Dark Lights, Big Cities? | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it is tuesday february the second groundhog day in america and welcome back to good fellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns in this time of pandemic i'm bill whalen i'm a research fellow here at the hoover institution as well as the virginia hobbs carpenter fellow in journalism i'll be your moderator today now this is your first time watching good photos which are in store for for the better part of the next hour or so is a lively conversation featuring three hoover institutions senior fellows or good fellows as we jokingly refer to them offering their insights to what may lie ahead in these uncertain times let's meet the good fellows beginning with john cochran he's an economist in the hoover institutions rosemary and jack anderson senior fellow hey john hey share singing i got you babe and i got to look at you guys again what's going wrong here happy groundhog day good to be with you my friend second good fellow joining us from his wilderness outpost is neil ferguson neil is the of course a renowned historian and author and he is the hoover institutions milbank family senior fellow neil have you stepped outside your cabin if so did you see your shadow no i have not stepped outside my log cabin yet but we'll do shortly after this is over and i still haven't seen the movie groundhog day which is kind of almost a blot on my conscience but i i'll get i'll get to that eventually too i'm trusting our third good fellow is seen groundhog day because he is a pennsylvanian and that would be lieutenant general h.r mcmaster he is the hoover institutions for uh michelle johnny senior fellow and he is the author of the new york times bestseller battlegrounds a fight to defend the free world hello hr hey bill and if i had to do ground hug day every day all over again every day i would do it with you guys always the optimist gentlemen we're going to talk about the state of cities today and we've brought on an urban economist to offer his thoughts on this so joining us right now edward glacier ed glacier is the fred and eleanor glenn professor of economics in the faculty of arts and sciences at harvard university he regularly teaches microeconomics theory and occasionally urban and public economics ed glaser's published dozens of papers on city's economic growth law and economics in particular his work is focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission best of all as john cochran will tell you ed glacier received his phd from the university of chicago it's book triumph of the city how our greatest invention makes us richer smarter greener healthier and happier is available for your perusal at amazon.com ed welcome to good fellows thank you so much for having me on but we we forgot the most important part of my history i'm a former archw sean national fellow at the hoover institution which uh which i am enormously proud so thank you thank you for writing that may i ask you before we get into the conversation who made you wear the bow tie cochran or ferguson i have not taken off this bow tie since 1979 uh ed let me begin the conversation with this question i'm in palo alto california we're all spread around here i think hr's in palo alto today uh neil is out somewhere in the world and that's i think john has gone to greater heights literally in california up in the mountains but i'm about 30 miles south of san francisco and uh to understand the history of san francisco ed is to also understand cycles uh there was an exodus out of san francisco beginning in 1853 after the gold rush in exodus in 1906 after the earthquake and exorcist uh in the exodus the late 1940s as housing prices took off after the war in exodus in the 60s due to counter culture in exodus in the late 80s when people started moving down the peninsula towards silicon valley in exodus during the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s now we see the story of san francisco and the word exodus again here's the question ed is this just history repeating itself in cities like san francisco or is there something different going on here i think we are at an extraordinary injunction point uh for four cities we are we're at a point in which uh uh you know cities are more vulnerable than they have at any point in the 1970s i do not think that in any sense the demand for face-to-face interaction is gone i think the world is filled with billions of of people who are desperate to enjoy the company of other people and desperate to work together in the sort of very fertile face-to-face uh areas but that doesn't mean that any one city has a lock on anything and san francisco does not either uh despite its extraordinary success over the last uh 50 years so it is very much a point in which every city needs to be asking itself uh uh you know are you doing all you can to hold on to your talent to hold on to your your uh uh the future of your business is the future of of your economy but i don't think that the city itself is going to disappear anytime soon okay fair point gentlemen ed yeah one of the many things i've learned from you over the years is there's a third function of cities and the first is agglomeration and production that goes with amenities so i think both are true say in new york people go there because they they have to because that's where they're very productive working with other people rich millionaires go there because they love the restaurants um both of those seem in great danger right now especially in san francisco uh maybe new york as well the third function of cities is uh is decay they become a place uh of um capitalist fixed capital stock that you can live in uh cheaply if you're on a government check and that seems like some of the danger of uh where you go if you over regulate if there's too many rent seekers at the trough and so forth um and maybe you'd like to tell us a little more about that the cycle of decay the dangers of becoming the next detroit uh the possibility for uh everyone to pick up and move to austin thanks thanks john and that's that's exactly right i mean the cities have this fixed capital stock that means that they you know last for a long time and that's one of the reasons why that observation is really important is that san francisco even in the you know even if this is a huge shock is unlikely to turn into empty office towers right because what happens is prices drop a lot before you start having everything empty out and so you don't have an immediate reduction what you have is sort of year by year decade by decade you have the slow grind of a sort of a city slowly coming apart in places that start closer to the point which boy you know landlords start saying boy if rent's dropped 20 we're really gonna stop you know stop this you know cities in the in the central us places where uh rents are more like 20 bucks a square foot than 80 bucks a square foot those places really you could see vacancies um the fear i think that john also raised is one in which decline compounds itself so a city receives an adverse economic shock uh the city responds by uh you know raising taxes it doesn't particularly try to hold on to its talent uh more skilled businesses leave uh the city cuts back on public services crime rates go up more skilled cities citizens leave that is very much sort of the story that we felt in the 60s and 70s many cities and you know that's very much what we want to make sure it does not happen in as many places as possible um but this sort of cycles happen over and over as you said bill to start this out but successful cities manage to reinvent themselves as indeed san francisco has and that requires that they sort of mediate the downside of the cycle and stop the sort of you know uh stop the sort of perpetual decline feeds on decline field one of the questions we're grappling with regularly on goodfellas is the impact of covert 19 and a hypothesis that's got a lot of journalistic traction is that covered 19 is a unique death blow to some cities at least because it's made possible a new pattern of work and many of us are simply not going to go back to the old ways uh that required us to be uh cramped in apartments in uh in new york city so i think it's worth pondering a little bit whether there's something special about 2020 uh that is going to make it harder for for san francisco to pull itself out of what looks to me uh as somebody who's observed the city now for nine twenty years like a pretty steady decline the the pandemic's a big shock and i'm interested in in how far cities can can recover from these very unusual shocks like pandemics as a historian i'm inclined to think that they generally do and that plagues far worse than covert 19 did not kill off the great cities of europe so if i was to take a kind of first cut at this question it would be no you're probably exaggerating the impact the pandemic it's pretty hard to kill a city i mean think of naples uh a city regularly over the centuries uh disrupted by volcanic eruptions but people still flock back there and i'm struck by the speed with which after a major disaster cities refill even if it's as bad as as a volcanic eruption what's your take on that head i just want to add the question there's also the effects of the us air force which did in some cities in uh in the middle of the last century and people flocked back but you you mentioned this question of face-to-face interaction so really the issue is not going to be covid i think we all see cities can come back from that as they have come back from plagues the question is zoom to what extent does the future require that face-to-face interact and how much does it require san francisco was already the city of the startup but not the city of production uh only stuff that absolutely needed that face-to-face floating workforce the minute you're kind of a business and you're there for 20 years you get the gold watch boom off we go over the sierra where the taxes are lower so how just how much will have to be done in that uh now very expensive face-to-face agglomeration there there are two questions here and i want to sort of respond to both of them one of which is is zoom the shadow of alvin toffler the rise of telecommuting you know for my you know for my entire life in some sense as an academic i've lived under the shadow of topher's prediction that the rise of electronic technology would move us all to these uh electronic cottages and we would just zoom it in and for 40 years after he wrote the third wave he's been completely wrong right so let's be let's be clear on this i mean he got the whole thing uh backwards in part because he he took a single comparative static a single effect which was this would increase our ability to dial it in but didn't look at everything else that would change along with a more technology intensive globalized world the fact that we became much more collaborative the fact that the world became more complicated in a more complicated world you know it's easier for ideas to get lost in translation which makes it more valuable to be face to face the incredible rise in the returns to skill which have happened partially as a result of new technologies partially as a result of globalization and we are a social species that get smart about around being around other smart people i know this more than from any data i know this from the experiences i had when i was 21 sitting around john cochran in the university of chicago right so this is a this is sort of a huge part of what makes us human is our ability to to learn from one another and i think looking forward today in 2020 one um there's no question that many forms of work will change but we we still have this fundamental thing that you know for highly creative highly interactive tasks proximity is very valuable even more so it is very hard to sort of get younger workers or for that matter younger students engaged with the enterprise and part of the team if you're not doing it face to face i don't know how many of you have had this experience with sort of people who you've been advising for years this works zoom is great like old friends it's totally fine right but if you ask me to inspire a bunch of 19 year olds to like get excited about mathematical economics over zoom it's much much harder and we see this in the burning glass data where if you split up occupations between those occupations that can be done remotely and those occupations that need to be done face-to-face the face-to-face occupations plummeted post-covered okay both uh employment and job openings and burning glass and then both of them came back okay both came back by the fall the remote jobs employment was steady burning glass postings collapsed and they've stayed collapsed so they aren't hiring new workers right so microsoft comes up with these reports that says that it's its programmers are just as productive post zoom as they were pre-zoom but overall burning glass highers in for programmers are down by something like a third which is suggestive of the view that you can take the old workers you can ride on the relationships that are already built but you're not going to start something from scratch doing this so again i think that this suggests that face-to-face working isn't really all that all that gone but are plenty of startups going to start thinking well you know i can deal with my venture capitalists from boulder i can deal with them from vail i can deal with them from bozeman montana and it's a quarter of the price so maybe i just want to take the whole team and take them there that seems to be the more realistic approach than that you know the startups of the future are going to consist of of five 25 year olds all living in their apartments and zooming it in that just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me for the for the sort of dynamic information intensive economy of of the future hr in on this and hr i guess nobody runs boot camp on zoom well you know or or rugby teams right i mean anything that that requires teamwork and and uh and i think building a team as ed says is very difficult to do remotely because that that has a psychological it has an emotional dimension to it as in in the case of the army in an ethical dimension as you as you create expectations of one another and it strikes me and you mentioned the toddlers you know they wrote the third wave but they also wrote war and anti-war and they were dead wrong about future of war as well and and i think the reason that they were wrong is they emphasized in both books they emphasized change over continuity and as my fellow historian you know first would agree i think is that was that we have to keep mindful of continuities in the human experience or else we're bound to make uh wrong decisions right the first step in making a project in the future i think is understanding how the past produced the present and whereas carl becker said that anticipation of future and memory of past have to walk hand in hand in a happy way so i i wonder if you could summarize for us what you see is continuities in the city i think you've mentioned some of these already and certainly having your scholarship in terms of our needs to be together to be in a community uh and and what are the changes and i think we're talking about the technological changes as well and ed in the context of that have you been following the line the saudi arabian project or neom uh that uh mohammed bin salman's your vision of a future city that argues that a different kind of city is necessary because of changes in technology but but really the overall question is how do you see continuity and change in cities it's a great question and and i'm gonna i'm gonna take it a slightly i'm gonna take to cycle back to neil's comment on the sort of long arc of plagues and cities because i think there really is there really are differences and um we could have different interpretations about 430 uh bc or 541 ce which are the sort of two classic plagues so the first is thucydides in the plague of athens possibly killing off about a quarter of the athenian population certainly uh you know casting doubt on pericles strategy of waiting within the walls of athens and harassing the peloponnesian uh coast by fleet uh you know whether or not we think this was absolutely crucial or you know the the athenian fleet ultimately uh perished because of al silbiyati's uh hubris and attacking uh sicily is unclear but it certainly was deeply damaging to that city that had been in some sense the brightest city of the mediterranean world during his period 541 right this is plague of constantinople first appearance if you're seeing a pestis on uh uh european shores right whatever hope you had uh that justinian and belisarius were going to reimpose the pax romana on the mediterranean world that hope vanished when uh the black plague showed up so i agree strongly with neil that post 1350 cities have been unbelievably resilient in part because the you know the seven centuries that followed right the black death's appearance on constantinople where in some sense the creation of a much more resilient uh european uh world part of that was in fact defensive military right instead of a military that was geared towards offense it was a military that was geared around walls that could be defended and if you lost a 30-year population you could still defend those walls but partially it was also smaller polities polities that were less prone to sort of immediately collapse when there was the disorder of this and of course neil is particularly right that in the 19th century when plagues like car and yellow fever which were far deadlier than you know covert by any stretch the imagination you know paris london new york they brush those things off and they use them as opportunities to come together and actually rebuild their cities to make them miss stronger one final point that i think comes out of this and this comes out of the work of matt khan and others on how natural disasters impact things in some sense all natural disasters are mediated by the strength of civil society when they're hit right so earthquake hits haiti larger earthquake hates chile chile you know death toll is minor haiti it's a it's a humanitarian disaster right in some sense the weakness of the of justinian and rome tells you why that became such a disaster uh if if if that's clear and then you've got to ask yourself where is where is america in 2021 are we are we as resilient as new york was in 1849 or are we somewhere that's less resilient than that or new york in 2001 when we were hit by the twin towers but this is a great point ed which is the point that ultimately a disaster is only as disastrous as the institutions the politics uh make it and that's what makes me concerned for san francisco at to an extent new york because when one contemplates the way san francisco has been run as a city in recent years it's almost as if they have a death wish i'm still reeling at the thought that the people running public schools in the city thought it was worthwhile to rename about 40 of them because they had highly offensive names like abraham lincoln attached to them crazy people run san francisco they appear wholly uninterested in providing the kind of public services like housing and education that would make people want to live in the city 20 years ago it was a pretty attractive city to my untrained uh eye i hardly ever go there when i moved from harvard to stanford i assumed i'd go there often a few visits quickly taught me that the place had become really quite uh odious and i think that's a failure of public policy that would have killed san francisco even if covert 19 had never struck so it's really about how people run cities not about which disasters strike them don't you think well i mean so yes how people run the cities are important but um and the city as long any city that can command the kind of real estate prices that san francisco commands can't be called a complete uh complete you know maybe a complete public public disaster but it's not a failed city yet right a city where condos go for multiple millions of dollars is a city that still is appealing to somebody um whether or not it's appealing to to you or not now in some sense that very appeal is what enabled the government of san francisco to act in a way that was not targeted uh towards towards uh the services that you that you value and in some sense that's what's happened in many of america's most successful coastal cities over the past 20 years the the new york of the 1970s was a city where as you know its giant garment industry had disappeared in a short number of years hundreds of thousands of jobs disappearing uh because of globalization uh and uh the de-industrialization um a city that tried to run a local welfare state and then found when it taxed the rich and when it tax businesses they just picked up and left right it found itself right asking going to the federal government having ford famously he didn't literally say toward the city dropped dead but the the daily news got the spirit of it right um and the city really had to reinvent itself it had to realize that it didn't have a blank check and city after city in the u.s came to that realization in the 1970s and we had really an arc from the sort of progressive dreamer of the 1960s to the city manager mayor be they you know a mike bloomberg or a tom menino these were sort of pragmatic people who understood that there's no democratic or republican way to clean up the trash or deal deal with the snow and so that was sort of the consensus as of 2001 and the past 20 years have been an enormously rich set of years for cities and they've responded by saying well you know we can do whatever we want we don't need to worry about businesses or rich people where san francisco will always be that way and now i think the question is how many election cycles does it take for san francisco and to new york to realize that they need to come back to the center and focus on core city services it doesn't mean i think it's harder harder than you think so first of all you might want to use past tense on all those prices because they are plummeting right fair enough um the great under reported in the national news story is the explosion of violent crime right now uh non-violent climate violent crime carjackings in chicago are up 150 um murders are skyrocketing uh and part of that is the police are kind of taking a little bit of vacation and prosecutors are just not prosecuting uh shoplifting the result being that uh stores are closing right left um you know crime is one of those things where it really hits you you can rich people can buy themselves public schools but you can't buy your way out of crime uh then the uh you know part of the loop is yes there's agglomeration it's wonderful to be productive here but there's also the great amenities well of course the businesses are all uh you know that kind of shoplifting crime the businesses all go the people all go and san francisco compounds it with with a wave of homeless san francisco spends 330 000 per homeless person on homeless services uh to not much effect other than to increase the number of mostly mentally ill and drug addicted people wandering around the streets somehow it doesn't have the money for public toilets even then once you get over the over the crime into the crime part i mean i we i lived on the south side of chicago in the 1970s it took a long time to convince people to come back that seems like kind of a death knell for the cities that have that in part because now we just meant you mentioned sort of politicians with a general let's get the city going but politicians have a voter base and they're once the rich people in the business people move out their voter base is the people who are there now who are not particularly interested they don't like crime um and they don't necessarily like uh progressive nostrums but they don't like gentrification they don't like rich people moving back in uh and this has been quite clear in chicago where local oldham and say no i don't want business and rich people moving in because my voters are the voters who are the ones who are there now and it won't be there anymore so who represents the potential that ought to be there that could move in is there an answer to this question in migration because it seems to me what makes the united states a dynamic and successful country is partly the size and decentralization of of the system and one thing that i remember striking me when i was writing a book about american decline called colossus was the decline of mobility between cities and and between states and my hope at the moment is that the shock of for the pandemic is going to increase mobility back to its kind of normal level and once you get that kind of mobility the competition forces the bad cities uh to reform themselves or be detroit could we see an increase or a return to normal of cross state line migration city city to city migration i i think we're seeing it already actually i mean the standard move at the moment is san francisco to austin texas and the other one is new york to name a city in florida so i mean my guess is that the best discipline for the bad cities is people moving to the good ones and in the united states that's really easy to do so so neil is taking my side on this so there's a clear view between john and myself and that i am somewhat more optimistic that cities will react soon enough or at least a good number of cities will react soon enough to the threat of out-migration that they won't collapse entirely but let me let me directly and you know it's exactly through the process neil was talking about right that we have this possibility of moving zoom has made businesses and people more mobile austin is more appealing than it's ever been san francisco needs to pay attention to it or it will lose so let me let me let me let me address two issues that john has raised both of which are quite serious one of which is crime moves quickly and that is right and uh you know we're we're not at a place that we were in 1985 or 1989 in which we think that safe streets are an absolutely scenario of every city right this is not something where current political discourse is gone and that's a problem uh because in fact in there is no way for this for the city to come back if it doesn't enable its its amenities its restaurants its parks to be used and that actually requires whatever one thinks about you know stop and frisk or the other issues around uh race and policing which i think is actually quite serious serious issues um they need to be handled at the same time you keep safety right and that actually requires not defunding the police almost assuredly if you're going to ask more of your police in terms of respect and also ask them to prevent crime you're going to actually have to spend more on them not less so that's that's sort of one one thing that i think is absolutely critical on this um and you know how quickly this will happen i will tell you that i have emerged out of the 90s and 2000s fairly optimistic relative to where where we were in the 1980s about how quickly the police can actually stop crime we've learned a lot about about how effective policing can be and things feel less dire in terms of the sort of complete helplessness that we felt in 1985 about not like this could never never end the second point which i think is a you know i'll just tell a story about this so john raised the sort of political economy issue of what happens if basically a mayor is elected by a constituency that doesn't care about businesses that doesn't care about rich people that thinks gentrification is nothing but nothing but evil and thinks it's great now the story that i i call this the curly effect named after the boston mayor james michael curley who famously in 1916 when a british recruiting uh colonel i think came and asked if it was okay that he recruit bostonians of british descent to fight in the great war um he came to mayor curley and asked mayor curley was it was an irish american mayor who was deeply fond of twisting the lion's tail and he responded to him go ahead take every damn one of them was his actual line uh and and by this of course he meant that you know not a single one of them were going to vote for him his poor irish constituents you know his probability of being elected was increased and that is a worrisome possibility as john raised that is that is a world in which the center doesn't rule in which there's not sort of some sense the city actually needs its economic base and i don't see that yet for you know i believe that sort of we will get back to that uh in new york and san francisco and that the competition will will win out but you know that is a very unfortunate outcome if it does occur hey ed you know we've talked we've talked about uh we've talked about education and public safety and i'd like to just add how about equality of opportunity which i think are related to both of those what do you think have been the worst uh the worst uh policies uh that have discouraged really growth in cities and and exacerbated problems associated with poor education uh you know lack of lack of public safety and increased crime and inequality of opportunity and what are some of the best policy solutions that you've seen that have invigorated cities and and addressed those interconnected uh issues and and and challenges it's a great question and one of the things that the data that raj shetty and nathan hendren and john friedman have made made clear is that um while cities are great places for productivity they're not great places for opportunity of the poor so if you come to a city as an adult typically you do experience faster wage growth you do uh you know uh experience significant income increases but cities particularly dense urban cores look quite bad uh for kids born in the in the bottom quartile of of the population uh of the income of their parents um and that's this is for a cohort born around 78 to 83 so that's their cohort so it's a particular cohort but it's really it's really shocking now in terms of what public policies make that happen or even why that is it's hard to know i mean one part of it is probably the the very isolation of the lives of the urban poor for the kids so if you are an urban you know if you're a poor adult you're going to a job that's probably filled with a lot of people who are you know richer than you or better educated than you you're part of an integrated world if you're a poor kid you often will live in a housing project a public housing project perhaps that is you know highly segregated and then go to a school that is deeply isolated and underperforming um the urban schools are of course a huge issue you see a huge break unsurprisingly in terms of upward mobility right at the boundary of the urban school district it is amazing and in fact i often contrast these stories that the the crime really i mean police police departments changed rapidly and crime really fell quickly in cities the project of urban school reform has been unbelievably painful and slow and you know like many people who are going to be listening to this call i have a deep fondness for some form of competition in this market i think right now given the difficulties of doing anything within the public schools i like the idea of sort of wrap around vocational training that could be completely competitively sourced and done outside of the side of the unions um and then but you know schools are very very hard the other low-hanging fruit that really should be a priority post covet is rethinking the business permitting uh of of uh you know new firms both in cities and in states with things like occupational licensing it is an outrage in this country that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor so much more strictly that we than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich if you want to start your internet phenomenon in your harvard college dorm right you have you will have to have a billion users before any regulators notice you if you want to start your small grocery store that sells milk products five blocks away you have 15 permits to go through to get it right that is outrageous and that is that is something that you know we are desperately a hundred thousand restaurants have closed or eating and drinking places have closed this year uh because of covet we're gonna need to start new restaurants and this is exactly the time to think about things like one-stop permitting and taking a cost benefit analysis hatchet to the regulations that exist on on the books this is music to all our ears uh ed thank you uh so nice to hear that uh message coming from harvard up but here's um here's a new direction i want to take this conversation in i can see two futures for cities uh one is the kind of cyberpunk city uh that you could read about in science fiction in the 1980s and 1990s the kind of snow crash san francisco or la which is public uh squalor private affluence uh a kind of uh wasteland uh anarchique wasteland techno enabled but basically without law and order the other city of the future is i'll just call it the chinese panopticon the much larger cities of east asia and let's remember that the asian cities are much larger than our western cities are gradually going to conform to the smart city model which is being pioneered in some chinese cities at a surveillance city uh in which there is absolutely no disorder uh because every citizen is under constant uh surveillance and a social credit system can even prevent you using public transport if you're a naughty person i think we should talk a little bit about these cities of the future because it seems to me that the more cyberpunk western cities become uh the more attractive the asian panopticon becomes and it's interesting that the chinese are already able to export uh their facial recognition technology and all the associated artificial intelligence to a very large number of countries around the world so which of these cities do you think will predominate 20 or 30 years from now will we be living in cyberpunk uh blade runner-type cities or will we find ourselves in fact in the panopticon i i cannot tell you how much i hope neil we get neither of those two uh delightful options that have been offered from us and uh let me let me let me take my way of of of responding to this which is i think there's no question that 2021 many of us think that we need to have a more effective executive branch within governments state local federal right that our our government failed on responding to uh to covet in many ways at many levels our vaccine rollout right now is currently not feeling like a model of of uh confidence um we probably even need some cross-national strength that looks more like a nato for health than it does the current wh so something that is more muscular and empowered that way uh john's comment about crime at the local level crime doesn't go away by singing uh nice songs crime requires a strong functioning city government to actually handle that which is your panopticon that's your that's your strong government uh the problem of course is that uh that can be terrifyingly abused i mean as a there's a line that i'm fond of using with my undergraduates which is my my father grew up in hitler's germany and my grandfather grew up in the czars russia and i have my doubts about the benevolence of government um and uh that that um you know that that means that somehow or other and this is why you know the the sort of wisdom of hoover is so vital uh we need to understand how to expand our state without turning ourselves into a police state we need to have a world in which we managed to do a better job on closing international borders when uh a new pandemic comes up without immediately uh you know turning ourselves into into a uh a state that's it's too controlled at the center and that is a very difficult uh uh it's a very difficult path to find but it's fundamentally the path that you know the federalist papers tried to achieve i mean that was alexander hamilton's goal was to try and create a state that was powerful enough to protect its citizens and to enable trade and to enable people to have the freedom to find their own futures and at the same time to restrict itself so i don't know exactly how to get there but i know that we need a stronger state than we currently have to avoid the the cyberpunk vision but i know we need to have far more controls on the state than in your panopticon vision um i want to ask i want to challenge a little bit your view of cities offer a third version to neil's version and then maybe hr who's been in cities like baghdad can tell us a little bit about different kinds of cities too the vision you offered was that the cities are back because of the great agglomerations of tech and and so forth which i think is a little bit uh narrow from our experience of of you know living in manhattan or in in san francisco 99 of the people in the world do live in cities but they live in cities where the uh you know what they do is not uh sit around and discuss the latest way to run ai software to start a new company they do very traditional things and it's interesting they do them in cities uh we mentioned historically so in the recent past we had cities because you needed walls and everybody you know the cuteness of europe is because everybody walls were expensive we had to live close to each other then i think in the 1900s we lived in cities because the provision of of public goods was was geographically concentrated you know things like water and so forth and then also you needed person-to-person exchange but what we saw in the us from the 1950s to the 1970s was in fact sort of the end of cities there was a natural force towards suburbanization we had transportation we had a certain amount of commuting um you go to places like china where there's yeah lots of cities but it's it's not about the great agglomerations of intellectual uh exchange it's about a factory and it's really cheap to put up apartments uh so that's a different kind of say i don't think you know the us is at a different level uh you go to baghdad that's still a city although uh we're not really uh thinking about um that that's not not about developing new software but in the american context is it not possible that the early 2000s were a a little bit of a blip where um the young tech people and finance people went back to cities half for agglomeration half for the amenities that they temporarily had but that the natural forces are towards suburbanization and those forces would continue so there's a question so what do you actually uh what do you actually call suburbs so uh you know for economists right we define cities as the absence of physical space between people the absence of physical space between economic actors and so a place like palo alto is not necessarily a classic city but there's an awful lot of density of talent that's close to one another in those areas and it's enabled by cars rather than by uh by walking so i think it is clear over the past 20 30 years that the sort of lower density parts of the us have hollowed out relative to the higher density parts of the u.s particularly actually the second decile in density which which includes places that would look more suburban to you than places that look that look more urban um it's harder in the us context to be entirely confident about where we're going relative to car based versus downtown stuff but even in the past 20 years even in this great golden time for new york and san francisco the population growth was much heavier in the car oriented suburbs than it was in the urban cores so even during that time period you have a reasonable case for that nonetheless i think there's a fair argument that our great urban agglomerations were still the economic heart of of our world even if they were people driving to get to the offices to connect with one another and that's even more so in the developing world one thing where i do want to push back on the sort of china view is you know you've been to shenzhen you've been to shanghai right these are places with a lot of knowledge and a lot of knowledge that's moving quickly over over places so i i don't think that our view of sort of china is a smokestack you know 19th century area no albeit there are lots of chinese cities that are built on you know overly ambitious local government leaders pumping up the the construction machine but there are in the most successful chinese cities these are places that are as information and knowledge intensive as anything we have anywhere else in the world let's bring in hr first neil do you want to fact check your colleague i i need to because i think i heard you say john that 99 of people lived in cities and you must have known as you were saying that that was nonsense we only recently crossed globally the 50 50 mark 2007 of the world's population is urban but half of them are living in in towns with less than 500 000 inhabitants which barely qualifies as a city so i just wanted to point out because as the representative on the show of rural life because i actually hate cities and i like living far from the madding crowd where true clear thought can be pursued without the distractions of internet cafes and all the other rubbish a lot of people still live in the country and i i want to break a lance for the idiocy of rural life because it's not actually that idiotic and to make the point that actually these arguments about collaboration proximity the need to be in a city i think they're much less compelling thanks to the internet not just zoom but all that is now possible i've been almost a year now in the middle of bloody nowhere and i don't think i've suffered any significant intellectual deterioration correct me if i'm wrong dear colleagues because you've had a weekly opportunity to check on it but i i wonder i just wonder if and here i'm going to go out on limb if covert 19 is just the wake up call and the first of multiple pandemics if we've actually reached a point of excessive proximity and density of population as a species maybe this is just the beginning of the end for the urban age and we'll look back and say 56 percent of the world in cities was too high it was actually dangerous to have us all crowded together in these megapolises where the probability of infection was actually high where novel pathogens were highly likely to spread rapidly you had ref jet you might have read jeffrey west's amazing book scale you know jeffrey argues that the thing about cities is you get increasing returns to scale both of good things and of bad things creativity and drug abuse so i i wonder if there isn't an opportunity here to reclaim rural life and that we may actually as a species have to do that for the sake of our own survival that would go against all of history because as you know the death rate in cities was much much higher well you know cities came back as you said after after the plague where two-thirds of the people died i hope i got that but john actually this is my point we never had in all of history this many people and we certainly never had this larger proportion of the population i'm i'm on i'm on john's side but let me just let me just make one thing if sitting in 541 you would not actually say it went all against all of history right if you were if john could have made that comment in 541 and said oh my goodness you know europe is never going to become rural again you know this urban civilization that we've had for the last nine centuries will continue and yet you know the the plague that struck justinian was followed by eight centuries of a more rural uh europe and a europe that really did go backwards well that was a collapse of civilization though which is uh that's something that's right happened and that's right i think i think that's just neil's vision division is and not just a bunch of things with like one percent mortality we need a bunch of plagues to get to neil's vision which has not just the level of communicableness of uh of a covet 19 but also a level of mortality that's much higher right because this is just too i mean you know to the extent the amazing work that newt melania has been doing uh serological work in mumbai slums right gives us that more than 50 percent of mumbai islam residents had had been exposed to the disease by the end of july right and yet the mortality rates were tiny young population low levels of obesity you know this will do nothing to the urbanization of the poor world if this is what it looks like let's get hr back in the conversation he should know the good general is a contradiction in terms he's an optimist and he's from philadelphia well hr also is from baghdad no i'm serious about this we i think we're taking a very us-centric view which is fine our audience is us but most people in the world live in in cities like rio or baghdad where you know the crime levels are outrageous compared to what we have now now you and they're not brought there to write computer programs uh that seems to be a model that in that part of the world is at least they're still living in cities and and you also know some about trying to get the peace in in cities like that well this goes to this goes to uh to neil's point on on how resilient our cities and i think they're quite resilient and i'll tell you why but first of all i'd like to say you know it kind of hurts my feelings a little bit that you know we miss you a lot apparently you don't miss us as much as we miss you but but the uh but i do think there is that that psychological emotional the social draw of cities i think i've seen it right i've seen i've seen kabul with the life choked out of it by the taliban uh when we went in there in 2001 i saw it at with the time i got to see it in 2003 as it was coming back to life a city that had been reduced in population to 500 000 right it had like maybe two phones uh in the city people were people were fearful you know of stepping out of line in any way list unless they uh they they wind up in the soccer stadium for the mass execution and so that city now is three million people it's thriving it's a bustling city and so what changed hey just security changed right just getting rid of the taliban and people came back naturally in in a very rapid way now you know a lot of the land is still informal uh in the city it grew in kind of a hodgepodge disorganized crazy way but it came back and then we i saw the same dynamic in in baghdad as well i was there you know of course during the during the really terrible uh period of the civil war when violence was at its highest and mass murder attacks multiple mass murder attacks were occurring and you see the effect as communities draw in on themselves and you you move through these empty streets and you think well the city must be empty but it's really not empty it's just everyone's gone inside of their homes and is in hiding essentially any common areas marketplaces are empty you know no restaurants open but when you reestablish security it it just comes back uh we we did this we had a major operation in microcosm in a city called talafer uh in nineveh province again the life had been choked out of the city by by al qaeda in iraq uh and as a sectarian civil war that was going on in microcosm uh within within the cities again the communities have fallen in on themselves you know the hospital was not a place where they cared for people but a place where al qaeda murdered people uh and um and so uh that all the schools were closed for over a year and once we conducted a major offensive with with courageous iraqi uh comrades there we were able to lift that paul of fear off the city and what we had done is before the operation we planned for a restoration of basic services all of which had been impossible because of the violence in the city you know we had the transformers and the lines ready to go there's a big hydroelectric uh dam uh close by there as well but we also plan for the reopening of the of the of the schools and contractors with the iraqi government to refurbish the schools and to have the teachers lined up and trained remotely in mosul and the educate and the educational materials and so forth so we took a systems approach to all of this planning and had it all ready to go and resourced so once al qaeda was defeated the city just came back to life so quickly reconstruction of police stations and retraining of police introducing them back in the communities now of course this is all reversible right as we saw with the rise of isis um but but it was it was it was amazing to go back there uh you know a year later and just to walk around with you with no body armor with my with my uh with my iraqi friends of course i would say at the top of the list was competent leadership which we've talked about as well and leadership that is trusted across the various communities in that city the mayor uh uh najam abid abdullah al jabori who is now the governor of nineveh province um was a phenomenal human being you know who brought these communities who had been shooting at each other together once once the the extremists were gone you know he mediated between these communities and they worked together you know for the for the common future everybody has a certain basic humanity in common so that's my experience is cities are extraordinarily resilient and and uh and especially in places that have this you know this geographic draw like baghdad at the confluence of the tigris and euphrates rivers for example and what but what you need and i saw because i saw it it's stark absence is is leadership is sec and security i couldn't agree with you more general uh that you need both to sort of the the combination of strong competent leadership that is trusted by a wide set of people um neil's vision of perpetual pandemic is uh is incredibly dark it is i guess possible but i want to highlight that that isn't just catastrophic for america cities one-fifth of the american labor force right employed labor force prior to this were in worked in leisure hospitality and retail trade right those were jobs that provided a safe haven when automation caused the factory jobs to go away those jobs disappear in a heartbeat when a face is a source of peril rather than a source of pleasure and so i cannot imagine a world in which america provides employment for its less skilled workers that does not have the capacity of an urban service face-to-face economy so i think for that reason as for many others we really need to invest enough to make sure that our cities become safe again and i think that very much does require the sort of strong capable leadership that takes care of the whole city that you were describing general and and there are two biological futures i i share some of neil's worries that uh you know evolution takes a look around us waterborne diseases aren't doing so well but boy respiratory ones there we've given evolution a chance there uh so we could be the era every globalization era has has had pandemics and um contrary to my own previous comments we're much more risk-averse than we used to be uh we used to put up with you know 1918 flu yeah right people are dying on the streets get back to work uh now uh you know much lower death rates and we shut down the whole economy so we are in some sense uh more more susceptible to it the other way is you know we've seen the scientific miracle mrna vaccines may be so damn good and and we you know if in a weekend we can stop any bug and next time around not have the fda and the cdc in the way uh we might have actually conquered those and and be towards a much more bug-free future so i'd say and both possibilities are there and it'll be interesting to see what the biology does to us my money is on the antibiotic resistance bubonic and mnemonic plague uh to send us right back to the 1340s and do not laugh gentlemen that is all too possible uh i wanna i wanna maybe uh offer a concluding thought there's a paradox about our conversation and the paradox is that i don't think any of us is is speaking from a major city and many of the world's most uh famous universities uh were located by design far from the cities i think of my own beloved oxford of cambridge of the other cambridge massachusetts where you are uh ed and and and stanford is is another of these universities carefully located in in what was farmland so how do we reconcile the the paradox we keep saying that cities are vital for all this intellectual creativity but but for some reason most of the great universities chicago being a notable exception aren't in big cities let me challenge that that that was set up when um population growth the death rate in cities was so high that uh you know they only grew in population when more people moved in than died there cities were just horrible places to live so they were they were set up as bucolic places where you could actually survive and now universities located out in the country are doing terribly uh students want to go to columbia nyu uh now stanford counts as city but the ones located out in in beautiful countryside are just they have no students no one wants to go there anymore well there's other exceptions to that i would say i would say mr jefferson's university in charlottesville for example and i think we are talking a little bit and neil's alluding to this tension between sort of a hamiltonian vision you know of of of of of successful american cities uh and a jeffersonian you know vision of the american agrarian ideal but uh and i think you still see those tensions today let me throw out daniel patrick moynihan's famous quip that if you want to build a great city build two world-class universities and wait 50 years uh most of the places that neil has mentioned are places that have developed great urban agglomerations around them even though they were originally bucolic including of course stanford which was you know a ranch and is now the center of one of the great sort of you know maybe it's car based but one of the great urban agglomerations of the world so the obvious solution is build a new university in a state other than california and and see what happens and make it a serious university that is devoted to the actual advancement of the knowledge that's quite useful to people i'd like to wind down the conversation and like get everyone's thoughts on this ed you go first uh triumph for the city you uh suggest that cities are the avenue for making us richer smarter greener healthier and happier i'll grant you the first three richer smarter and greener as we look to the future since we like to look forward on good fellows all the time tell us how cities are going to make us healthier and happier in the future if this neo suggests pandemics are more of the norm there's no question that there are demons that come with density uh they're the congestion of city streets there's the facilitation of crime there are high housing cri costs but the most terrible of the demons of density is indeed contagious disease and it is an old companion documented at least since lucidities wrote about the plague of athens but quite possibly plagues killed the bronze uh age civilizations of of uh the mediterranean as well um so anytime you have people who are connected both globally right through cities of the nodes for global transport and locally right si play can cross uh people and that is that is a real issue now we had a blessed century from 1919 to 2019 when that didn't rage but it is indeed uh a possibility i am optimistic enough that i believe that we will actually face this existential threat to urban life and actually do the investments that we need to with the help of you know the amazing things that have happened in vaccines to make that possible but i admit that i accept that neil's darker prognosis is also a possibility uh but you're not gonna stop me from being optimistic both about life and about cities now unhappiness i think the main the point here is that you know for billions of people throughout the world unlike neil social isolation has been some form of hell right that in fact the world is filled america is filled with millions of people millions of teenagers who've been forced to grow up and accept the responsibilities and stress of being older without any of the freedom without any of the social connection the social ties and i think that you know cities have been enabling us to find pleasure and do miraculous things working together for thousands of years since socrates and plato bickered on an athenian street corner and the age of urban miracles is not over well i hope cities become a place to help you know really uh pragmatism triumph over sort of this the ideological you know movements that we've seen and the orthodoxy you know associated with you know the far right and the far left and and stressing you what's different about us and and i hope that cities because they do bring people together will foster common understanding across different communities of americans and restore confidence in who we are as a people and there are democratic processes and institutions i think we all ought to demand more from our leadership and i think the greatest promise is at the local level where people want better education for their children they want better better services so they can live more comfortably and and they all ultimately want to build a better future you know for their children and grandchildren so cities should be a place where where you can attain uh those goals and and uh and i think we ought to demand that our leaders put policies in place uh that allow americans to to achieve those goals i'll add some lessons that i've learned from ed glazer over the years or at least i'll credit you with far from uh demons of density density is wonderful for all sorts of things they're of course uh people seem to be for ten thousand years they've been more productive in cities ideas have come from cities civilization comes from civitas live uh in cities um cities have can there's increasing returns to scale so the public goods whether provided by government or by businesses uh tend to be in cities cities are green something we haven't talked about the best thing for the planet is for people to live in apartment buildings and walk to work and leave the countryside alone cities however uh the locations of current cities we talked a little bit about that locations of current cities make no sense locations of current cities are just happenstance um i learned from it most of the uh east coast cities are on the fall line where it was uh easy to make a mill or the highest point that you could bring a ship up uh a river none of that matters anymore in fact i think most of the if we were to resettle the us and it were to be settled by uh well invaded by japanese and chinese the whole east coast would be completely unsettled we'd all be on the west coast and a lot of maine would be completely uh just woods right now san francisco the why is san francisco where it is because it was a good sailing ship port in 1850 the port moved to oakland and there is no reason for san francisco once the railroad came in and stopped in oakland there's no reason for san francisco to be there it just turned it's got a capital stock and the point it needs to reinvent itself uh every city that is successful now is not doing what it did 50 years ago and it's not doing the reason for it being where it was um and reinventing yourself is hard this is the place where all the standard market economics is a little bit of problem because the the young people go there because the bars and restaurants go there the bars and restaurants are there because the young people are there and the tech companies are there because the young people want to want to be there and we kind of get everyone to move to the same place at the same time and if it's too too bad we're all gonna pick up and go to austin so the the process of reinvention um has to happen reinvention coordination uh has to happen and um so which cities i think remains the the important question okay neil who apparently doesn't miss his colleagues as much as they miss him well i get to see them via zoom and as we began the conversation by observing it's pretty much as good if you know someone well i grew up in a very rough city glasgow which went through some very tough times uh when i was a kid you you've read hillbilly elegy perhaps well we did all that long before jd vance was born and there's one thing i i learned which we haven't talked about and that is the problem that cities are very anti-conservative places cities are where socialism tends to breed and we complacently look forward to a time whenever more of the population are in cities well i tell you what that will mean politically my friends the decline of the countryside and of the small town and the rise of the metropolis means an inexorable move to the left politically and that's something that i think my colleagues are giving too little attention to last thought bring us back to the chinese city if there are recurrent pandemics then there will be strong incentives even in the west to create systems of surveillance we talk about contact tracing often on this show for an authoritarian government nothing could be better than a really efficient system of digital contact tracing because then you'll be able to know not only where everybody is but who they're with so i think we have two real things to worry about as the world becomes ever more urban one is that it goes ever further to the left and the other is that it becomes even more authoritarian i'll stick to the countryside thanks very much ed glaser i have to give you the final uh word here and the final word is a thought about glasgow so i was just saying glasgow neil is the only place where i've ever seen a pub fight where someone literally took a chair and struck another person over the back with it so so i i could confirm that glasgow is it can be a rough place occasionally that's because the table was too heavy to lift i presume okay gentlemen we're going to leave it off at that uh thanks for a lively conversation we could keep going on this this is a great topic and and maybe we'll have you on a future show and pick up where we left off we'd love to do this this is fabulous fun thank you so much for for including me so that's it for this episode of goodfellas we'll be back next week with a new episode a new conversation on the behalf of hoover's good fellows neil ferguson h.r mcmaster john cochran our guest today ed glaser we wish you and yours the very best stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed we'll see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 52,782

Rating: 4.7924867 out of 5

Keywords: Hoover Institute, Hoover Institution, John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, Bill Whalen, public policy, GoodFellows, Goodfellows, Stanford University, COVID, pandemic, cities, Edward Glaeser, San Francisco, New York, density, Zoom, conservative, socialist, Iraq, Afghanistan

Id: QrU3zG1vlkE

Length: 61min 38sec (3698 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021