Best 6 quotes of Edward Glaeser on MyQuotes

It's hard not to empathize with the mayor's anger, given the injustices he'd suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.

One classic paper compared the effects of right-to-work laws on factory jobs in neighboring counties, on either side of a right-to-work border. It found that manufacturing grew 23.1% faster between 1947 and 1992 on the anti-union side of the divide.

One of the great ironies is that the impact of the flattening world has not been to empower decentralized rural land, but to strengthen the cities in China and India and elsewhere that are gateways between those countries and the West. It's deeply wise for the Chinese to be pro-urban in terms of development. They're creating space for ideas and human capital to be developed.

There's a reason Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix are our four fastest-growing areas. They offer an astonishingly high standard of living for ordinary Americans. New York City is a great place to be really rich and not a terrible place to be really poor, but it's a pretty hard place to live on $60,000 a year. You don't experience anywhere near the basic standard of living you would in Houston on the same income.

The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilisation's success and the primary reason why cities existwe must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth.