Cities are humanity's greatest invention—not in spite of their density, but because of it. In this bonus episode of the Liberalism.org Show, Jason Canon sits down with Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City and Survival of the City, to make the case for urban life and to ask why America has stopped building. They discuss how the New York of the 1970s shaped Glaeser's lifelong fascination with cities, why urban poverty is a sign of opportunity rather than failure, how prosperous suburban homeowners turned the Sun Belt's growth machines into engines of stasis, and what the YIMBY movement and comparisons to housing policy in Japan and the UK reveal about the tension between local control and the freedom to build.

Further Reading

• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier — Edward Glaeser, Penguin Press

• Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation — Edward Glaeser and David Cutler, Penguin Press

• "Why Is There More Crime in Cities?" — Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, Journal of Political Economy (1999)

• Augustine of Hippo: A Biography — Peter Brown, University of California Press (1967)

More from Liberalism.org

• Liberalism: A Future Worth Wanting — Emily Chamlee-Wright