Book Reviews Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier By Edward Glaeser. 2011. New York: Penguin Press. Pp. 352. $29.95 hardcover. Business Economics (2011) 46, 185–186. doi:10.1057/be.2011.16 H arvard economist Edward Glaeser has written an ode to the city. Think of it as the counterpart to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and their fellow Romantic poets who extolled the magnificence of English country living. Think of it as antidote to the back-to- nature views of Henry David Thoreau. “Residing in the forest might seem to be a good way of showing one’s love of nature,” he writes, “but living in a con- crete jungle is actually far more ecologically friendly.” So what is so great about cities? They are the human species’ “greatest inventions,” according to Glaeser, who poses this paradox: as the cost of connecting across long distances continues to fall, why has the proximity to others made possi- ble by the density of large cities become ever more valuable? Part of the answer is that people in cities earn more. They earn more because something about cities makes them more productive. People who live in areas with more than 1 million residents are 50 percent more productive than people who live in smaller areas—after adjusting for education, experience, and even I.Q. There is also a near perfect correlation between ur- banization and prosperity across nations. As the share of a coun- try’s population that is urban rises by 10 percent, the country’s output rises by 30 percent. But aren’t people who live in large cities less happy? Actually, no. In general, more urban coun- tries are happier countries—even after controlling for income and education. What about disease, crime, and congestion? It turns out that while some cities fail (for example, Detroit), others go through life cycles—rising, de- clining, and rebounding—to become healthier and safer (for example, New York and Chicago). The modern U.S. city today is a “consumer city.” It has clubs, restaurants, theaters, and bars. It is a fun place to live. And that may explain the rise of reverse commuting. Today, thousands of people chose to live in the city and travel to jobs outside of it. What about poverty? Cities do not make people poor; they attract poor people. Cities pro- vide a better alternative to the lower standard of living in rural areas. The specialness of cities in the modern era is their role as idea factories. They connect smart people to each other. In the developing world, especially, cities create a gateway between markets and culture. They enhance the spread of knowledge “from engineer to engineer, from designer to designer, from trader to trader.” Glaeser is at his best when he uses economics to analyze mis- guided public policies. Although he has some sympathy for the desire to preserve old neighbor- hoods, preservation has a cost. As people have to live some- where, limits on development within cities contribute to urban sprawl. Think of the ordered beauty of Paris. Its tidy charming boulevards are straight and wide, lined with elegant nineteenth century buildings. y. Restrictions on new construction have en- sured that Paris—once famously hospitable to starving artists—is now affordable only by the wealthy. Glaeser argues that good environmentalism means putting buildings in places where they do the least environmental harm. That means putting them in cities, where the carbon foot- print is almost half of what it is in suburbia. He sees highway subsidies and the deductibility of homeowner’s mortgage pay- ments as contributing to environ- mentally unfriendly sprawl. At the national level, Glaeser coins what he calls “he law of conservation of construction,” which says: when environmenta- lists stop development in green Business Economics Vol. 46, No. 3 r National Association for Business Economics