/65334/ Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Tyler Cowen, a star economist-blogger, asked earlier this week in an online posting: "Why is Ed Glaeser writing for the New York Sun? Essentially he's blogging. Without blogs I can't imagine it would make sense for Ed Glaeser to do that." I am certainly thrilled whenever Mr. Cowen's superb blog, "The Marginal Revolution," or any blog for that matter, picks up my work, but his statement is off the mark as to newspapers in general and the Sun in particular. The fact is that I am delighted to be... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/world-according-to-paul-krugman/64281/ Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Human knowledge is produced by intellectual combat that exposes weak premises and faulty conclusions to withering challenge. We are often improved more by our ideological enemies than by our friends, because our enemies push us hardest. In that spirit, I welcome the publication of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" (W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $25.95). The book espouses a world-view that is in many ways diametrically opposed to my own, but the process of intellectually disagreeing with Mr... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/wealth-of-one-nation/62992/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST For almost all of human history, mankind has been poor. Our incomes were spent on bare necessities, and we often died because we couldn't afford enough food. Over the past 200 years, a large share of our species has achieved prosperity almost without precedent. Middle income Americans today enjoy a standard of living that is in many material ways superior to that of Louis XIV. How did this happen? Gregory Clark's new book "A Farewell to Alms" is an investigation of both our nasty, brutish, and... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/vilifying-lenders/62832/ Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Not so long ago, banks were routinely vilified for not lending to the less fortunate. Over the past 15 years, a revolution in credit has made it possible for millions of less wealthy Americans to borrow to buy a house or a car, or to go on vacation. The rise in subprime lending has made credit available to the many, not just the privileged few. And so politicians now denounce the banking industry for lending to the less fortunate. Lenders that entrust their money to riskier borrowers are... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/how-to-recover/61801/ Tue, 4 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST Democrats with an itch for Pennsylvania Avenue real estate recently have trooped down to New Orleans to remind us that the city is still poor, still vulnerable to the vicissitudes of hurricanes, and only partially rebuilt. They have suggested a dizzying array of expensive new federal projects for the region, like light rail lines between New Orleans and Baton Rouge and Community Mental Health Block Grants. Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf region and damaged the Bush... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/latest-sign-of-citys-comeback/60938/ Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST New Yorkers, like the two Roosevelts, Thomas Dewey, and Al Smith, led one of the major parties in nine out of the 12 elections between 1901 and 1950. In those years, New York bestrode the Just as New York has come back as a city, it is once again in the center of presidential politics. The Intrade betting market suggests that Hillary Clinton has a 64% chance of winning the Democratic nomination, while Barack Obama has only a one-in-five chance of beating her. Rudy Giuliani leads the Republicans... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/where-edwards-is-right/60007/ Tue, 7 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST Last week in the New York Times, David Brooks compared the anti-poverty programs of Barack Obama and John Edwards. Senator Obama's plan focuses on making impoverished places more successful with funding for public transportation and community centers while Mr. Edwards wants to give housing vouchers directly to a million people. Suddenly, the press coverage of the Democratic primaries rose above puerile posturing about Hillary Clinton's neckline into a serious debate about anti-poverty policy... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/better-a-murdoch/58969/ Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST Perspicacious press pundits have proclaimed that Rupert Murdoch's possible purchase of the Wall Street Journal will lead to the destruction of that newspaper, a decline in unbiased reporting, and possibly the end of American democracy as we know it. The enemies of Mr. Murdoch seem to think that the market for ideas only works when its assets are owned by enlightened saints with an appropriately enlightened left of center worldview. What an odd idea. The markets for steel or coal or computers do... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/risk-worth-taking/58145/ Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST My colleague, Roland Fryer, recently announced that he was taking a leave of absence from our economics department to serve as the "chief equality officer" for the New York City Public School System. Mr. Fryer will help implement a pay-for-performance program that will reward poorer children for excelling on standardized tests. The program involves a medley of rewards ranging from 25 bucks for a good elementary school attendance record to $600 for passing a regents exam. The rewards are being... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/come-one-come-all-2007-06-26/57337/ Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST If the world is so flat, then why are people willing to pay so much to be in New York? Since we can telecommute from the Ozarks to Azerbaijan, shouldn't one spot on earth be as good as another? Yet as the world has become more accessible, people increasingly have been attracted to a few privileged spots, like Manhattan. Globalization reflects a dramatic decline in transport costs that has hurt goods-making cities like Detroit and helped idea-producing cities like New York. America's industrial... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/end-of-the-new-deal/56458/ Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST The history of the Great Depression has generally been written by the liberals who were the victors in its political battles. Great, but hardly neutral, historians like Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., crafted a narrative of the New Deal where the just forces of government righted the failures of the free market. Textbooks today teach that the Great Depression demonstrated the need for state regulation, as long as the state were run by well-meaning progressives. Amity Shlaes's... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/upward-trajectory/56343/ Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Mayor Bloomberg is making a spectacular exit from office, spending his well-earned political capital to give the city a much-needed congestion charge. Mayor Giuliani's ended his term as gloriously "America's Mayor" shepherding his city, and his country, through the horrors of 9/11. New York's mayors didn't always leave office so well. Seventy-five years ago, Mayor Walker resigned and fled to Europe to avoid removal and possible criminal investigation because of his penchant for accepting large... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/fight-for-housing/54138/ Wed, 9 May 2007 00:00:00 EST Last month, the U.S. Census reported that the three metropolitan areas that added the most people since 2000 were Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas. Each of them grew by more than 800,000 people since 2000. There was not a single place in the Northeast or Midwest that was among the 30 fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country. The New York City area expanded by only 2.7%. These numbers update a 50 year trend where the population of the Sunbelt has boomed and New York City has gone from... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/new-york/greenest-policy-is-growth/52987/ Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST Mayor Bloomberg's time in office may be term-limited to eight years, but his Earth Day speech yesterday made it clear that he wants a permanent impact on the city. The mayor outlined a sweeping program of 127 green growth policies that will help both New York and the environment. He continued his fight for more housing, because more energy efficient homes in New York will mean fewer gas guzzling residences and drivers in the exurbs. He promised to transform the city into a more environmentally... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/in-the-city-inequality-rules/49654/ Fri, 2 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST In New York City, 45 billionaires live cheek-by-jowl with 1.6 million people who live in poverty. Progressives since Jacob Riis have seen the urban juxtaposition of wealth and poverty as a flaw of New York. New York's wealth inequality reflects strength not weakness. The city's billionaires are the producers and the products of the city's extraordinary economy. The city's poverty reflects the fact that the less fortunate are drawn to New York by its economic openness, public transportation, and... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/modernism-that-failed/49501/ Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST In a new, wonderful collection of essays, "From a Cause to a Style" (Princeton, 310 pages, $27.95), Nathan Glazer asks why modernism failed: "How did a socially concerned architecture come to be condemned, 50 years later, as soulless, bureaucratic and inhuman?" It is a great question, and Mr. Glazer's analysis elegantly weaves aesthetics, political science, and intellectual history together to answer it. Mr. Glazer is one of the last lions from a remarkable generation of sociologists, including... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/greenness-of-cities/47626/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST The patron saint of American environmentalism, Henry David Thoreau, was no fan of cities. At Walden Pond he became so "suddenly sensible of the sweet and beneficent society in Nature" that "the fancied advantages of human neighborhood" became "insignificant." Thoreau's like-minded heirs, including the urbanist, Lewis Mumford, praised the "parklike setting" of suburbs and denigrated the urban "deterioration of the environment." Millions of Americans proclaimed their love of nature by moving to... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/arts/great-cities-need-great-builders/47012/ Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Robert Moses still bestrides New York like a colossus. More than three decades have passed since Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro tore down Moses's once pristine public image, but his physical legacy remains standing. Our New York is Moses's New York. He built 13 bridges, 416 miles of parkways, 658 playgrounds, and 150,000 housing units, spending $150 billion in today's dollars. If you are riding the waves at Jones Beach or watching the Mets at Shea Stadium or listening to "La Traviata" at Lincoln... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/teddy-kollek-city-builder/46109/ Thu, 4 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Jerusalem's longtime mayor, Teddy Kollek, died on Tuesday. Kollek began his term in 1965, when John Lindsay was first elected mayor of New York, and was ousted by Ehud Olmert 28 years later. Prominent Israelis are inevitably seen through the prism of foreign affairs, and Kollek's moderate Zionism shapes much of his image. Even his final defeat was seen by some as a referendum on the agreement between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. But Kollek should not be seen solely as an Israeli leader. As... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/breathtaking-vision-for-the-future-of-the-city/45041/ Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST In a world of civic tortoises who huddle in their shells fearing any change, the mayor — with his vision that the city must build housing and infrastructure so that the metropolis can accommodate more than 9 million residents in 25 years — is a lion embracing the unpredictable but optimistic path of urban expansion. The mayor's vision of a growing New York is the right one. A bigger New York can be an economic engine for the nation. A bigger New York is a boon for the environment: Every... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/bonfire-of-the-landmarks/44261/ Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Once again, the dark clouds of a real estate battle darken the sunny cooperatives of the Upper East Side. The neighborhood's great paladins of preservation are sharpening their verbal rapiers to wage war against those nefarious malefactors, the developers who make Manhattan more affordable by building more housing. The great melee on Madison, the fight over new construction on the old Parke-Bernet building, is starting. Glamorous neighborhood activists will fight developer Aby Rosen and... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/friedmans-work-in-new-york/43833/ Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 EST Milton Friedman's death has brought forth a flood of appropriate tribute for this great and good economist who was able to use ideas to change the world. Friedman was an intellectual leader in the victorious fight for freedom against communism. No man did more to destroy the myths of Keynesian orthodoxy and to set American monetary and fiscal policy on firmer ground. But Friedman didn't always win, and many of his battles remain unfinished. The best tribute to him would be to continue waging... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/my-father-the-architect/42594/ Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST Ludwig Glaeser, my father, died after a fight with throat cancer on September 27. He was an architect who, to my knowledge, never built a building, but rather presented works of the great modernists, like Mies van der Rohe, to the American public. He spent much of his career as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and then briefly became director of the Canadian Center for Architecture. At MOMA, he ran the Mies Van Der Rohe archive, caring for Mies' papers, which my namesake and his... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/endless-apartments/42145/ Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST On Tuesday, Metropolitan Life announced the sale of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town to Tishman Speyer for $5.4 billion dollars. Stuyvesant Town was a state-subsidized project first planned in 1943, when rent control was imposed on New York. The two complexes are the embodiment of postwar New York's two approaches to housing affordability: rent control and supply subsidies. Both were built on the Lower East Side with the help of tax breaks and eminent domain, which were at that time the... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/improving-brooklyn/39305/ Fri, 8 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST New York City has progressed from the declining industrial Gotham of the age of Beame to the glittering financial capital of the age of Mayor Bloomberg. While previous urban booms were marked by modest housing cost increases and massive construction, this turnaround saw modest construction and massive price increases. In the entire decade of the 1990s, the city permitted only 21,000 units. In 1960 alone the city permitted 13,000 units. The construction slowdown and the resulting high prices... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/city-thank-your-immigrants/39064/ Tue, 5 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST Today the House of Representatives reconvenes after spending the summer holding public hearings discussing the alleged dangers of unchecked immigration. The House's Republican leaders will decide whether to follow the Senate towards moderate immigration reform or whether to follow Representative Tom Tancredo's hard anti-immigration line and an appeal to immigration's enemies. The Republican attraction to nativism isn't new. The party was formed in the 1850s on the ashes of the Whigs, the Free... EDWARD GLAESER http://www.nysun.com/opinion/endless-land-debacle/38003/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST In the five years since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, America has built more than 6 million homes. Yet the main World Trade Center site remains empty. The memorial is projected to be completed in 2009 and the Freedom Tower is projected to be completed in 2011. Why does it take a decade to rebuild? The Empire State Building was, after all, built in 419 days. The Manhattan construction industry hasn't evaporated since then. Since 9/11, 30,000 new units have been permitted in... Edward Glaeser http://www.nysun.com/opinion/schools-for-cities/37951/ Tue, 15 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST New York City could be the best place in the world to educate children. The city's vast size could support competition and specialization in schools, just as it does in hedge funds. The dense agglomeration of smart New Yorkers should speed innovation in education just as it speeds innovation in the media. The city has a particular edge in serving children — public transportation enables children to access city-wide schools without a parental chauffeur. Schools share so many characteristics with...