Professor Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His most recent book, Survival of the City, examines cities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: What do you think will be the greatest consequence of the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure plan, and what work remains to be done?
Ed Glaeser: I completely agree with the need to invest seriously in America’s infrastructure, but I am somewhat saddened that cost-benefit analysis wasn’t more strongly baked into the infrastructure plan. I was somewhat surprised that post-COVID, infrastructure was the top priority as opposed to public health, which seemed like it was a more pressing need, but it is what it is. The hope is that we will get something that empowers innovation. The hope is that we will be able to rethink public transportation for the 21st century, perhaps with more of a focus on busses, as opposed to trains, perhaps embedding the use of new technologies, including autonomous vehicles into the public transportation fleet. But typically, large-scale public efforts lead primarily to more repaving, so I would expect the first thing we’ll see is a lot of repaving.
HPR: Your recent book is titled Survival of the City, and you argue that cities will continue, even with the rise of remote work. What makes you confident about your prediction?
Glaeser: Well, cities have been around for 3000 years, and they have survived far worse than this. We’ve forgotten the fact that cities are ports of entry on our global lattice of travel and trade, so they are the places in which goods, ideas, people, and diseases enter. This pandemic, of course, has been accompanied by a switch to remote work, and so many people have come to the view that we’re going to stay remote now. In fact, only 12% of the American population is still working remotely because of the pandemic. We’ve gone from 50 million people who were working remotely in May of 2020 to under 20 million, so more than 60% of those people that had gone remote have switched back.
Additionally, this is not the first time that people have asked whether or not information technology that enables face-to-face contact would make cities obsolete. In 1980, Alvin Toffler published The Third Wave, which predicted that information technology would do to urban offices what containerships and highways have done to urban factories and that they would lead to a move towards working inside the home. For 40 years, he was completely and totally wrong because the first-order impact of these technologies was not to lead us away from offices, it was to radically increase the returns to skill, which increased innovation.
We are a social species that become smart by being around other smart people. I think there’s a lot of evidence, even during the pandemic, to suggest that we lose a lot when we go remote. And I think no one who lived through a year of zooming your way to classes at Harvard can possibly think that remote is any kind of substitute for life.
HPR: In your book, you talk about previous plagues. How do you think studying COVID-19 in its historical context can help us understand the state of the world today?
Glaeser: We have a long history of disease. We can learn from how societies in the past fought them, we can learn from what tended to work and what didn’t work, and we can learn when plagues were more or less devastating, not just in terms of direct mortality consequences, but also in terms of the larger social consequences. Typically, the impacts of all-natural disasters are mediated by the strength of civil society when they strike. So if an earthquake strikes Chile, which has a very strong, functional public sector, it has a very modest impact. If an earthquake strikes Haiti, it is an absolute catastrophe, even though the earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 was of a smaller magnitude than the one that struck Chile in 2011.
The plague that struck Rome in the second century came during the so-called “era of the four good emperors,” which, Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, famously said was “the most felicitous time that a human being could have lived,” and that plague was roughly shrugged off. By contrast, the plague of the sixth century arrived when Constantinople and the future of Europe teetered on the edge of a knife, so the disease was far more devastating. And so, we have to ask ourselves how strongly do we think our cities are? How strongly do we think our overall public health system is right now? It certainly feels like fissures have developed that were less apparent 20 years ago, and it certainly feels like our cities are far more fractious than they were when terrorists struck the Twin Towers in 2001.
HPR: In your book, you discuss problems in healthcare, education, and policing. What do you consider to be the greatest challenge facing cities today and why?
Glaeser: Today’s greatest task is the challenge of making our cities places for outsiders once more. Over the last 40 years, local governments have been captured by insiders, who’ve made it difficult to reform schooling and difficult to build new housing. Typically wealthier, older individuals have erected rules that protected what they have, protect their views, their convenience, their commute, and their school districts from people who are disadvantaged.
As a result, it is harder to afford to live in a city because we have made it very difficult to supply housing and urban affordability reflects the supply of housing. It affects the quality of our schools because it’s far too difficult to actually reform underperforming schools and get rid of underperforming teachers. And it has made it far too difficult to start the big businesses that lead to opportunities for urban entrepreneurs, many of whom are immigrants or people who have a different ethnic background. It is an absolute shame that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor, so much more tightly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich. If you want to start your internet phenomenon in your Harvard college dorm room, you will face very few regulatory oversights, at least until you have your first 100 million users, whereas if you wanted to start a grocery store that sells milk products five blocks away, you have something like 15 permits to get. Because less educated people tend to be entrepreneurs in physical space, rather than in cyberspace, they face the full brunt of the regulatory state and they suffer for it.
HPR: You propose greater accountability for police officers as a solution to the problem of both rising crime and police brutality. How do you respond to people who are so disillusioned with policing that they view defunding the police and funding social programs as the only viable solution to dealing with police brutality?
Glaeser: There are two civil rights here. There’s the right of every young person, of whatever color, to walk home from school without being harassed by police officers. That is an absolute civil right that we have to do a much better job of ensuring. But there’s also the civil right of every young person to walk home without fear of being harassed, or robbed, or beaten up. I know of no way to protect those people without having some form of law enforcement. We are not a species of saints. Humanity has shown a disturbing tendency to abuse other humans when they are not prevented by some form of state apparatus and attempts to think that we can just educate our way out of malevolence runs counter to hundreds of thousands of years of human history.
When the police failed in the late 1980s, minority youths overwhelmingly paid with their lives because the police weren’t there to stop crime. So the world of defunding the police is a world that is absolutely cruel, particularly to the disadvantaged. But while I believe strongly that police need to be funded, I believe just as strongly that police need to be reformed. We need to make sure that we have a police force that follows the twin objectives of both preventing crime and treating every human being with decency and respect. I have a certain amount of confidence in Peter Drucker’s mantra that what gets measured gets managed. And so one place to start is by having a better measurement of non-crime outcomes. Right now police reduce crime because they get graded on their crime performance. They should also be graded on how happy everyone is with their policing. They should be graded on the quality of everyday interactions with police, which requires some form of regular survey or independent assessment ideally done with quantitative measures.
HPR: Many of your policy recommendations are based on historical successes: the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. What do you think was special about that generation of policymakers that their programs were so successful?
Glaeser: You know, they had a lot of resources: America was willing to spend a lot of money on policy. But there was also a sort of pragmatic centrism that came out of World War II and then what followed. There is this famous line associated with Senator Arthur Vandenberg, that politics stops at the water’s edge. In truth, it frequently has not stopped at the water’s edge, but it certainly should. There should never be a Democratic or a Republican way to win a war or to defeat Nazis. And by and large, in the 1940s, we were focused on the very difficult task of defeating Nazi Germany and winning victory in the Pacific. These were hard technocratic problems, and they called for technocratic leaders. Remember, the Secretary of War during World War II was a Republican, Henry Stimson, and nobody even knew George Catlett Marshall’s party because he refused to divulge. The generation of leaders who followed was fairly non-ideological too. Kennedy, for all of his liberal icon status now, ran on the missile gap and ran on the fact that, allegedly, Eisenhower had let the Soviet Union become too strong and not too weak. Nixon in 1960, was a card-carrying member of the NAACP. There was a much narrower gap between the parties, and there was a real focus on having people in government who were considered good managers. I think, looking forward, we need to stop having these painful arguments that have raged since the 1970s about whether we want less government or more government. The task ahead is how the heck do we get better government?
HPR: People today seem disillusioned with politics. What’s one sign of optimism you have as an economist?
Glaeser: I am congenitally optimistic, primarily because I spend a lot of time in the classroom, talking to Harvard undergraduates and Harvard graduate students. I just think that the hope and the courage and the passion for social change, and the talent are abundant. And that strength is not just about talent: it’s talent yoked together with a desire to make the world better.
I am also optimistic because I think that cities have been doing miraculous things for thousands of years, at least since Socrates and Plato bickered on a street corner. And when I look around me, I believe very strongly that the age of urban miracles is not over.
In terms of government, I tend to be more enthusiastic about state and local governments, than national governments, mainly because they tend to be much more pragmatic. And, while it’s not obvious that I agreed with all the policies that Michelle Wu espoused during her campaign, I have to be optimistic when one of our former Economics 1011a students is now mayor of Boston.
