Growing up in a small town can inculcate chauvinism against big cities, which we took as a matter of faith to be dangerous, inconvenient, and impersonal, lacking entirely the sense of community fostered in small towns. That opinion is not uncommon among small-town folk.
Of course, denizens of big cities recognize the folly of such an attitude, and I had to live in one myself before I could see the errors of my ways. But not everyone from the greater Peoria area or any other small community will be able to experience life in a big city. Part of Ed Glaeser’s task in his new book Triumph of the City is to convince these people of the inherent advantages of big city living, and that big city life can be consonant with the values we typically associate with small towns.
The tale of fish-out-of-water conservatives adapting and thriving in a big city has been told before; witness Rod Dreher’s paean to granola conservatism a few years ago (“Birkenstock Burkeans,” National Review Online, July 12, 2002) that drew widespread enmity from the National Review crowd. The derision heaped onto this idea was partly self-afflicted — his implicit assumption that conservatives viewed eating vegetables as radical was taken as a bit condescending by a few of his conservative city brethren and as an insult to small-town living. But the broader point — that conservatives can thrive outside of the small town and suburbia — was valid.
Human capital | Glaeser’s defense of the city is more substantive than that. He focuses on the more tangible rewards to big city life, such as community, health, jobs, and the cities’ disproportionate impact on the economy. As I discovered upon moving to a big city myself, it can be much more difficult living in isolation there than in a smaller town, where the need to travel everywhere by car can minimize encounters with friends and acquaintances. The forced sociability can be a real curse at times, but usually it is a source of comfort for most and one that scientists believe leads to greater happiness and better health. The near-impossibility of living the city life without copious walking is another ancillary health benefit, as well as the peer pressure that comes from being surrounded by the skinny fitness fanatics who eschew fatty foods and who tend to congregate in big cities. (Another benefit of city life is the vast quantities of beautiful people that seem to inhabit it, if you’re into that kind of thing.)
It is this forced sociability that gives cities a marked advantage when it comes to the economy as well, at least in non-dysfunctional cities. Changing jobs in a small town can be difficult since there are usually only a few employers. Making a switch can entail a faraway commute to another town, settling for a job that is a much worse fit, or leaving the community altogether. Of course, the latter is much easier said than done: most jobs are filled by word of mouth, via friends or acquaintances who pass along news of openings via an informal network.
This truism means that life in the big city makes changing jobs much easier to do than in a small town. (I should know, having had six different jobs in the past four years.) The mobility makes it easier for a worker to find a job that is a better fit; it also makes it much easier for an employer to find qualified and motivated workers. The result is that new businesses and capable workers flock to urban environments.
Ultimately, it is the human capital, more than anything else, that gives the edge to big cities as a way of organizing society. Cities that chase away human capital either explicitly (like Coleman Young did in Detroit in the 1970s, a story Glaeser recounts in some detail) or implicitly (via high taxes and poor services) suffer accordingly. The way to recover is by redoubling efforts to change the climate to make the city more attractive to the young, talented, and educated. This is a persuasive argument and Glaeser delivers it without veering too closely to the Richard Florida school of pop-culthood. Boston survived the demise of its industrial base decades ago because of its human capital: Detroit’s economy cratered with the diminution of the auto industry because of its lack of human capital.
Glaeser points out that liberal responses to big city woes that ignore this are doomed to failure. Cities that impose their own income tax almost invariably chase people and businesses out of town and raise much less money than first anticipated. Most of the high cost of real estate in New York City is due to restrictive land use regulations and not the scarcity of land (a policy error shared by Mumbai, incidentally). Investments in big, vaguely utopian projects (such as the Detroit People Mover downtown rail system) invariably fail to do anything for the economy.
City conservative | While people praising the virtues of urban life do not typically fall under the conservative label, Glaeser’s message on the virtues of cities and how they can be improved is fundamentally a conservative — and worthwhile — one: Cities need to focus first and foremost on making livable communities, and the people, jobs, and economic growth will follow. While he is at it, Glaeser reminds us in a plethora of ways that subsidizing businesses to relocate to the city or remain there, embarking on grandiose projects, or paying munificent salaries for government workers are ultimately counterproductive.
Improving schools, reducing crime, and making real estate less expensive is the formula for a prosperous city — and one that might actually attract a few conservatives as well.