Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier [Tapa dura]

This is a book I thought I would love, but as I read it I began wishing there was another, tighter, more focused book I could be reading.

The book is pacted with factoids, most of the post hoc ergo propter hoc type, but, for me at least, it doesn't really gel as a convincing, connected argument. There are points made that make sense - some cities have a lot of poverty because they attract poor people seeking opportunity, cities with diverse economic bases are less susceptible to an economic shock linked to the decline of single industry, it's good for cities to have strong educational institutions, that London is a fun place helps make it attractive as a place to live for skilled professionals, skyscrapers are an efficient way to house businesses and people, there are still advantages to be had in close physical proximity. Some of these points are old hat; some are relatively fresh and even against the received wisdom.

For an awful lot of these points, though, the ultimate response is: So What? The whole seemed like a lot less than the sum of the parts. The experience was less like reading a focused essay than browsing through Google news or an RSS feed on cities - a lot of information, somewhat organized, but nothing like an actionable vision. At times the data triumphantly trotted out was inconsistent (Silicon Valley succeeds as a kind of city, dispersed into office parks thought it be; Route 128 failed because being dispersed into office parks as it is it lacked the physical connections of a true city). At times, it fails to grapple with the implications of the obvious (yes, the theater in London or New York is great, but the seats are often filled with tourists because the locals are too busy working to make it). More often, the arguments make a kind of superficial sense (when the big three went down in Detroit, the economic monoculture built up around cars was incapable of spawning replacement industries) but seem less clear upon reflection (why could none of the thousands of supplier firms, from ad agencies to banks to muffler makers to makers of industrial robots, that clustered around Detroit migrate into new businesses? Surely there were opportunities for these suppliers outside the auto industry, so we are left wondering).

He makes the point, surely a valid one, that cities are ultimately about people, not structures, but doesn't deal adequately with the nuances and subtleties of the institutions and social structures that draw people to cities and keep them there. It requires way more than observing that London has good theater and excellent restaurants to explain why people and businesses cluster there, as they do, despite the expense and the awful climate.

Living in a new (30 years) city of 15 million people, next to an older (150 years) city of 10 million that has been totally transformed in the past fifty years, has made me very interested in what makes cities grow and become great. From this book, I got a lot of factoids and references to other people's work. If Glaeser has a synthesized vision, it's lost in the flood of seemingly unconnected data (or perhaps the decision was made to serve up a low fiber buffet of canapes for a mass audience instead of really working through things for those willing to think it through). It's not an awful book, but given Glaeser's academic work and background it is so much less than it could be.

Producing a comprehensive and entertaining book on cities' value to society requires a scholar with a lifelong urban devotion whose background and skills cut across traditional social science disciplines. Fortunately, the world has Ed Glaeser. Each of Glaeser's chapters seamlessly blends historical narrative, present day travelogue, history of urban thought, rigorous empirical research, and policy prescription. By presenting each of these well, he produces a convincing polemic. As more academic economists begin to popularize their research, Glaeser is distinguished in both the quality of his scholarship and the importance of his subject to society.

Much of Glaeser's work is refuting conventional wisdom against cities: we learn urban life can be green, skyscrapers need not destroy local character, congestion ills can be solved, and inner-city education need not be dreadful. Glaeser does not have all the answers to the problems he addresses, and occasionally his arguments are weak. But what fun is reading about a subject with nothing left to debate?

Glaeser is most convincing on one central policy theme: inept government makes urban living less accessible than it should be. These policies include overzealous historical preservation and height limits, subsidization of home ownership and auto travel, oversupply of public infrastructure, various forms of NIMBYism, and the more complex failures surrounding urban education. These issues touched Glaeser deeply as the tilted landscape led him to pick suburban life for his own children.

The book's subtitle could use clarification. Glaeser is not arguing that everyone will be happier in cities. He is not merely trying to impose nostalgia for his NYC upbringing on the world: as he says, "one's own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy." Glaeser's urban advocacy is evidence-based. Cities are the incubators for economic growth, and throughout history the innovation arising from cities has improved standard of living even for those choosing to avoid them.

This is two really wonderful books and one less wonderful book all wrapped into one.

The first book, which is terrific, is a brisk and accessible tour through a series of real-life experiments deeply grounded in data: "A study of corruption in Indonesia found that the stock prices of companies whose leaders stood closest to that country's dictator in photographs suffered most when the leader fell ill."

More: "When American cities have built new rapid-transit stops over the last thirty years, poverty rates have generally increased near those stops." It's not that transit stops cause poverty, he explains; rather, poor people value being able to get to work without the expense of owning a car.

That insight, like many of those mentioned by Professor Glaeser, bears on the main topic of his book, the economics of cities. The author proves useful as a guide to the research of others as well as in conveying his own thoughts. "Nathaniel Baum-Snow, a Brown University economist, has calculated that each new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent." And, "Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote found that children displaced from New Orleans by Katrina had a significant improvement in their test scores. He found the biggest beneficiaries of the exodus were children from poorly performing schools who left the New Orleans area altogether." It's the counterintuitive nature of these insights that makes them particularly delicious -- that expensive highway project that the local congressman fought to get funded turns out to be bad for his city, and Hurricane Katrina turns out to have been a good thing for the education of its "victims."

The second excellent book within Triumph of a City documents the way that regulations prevent cities from accommodating the needs of people. "Too much preservation stops cities from providing newer, taller, better buildings for their inhabitants," he writes.

Historic preservation laws are just one part of a set of barriers to building that also includes zoning, environmental laws, and government approval processes. "Over the past forty years, we've experienced a little-remarked revolution in property rights in America," Professor Glaeser writes. "We have gone from a system wherein people could essentially do what they wanted with their own property to a system wherein neighbors have enormous power to restrict growth and change."

The strength of the first two books makes the weakness of the third book contained within Triumph of the City all the more disappointing. This third book-within-a-book consists of a series of left-wing assumptions.

The problems of cities, Professor Glaeser insists, won't be solved by "mindlessly relying on the free market." In fact, he says, "there's no free-market solution for the great urban problem facing slums....Cities desperately need forceful, capable governments to provide clean water." He doesn't mention that here in America, private water systems produce 4.6 billion gallons of water a day, or about 1.7 trillion gallons per year. Or that the private drinking water business is a $4.3 billion per year business, with at least 12 publicly traded companies among the players (more if you count bottled water).

Professor Glaeser has a strange crush on the French school system. "If America imitated the best aspect of European socialism and invested enough in public schools so that they were all good, then there would be little reason for the rich to leave cities to get better schooling," he writes. Later, he repeats, "If the United States emulated France and embraced nationwide quality schooling funded by the state, there would be less reason to flee urban areas."

In fact the 2009 results from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment, which studies 15-year-olds, found that America outperformed France in reading and science. France did better than America in math, but is that a reason for America to emulate or embrace an educational system that in two of three categories measured produced worse results than ours? The latest UNESCO statistics also show that the United States outspent France on primary education, as measured by annual public expenditure per primary student as a percentage of GDP per capita.

The sections devoted to global warming veer into self-righteousness. "Anyone who believes that global warming is a real danger should see dense urban living as part of the solution....The polar ice caps appear to be melting quickly and threatening seaside cities from New York to Hong Kong with the prospect of severe flooding," he writes. "For the sake of humanity and our planet, cities are -- and must be -- the wave of the future."

It's not just cities that Professor Glaeser has in mind for his project of saving "humanity and our planet" but also taxes. "Current U.S. gas taxes are too low," he insists. "Throughout the world, we can adopt a global emissions tax that charges people for the damage done by their carbon emissions. The actual size of the tax needs to be worked out by the experts...."

Toward the end of the book, he writes, in arguing for more stimulus spending to be directed at cities: "The five least dense states managed to sit out the recession with an average unemployment rate of 6.4 percent, as of December 2009." For a book whose whole argument is "the power of proximity" in cities to create wealth, jobs, and growth, that's a fact that undercuts the author's argument, and one wishes Professor Glaeser would at least try to explain it. He does not.

Professor Glaeser is also not always as clear as one would wish in terms of his definition of a city. Is it the whole metropolitan statistical area, or just what lies within the municipal boundaries? Sometimes cities and suburbs have similar characteristics in terms of density, they just lie on opposite sides of political boundaries. If cities make us "richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier," as the book's subtitle claims, would just expanding some political boundaries help? Or is density all that is required, and, if so, why aren't dense suburbs just as good as cities?

Professor Glaeser himself, who grew up in Manhattan, moved his family to the suburbs of Boston, a decision about which in the book he expresses a certain amount of ambivalence and, perhaps even guilt. He seems to want an increased gas tax and a lower home mortgage tax deduction to make it more cost-sensible for him to live in the city, but those may strike Americans who don't share Mr. Glaeser's taste for cities as high prices to impose.

Disclosures: I was sent a free copy of this book by the Manhattan Institute, where Professor Glaeser is a fellow. Professor Glaeser was a frequent contributor to the New York Sun when I was its managing editor, though I don't recall ever dealing with him directly.