supply. if we anticipate unlike the titanic we can see the iceberg. this is the time to take the actions that will help many of adapt to the scenario. >> watch this and many other programs online at booktv.org. >> edward glazer says the 2/3 of americans are more conscious than other americans. he discusses "triumph of the city" under an hour in the manhattan institute in new york city.

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>> they also have people who describe themselves as being more satisfied with their lives and their jobs. cities are the pass of out of poverty into prosperity for so many of the world. we've seen the success of places like new york, not just in terms of their income. cities are also fun, green, healthy. they are exciting places to be where the magic of human interactions tends to make place just so much more exciting. now if you -- the idea behind this book, the reason to claim that the book makes for why cities come back is that cities play to mankind to human kinds

greatest asset. which is our ability to learn from people around us. we come out of the womb with the remarkable ability to learn from our parents withing from our peers, from sibling, from people around us that are doing things that are really smart from people around us who are screwing up. cities make that happen. they are the obvious sense of space between people, proximity, closeness, coming to the city, you sense the on rush of experience that teaches you. when we observe the wages of people that come to the cities, it's not as if they become more productive in the city overnight. year by year, month after month, they experience faster wage growth. they become more productive. that's capacitiable with the view that cities are machines for learning. as the great english economist said more than a century ago, in dense clusters, the mysteries of the trade become no mystery, but are as it was. that's how new york and san

francisco and london work. precisely because globalization and technology has increased the returns. they are working for cities, rather than against them. while it is true that globalization and new technologies caused the garment industry to disappear, they didn't eliminate good fashion, creation, value to creates new images and new york. after all, seldom on the other side of the planet. you can take advantage of all of the opportunities in the more globalized world. taking advantage of the requires new ideas and innovations. we get smart by being around other smart people. things didn't always look so bright in new york. when i was a kid growing up in the 1970s, it looked as if not just president ford, but history itself was telling it to drop dead. it seems admireed.

that situations in fact what new york was going through. it was process of industrialization and decline. all of america's oldest cities. one the themes of this book is that the american dream doesn't have to lie behind a white picket fence in the suburb. cities has been as intensic to american history and to our experiences as a nation as any place else. the very birth of america has its roots in urban interaction in the boston in 1770s, between john hancock who wanted the political change that could be created by a mob and sam adams knew how to conjure them up. their connections as created by the city of boston changed america, created -- help create the great country. in the 19th century, the great problem was making the wealth of the american interior

accessible. cities made that happen. that enables of rich, productive soil of iowa to become productive. go back to 1816, it cost as much to move them across land as it was in the atlantic. it was hard to manage the goods. the chicago -- which was formed, started off with the illinois-michigan canal spanned from new orleans. rails only supplemented that transportation network that was based on water. every one the 20 largest cities was on a major waterway from the oldest like new york in boston which is typically where the river meets the sea to the newest on the point on the mississippi river.

all of it was tied to new york. sugar fighting because it was trade that involved the caribbean. which is how isaac roosevelt got involved in the sugar refining business. he was also an anti-british agitator. it interfered. it's one the favorite stories. they have to come to walter scott and get it out first. new york ports made that thing. the thing that made the harper brothers succeed, they could get the latest walter scott, get pebble at the people, they were in new york, they were in the

great port that got the books first. that enabled them to print first and dominate the market. chicago as well. the stockyards grew up around the rail yard. they were right next to rail. and in detroit, even more remarkable event occurred in the rise of the automobile industry. it shows the ability of cities that formed for mundane reasons to then create the chain innovations that create some of human kinds greatest endeavors. if you go back to mid 19th century detroit, the city of small firms, small people in connections to the outside world. it's a city with a huge amount of inland trade and it has a great business in taking care of the engines on the ships going on the great lakes. detroit dry deck, firm in the 19th century. frank kirby, a great shipping entrepreneur comes there. they form a critical role educating with people that work

with engines. like henry ford in detroit. he then becomes part of the great chain of entrepreneurship. detroit in the 1900s feels a lot like silicon valley in the 1960s. all of whom are inventing and stealing each others ideas and trying to figure out the new, new thing. they do it. they create the amazing thing. the mass producted, inexpensive automobile. one the tragedies of detroit, unfortunately there are going to be several tragedies is the way they figure it out is by -- the way they are able to make mass producted automobiles is by doing something that's fundamental to city. of they do it by creating factories and provide employment for less educated americans on a grand scale. one level this is great. extremely productive for

providing jobs. that's wonderful. nothing could be more to what makes city work than the plant. great walls surrounding the area, little connection with the people around them. and for a while, it's wildly productive. but when the economics change and transportation costs fall, that production can easily move and move to lower cost areas like the right-to-work states. then, of course, automobile production can cross the globe. and when those conditions change, they don't have the stuff to reinvent themselves because it didn't have the skills that were intensic to urban renewal. the second tragedy of detroit was the way the government responded to it. it was the opposite of what detroit needed. the government responded and federal government pairs a lot of blame in this. be ready to structure, first urban renewal, then infrastructure. creates investments like the

people mover. now the problem is, you know, a city like detroit, the declining city already as abundance of structures and infrastructure relative to people. the last thing you need were more structures in a place like detroit. yet the politicians were there ready to build villages because it looks great. because it's beautiful to have a shiny new building and all of the sudden you can declare cleveland a comeback city. it does nothing to address the real problem. it does nothing to do the most important thing which is to make sure the children who are growing up have the skills to compete and has something that should be a birthright of everywhere, which is the safety of the streets. we have a people moving that moves over the empty streets, but we didn't have the skills in detroit that would have enabled it to come back. by contrast, new york did come back. it came back not because of government program, but because of private entrepreneurship, because of people coming up with new ideas and creates change. now there are many reasons for

this. part of it is, of course, new york scale, it's global connections, culture of entrepreneurship that came out of the garment industry, which was a hay den for people. i tell the story who was new york greatest skyscraper before the great depression and before he was sure that 1930 would be a great building year. it didn't turn out so well. until that point, he was a great example of someone that starts and actually has the tremendous career that follows it. stanford while's father, another entrepreneur that started off in garment. it's tide to a chain of innovation in finance. cities have always, always permitted the chains of brilliant, one smart idea. think about renaissance florence, right. where one figures out linear, and passes it to his close friend. who passes along to his friend who puts it on the wall of the

chapel and marvelous pitch of st. peter finding a coin in the belly of the fish who passes it along to the monk and one smart idea ripping on another. i think finance is like that. my own sort of view in the chain of innovation in finance is it starts with people, many of whom at the university of chicago, milton friedman and jimmy savage. some of that get passed to the student harry markowitz, and carry by the trainer. makes it's way to wall street. the intellectual apparatus is used by michael milk, then still in new york to sell high yield debt and enable investors to recognize his security has carried enough return. the high yield enables the young harry craviec.

i think lou, who starts in the solomon brothers mail room is a great example of the ability of cities to nuture and sustain. my favorite member is bloomberg himself. bloomberg is important in so many ways. one of which is his data terminals are one part of the chain of making this sophisticated to tradeoff risk and return possible. but he's also a great example of how cities create cross industry. how the combination of different industries create the largest and most successful leaps of entrepreneurial innovation. bloomberg, of course, comes out of finance. he's an i.t. he's competing with the guys in silicon valley with the terminals. he knows how to outcompete and out do them. because he had run the trading floor at solomon, because he had among that he gained in the city that no silicon valley software

engineer could know. he's able to make this leap. the other reason that i like to bring up bloomberg is there's a picture that's in the book that i'm fond of. which is of the bullpen. in city hall. that bullpen is borrowed from the bullpen that bloomberg had and before that, it's borrowed from the solomon brothers trading floor. in some sense, there's a city small. you have some of the people at the planet, will sit behind giant oak doors in large protected offices enjoy the space and privacy. 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 city succeed. that's how new york came back. knowledge was more valuable than space. finance is in new york because there is no industry where knowing more is more valuable. is more important. and that's why other -- that's why there's the very strong

tendency of idea oriented to be the mainstay of urban renaissance, whether you are talking about biotech in massachusetts, or computers in greater san francisco. you are talking about leveraging the urban ability to connect smart people who learn from one another. now it's often suggested, of course, that computers will make that obsolete. i don't think that's true. because there's something so fundamental about us as people that makes face-to-face contact so valuable. we've involved over millions of years to have a rich set of tools. anyone here who's taught knows the hard part about teaching is not knowing your script. is not knowing the information that you want. it's knowing whether or not your audience gets it. it's knowing whether or not your ideas are getting through. and human beings have all of these great cues to signal comprehension and confusion. that's a critical part. what new technology is done, they made the ideas ever more complicated. they have increased the cost of

screwing up and not commuting properly. that's why it's valuable to be face to face. cities also succeed because of the happen tarp. the things that bloomberg learned that they never would have learned in a trading session. they would have had no idea. the success of new york isn't just about productivity. it's about the revival of cities as places of pleasure as well as earnings. and if you go back to the sort of new york of the 1970s, this wasn't clear this was going to happen. you had to pay people to get them to live in new york. now people are willing to accept lower real wages just to have the fun of living in the city. that didn't happen by accident. it requires vast number of undertakings. we're still not down in the developing -- in the developing world. these are the great challenges

that lie ahead. if you go to 1900, a boy could expect to live seven years less than the national average. today life expectancy is two years longer. i'm not sure we understand that. some say that walker plays a major role. younger new york, it's clear why death rates are lower. lower rates of motorcycle, taking the subway is a lot less danger than driving drunk. lower rates of suicide. while new yorkers aren't likely to say they are happy, why new w yorker would do that, they off themselves that the people in low density areas do. that actually required investment. and the local governments at the start of the 20th century were spending as much on water as the national government was spending on everything expect for the army and post office. and these investments were real and important. while clean water required an engineering solution.

other problems of urban life don't actually require engineering. crime has been a major challenge and something the city has met. that also required. let's not forget it has required serious government intervention. handling the crime was difficult. traffic congestion is a problem that is still with us. i think in some sense, i like to describe it. new york is running a soviet style transport system. but that i mean in the old soviet union, groceries were vastly under priced, and given away. the way they were allocated, long lines anding to -- and stock out. that's what the new york traffic line is. long line and stock out. you are waiting for the guy to turn. the only way to handle this is to price the product. you have to charge something for scarce space. that's what congestion pricing does. what we know from the data, you can't just build your way out of

traffic congestion. there's something called the fundamental law, vehicles miles trafficked with highways built. if you build it, they will drive. there's only one solution for that, which is to make people pay for the social costs of their actions. now the success of cities, of course, means that also creates a downside. and the downside is if you don't allow supplies to keep up with demand, cities become ungodly unfordable. and that's certainly one the challenges that new york faces. that, you know, cities like chicago which has been very friendly towards construction have made it possible for young people without a huge -- without a lot of means live in chicago. new york under the bloomberg administration has moved, i think productively, towards allowing more production. if you look at the broad path in the 1970s to the 1990s. just as prices were rising, the city was making it more and more difficult to build and with the swath of preservation which was

at the island and currently 15% of the land area in manhattan is in a preservation district. if it's not if i don't preveer our architect. my father was a architect. i believe they are treasures. not a postwar glazed building needs to be preserved. i draw a lot on the wisdom of jane jacobs. she understand the magic. this one she got wrong. a lot of who she did was wandering around. old buildings are cheap, new buildings with expensive. the way to keep new york affordable, kept the old buildings and not let anybody build on them or change them. that's not how supply and demand work. if you are restrict building for whatever reason, prices are going to go through the roof. that's a lot of what we're seen

in new york, particularly in her own home neighborhood. greenwich village. it was affordable to middle income housing. what middle income can afford a townhouse in greenwich village today? preservation made it happen. it's made it difficult for the free market. it's a great irony that progressive states like new york and massachusetts and california which allegedly care so much about provides affordable housing do such a bad job. which as far as i know is never against the attention for low cost housing for ordinary americans. yet, it does a great job by unleasing. the and the ability of relatively construction to actually deliver the space that people need is one the sort of important lesson that is i tried to get across in the book. now there are many reasons why cities should have their -- you know, should be relatively unleased.

but there's one reason that i emphasize in the book. which is the greenness 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 out of concord. he and a friend went to do fishing. there hadn't been much rain. it made it easy to get fishes out of the stream and cook a chowder. as they were doing that, the wind flicked the flames and the fire started and grew larger and larger. an inferno ensued. before it was done, 300 acres were burned. he was -- the conquered freeman in 1844. it's hard to think of any boston merchant who did as much damage to the environment as this young

man in the concord woods. this young man today is henry david thou row. if you love nature, it makes sense to stay away from it. when i started acaring small children about five years ago -- you can tell i'm an exist. i also moved to the woods, not that far from concord. i also started to do a lot more damage to the environment than david did. now it's not -- i'm taking no stand on, you know, the science of global warming in this book. but certainly if either of you worry about global warming or worry about the price of gas that, in fact, living in relatively compact urban spaces leads to less energy consumption. and that's data that i've done with matthew khan. one fact is that people who live in single family attacked houses

use 88% more electricity than people who live in apartments. the gap is smaller for controlling income and family size. it's still there. a lot of it has to do with smaller housing units and less driving. if you like green space, live in new york. the book though is not fundamentally about trying to urge any particular person to live in an area they want to live. i'm an economist. not a lifestyle consultant. and the point of the book is that merck has idealized a certain style of living. it involves white picket fences in suburbs. it does not include living in a city. this is what i hope to get from this book. of course, the cities doing the damage by limiting construction.

the three areas that are most problematic, home mortgage, transportation intrack, and the way we handle schooling. the way in terms of mortgage, it's the great wake that we are bribing americans to leverage themselves on the housing market. on top of this, we're encouraging americans to buy bigger and encouraging them to wave away from urban apartments. 35% are owned or occupied and 85% are rent. there are good reasons. renting out an apartment involves -- renting out a house involved the depreciation of renters not taking care of it. on average, they depreciation 1%. they have the chaos of new york city co-op board. both of these reasons say when you subsidize owner, you are taking people away. ape not surprised. but deeply disappointed by the, you know, fetish for

infrastructure in the recent budget. this infrastructure which filtered by the senate is anti-urban. during the stimulus. infrastructure per -- infrastructure spending per capita was twice as high in least dense than the most dense. the least have a lot of senators as opposed to people. america will no longer compete by producing and shipping natural resources and manufactured goods slightly cheaper than our competitors. we will compete by what is in our minds. we will compete by the ideas and innovation and entrepreneurship that happened so naturally in cities. i guess the third thing, i want to end with this, so many participants leave cities because of the school. the way we have structured our school undose the innovation and entrepreneurship. if you took new york restaurant seen which is currently one the great glories, if not all of human civilization ever.

start with new york. instead of having all of this private innovation, lots of people entering and closing, it turned out tie german fusion didn't work. instead of doing that, what you did is have a single food superintendent who delivered food in a system of city-owned, it would be an awful place to eat. yet that's what we've done with our schools. right? instead of allows private competition to come up with new ideas for education, we turn that off. it's enormously hard for anyone, no matter how hard working to affect change from the topdown. i have enormous admiration. joel klein tried to introduce more competition in the school district. but under his leadership just shows how heavy of a lift this is. i think we've had really hopeful signs from things like the promise academy in harlem and other results to have some form

of proving test scores. i think we're unlikely to have better schools and to have improvement in this area without actually harnessing the urban virtues of competition. once you do that, there's no reason why american cities can't have the best schools in the world. they are unlikely to happen if we stick with a public monopoly. let me end there and say how many i'm grateful to your attention and how many i look forward to learning from you in the confines of the urban environment. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] >> we're going to take questions. can you wait for the microphone since we are recording? right over here. the cities are attracted to brilliant, talented wealthy people is not counterintuitive.

but question really is are cities attractive to people who are poor? david brooks wrote a series ten years ago where he talked about how happy people were in rural areas because there was less income and equality and much more of a sense of community. let alone the conservative position of rural virtue. can you address some of those? >> sure. also it would be great to talk about the cities in the urbanism in the third world where problems have poverty and over population are dominant. >> absolutely. i think those two questions are connected; right? so, in fact, the new york issue is the hollowing out of the middle class. : go up near the stop,

okay? does that mean that those subway tracks are making people poor? they are magically um positivishing those people. it's the people to value the ability not to have a car for every -- for every adult who needs to get around. now, in the developing world, cities provide an even more important path out of poverty. gandhi talked about how the future is in the villages but this is plainly nonsense. the future are in the cities in the ways that connect with the

outside world. and it's unquestionably true that life in a village is difficult. it's a life none of us would want to live for days let alone for years but there's still reasons why people come there. it still beats the poverty and deprivation of the rural northeast of beverly hills and it -- brazil. and cities provide that promise. now, it doesn't mean that cities don't actually create challenges. and this is related to the clean water point. that if we're close enough to exchange ideas and infect each other with a disease and if we're close enough -- if i'm close enough to sell you a newspaper, i'm close enough to rob you and that's why cities require a well structured government. they require a government that overseas the provision of clean water. they require a water that handles congas station and handles crime and the tragedy of

india they have policies that they have no busy of regulating. mumbai has suffered. while at the same time they have failed to provide the basics of urban life. when i wander around a place for while the largest slum in the world you're struck simultaneously by the enormous power of entrepreneurship. it's thrilling to see -- one corner there's -- there's a couple of guys making bras and you feel like you're on the lower east side of manhattan and there's these little beautiful pots being painted. and in the corner there's a bunch of people who are recycling old plastic. i'm not sure the syringes they are recycling but there's other that is perfectly acceptable and yet at the same time you see the child defecating in the street. that's the great challenge. the public sector is not doing the thing the public sector should be doing.

i certainly push back on the notion that there's much to like in the rural poverty certainly not in the developing world. but having cities actually requires better management and it requires a good but limited public sector that actually knows its jobs and does it seriously. >> eric? >> 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 and it seems he spoke about industries and clusters and innovation and competition and the like. it seems very similar. i wonder if you had any areas where you part company with michael in your thesis? >> well, i don't disagree with that. in fact, we both started -- my first work on cities was done in 1990 as well and unquestionably he were influenced by his work. one of the facts that came out of that they were showing the enormous correlation between small, average establishment sizes.

the president of competition and subsequent urban success. i think that's -- you know, seeing the virtue of idea flows in cities. this is an old ideas. alfred marshall was high on this notion 120 years. it's nothing that separates us. i think i'm probably less optimistic about the -- his vision for competitiveness in the inner city. i think actually there was probably too much of an emphasis of what their current competitive advantage is relative to trying to think of more game changing things. actually radically increase the human capital in these areas. i think that's -- that's the fundamental thing. it's not actually figuring out how to do low value-added services in inner city areas. it's actually figuring out how to provide the skills and the 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, you know -- unrelated to michael porter's core interests but certainly,

you know, i share his enthusiasm for competitiontician and entrepreneurship and the value of connecting in dense corrid s corridors. >> right here. >> the cover of your book has a picture of chicago, i think, right? >> it is. stretched out. >> anyone who has been to chicago lately knows the city looks amazing. it's clean. there's these new parks downtown and there's these huge new skyscrapers and the census came out and said chicago lost 200,000 people in the last 10 years which was even more than they were expecting and at the same time the ex-urban counties away from chicago were some of the fastest growing in the country. is that a problem? and -- what could chicago do that it's not already doing? why are we seeing these results? >> chicago is, i think, a very successful city on a lot of dimensions. the right thing to do is level chicago. chicago has a lot of things in

common with other rust belt cities and if you go back to the chicago that i knew when the city was there, you know, when i came to the city in 1988, that city seemed very much to be, you know, on a hinge of history, right. i remember it seemed like it could go the path of cleveland or detroit rather than the path that it's on. it fights against very severe trends. there's no variable that predicts the growth than january temperature and chicago's winters can be a little tough. chicago also center city chicago also fights against the general move toward car-based living. chicago is a very decentralized city in terms of its employment. and that's also an issue with the city. now, that being said i don't think you want to judge the city by population numbers and there are a lot of people moving into chicago as well as the fact that there are, you know, some areas that are losing population. you also have in many areas depopulation because of larger families being replaced by

smaller families. that was particularly -- that was most evident in the 1970s where you had a huge population loss because of that but that continues to be true in many large cities today. that, you know, and often increasingly wealthy population means that you have more people occupying the same space which actually means the population numbers can go down. i have a lot of admiration that the mayor has done and i think it's a very successful metropolitan area and i think it's difficult to say the straight numbers are the only or the primary gauge of success. i mean, you also want to look at the income of the area. you want to look at the crime area both of which has shown tremendous progress under daley's leadership. >> you began your talk citing one hard fact that the fraction of national output that's produced by large metropolitan areas exceeds the fraction of the population.

with only a small number of really large metropolitan areas, it's possible for a new nuances to skew that result. normally we measure outputs by the dollars paid for something. if, for example, a restaurant meal cost $200 in meal they would say the value is created. and there's a number of those those are matters of opinion and fact. in gdp, normally, there's a gdp deflated that's applied but it applies at the level of the whole country or state. and people could argue whether it should be applied the level of city. for example, if a restaurant meal in new york city cost $200 and the same meal somewhere in kansas cost $50 is one more times the valuable of the other and that's a matter of opinion. another example is that new york city is dominated by the financial industry and people can argue about whether financial transactions produce much value as people claim. do you consider those issues -- opinions as both issues of fact. >> if you look across the

metropolitan area, first of all, if you would look at the relationship of gdp per capita per metropolitan size, it's a steady curve up. it's not as if new york is through the progression line and everything else is flat. if you look at particular industries, so you divorce yourself from the locally domestically traded and turn to the urban industries and you look at the export oriented industries you see the strong relationship between metropolitan area size and per capita per employee output. it is certainly true that there is rarely a free lunch in city -- in city choice as in anything else. and 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, you know, charging people in some sense for them. that's the nature of -- you know, that's the nature of space, that's the nature of cities. but if firms weren't more productive in metropolitan areas, they wouldn't be sticking

around and paying the higher cost of the workers living in those areas and they wouldn't sticking around and being in those areas. we have literature looking at conglomerate areas which is what they're called. and they uniformly come down on the side that there are fairly positive efforts in conglomerating in other industries in various ways. >> your point in competition of schools, do you think going forward, that there's a likelihood of an improvement of that in new york as well as other cities? >> you know, i'm hopeful. i'm by nature optimistic and i'm most hopeful in places like new york because there's so much talent in the cities pushing on various margins. new york has -- if you look at the promise academy, if you look at the harlem children's zone there's two things for that to

make it happen and it's much more difficult in many other cities. one is the wealth of areas and the things that make manhattan institute work, in fact, i'm strongly in favor of it. [laughter] >> the other thing, of course, is you can get great teachers. there are just people -- they are there and willing to work for the promise academy which would be harder in a small and less -- a smaller and a city less with human capital. so the i continue to be quite optimistic about new york. now, it requires leadership at the center. you could have a back turn in terms of who's the next mayor. all sorts of things could go wrong. i basically think people get -- you know, the energy of new yorkers will get a relatively good income going forward and that makes me optimistic about the city. i'm less optimistic about the cities with less education and i'm less optimistic that they'll be able to create change in this area. now, the good news is, you're

starting off such a low base in education in some of the centers of deprivation in this country that anything will be -- can have the possibility of doing good. but i'm less optimistic of the ability of really meaningful political change in this area to work. but, remember, part of the job of being an economist who's not running for office, never plans to be confirmed for any political job is that i'm supposed to say things that are politically impossible, right. because if i only limit recognize to things that are doable tomorrow, i'm not doing my job of trying to, you know, push beyond that. i'm not really the best judge of what's politically feasible anytime soon. >> we just have time for one more question. >> i saw a television reporter in one of these rust belt cities that we've been talking about. >> and you've got the voice for it. [laughter] >> the question i guess is, how can we bring these rust belt cities back. it was a city that was on one of

these great waterways and universities but the great problem they face is this flight of youth and influx of capital. what are some of the possible solutions are we to conglomerate on new york, los angeles, and san francisco? >> you know, i think one of the glories of the united states is that we have lots of different types of cities, right? it's not as if, i believe, everyone should live in a new york city skyscraper and there's a lot to like in buffalo and binghamton and lots to like in those towns. they once existed because of transportation, once existed because the eerie canal had focus in a few large manufacturing industries and have lost their way. their cities are certainly facing enormous challenges. in the -- you know, in the long run, education is the best -- is the best fix for these areas. so middle sized cities that are educated have done much better than middle sized cities that have not. there's no way to predict the rust belt will come back.

as the share of the adult population in that metropolitan area with a college degree increases by 10% wages go up for workers by 8% holding their own education constant. so it's just an enormous value being around skilled people and it's true in the downtown that education was very protective of metropolitan area. there was a strong negative association between metropolitan area unemployment and the skills of that metropolitan area. again, more of a -- more of a connection than you would just predict from the fact that 5% of college graduates are unemployed and 15% of high school dropouts are employed. so education is certainly the central thing. and not investing in infrastructure, right? that's not what they need. thinking in terms of limiting regulations in terms of relatively cheap quality of life investments. in some sense, the best economic development strategy at the urban level is to attract and train smart people and then get out of their way. so you want to be focused on policies that will attract and train smart people and you want to be making sure that you've gotten rid of those things that

gets in the way of private entrepreneurship. and then on top of that you finally and this is related to the chicago question you don't want to be chasing the will and wisp of your population of the 1950 because that's not going to happen and that shouldn't be your objective. just once i want to hear a mayor say my population dropped 150,000 and they were well trained and go on to charlotte, right. just once i want to hear a city mayor focused on the people that are there, their fundamental responsibility rather than chasing some population goal. so, unfortunately, i don't think there's any sort of silver bullet but i do think we can do better than we have. and i think our cities deserve that. >> great, well, thank you very much. [applause] >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books. on c-span's booktv. >> in your book you talk about one of those life-changing moments, you're watching the

justice thomas/anita hill hearing. what happens to andrew breitbart? >> well, i just graduated from college, a place where -- it was like my bar mitzvah. i thought in my bar mitzvah i would learn an education about judaism but i left feeling very empty because i just learned how to chant. and i felt -- i was open for a open experience and i didn't get that. i felt the exact same way in college where i was an american studies major and the stuff that i was reading was incomprehensible. and it was jargon. it was noam chomsky-like in its lack of comprehension to a person who doesn't understand that language. and it was demoralizing. and i graduated less skilled, less motivated and i was a waiter. >> you robbed yourself? >> i did. my education was a lack of an education. and so i was waiting tables right after graduating college,

and i finished my lunch shift and i'd go home. >> and your friends are saying to you, why are you doing this? you're so much better than this. >> it was embarrassing and humiliation. it was the best thing to happen to me in my life. to work and grind and looking up to the people i was trying to impress and i started to pay for my own shoes. >> but your parents cut you off. >> my parents cut me off. it was brutal that is why i dedicated my book to my father who cut me off and clarence thomas at the same time. both of their guidance in my life coincided. >> that's a good segue back to the hearings. >> yeah. well, i went from my wait job and i started watching the hearings, wanting to root for the takedown of clarence thomas. i watched the television set and the television set told me that this was a bad man and the newspapers told me he was a bad man. and i remember eleanor snell and

patricia schroeder walking up the steps, these ladies, we're going to take a stand against this guy for sexual harassment, serial sexual harassment so i watched these hearings like a spectator who wanted to see somebody mauled, you know, like a lions mauling, you know, romans. and i watched the entire thing. i went from wanting him to be taken down to where's the beef. what's going on here? i don't understand what's going on here. i don't understand the color commentary that's on the screen where they're saying, oh, this is outrageous. and i didn't understand the bumper stickers that were going by me on the streets saying, i believe anita. i said i believe anita what? what's going on here? i don't understand what's going on here. everything that i knew, everything that i picked up at college, in my american studies cultural marxist, oppressor oppressed, black people are always right, white people are

always wrong -- i didn't understand how ted kennedy, the ted kennedy of chappaquiddick fame, how howard metsenbaum and joe biden, a series of privileged men and a man from a sharecropper who did everything right including for allowing anita hill to rise through the ranks through the legal prophysician through jobs with him where she never had a sexual relationship with him at all and he did nothing untoward and she was a party to this takedown and i could not figure out how these white people of privilege who were attacking this black man who was in this position while the mainstream media took him down while the naacp and the urban league and other black liberal leaders sat and seemed to relish this takedown. >> who were your mentor -- you had this mentor at the time who

we're going to get to later who's brutally murdered and you didn't know to cry for him or not. and it was along that time that you started questioning the indoctrination. >> the smartest person i ever met was this guy name mike and i was delivering pizza in high school. he was just different. he was alternative and the smartest guy i ever knew. in hindsight he wasn't the most ethical guy. he took s.a.t.'s for a bunch of my friends and got them sonic00s and he dropped out of uc santa barbara and whole i was going to college he was floundering and doing drugs. during the period of time that he was my mentor, he was taking me to alternative bookstores to read about left wing ideas, you know, he very much was into the class struggle. and when i started to have these epiphanies, when i started to get my job -- as i was aspiring

to be an intellect, as i was trying to understand his world view, as i was trying to embrace the struggle, at a certain point my dad said something that nobody told him. you need to get a job. you need to clean up. you need to get your act together. you need to stop doing drugs. and so there was a certain point where i started to challenge ply -- my mentor. it wasn't an intellect and i couldn't beat him at s.a.t. scores. i was still about 400 points below him on that level but i started to gain the self-confidence and the self-respect that i could call him out on his misbehavior. and i just started to move away from this guy and i got a phone call once, as i was starting to move towards independence and away from this victimology that absolutely dominated this guy's consciousness. i got a phone call that he was murdered at a hotel room in los angeles.

and i imagined it was during a drug deal that went bad and to this day i think about how i never cried about that. >> you know, but i was thinking about your parents and about your story of humiliation and how you had to negotiate with the professor to give you higher grades so you could graduate 'cause you realized if you did not graduate it would be humiliation, much more of your life would be lost but then a friend of yours at yale who was very bright called and said andrew breitbart, i've got the perfect job for you. tell us about that. >> he was from home run. he was an astrophysics major who always cared for me. he always knew in prep school that i was not going to be the a student but that i was the class clown but that i meant well, you know, even though -- that was how i skirted my add and in an

eleap prep schooled where everybody was harvard princeton-bound and i knew i wouldn't be going to elite school. seth knew my burden. >> but you would visit him. >> he visited me and he said i need to take you on a walk. i said, no, just sit down. he said i need you to take a walk and you took me for a walk and he said and this was when i was utterly way word and he said i've seen your future. it's this thing called the internet. it works the way your brain works and at that point i had been diagnosed with adult add. and i had tried ritalin for about a month and i hated it. i felt hideous about it. i was trying to figure out how i could conform to the workplace where people have to work in cubicl cubicles. i knew i couldn't do that and i knew i wanted to drive around the car listening to the radio.

>> oh, but you stopped that listening to rush limbaugh. >> i've seen the internet, i've seen the future. and i still to this day think that there's something almost too eery about that because he's right. the internet does work the way my brain works. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> if you would walk down the streets of philadelphia, if you would walk down the streets of new york in the 1850s and asked somebody, well, what is the most pressing problems facing america at this time, they would have told you, it's this sectarian conflict. the fact that the catholics are trying to take over. they're trying to take over america. and there was a rumor that the pope was going to come and establish headquarters in cincinnati. [laughter] >> now, why cincinnati? i have no idea. you would think the pope would have better sense than. that was the rumor and he was going to establish his headquarters at the jewish hospital in cincinnati.

[laughter] >> you get this connection. it's a conspiracy and americans love conspiracies and this was part of the conspiracy. so far nothing about slavery, right? these guys are bent on destroying the roman catholic church. and as one minister said, exterminating roman catholics. so thomas nast a german immigrant came over and he was one of the great political cartoonists of the day in the 1850s, 18 zbhaifkts santa claus. he gave us the democratic donkey and the republican elephant and here he is a cartoon and, of course, people couldn't read in those days but they could, in fact, understand cartoons and here he has a cartoon which shows -- you may think they are crocodiles on shore but they are

from the roman catholic church and they are coming to take our church and in the background is not the white house but st. peter's cathedral. although you can't see it on this -- up here it says, tammany hall. [laughter] >> and tammany hall, of course, is a democratic party organization of new york. and thomas nast was a republican. well, the republican party was the first major evangelical party in america. it was founded in 1854 and it brought together the anti-catholic wing of the party with the antislavery wing. and here's the anti-catholic wing of the party. the american patriot. it was a party newspaper for the american party which eventually folded into the republican party. they are opposed to papal aggression and roman catholicism.

and they are opposed to foreigners holding office, opposed to nunneries and the jesuits. they wanted to restrict immigration but particularly restrict the rights of roman catholics to vote and to hold office. now, the republican party was the offspring of these two strains, the antislavery strain and the anti-catholic strain. when i say "antislavery" keep in mind that the republican party -- most of the people in the republican party did not care about slavery, where it already existed. they wanted to keep the territories white. they wanted to keep the slaves out of the territories. so white men could have opportunity there because they believed that any place slaves go, whites cannot compete,

obviously, because slaves don't take wages. so the republican party bills itself and build itself as the white man's party and here you have abraham lincoln lincoln and he's debating steven douglas in that famous 1858 senatorial campaign. the republican party's slogan that year was vanquish the despotism in going hand-in-hand. now, i should tell new full disclosure that abraham lincoln was not a religious bigot. he hated religious bigotry but he swallowed the republican party line because it was very effective among the republican party base. you know, you've heard in politics, get out the base. get out the base. it was the republican party base. the republican party base were protestant working men in cities and there were protestants