Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
The authors, two Harvard University economists, begin by noting that cities have life cycles - some fade away and all change over time. Historically, deindustrialization, shifting demographics, and rising crime rates affect urban spaces. Over the past few years, COVID-19 caused the rapid deurbanization of our world, at least temporarily. Recently, soaring housing prices, battles over gentrification, and increasing racial tensions due to high-profile police incidents have affected cities negatively.
One of the central points of the book is that regulations that limit housing construction and keep property values high are good for rich people but not good for the rest of the world. Another is that one of the good things that came out of the pandemic was that we learned that people crave close human contact. Zoom and Facetime don’t quite make up for actually being there. Cities help you be with other people.
The authors bring different perspectives to the work. Glaeser is a traditional East Coast Republican, a vanishing species. Cutler served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Because of density and diversity, cities need to be governed more than rural areas, something that explains our partisan divide today. Government is in a position to help deal with the challenges of urban areas, but without effective leaders who have the trust of the people, not much can happen. Historically, mayors have been less partisan than other elected executives because cleaning streets and picking up trash are non-ideological tasks that just must be done.
Cities have always been unequal places with a wide gap between the rich and the rest of us. However, people flock to urban areas because they see opportunities for them that they would not have in other locales. For too long, mayors have relied on high taxes paid by the few to provide benefits for the many. A better approach would be to have cities be real engines of growth and opportunity for all, again something that requires enlightened, smart governance.Regulations need to change to help convert office space to residences and speed up the commercial permitting processes.
Cities have been hotbeds for disease. Athens and Sparta fought the Peloponnesian War in the fourth century BCE. Plague came to Athens, a dense city that was a commercial center that brought in goods and germs from all over the world. Disease killed 25% of the population. Sparta was rural, with little contact with outsiders and few dense areas to spread a deadly virus. Because their people did not get sick, Sparta defeated the disease-weakened Athenians.
As was the case with COVID, isolation and quarantine were two effective responses, but Athens didn’t completely close its borders so people got sick. Today, very few national governments could enforce effective isolation from people carrying the virus. The Black Plague and many other outbreaks over the years periodically decimated cities all over the world, although most made strong comebacks. COVID has hollowed out cities. The authors compare the empty streets of Constantinople in the sixth century in the ravages of the Black Plague to COVID-ridden New York City in 2020. Throughout history, people left dense cities for the country to isolate and avoid disease. People are returning, but it will take time for downtowns to regain the same density and vibrancy they are known for.
Plagues are not equal-opportunity disasters. While most professionals could work from home in 2020, only 13% of people with a high school degree or less could call it in. That simple fact may explain why the pandemic disproportionately infected low-income earners and people of color who are more likely to have less education than the rest of the population.
One good thing about plagues is that eventually scientists figured out what contributed to high infection rates: unsanitary conditions and dirty water. Over time, cities developed clean water delivery systems and public health agencies to deal with the outbreak of disease.
The authors argue that we need a NATO-type world body to deal with future health problems. The existing World Health Organization (WHO) is too weak and too political to be effective. Once the pandemic hit, many nations closed their borders, but it was far too late to do any good. An effective, respected international public health monitor could have given advance warning that would have enabled countries to close borders earlier and reduce infection. This organization must be established and supported by a formal treaty process so that there is genuine buy-in by countries.
WHO has no stable funding so it hustles for money, which often comes from China. That explains why WHO let China off the hook during the early days of COVID. WHO sees itself as a political as well as a technical organization, so it will pay attention to which country pays most of the freight. The authors’ proposed multinational health agency must be scientifically grounded and just report the facts. It also must have enough credibility and broad support to do serious investigations about disease outbreaks. NATO, which has been very effective in responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is the model. NATO is paid for by its members who benefit from its services, a good approach.
Pandemics affect the entire world. This is not true of wars. Even WWII was not much of a factor in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The omnipresence of infection is why the book proposes that affluent countries help poorer countries improve their capacity to respond to health crises. The book goes into extensive detail about how various diseases spread among undeveloped countries because of a lack of sanitation and clean water. Cholera especially is spread through bad water. The colonial British military troops in India in the 19th century suffered high rates of disease until they moved away from the polluted rivers near urban areas to more rural bivouacs with clean streams. Today, helping developing nations build sewer and water systems would go a long way towards limiting the spread of disease.
In the United States, New York City led the way to developing effective water and sewer infrastructure. Yellow Fever struck the city in 1822 and 1823. Five times more people died per capita then than now with COVID. New York’s first mayor, Stephen Allen, was committed to getting clean water into his city. He began a long process setting up a private company to help build water lines from upstate to bring water to the city. Eventually the public sector became involved. Mayor Allen intuitively sensed that bad water contributed to high infection rates. In 1837, long after the mayor had left office, construction of a massive aqueduct began. Five years later, clean water flowed into the city. Other cities and towns followed New York City’s lead. Subsequent contemporary research showed that child mortality dropped by over half in cities with clean water.
Improvements in sewage soon followed. In Britain, constructing waste facilities was a national task. In the USA, it fell to local governments. Both approaches worked. In New York City, even after sewer systems were built, many tenants had no toilets. The local political gang, Tammany Hall, took bribes from landlords so that they would not have to provide sanitation. Dr. Stephen Smith was very interested in public health. He founded the American Public Health Association. Dr. Smith organized resources to fight Tammany Hall. He eventually convinced the New York Assembly (legislature) to pass laws that made landlords have to provide sanitation to tenants. He also helped create the National Board of Health which broadened its reach to convince states to pass laws to clean up filthy streets which were essentially latrines for horses. Over time, fines were put in place that convinced business owners to clean up their areas and also prodded cities to provide public works money to clean the streets. All of these changes greatly improved the health of the population.
As the COVID pandemic went on, scientists realized that the virus was much more dangerous to people who had pre-existing medical issues. Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital noted that hospitalized patients were younger than they expected and obese. In Massachusetts, 98% of those who died in 2020 had pre-existing conditions. The authors connect socioeconomic class to infection rate and deaths. While urban areas had higher infection rates, rich people who lived on Park Avenue were healthy, wealthy, and wise enough not to put themselves in a position to catch COVID. Very few of them got sick. Poorer New Yorkers were much more likely than the affluent to become infected, be hospitalized and. This scenario played out all over the nation.
oor people tend to be less healthy, less educated, and less able to access medical care and learn about how to take care of their medical needs. The authors cite the fact that 26% of third-class passengers on the Titanic survived compared to 62% of first-class fares. The modern city is much like the Titanic in terms of danger to the poor.
The book cites voluminous statistics that show that income and education level, which are closely related, predict average life expectancy, general health, and access to medical care. People who live in Utah are the healthiest in the nation. They also are more likely to be Mormons, who don’t smoke or drink or get fat. Folks who live in Mississippi are on the other end of the health and life expectancy scale.
Even in NYC, life expectancy varies widely by neighborhood. On the Upper East side of Manhattan, people live to be 87 years old on average. In Brownsville in Brooklyn, 12 miles south and east, people die at 76 years old on average. People in Brownsville are much more likely to smoke, be obese, and suffer from more serious diseases than the rich folk. Poor people in Mumbai, India, got COVID at a high rate but relatively few died. Many scientists believe that the death rate was so low because the people were thin – they did not have enough to eat. Obesity increases the COVID death rate. Starvation decreases it.
Obesity is a burgeoning problem all over the world because we have become much more sedentary over the decades. Most people today do not do physical labor at work. Few people walk to work or to make purchases. We stay off our feet and we gain weight. In the US, we also drink and eat a lot more than we did 50 years ago. The average calorie intake increased over 20% over that period, even as physical activity was decreasing. That is a recipe for expanding waistlines. Much of our increased food intake can be traced to the fact that the cost of tasty, processed, not-good-for-you food has dropped over the decades so that now we can buy more junk food than we could before. The same phenomenon can be seen in Britain and other English-speaking countries which have much less food regulation than most countries. It’s harder to market junk food in Germany or France than it is in our country.
The book gives a history of drug use in cities, which, because of density and the ability of dealers to stay in the background, are easy places to dispense illegal narcotics. Addiction and the violent crime that goes with turf fights by drug dealers harm city dwellers and lead to poor health and death. Interestingly, opioids, which were initially marketed in urban areas, now are the scourge of rural America, but a lot of city folk still have drug problems compounded by the rise of cheap fentanyl as a drug component.
The authors fault the federal government for going easy on companies that hurt the public health – Purdue Pharma, the tobacco giants, and even junk food manufacturers. These companies have powerful lobbies to influence legislation and regulation and no executives ever pay the price for the harm they do to the public. The book provides no answers about how to make elected officials more vigilant about bad private sector actors. Glaeser and Cutler suggest that the best way to improve the health and awareness of the public about what is bad for them is education. If people understand the risks they are taking by eating poorly, smoking, and taking recreational drugs, they are more likely to embrace a better lifestyle. That sounds good but I’m not sure how to actually do it.
The authors observe that the US prioritized building a private health insurance system over creating a public health system. If you have good insurance, you have access to superb medical care. If you don’t, not so much. Our COVID death rate was about twice that of other developed nations, despite the fact that we spend more on healthcare per capita than most countries.
The book faults the Trump administration for not taking the pandemic seriously and presenting their response in terms of what would provide political advantage, but the authors also criticize the country’s medical industry’s response.
In the US, healthcare companies and doctors get paid a lot more money for doing extraordinary health interventions - heart valve replacement - than they do for providing preventive care. President Lyndon Johnson tried to get a single-payer health care system in place but it never happened. He did get Medicaid and Medicare enacted, but they are much more limited in coverage than what he wanted to do.
Since the 1960s, the percentage of national income spent on health has risen sharply. We spend more than other countries but by most measures our health care is worse. Complex rules and regulations, and the fact that there are hundreds of health insurance plans create a paperwork nightmare that sharply increases costs not directly related to providing care. Our prescription drug costs are about the highest in the world.
The pandemic revealed the flaws in our public health system. The government was really slow to provide adequate testing, the cornerstone of beating the virus, even as it blocked private sector companies from helping. We all recall the continuing shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) - masks and such - that lasted months. President Trump gets a lot of blame for his casual response to the crisis, but the federal health care system itself is a mess. The CDC and other federal and state health agencies have seen their budgets reduced over time, even as the need for them increased.
COVID did open up our healthcare system. The government essentially adopted a single-payer system by providing free testing and vaccinations. Telemedicine has been proposed for years, but it took the virus to make it happen. The devastation of lower income people caused by the virus showed that we have both a wealth gap and a health gap in the US.
The authors point to countries like Singapore and New Zealand as examples of getting it right. They quickly closed the borders and isolated infected people. They employed rigorous contact tracing. They used solid science to guide actions, and they had enough testing capacity so that the science could work. By the end of 2020, far fewer people had died of the disease in New Zealand than were killed at the Holyoke Soldiers Home in Massachusetts.
Pandemics can be good for the long-term economy. In the 1348-49 pandemic, the population of Europe was reduced by 46%. That is a horrendous human tragedy. The people who survived, however, were in a much better position to demand higher wages, more freedom, and better working conditions since the labor force had been decimated. Land-owning barons had to give in to the workers’ demands or go out of business. The plague also opened up work opportunities for women who historically had been excluded from the workforce. When almost half of the population suddenly dies, you have to rethink traditional gender roles. Today’s pandemic has emboldened labor to organize for higher wages and better treatment. That’s not going away.
The pandemic of 1918, despite being much deadlier, did relatively little damage to the American economy. Back then, many people were in farming and worked in other small businesses that did not produce crowded working conditions that could spread disease. It was hard for people to get from place to place so it was harder for infected people to travel and infect other people. Governments did not lock down business so most stayed open. Back then, there were very few service workers who were in face-to-face contact with people for many hours a day. By 2020, 20% of the population provided services and were routinely in close contact with other people which increased the infection rate and incentivized baristas, office, and retail workers to stay home, which hurt economic activity.
As of April, 2020, half of the nation’s retailers had closed. Over 50% of restaurants were shuttered. Many of these businesses either took a long time to reopen or closed permanently. This reduced commercial activity really hit low-income, non-college educated people hard. Their jobs were gone. Federal stimulus money helped people get by, but if your job is permanently gone, you have a problem.
The book cites Florida as both a failure and a success. The government opened up businesses very quickly so the economy stayed strong. COVID rates went up, but many would argue that you can’t get rid of the disease so don’t kill the economy while you're waiting for the pandemic to end.
The authors urge policy makers to use the cratering of many businesses and the need to start new ones as a launching pad to reform regulations and permitting processes that are often stumbling blocks to entrepreneurs.
The book is optimistic about the future of cities. People are natural socializers and much good thinking gets done in live group settings. Hybrid work is here forever but that personal touch will keep people commuting into cities.
There is a discussion about how cities ebb and flow based on technology and innovation. The creation of the subway and the elevator spurred the rapid growth of big cities. Elevators enable skyscrapers which greatly increase the number of people who can work, and the rapid transit brings people in and out of the city at a reasonable cost. As automobiles became affordable, people could move to the suburbs, buy a house, and drive to work. This really accelerated after WWII when the government subsidized home mortgage loans for veterans. The interstate highway system made it possible to live farther away from work and still get there on time. Schools in the suburbs were much better than those in the cities, a big reason to relocate. This led to the growth of neighboring towns. Recently cities have become cool again as many young, high-income professionals are drawn to the excitement of urban life. COVID has led to at least a short-term movement away from cities by many people. Given how well the hybrid office works, it is unlikely that all will return to the urban office five days a week.
The book discusses Future Shock and The Third Wave, which were written by futurist Alan Toffler in the 1970s. He correctly predicted that computers would radically change our world. He also wrote that politics would evolve to become more civil and productive. That one he missed. Toffler’s writing focused on the future of cities. He thought that there would be a steady movement away from cities because telecommuting - working from home - would become more prevalent. He got that sort of right. Even before the pandemic, about 20% of work was done remotely but cities thrived. COVID clearly will keep people at home for some period of time, but Glaeser and Cutler are confident that cities will make a comeback.
The authors note that the pandemic changed how academics work together on papers. Zoom meetings replaced real ones so the work was done, but most people missed the face-to-face discussions that occurred both formally and informally. These often changed the course of a research project and improved the final product.
In May of 2020, 50 million people were working from home due to COVID. Another 50 million people lost their jobs. By the end of the year, about two-thirds of remote workers returned to the office at least for a few days a week. Many of the people who became unemployed because of the virus - usually low-income service workers - did not get their jobs back.
As a rule, highly-paid professionals didn’t lose their jobs or any pay. Author Glaeser didn’t go into his Harvard office at all between March of 2020 and the end of the year. Cutler went in once to pick up mail. Neither one missed a paycheck. Their point is that the rich protected themselves from the disease by telecommuting. Lower-paid people either lost their jobs or continued to work in high-risk environments like grocery stores and nursing homes.
Several studies by think tanks indicate that there are advantages for employees and the employer to actually have people work in an office. Productivity is higher and people who show up are more likely to get promoted. The research found that formal and Informal face-to-face communications between workers is important to improving the efficiency of the operation and keeping folks engaged and happy at their jobs.
While the authors see cities as surviving COVID, they are worried about other threats to the urban communities. The rising costs of housing and the rigid regulations that are barriers to building affordable housing can make cities the playgrounds for the wealthy. Consistently ineffective public schools that are resistant to real reform send parents to the suburbs. Overly aggressive police and rising crime rates in some neighborhoods drive people out.
The history of Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood is a cautionary tale. In the late 1800’s, a successful businessman created a neighborhood designed to attract diverse residents including Chinese, Mexican Americans and Jews, who were often discriminated against in housing. For decades the area flourished because it had affordable housing and bus lines brought people into the city for work. In the late 1940’s, things began to change as the federal government and the state decided to run highways through Boyle Heights. Besides displacing many people as their homes were destroyed to build roads, the traffic generated by the highways sharply increased pollution, asthma, and poor health. Housing values dropped sharply. The neighborhood that was once a model of affordable housing for all started to erode. The middle-class people who had lived there for decades left. As the housing stock declined, the neighborhood became less diverse and poorer. Crime rates rose. Low-income Latinos and Hispanics, who had little political clout, moved in as the city continued to ignore the problems of the neighborhood.
In the 1960’s, two men began to work to save Boyle Heights. Dr. Julian Nava was a Harvard-educated member of the Los Angeles School Board. Sal Castro was a high school teacher who inspired the HBO film Walkout, which was about the movement that led to thousands of Los Angeles public school students marching out of their schools to demand bilingual education, better facilities and other reforms.
Nava was an activist who worked with labor organizer Cesar Chavez on community issues. He was elected to the school board in 1967. He became aware of Sal Castro’s work encouraging students to protest poor conditions in the schools. This activity led the police to arrest Castro on trumped-up charges of conspiracy to disrupt schools. Although the charges were eventually dropped, Castro served five days in jail. He did get his job back.
The student walkout did not immediately change anything but it did inspire Mexican Americans to organize to improve their lives. Because of the protests, many elected officials became aware of problems in the schools and the community. The Brown Berets, a community improvement organization, was formed in the late 1960s. Over time, they worked with elected officials to bring solid improvements to Boyle Heights. For the next thirty years, the neighborhood thrived as a Mexican American success story, with much higher average incomes than the typical Hispanic in the city.
Around the turn of this century, Los Angeles enacted regulations, such as minimum lot sizes and height restrictions, that made it very difficult to build affordable housing. Coincident with a reduction in new housing development, in 2009 the city opened the Gold Line, a direct, traffic-free connection to downtown, which accelerated gentrification of Boyle Heights and the displacement of its traditional population. Many locals protested the newcomers, sometimes violently.
While housing costs have risen sharply all over the country recently, California led the way years before. Housing is really expensive and people with even relatively high incomes can’t afford to live there. Low-income people are really priced out. Boyle Heights is a prime example of what happens when only high-income people can afford to live in once-affordable neighborhoods.
The authors use the tale of Boyle Heights as an example of how over-regulation limits housing construction which in turn leads to the displacement of working-class people from their neighborhoods. When a city residence is only affordable to rich people, the diversity that is the essence of a city goes away. They argue that since we have exhausted the American frontier, there is little available land to develop. One way to promote balanced, diverse growth is to make it much easier to build dense housing in cities. This would include repurposing skyscrapers that may become underutilized as millions of people continue to work from home. This vacant space can be turned into affordable apartments.
Historically one way to improve your situation was to move to a place with greater opportunity for satisfying work. My father moved often, each time getting a better job. He ended up as vice president of a major manufacturing company despite not having a college degree. I went to six different schools in four different states, including three high schools in three states. That probably explains a lot of my personality.
In the 1950s and 1960s, many families moved all over the country to better themselves. That has changed. Between 1970 and 2010, the rate of interstate migration fell by a third. Today, many people just can’t afford to move so their employment opportunities are limited to the local job market. That has helped create long-term joblessness for many. People in the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and Delta Mississippi are stuck in areas with poor employment prospects.
Glaeser and Cutler devote a chapter to the impact of poor schools and sometimes-brutal policing as threats to urban vitality. George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis was the most high-profile death at the hands of police in recent history, but each year hundreds of Blacks are killed by cops. Some of these are justified ¬– the police were getting shot at – but about 10% of those who die were unarmed. Many urban residents just don't trust the police, a situation that is a double whammy. Police get little help from the community to solve crimes and the people are exposed to more violence because many perpetrators, who are local residents, are never brought to justice.
Government has tried various things to fight crime. Mandatory sentencing and Three Strikes legislation have sharply increased the number of people in prisons, many of whom are minorities. Bill Clinton enthusiastically pushed the Three Strikes bill. It seemed like a good idea – commit three serious crimes and you get a long prison sentence. The problem is that some relatively minor crimes qualify as serious and trigger the punishment for someone who doesn’t deserve a long prison sentence. The other problem is that research shows that just extending the length of time someone is behind bars does not make society safer. It just costs a lot of money to keep the person incarcerated. Lately, the criminal justice system, particularly in the federal system, is changing a lot of the policies that led to long sentences for nonviolent offenses.
The book highlights the career of Ray Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner in the 1990s. He was a Vietnam War Marine veteran who rose to the rank of Colonel in the reserves. He started out as a beat cop in the 1960s and rose through the ranks. Kelly had a hands-on understanding of police work. He prioritized reducing domestic violence crime, which was a huge problem in the city. He sent officers out to small incidents to try to work with the couple to help them learn how to de-escalate tensions. Kelly also let abusers know that they were being watched. It worked. Domestic violence crime fell precipitously.
Kelly also implemented the stop-and-frisk policy that disproportionately targeted young black men, often for no good reason. A judge ended that practice, and Kelly’s reputation was tarnished. The authors’ point here is that Kelly implemented a lot of practices and training that really reduced crime in the city, even without stop-and-frisk. A capable leader can make a big difference.
Minneapolis, in contrast, had a department that was essentially run by the police union. Any punishment of an officer was very rare. The contract grew from 40 to 128 pages over 25 years, adding many officer protections. Mayors and police chiefs knew that the contract was so protective of officers that they couldn't do much so they didn’t try to rein in rogue cops. George Floyd’s killer had been cited numerous times for improper and brutal behavior. Nothing ever happened to him. Chicago had a similar problem with the contract essentially turning the code of silence about fellow officers' bad behavior into official policy.
The authors make a good case that defunding the police is the last thing we need. Today, police are trained to react to worst-case scenarios. They don’t learn how to de-escalate situations and calm a possible perpetrator down. Smart funding and reinventing police training procedures are the way to a better relationship between city residents and law enforcement.
Glaeser and Cutler cite research that shows that the denser the population of a child’s neighborhood, the more economically disadvantaged that person will be as an adult. Providing quality education is the way to change that harsh reality.
The book examines President Obama’s Race to the Top education improvement program that offered $4.35 billion to state governments to carry out interconnected reforms. The idea was that throwing lots of money at school districts would incentivize them to really change. Something called the Common Core Standards anchored Race to the Top.
Common Core was controversial. Some progressives just don’t want any standards. They see them as racist and unfair. Even people who believe that we need some way to measure progress pushed back against the federal standards. States like Massachusetts that were at the top of educational achievement in the nation, saw Common Core requirements as being less rigorous than the ones already adopted by the Commonwealth. Many states resented what they saw as federal intrusion into their public education systems.
The big problem with Race to the Top was that it assumed that it would be relatively easy to reengineer public education across the land – just give districts lots of money. Reform is really hard. Urban schools have not significantly improved student achievement over the past thirty years Public education is one of the most conservative institutions in the country. Change is not embraced. With Race to the Top, it just took too long for the states to bring about any changes, even relatively modest ones.
Race to the Top has come and gone. Educational achievement did not improve. In math, achievement dropped between 2009 and 2013 after the program had been implemented. COVID disrupted public education, especially for students in many city districts which were closed down for much longer than suburban ones. Many urban students also did not have access to reliable online resources so ZOOM school did not work very well for them. The authors blame teachers’ unions for overdoing it on keeping schools closed. They also blame unions for giving big pay increases to veteran teachers instead of boosting pay for new ones so more qualified people will be attracted to the profession. Urban schools desperately need outstanding teachers. In a real sense, the authors maintain, education is over-regulated as are new business start-ups and developers who want to build affordable housing.
In the last chapter, the authors summarize what they see as important to improving life in this country and the world.
– Glaeser and Cutler want a NATO-type organization for health to help nations prepare for the next pandemic or public health emergency. Such an agency would provide resources to help us navigate through the next pandemic more successfully than we did with COVID. This proposed organization must be science-driven and have impeccable leadership. Countries would pay dues, send representatives to speak for them, and have input into outcomes.
– Domestically, the authors want the federal government to figure out how to shorten the time between when a vaccine is developed and when people can get it easily. We also need to rethink our public health agencies. We did learn some things during this pandemic, but the Centers for Disease Control and the US Department of Health and Human Services need a lot of work to make them more effective.
– The authors want an Apollo program to increase opportunity in America. They're short on details here but much of what they proposed is to invest in children’s health and education. The federal government appropriated trillions of dollars to deal with COVID. Going forward, Glaeser and Cutler want Washington to target money to urban students who need more support to succeed.
– They also see community colleges and vocational training as keys to reducing the gap between rich and poor. These schools are relatively affordable and are the best way to give people the foundation they need to go on to college or get a high-paying job.
Bob’s Take
This book was thought-provoking but it was all over the place as it made its major points. This is probably because much of what is in the book was taken from reports and essays the authors wrote over the past few years so the narrative rambles a bit. Their conclusions:
– Cities are essential and people like them. – Cities are complicated and require more governing than rural and suburban locales do. To govern well, we need good elected officials. Given how partisan and small-minded politics is today, that is a tough challenge.
– Local and state regulations that interfere with building denser housing in cities need to be changed.
– Rich people should not be allowed to keep cities for themselves.
The book makes the obvious case that our nation’s response to the pandemic was botched on many levels: “America’s death toll was large, the economic carnage was enormous, and the public came through the pandemic with far less sense of solidarity than other countries today or the US itself after past crises like WWII.”
Globalization is with us to stay. That’s good for opening up trade opportunities. It’s bad because being interconnected internationally accelerates the spread of deadly disease.
In a nutshell, here is the authors’ message: “Public power must ultimately empower rather than restrict individual autonomy - the freedom to flourish.”
