>> edward glaeser says that the two-thirds of americans living in cities are healthier, more prosperous, and more environmentally conscious than other americans. he discusses his book, "triumph of the city," a little under an hour, and ended hosted by the manhattan institute in new york city.

>> across the globe. in which we all decide to sit in some spot that appeals to us and just diluting. and yet on so many dimensions cities are healthier and more successful than ever. in the developed world, it was remarkable productivity. in per capita output level from the rest of the country rose to those out of new york our national gdp would increase by 43%. the three largest metropolitan areas in the u.s. produced 18% of our country's output while containing only 13% of our country's population. the connection between urbanization and economic prosperity is even stronger in the developing world. if you compare those countries with more than 50% of the population living in urban areas with those that have less than 50% of the population living in urban areas you will find more urbanized countries are more

than five times more prosperous, five times richer. they also have infant mortality levels that are one-third as i. they also the people who describe themselves as being more satisfied with their lives and their jobs. cities are the path out of poverty into prosperity for so much of the world. we've seen the success of places like new york not just in terms of their income. cities are fun, green, healthy. they are exciting places to be where the magic of human interaction tends to make a place so much more exciting. the idea behind this book, the reason, the claim the book makes for why cities have come back is that cities play to mankind, humankind's greatest asset. which is our ability to learn from people around us. we come out of the womb with this remarkable ability to learn from our parents, from a parents, from her siblings. from people around us who are screwing up.

cities make that happen. cities are the space between people, the proximity, density, closeness. coming to a city like new york you will experience this on rush of human experience that teaches you. when we observe the way people come to cities it's not that they become more productive in cities overnight. what happens is year by year, month after month that explains faster growth. they become more productive and that's compatible with cities are machines for learning. as the great english economist said more than a century ago intense clusters, the mistress of the trade become known history but are in the air. that's i think very much a places like new york and san francisco and london work. precisely because globalization and new technology had increase the returns to be smart, increased returns for innovation, they are working for rather than against. while it is true that

globalization and technologies calls the garment industry to disappear from new york city they didn't eliminate the idea of good fashion ideas. you can now sell them on the other side of the planet. you can produce them on the other side of the planet. you can take advantage of all the opportunities but taking advantage of that requires new ideas, requires innovation. we get smart by being around other smart people. things didn't always look so bright in new york city. when i was a kid growing up here in the 1970s it looked as if not just president for but history itself was telling me york to drop dead. the city seemed mired in crime and disorder, the decline of the garment industry felt that it had left the city essentially unmourned. now, that situation was not unusual in newark because what new york was going to was a process of the industrial asian decline. it was common for all of

america's older cities. one of the pains of this book is that the american dream doesn't have to lie behind a white picket fence in the suburb. and that cities have been as intrinsic to american history and to our experience as a nation as anyplace else. the very birth of american has its roots in boston in the 1770s between john hancock badly wanted the political change that could be created by a mob. and sam adams who knew how to conjure a mob. and their connections as created by the city of boston changed america, created, helped create this great country of ours. in the 19 century the great problem was making the wealth of the american interior accessible to the market to the east and europe. cities make that happen. they grew up as the great transportation network that enables the rich dark soil of iowa to become productive. if you go back to 1816 it costs us much to move goods 32 miles

overland as it did to ship them across the atlantic. it was enormously difficult to access all the wealth that was in the american hinterland. cities grew up chicago which was formed, start off in illinois and michigan canal created a great water park that span all the way to new york to new orleans the rails only supplemented that transportation network that was based on water. every one of the 20 largest cities in america was on a major waterway like new york and boston which are typically work in river meets the sea's to the newest, minneapolis. industry then grew up around those transportation modes. new york's three greatest industries in the 19th century were sugar refinery, printing and publishing, and garment production. sugar refinery of course new york as part of a great triangle

trade. which is how isaac rosenfeld the fount of fdr's family fortune got involved in the sugar refining business. he also was idly and anti-british educated because mercantilist interfered with the sugar trade. printing and publishing is one my favorite stories because the big money and 19th century publishing wasn't printing hybrid novels forget to come out with the latest dickens or walter scott and get it out first. new york's port make that happen. the thing that made the harper brothers succeed in the 19th with was the fact that they could get the novels faster than the philadelphia competitors because they were in new york. do do in this great fork got the books first. and enable them to put first and dominate the market. chicago as well. chicago's greatest industry, the stockyards of course grew up around. the stockyards were right next to real.

in detroit and even more remarkable event occurred in the rise of its automobile industry. and it shows the ability of cities for all the mundane reasons to create these chains of innovation that creates some humankind's greatest endeavors. if you go back to mid-19th century detroit, the city of small firms, smart people and connections to the outside world, and it's a city with the huge amount of trade and has a great business of taking care of the engines that on the ships going on the great lakes. so detroit dry dock, assembled from in and 19th century, frank kirby, a great shipping entrepreneur comes there and they then form a critical role, educating young people who work with engines like henry ford. he gets to start in detroit. he becomes part of a great chain of entrepreneurship. detroit in the 1900s feels like silicon valley in the 1960s. there's basically an automotive genius on every street corner.

the fisher brothers, the dodge brothers, all of whom are inventing and innovating and stealing each other's ideas and applying each other with input. all of them are tried to figure out the new thing. and they do in the create this amazing thing, the mass-produced inexpensive automobile. one of the tragedies of detroit and enforcement there'll be several tragedies in detroit am going to talk about is the way they figure it out is by, the way they're able to make mass-produced automobile is by doing something that is done in the antithetical to the city. they do by grading great walled off factors that are vertically integrated and provide employment and less educated americans on a grand scale. on one level this is great. productive and providing jobs for americans. that's wonderful. but nothing could be more antithetical to what makes cities work than ford's river rouge plant. great wall surrounding the area. little connection with people. for a while it's wildly productive but when the

economics change, when transportation costs fall, that production can move and move to lower cost areas like the right to work states. windows conditions change detroit didn't have the stuff to reinvent itself because it didn't have the culture bought a partnership because it didn't have the skills that were so intrinsic to urban renewal. of course, a second area in detroit, the way the government responded to it was exactly the opposite of what effect detroit needed. the government responded, federal government has a lot of blame in this, by being there ready to subsidize. creating nonsensical investments like detroit monorail, people mover. the problem is that a city like detroit, a declining city already has an abundance of structures relative to people. the last thing you need were more structures in a place like detroit and get the politicians were there ready to cross, ready

to build villages because it looks great. because it's beautiful, a shiny new building and all of a sudden he declared cleveland a comeback city. it does nothing to do the most important thing which is to make sure the children were growing up in the cities have the skills they need to compete. so we have a people mover that moves over essentially of history but we did have the skills and often osha in detroit to enable it to come back. by contrast new york to come back and they came back not because of some government program to get because of private entrepreneurship, because the people coming up with new ideas and creating change. there are many reasons for this, part of it is new york's global connection. this a came out of the garment industry which was very much of a haven for people who are getting their start in operating difference.

new york's greatest sky scraper builder. it didn't turn out so well. but until that point he was a great example of someone who starts and has a tremendous career and follows it in different industries. another entrepreneur who started off, the story of course of new york's comeback is tentatively titled chain of innovation in finance. cities have always permitted these chains of upgrades for one smart idea feeds on the other. think about renaissance influence are one people -- one person figures out how linear perspective work. he passes it on to his friend, donatella. who passes it along to his friend. who passes it along to the month. who passes along to botticelli and so on and so forth. one smart idea ripping on another. i kind of think finances like

that. so my own sort of view of the chain of innovation of finance is that it starts with people, many of whom are at the university of chicago like friedman and savage. figure had to think about, think mathematically about the trade off. some of that gets passed to the students and then carried by people like jack trainer and fischer black that is sophisticated ability think about risk and return trade off and makes its way to wall street. this is then used by the of michael milken. then still in new york to sell high yield debt to enable investors were more quantitative to recognize that his securities carried in a return to offset the risk. that high yield debt been enabled a young man to structure larger leveraged buyouts and increase that industry to trade off understanding of risk return also make possible a circulation. on my favorite number of this chain is bloomberg and so.

bluebirds important in so many ways during this phase. one of which, of course, is his data terminals are one part of the chain of making this ability to trade return possible with better data tools. but he's also a great example of how cities create cross industry fertilization, how the combination of different industries create the largest and most successful entrepreneurial innovation. bloomberg of course comes out of finance but he's in some sense is competing with guys in silicon valley with his terminals. he knows how to compete. he knows how to outdo them. because he knows what the traders one. he had knowledge that again in a city that no silicon valley software engineer could possibly know. he's able to sort of make this way. the other reason i like to bring up the bird is there's a picture in the book i'm very fond of which is of the bullpen in the

city all. the bullpen of course is barred from the bullpen the bloomberg had bluebird llp. and before that barred from the salomon brothers trading for. those trading force illustrate the city small. huge have some of the wealthiest people on the planet would city a giant oak doors and large protected offices and enjoy all the space privacy that they could have, and yet they don't. they choose to be right on top of each other because they are in an industry where knowledge matters more than space. that's basically how cities 60. that's how new york came back was knowledge was more valuable than space. and finance is in new york. there is the industry were no just a little more is more valuable, is more important. that's why there's this very strong tendency of ideal oriented industry to be the mainstay of the urban renaissance. you're talking about leveraging this urban ability to connect

smart people who then learn from one another. it's often suggested of course that computers will make that obsolete. i don't think that's true. because of something so fundamental about people that makes face-to-face contacts of valuable. we have evolved over millions of years to have an incredibly rich set of tools, communicating. the hard part about teaching, not knowing your script, you're not knowing the information that you want to proclaim from on high. it's not whether or not your audience gets. it's whether or not your ideas are getting too. human beings have all these great juices in the compensation of confusion. that's a critical part of transmitting complicated ideas. and what new technology is that is to me the idea for me coppock a. they increased the cost of screwing up of not committing something proper and that's what is the bible to be face-to-face. cities also succeed because of the happenstance. the things that bloomberg or other learned that they never have learned at a training session. they would have had no idea

about. the success of new york isn't just about productivity. it's about revival of cities or places of pleasure as well as earnings. and if you go back to the sort of note of the 1970s, this wasn't clear that this is going to happen, you have to pay people to get them to live in new york. now actually people are willing to accept real wage, lower real wages in new york just to have the fun of living in the city. that didn't happen by accident. the creation of livable cities required vast undertakings. we are still not done in the developing come in the developing world. these other great challenges that lie ahead. if you go back to 1900 new york, today life expectancy in the city is two years longer. i'm not sure we fully understand this for older new yorkers. something that walking plays a

major role. for younger new yorkers it's pretty clear while death rates are lower. it's just lower raised in motor vehicle accidents take a subway if you drink is a heck of a lot less dangerous than driving drunk. and lower rates of suicide. one of the interesting things they aren't sake they're happy. what dumb new yorker would say that? that required investment. the local governments at the start of 20 sensuous thing as much on water as the national government was spending on everything except for the army and the post office. these investments were real and more important. while clean water required engineering solution, other problems of urban life don't require engineering. prop crime of courses been a major problem the city has. that also required and let's not forget, it has required serious government intervention, handling the extra of crime was

difficult. traffic congestion is a problem that is to with us. and i think in substance the way, way i described is new york is essentially a soviet style transport system. by that i mean in the old soviet union, groceries were vastly underpriced relative to market prices, and given away at grocery. the way to allocate was long lines and stock after that's what a new york city traffic jam is. it's a long line and a stock it. so you don't get the goods because you're sitting there in line. the only way i know how to handle this if you price the product or just to charge something for scarce space. that's what congestion pricing does. what we know from the date is you can't just build your way out of traffic congestion. there's something called a fundamental law which is that the vehicle miles traveled increase roughly one for one with roads built with highways bill. if you build it, they will drive. there is only one solution which is to make people pay for the

social costs of their actions. now, the success of cities means it also creates a downside. the downside is if you don't allow supply to keep up with demand, cities become ungodly unaffordable. that's one of the challenges that new york faces. cities like chicago which has been very friendly towards construction has made it possible for young people without a lot of means actually live in chicago. new york under the bloomberg administration has moved productively to align more production. if you look at the brought that in a 1970s and '90s, just as prices indices were rising, as he was making it more and more difficulty -- difficult to build. so currently 15% of the land area in manhattan south of 96th street is in a preservation district. it's not as if i don't with your our architectural legacies.

but not a post grip brick building is to bury preserve. i draw a lot on the wisdom of j. jacobs in his book. she serving as to the magic. but this what you got wrong. jane jacobs wisdom came wandering around cities. she observed that old buildings were cheap and new buildings were expensive. this letter to thank the way to keep new york, other states affordable, was to make sure he kept the old buildings and not let anybody build on top of them or change them into new buildings. that's not how supply and demand works. if you have high demand, prices are going to go through the roof. that's a lot of what we have seen in new york. particularly in her own own neighborhood of greenwich those. when she was there it was affordable to middle income couples like herself, like her own family. what middle income households can afford a town house in greenwich village today?

preservation, the vast district has helped make that happen. it's a great irony that progressive states like new york and massachusetts and california, which allegedly care so much about providing affordable housing for people, to such a bad job of the relative to texas. and yet it is a great job of it. it is a great job of it by unleashing the builders. the ability of relatively unfettered construction to deliver the space that people need is one of the sort of important lessons i am trying to get across in the book. there are many reasons why the city should have, should be relatively unleashed, but there's one reason i emphasize in the book, which is the greenest of cities. i want to lead into this with a little story about a young harvard graduate in 1844 who went for a walk in the woods outside of concord.

he and a friend went to do fishing. there hadn't been much rain lately which made easy to get fish out of the stream and cook and chatted as they were cooking the chatter, the wind flicked the flames to the nearby tall grass and a fire started on the dry timber that was nearby, grew larger and larger an inferno pursued by the time it was done, more than 300 acres of woodland was burned. during this young man's own time, he was cascaded as an enemy of the about it. they refer to him as -- and it's hard to think of course as any boston merchant who did as much damage to the environment as this young man. of course, this young man today is the sectors have environment is, henry david thoreau. there's a lesson in which is where destructive species. and if you love nature, it often makes sense to stay away from

it. now, in fact, also when i started acquiring small children about five years ago, you can tell i'm an economist. i also moved to the woods not that far from concord and i also started to do a heck of a lot more damage to the environment and david thoreau did. now, it's not, i'm taking no stand on the science of global warming. but certainly if you, you were about global warning or heck is what about the price of gas at the pump, that, in fact, living in relatively compact urban spaces leads to significant less energy consumption. even holding the family size constant. that's data work i've done. one fact is that people who live in single family detached houses use an average 88% more electricity that people live in apartments. the gap is somewhat smaller can deliver income but it still there. and a lot of it has to do with more housing units and less driving.

so if you like a green space, live in new york. the book though is not fundamentally about trying to urge any particular person to live in an area that they don't want to live. i'm an economist not, not a lifestyle consultant. the point of the book is america has idolized a certain style of living, and it's a style of living that involves white picket fences and suppers. it does not include living in urban apartment. we have a terrible series of policy that badly want to be part of a national dialogue. so choose to three, apart from this, cities doing themselves damage, the three policies that affect our most obvious and most problematic are the home mortgage interest deduction from our transportation of researchers bank, and when we handles schooling. interest deduction excludes problematic in the wake of the great housing fallout that we're

bribing americans to leverage themselves to the health to bet on the housing market. on top of this were encouraging americans to buy bigger houses and move away from urban apartment. 85% of single, attached houses are on occupied. there are good reasons for the. renting out an apartment involves renting out the house involves the inevitable depreciation of renters not taking care of it. if you put a lot of owners under one big welcome to the chaos of the newark city co-op board. both of these reasons say that when you subsidize owning your pushing people away from dan's urban living. transportation infrastructure as well. i'm not surprised but deeply disappointed by the face for infrastructure in the recent budget. this infrastructure when filtered by the senate is inevitably anti-urban. during the stimulus infrastructure spending per capita was twice as high in our least dense states. not surprising.

there's very little reason why the government should be in this business. america will no longer compete by producing and shipping natural resources to manufactured goods. slightly cheaper than our competitors but we will compete by what is in our mind. we will compete by the ideas and innovations and out of out of an osha that happens naturally in cities. i guess the third thing and i will end with this, i want to emphasize that so many parents leave cities because of the school. in some sense the way that we structure our schools undoes the great urban virtues of entrepreneurship. if you took new york's restaurant scene which is currently one of the great glories of the city, if you start with new york's restaurant scene and instead of having all the private innovation, lots of people entering and closing, if instead of doing that, what you did your a single food

superintendent who delivered food and a system of city-owned, this would be a pretty awful place to be. and yet that's kind of what we've done with our schools. instead of allowing private competition and opportunities yet to come up with ideas for education, we turn it off. it's hard for anyone no matter how hard-working or smart to effect change from the top down. i have enormous admiration for joe klein and i think he tried very, very hard to introduce more competition and more innovation in school districts. is slow movement of schools under his leadership should have heavy on the it is. and i think we are really hopeful signs from things like to promise academy in harlem and other results and charter schools suggest that allow some form of competition and innovation that does a meaningful thing in terms of improving test scores. so i think we are unlikely to have better schools and to have improvement in the state without harnessing the urban virtues of competition and out of an osha. once you do that i think there's

no reason why cities, american cities can have the best schools in the world. so let me in there, and let me say how much grateful i am. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] >> we will take some questions. can you please just wait for the microphone since we are recording. >> that cities are attracted truly talented and wealthy people is not counterintuitive, but the question really is our cities attractive to people who are poor, you know, the david brooks wrote a series in "the atlantic monthly" years ago where he talked about how happy people were in rural areas

because there was less income and he called and with those much more sense of committee vote on the conservative tradition of rural moral virtue and committee living. can you address some of those questions? and also i think it would be great to talk about what you think about the cities, in the third world were problems and overpopulation are dominant. >> i think those two questions are connected. in new york issue is a hollowing out of the middle class. it's not an issue of the lack of poverty. new york continues to have a high poverty rate as indeed does all of urban america. city student tend to have a much higher poverty rate and suburban areas. the preponderance of poor people in cities is even more evident in the cities in developing world from mumbai to rio. that poverty is often seen as a sign of urban failure. but, in fact, i believe it's a sign of urban success. cities attract more people. they attract for people with the

promise of economic opportunity, and in the case of u.s. the ability to get around without a car for every adult. so some of the work that i cite in the book, my research on public transportation and its connection with public poverty. when you build a new subway stop poverty rates go up near that stop. does that mean that the subway stops are making people poor, that they are magically impoverishing the people around him? of course not. the subway stops are tracking for people who value the ability to not have a car for every adult who needs to get around. in the developing world cities provide an even more important path. condi dr. hunt the future of the india. this was nonsense. the future of his in the cities. the place where poor indians. it is unquestioned the true the life is enormously difficult. it's a life that none of us would want to live for days let

alone years. but they're still reasons why people come the. it still beats the poverty deprivation of the rural northeast of the brazil. it beats living in a world in which time seems to stand still and since mortality is endemic. cities provide the promise. it doesn't mean that cities don't create challenges as related to the clean water point. we are close enough to exchange ideas, we are close enough to affect each other with a disease. if we are close enough to sell you a newspaper i'm close enough to rob you. that's the point of cities require a certain amount of well structured government. they require a government that oversees the clean water, that handles congestion, a government that handles crime. and the tragedy of it is, is that government policy have engaged regulating areas that they have no business regulating. mumbai has suffered terribly for its draconian ratios. it has kept the city far too low

and far too expensive at the same time they have failed to provide the basics of urban life. when i wander around the place like do robbie which was the largest place in working your struck struck some tennessee, by the private entrepreneurship. one corner there's a couple guys making broths. then there's another core these beautiful little pots being painted and carved out, and another corner for a bunch of people are recycling old plastic. i'm not sure about this ranges their recycling but the other things seem perfectly reasonable. yet at the same time you see a child defecating industry. this is the great challenge that, in fact, the public sector is not doing the public sector has to do. so i certainly pushback on the notion there's much to like about rural poverty. survey not in the developing world. but having cities require better

management, requires a good but limited public sector that does its job and does it seriously. >> the central thesis that you raised seems very similar to another colleague of yours at harvard, michael porter, in an article that he wrote in 1990, the competitive engine of nation. it seems he spoke about industries and clusters and innovation competition and the like. it seems very similar and i wonder if you had any areas where you part company with michael? >> i don't disagree with that. we both started, my first work on cities is done in about 1990 as well. we were influenced at that point in time by his work. what effects it came out of that study was shown the enormous correlation between a starship sizes, competition and urban success. sing the virtues of idea close in cities, this is an old idea

that marshall is high on this notion, 120 years ago. it's a sunny i think that separates us. i think i'm probably less optimistic about his vision for competitiveness in the inner-city. i think actually that was probably too much of an emphasis on what the current comparative advantage is relative to trying to think of more game changing things. i think that's the fundamental thing. it's not figure out how to do low value added services in inner-city areas. it's actually very i have to provide the skills and connections that enable those areas to grow. and then, of course, there's a whole, 80% of the book is about things that are unrelated to michael porter's core interest. but certainly i share his enthusiasm for competition and awed when osha and the value of connecting between people intense quarters.

>> the cover of your book is a picture of chicago, i think, rights because it is. stretched out speaker anyone who's been to chicago lately knows the city looks amazing. it's clean, new parks downtown, then the census came out a few weeks ago and said chicago lost 200,000 people in the last 10 years. it was more than they were expecting. at the same time, the ex-urban county away from chicago with some of the fastest-growing in the country. is that a problem? what could chicago do if it is not are redoing? why aren't we seeing these results because chicago is a very successful city along lots of dimensions. in some sense the right things to do the level of chicago. chicago has a lot of things in common with other cities. if you go back to the chicago that i knew when the city was there, when i came to the city in 1988, that city seemed very much to be on a hinge of

history. it seemed like it could very well go the path of cleveland or detroit rather than the path that it is on. it fights against very severe trends. there is no for able that better protects our been growth in the 20 century in january temperature. and chicago's winters can be a little tough. chicago also fights against a general move towards are basically. chicago is a very decentralized in terms of its unemployment. that is also an issue with the city. that being said, i think you don't want to judge a city purely by population numbers. there are a lot of people moving into chicago as well as the fact that there are some areas that are losing population. you also have in many areas the population because of larger families being replaced by smaller cameras. it was most evident in the 1970s we had such huge population was because of that. that continues to be true in many large cities today, and

often an increasingly wealthy population means that you have more people occupy the same -- fewer people ought to find the same space which we've population numbers can go down. so i have a lot of admiration for a lot of things that mayor daley had done. i think he deserves to be seen as a very successful city as well as a very successful metropolitan area. i think it's a mistake to just view the state the straight population of us as being the only or the primary gauge of success. you also want to look at the income of the area. you want to look at the crime rate of the area both of which have seen tremendous progress under mayor daley's leadership. >> you began your talk by citing one hard fact, that the fraction of national output that is produced by large metropolitan areas exceeds the fraction of the population. with only a small number of really large metropolitan areas, his apostle for a few nuances to ask you that result? normally we measure outputs i these dollars.

if a restaurant meals cost $200 in manhattan we would say a $200 bike was created. there's a number of ways those are more matters of opinion that matters of success. with national gdp there is a deflated that is applied. people could argue about whether, if restaurant meals in new york city cost $200 the same meal somewhere in kansas cost $50, is one with more viable than the other. that's a matter of opinion. another example is new york city is dominated by the financial industry and as a last two years demonstrate people can argue whether financial transactions create as much by as people claim. >> if you look across metropolitan areas, if you look at the relationship between gdp per capita, it's a steady curve up. it's not as if new york is all progression and everything else

is flat. if you look at particular industries, you divorce yourself from the locally domestically trade and you turn to the urban industry, and you look at export-oriented industries easiest thing very strong positive relationship per capita, per employee output. it is certainly true that there is rarely a free lunch in city choice as in anything else. the fact that there are higher prices in new york is the price of living in a productive fun place. it's not as if new york is giving people more productivity without charging people in some sense for the. that's the nature of space, the nature of cities. but if firms were not more productive in metropolitan areas they wouldn't be sticking around and paying the high cost to the workers living in those areas. they wouldn't pay the higher cost of being in those areas. we have decades of literature

looking at conglomeration economies. that's what these things are called in various ways. all of which uniformly come out on the side that they're fairly strong positive benefits from conglomerate around other industries in various ways. >> to your point about competition in schools, despite those who have left them to think going forward is a likelihood of an improvement in new york as well as other cities? >> you know, i'm hopeful. i most hopeful in places like new york because there's so much talent in the city pushing on various margins. i think new york, if you just look at the promise economy -- academy, there's two things to make that happen. it's much more difficult. one is the wealth and energy which is a special industry which makes things like that work. also makes things work, i'm

strongly in favor of it. the other thing of course is you get great teachers. there are people who are there and went to work for the promise accounting which would be harder any smaller, a city with less richness in human capital. so i continue to be quite optimistic about new york. you could have a bad turn in terms of who the next mayor. also things could go wrong. i basically think that people get, that the energy of new yorkers will usher a row to the good government outcome going forward. it makes me optimistic about the city. i'm less optimistic about the declining cities with less education. i'm less optimistic that they will be able to create change in this area. the good news is that you are starting off such a low base in education, some of the centers of deprivation in this country that anything can have the possibly of doing good. but i'm less optimistic of the

ability of really meaningful clinical change in this area to work. but remember, part the job of being an economist who's not running for office, never plans on being confirmed for any political job is that i'm supposed to say things that are politically impossible. if i only limit myself to things that are doable tomorrow, i'm not doing my job of trying to push beyond that. i'm not the best judge of what's politically feasible anytime soon. >> i spent a few years as a television reporter in new york. >> you have the voice for it. laugh that. >> the question i guess is how can we bring these cities back? essays on this great waterways, the great problem they face is this flight of use and intellectual capital. how do we bring that back? what are some possible solutions or are we all to conglomerate

around new york, chicago, los angeles and san francisco? >> i think one of the course of the united states that we have lots of different types of cities, it's not as if i believe everyone should live in a new york city skyscraper. i think there's a lot to like in buffalo in binghamton. that being said, those towns that have once exist because of transportation cost advantage, because of the erie canal, had focus on a few large manufacturing industries who lost their ways. these cities are facing enormous challenges. in the long run, education is the best mix for these areas. middle sized cities that are educated have much better than middle sized cities that are not. there's no free will that better protects which cities come back. and across the metropolitan areas as fisher of the adult population in the metropolitan area with a college degree increases by 10%, wages go up by 8%.

there's enormous by a been a rescue people. it's also true in the downturn that education is very protective of metropolitan areas. again, more of a connection then you would predict from the fact that 5% of college graduates are unemployed and 15% of high school dropouts are employed. education is essential thing and not investing infrastructure. that's not what these places me. thinking about what else you can do in terms of limiting regulation, in terms of regulars are cheap way of life, the best strategy at the urban level is to attract and train smart people and get out of their way. you want to be focus on policies that will attract and train smart people and you want to be making sure you got rid of those things that get in the way of private entrepreneurship. and then on top of that you just finally, this is related to chicago question, you don't want to be chasing the will of the with in 1950 because that

shouldn't your objective. just once, i want to hear a big city mayor said my cities by bush and dropped in my tenure but those people were dashed those people will well trained. just once i want to hear a city mayor focus on the people that are there your rather than on chasing some population goal. so unfortunately i don't think there's any sort of silver bullet i do think we can do better than we have. i think our cities deserve that. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> booktv is on twitter. follow us for great updates on our programming and news. on nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/booktv. >> in about an hour we're going to cover several thousand years of world history and touch every part of the planet are you ready to roll? are you ready to go on the journey? and this is a journey that as we

touch all these places did actually start from two families stories, and so if we can look at the world map, marine and i were in jerusalem, and israel, visiting with my family. and i asked about the story of one of my aunts, a mysterious and of mind, a non-jewish woman who admitted into our jewish family. and i wondered about her, what's the story about her. it turned out that her grandfather had been a surge in russia. to any of you remember what a serf is? hold on. you in the back row. could you hand is to him? >> i think it was a slave. >> a serf was very much like a

slave. he was a person or a woman who could be bought and sold with the land. so my aunts grandfather was a serf, but he had invented a process are working with beet sugar that was so useful, he became so rich, he bought his freedom. when we learned about that, we sadly learned about a connection to marina's family. >> so, i had always known about my families connection to sugar because my great grandparents traveled from india across to guyana, which is in south america but it is considered part of the caribbean. and they came to cut, to work on sugar plantations. so part of what fascinated as wise, what is the substance where someone in his family all the way in russia, a serf, and

someone in my family, looking to get a better life, over here in india and then over to the caribbean, what is this substance that could affect people from such different parts of the world? >> and before before we trace that i want to ask a question. how many of you think you might have sugar somewhere in your family background? so, that's one, two, three -- oh, man. yes, yes. >> what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring it on. i want to hear from a couple of you, where your family might have been from, okay? >> i think my family might have been in the caribbean. >> caribbean, okay. very good. >> i feel my family was either in the caribbean are in europe. >> very good. >> i think the family was either

in the caribbean or europe. >> okay. a very good. anybody else here? >> actually i learned my family was from the caribbean. >> so if you have the caribbean in your background, you definitely have sugar in your background. but we believed that many more people have sugar in the background than they know. and we are about to take you, as i say, spinning around the world. and the subtitle of our book is a story of magic, spice, slavery, freedom, and aside. and let's start out with magic. why might we relate sugar to magic? well, sugarcane, if we go back to the world map, originally was very first, you know off the edge, on the far edge if we know that it was first grown in new

guinea. and they grew sugarcane. have any of you seemed sugarcane before? have any of you ever tasted sugarcane? all right. all right. we know that, we do know that sugarcane was first grown in new guinea, and then it was brought up to india. and the reason we know that is there are priors to the goddess, dirk a. to the goddess durga. and one of the offerings that you learned was sugarcane. and we know that the original word in the ancient indian language for sugar was that which brings sweetness to the people. but at a certain point, the name for the substance changed, and the new name for it was

sharcara, which means ground. can anyone guess why you might use a word that means gravel for sugarcane, or for sugar? >> you might use gravel because when you put in your hand, a kind of like, it came out like sand and sand is like gravel. >> you are exactly right. originally they had sugarcane, but they had learned how to make gain into sugar. and this is one of the crucial things. sugar granules do not exist in nature. what exists in nature is cane. we had to learn how to turn the cane into those little pieces of sugar. and we'll get to that. but before we get to that, the question is how did knowledge of sugarcane spread? how did people learn about this plant growing in new guinea, the

substance used in religion in india? does anyone remember who might have brought knowledge of sugar across -- that background is grey. i think the second either hasn't spoken yet. >> christopher columbus -- >> year ahead of us, buddy. your head. we are way back. >> i think it's spread because it went across the world, and i think china had its. >> yeah, but before china gets it, there's someone who -- >> i think it was the slaves. >> that's later. we are way back. we are in b.c. we are way, way back. >> the australians.

>> know. >> the greek? >> yes. if any of you remember the story, alexander the great is conquering across from greece. he is conquering across iran. he is conquering -- he gets to the edge of india, and his troops say i won't go any further. i've gone as far as i'm going to go, but alexander is conquering -- he had his hunger to know. alexander can never know enough. so he sends his friend in the boat sank go explore india. find out stuff for me. and he comes back and talks about the reed that gives honey, although there are no bees. now, why would you describe sugarcane as the reed that gives honey, although there are no bees? >> because it was sweet. >> yes. and white house?

>> passionate and white house? >> because the honey, bees usually produce the honey and with sugarcane,. >> right. before people knew about sugarcane, how might they have sweetness their food? what we might people have used to sweeten their food? >> they would use honey and sap from maple trees. >> you all may remember the in north america there were no bees north and south america. they didn't have honey. so what they had was maple syrup. they had the cactus. and then the rest of the world, they had honey. we've had sugar used in magical ceremonies. we've had sugar now. it's spreading. people are starting to learn about it. >> one thing we want to mention,

when you say they use, let's say honey or fruit, is sugar or sweetness at this time is not the way we think about what you're going to have a chocolate bar or a cookie. it is just a cake. it is a spice. it is something you use in your meal to give it one of the flavors speaker you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we are here at the conservative political action conference talking with amanda pritzker. can you tell us what's coming out this your? >> absolutely. we just came out with secretary rumsfeld's book this week. we are very excited about. he is your signing books today. at the end of the month we have governor huckabee's next book which is coming out at the end of february. and in march we have but what the founders say which is very schweiger's look. he is standing here with me in the booth.

>> can you tell us about choice but? >> sure. "what would the founders say?," i look at 10 issues that seem to be at the top of the news today, everything from death to government bailouts, the guns, to religion. and i went back through the documents of the founders, not what it said but what did written and what they have done. and they have a lot to tell us. some of these things you might think of comedies are such new problems, what could they possibly learn from the founders, but, in fact, they dealt with all these things. for example, there's a financial panic in 1791 that alexander hamilton dealt with, and he did not bailout any banks. >> were there any surprises in your research or things that you hadn't seen before? >> absolutely. i have to say as a conservative i'm kind of bent towards private schools. what i found was that all of the founders were in favor of the public schools. but was it was important was

what they thought should be taught and what should be taught was patriotic history, math and religion. >> any other revelation? >> there's a lot in there about guns. we are chapter about guns and gun ownership. i think a couple of the recent supreme court cases have pretty much reaffirmed what the founder said, which is gun ownership was meant to be an individual right, not just for personal defense, but so that the people collectively would be well armed as the government in case they ever had to get rid of that government. >> can you tell us about your next project, is the one in the works already? >> yes, there is. it's like tranninety. i've taken on the whole world from 1898 to the present. >> and what led you to take on such an enormous task? >> it's sort of stair step up from smaller segments of american history that an immediate "a patriot's history of the united states." i thought well, somebodyds