By Edward Glaeser & David Cutler

Survival of the city

Who are we & why did we write this book?

We are two Harvard economists who have been friends and worked together for about thirty years. We are both suburban parents who generally live lives that are quite exciting to ourselves, but that most people would find fairly dull. We are certainly not cool urban hipsters or cultural warriors, but we do love cities and worry about their future. We started this book in May of 2020, because we felt an urgent need to bring the tools of economics to the debates that were raging about urban life and death during the pandemic.

COVID-19 does not kill everyone who develops it. Indeed, the vast bulk of people live. However, many of those who survive suffer long-term impairments – respiratory disease, cardiac disease, and other complications. We fear the same will be true about cities. Urban life as a whole will outlast COVID, but not every city will. And some that survive might be permanently impaired. We wrote this book because we hope that better policy can limit the damage that COVID does to cities, and to the people who live in them.

While we have written many papers together over the years, on topics as varied as racial segregation, obesity, smoking, and opioids, we come from two different subfields: health economics and urban economics. The core speciality of one of us (Cutler) is the functioning of the health system and the public role in that system. The core speciality of the other (Glaeser) is the economic life of the city and public policies that surround our urban world. We believe that both specialities are vitally needed to make sense of policy making at this juncture.

We also differ in our political past. One of us (Cutler) served in the Clinton White House and on the Obama presidential campaign and has been engaged with Democratic health policy for decades. The other (Glaeser) has been a traditional East Coast Republican, who idolized Alexander Hamilton long before Lin-Manuel Miranda made him a pop icon, and generally worked with city governments of any party from the outside. We have both compromised at some points about policies discussed in this book, and we think that is a good thing. Americans, and the world in general, should remember that policy progress almost invariably involved compromise and that no single person has all the answers.

Compromise is not mediocrity. It is not even moderation. There were compromises between British and American leaders as they launched the greatest amphibious assault of all time on June 6, 1944. Indeed, we are radical in our desire to strengthen the world’s cities. We are just not radical on a conventional left-right spectrum.

We see three elements that must be woven together to protect urban life. First, there must be a shared strength that serves the city, which means more accountable and capable governments and the balancing power of civil society. Second, cities must enable the freedom to flourish. Third, governments, entrepreneurs, and all of us must have the humility to learn.

Download

The City Besieged

The decline of a city is a terrible thing to watch. It might begin with a factory closing. Some of the factory’s workers then cut back on spending at local stores; other workers, those with the most education and opportunities, leave the city altogether. The tax base declines, and the city both raises its taxes and cuts its spending on police, schools, and parks. Crime increases. New businesses stay away. More people leave. Economic trouble begets social trouble, which begets more economic trouble.

Before the 2020 pandemic, 32 million Americans, or twenty percent of the employed labor force, worked in retail trade, leisure, and hospitality. One fifth of America’s leisure and hospitality jobs vanished between November 2019 and November 2020. Between the third quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2020, UK employment in accommodation and food services declined by more than 14 percent, and 22 percent of those who still have jobs in the sector are on some kind of furlough.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 is unlikely to be a one-time event, unless governments take pandemic preparedness far more seriously. As global mobility has grown, actual or potential pandemics have become more common. Between 1900 and 1980, only a few outbreaks threatened all of the United States: the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the Asian flu (1957-58), and the Hong Kong flu (1968). The first of these was terrible, but our memory of it dimmed over time. Since the 1980s, the country has experienced HIV/AIDS (1980s-present), the H1N1 flu (2009), the Zika virus (2015-16), and now SARS-CoV-2 (2020), which we will hereafter refer to as COVID-19, the disease it causes. COVID-19 is itself the third in a series of coronaviruses to jump from bats to humans, following SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Then there are the near misses, like Ebola (2013-16, 2018-20) and the Marburg virus (1998-2000, 2004-05).

Contagious disease is the most obvious threat to urban life in 2020, but it is not the only one. A pandora’s box of urban woes has emerged including overly expensive housing, violent conflict over gentrification, persistently low levels of upward mobility, and outrage over brutal and racially targeted policing and long prison sentences for minor drug crimes. These seemingly disparate problems all stem from a common root: our cities protect insiders and leave outsiders to suffer.

If people decide that cities are too unsafe, either because of disease or crime or declining public services, we will move to a world not of cities, but of enclaves. The rich will live in their own luxurious retreats, keeping their exposure to the poor to a bare minimum. Middle-income people will form their own havens of stolid respectability, and the poor will inhabit what remains. Whatever mixing can be done remotely will. With less connection between rich and poor, economic opportunity will diminish. As the urban tax base declines, disadvantaged areas will have even fewer public services: schools will educate less well; police forces will be smaller, which may lead to more brutality and more crime. As violence increases, crime will particularly terrorize poor, minority neighbourhoods as it has in the past.

America’s national health programs were generally designed to insure the elderly and the poor against medical expenses, not to enhance health most efficiently. America adopted a legislation-heavy solution for health care with Medicare and Medicaid, with little executive public health capacity. That structure explains why the US spends by far the most on medical care of any country in the world, and was among the worst in preventing deaths from COVID-19 during 2020: the mission of America’s public health insurance programs was never modified to protect public health or prevent contagion.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the calls to “defund the police” have become loud. Yet a poorer police department will provide neither more safety nor more respect for the community. The answer is not defunding but defining the mission of the police to include both crime reduction and upholding civil rights. A young woman of colour has a right to walk safely home from school that is just as precious as the right of a young man to be free from police harassment. The girl will not be safe if the police are defunded, but the boy will not be safe unless the police are reformed.

It is not that individuals are bad – though of course some are – but that the system is not working. Too many cities have coasted on the prosperity of the privileged rather than on empowering the upward mobility of the less fortunate. That empowerment needs better education and fewer barriers to entrepreneurship, especially among the poor.

Download

Will Globalization Lead To Permanent Pandemic?

Download

Only 13 percent of Americans with a high school degree or less were able to work remotely during May of 2020.

The world is going to need a new form of global health alliance. The intentional body most responsible for monitoring the spread of epidemics, the World Health Organization (WHO), is unfortunately not up to the task. The WHO was formed in 1948 as a part of the United Nations. By and large, the WHO is staffed by health professionals. Over the years, it has done enormous good. It led the fight to eradicate smallpox and has pushed vaccinations for children. It is currently pushing to improve access to quality health care throughout the world. But the WHO is poorly equipped to deal with disease outbreaks.

Several factors inhibit the WHO’s ability to stop pandemics. Fighting illnesses needs to be a technical issue, not a political one. Scientists need to judge the virulence of new diseases, calculate their likely spread, and convey relevant knowledge. The WHO sees itself as being partly a technical agency but also a political body, where major world health issues are discussed and debated. Politics and science rarely mix well.

The WHO also lacks the power to investigate

Membership in the WHO is open to every member of the United Nations (UN) that accepts the WHO constitution, and consequently, the WHO has the same unwieldy structure as the United Nations General Assembly. Like the UK, the WHO has real little power. The scale of pandemic threat facing the world requires a more muscular global partnership that looks more like NATO than the UN.

The World Health Organization is woefully underfunded, and is continually scrambling for cash. The WHO budget is roughly $2.5 billion per year, which must cover pandemics and every other health condition in the world. A single big hospital in the United States will have a budget that is bigger. As a result, money spent on pandemic preparedness quite literally gets taken from the immunization campaigns.

The World Health Organization has a decision-making process that is not designed for rapid action. The governing board of the WHO has thirty-four members, drawn from size areas of the globe. Major operational decisions are made by the World Health Assembly, which represents all member states. Consensus bodies often work off a “lower common denominator”; the UN system is a prime example.

Can Indian Sewers Make India Healthier?

A pandemic like COVID-19 threatens every person on the planet. The danger of disease spreading around the globe reminds us that we are all connected. If I nothing else, then at least in our ability to make each other ill.

Private water companies can also work, but they need to be regulated. A private provider will cut costs, but they will also cut corners if services aren’t watched by citizens or governments.

Providing clean water to the poor is not a naturally lucrative task, which is why the Manhattan Company spent more time banking than building water pipes.

It may seem obvious that when the public sector is weak, the private sector should step in, but that conclusion is often wrong. Consider a public regulator that is setting the fees that a private water company can charge its customers. If the public sector is strong, then the system may work. If the public sector is modestly weak, then the private company will skimp on quality and convince the government to let it raise its rates. If the public sector is utterly inept, then it will end up subsidizing the private company with massive tax dollars and the taps will still be dry.

When it comes to water systems in the developing world or anywhere else, neither public nor private is inherently better. The right answer is a ruthless pragmatism that chooses the appropriate institution based on local conditions. In some cases, cost efficiency is particularly important, and private companies have the edge. In other cases, the critical task is to provide water to the neediest, and a public entity is more likely to serve that end.

The Spanish flu did not originate in Spain. The flu is associated with Spain only because the Spanish were more forthcoming about the extent of the problem.

Clean water is the most basic job of urban government. It is tempting to say that the cities of the developing world are ultimately responsible for their own water supply. Yet the multitrillion-dollar cost of the COVID-19 pandemic to the wealthy world means that wealthy nations cannot look the other way. Rather, we all have to contribute to the prevention of future waterborne plagues. Fortunately, we have successful examples. The rich world had the same problems over a century ago and finally solved them. Our challenge today is to replicate that around the globe.

Preventing pandemic disease requires action at the international level, at the city level, and at the individual level.

Download

Can Our Bodies Be More Pandemic Proof?

Download

The great challenge in reducing health disparities is that death reflects not just access to medical care, which can be altered by policy, but behaviours such as smoking, obesity, and use of illegal drugs. None but the most dictatorial governments can tell people what snacks they can and cannot consume.

In the United Kingdom, people in London live on average more than five years longer than people in Glasgow.

Health insurance is universal in both London and Glasgow, and the social safety net is generally string, certainly stronger than in the US, but London is richer and better educated.

In the Camden borough of London, life expectancy for women is eighty-seven years go age. Go sixteen miles east, to Barking and Dagenham, and life expectancy is five years lower.

And the rich spread disease to the poor as well. COVID-19 was carried across continents by the rich, who then seeded the disease to lower-income areas. Cross-city travel is far more common among the wealthy than among the poor. As the disease spread, the rich then cloistered themselves, but the poor continued to move around, if they were lucky enough to still have a job. As they moved, they continued to get sick.

One quarter of adults in New York City are obese, but more than half of those hospitalized for COVID-19 in March 2020 were in that category. Among those aged forty-nine or younger, 60 percent were obese. The biology of obese people makes COVID-19 far more serious: their higher levels of ACE2 allow entry of the virus into cells, they have reduced lung volume as the diaphragm is pushed into the lungs, their blood is more likely to clot, they have fewer and less effective immune cells, and so on. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that individuals are at highest risk of severe COVID-19 illness if they have any of a series of risk factors, including cancer, chronic kidney disease, respiratory difficulty, serious heart disease, diabetes, immunocompromised state, and obesity. In addition to the direct effect, obesity is a risk factor for many of these other conditions.

Just as high levels of obesity have made COVID-19 deadlier in rich world cities, low levels of obesity may have protected the world’s poorest urban places. More than 50 percent of the residents of Mumbai’s slums appear to have developed COVID-19 antibodies by July 2020, yet the death rates were quite low in Mumbai, and across India as a whole. One possible reason is that the residents of India’s slums are too poor to be overweight.

The rise in American obesity since the 1960s appears to be almost entirely about eating and drinking more.

Between 1970 and 2000, weights rose nearly ten pounds per person, while the total food supply in the US increased from 3,300 calories per day to 4,000 calories per day. Correcting for calories lost due to food waste, calories consumed grew from 2,054 calories per day to 2,560 calories per day. An extra 500 calories per day per person means that we’ve increased our food consumption by one fifth over thirty years. According to the food diary data, daily caloric intake increased by 268 calories for men and 143 calories for women. This alone can explain the ten-pound weight increase.

More than three quarters of the calories in purchased foods in the United States comes from moderately or highly processed foods. This includes frozen French fries and desserts, canned foods, breads and cereals, premade meals, candy, and soda. In the 1950s, processed foods were rare. Today, they are ubiquitous.

Opioid manufacturers claim that they do not bear responsibility for deaths from heroin and illegal fentanyl since they do not produce those products. But for many users, it was the legal drugs that led people to become addicted and ultimately to transition into illegal drug use.

One possible reform is to increase the damage payments so that they exceed the profits made from misconduct. At the individual level, the possibility of jail time for corporate leaders might have an even larger impact. If a drug dealer can be sentenced to jail for illegally selling OxyContin on the street, then perhaps a pharmaceutical CEO ought to be jailed for illegally promoting the same drug.

During a pandemic, a city, even a country, is only as healthy as its sickest group. A global plague reminds us that addressing health behaviours is as much a matter of civic need as it is of personal compassion.

Why Did So Much Health- Care Spending Produce So Little Health?

Download

Over 350,000 Americans died from COVID-19 in 2020. Adjusted for the higher US population, this death rate was more than double that of Germany or Canada, even though Germany spreads one third less than the US on medical care and Canada spends half as much. The US death rate was thirty-three times higher than the rate in Japan and fifty times higher than the rate in South Korea. Singapore and Taiwan collectively lost fewer than 40 people to COVID-19 in 2020; the city of Lubbock, Texas, with one-hundredth the population of those two countries, had ten times more deaths. And Asian cities were disadvantaged relative to US cities because they are much closer to China and thus more likely to have received infected visitors before the risk became apparent.

America’s health-care system shows what happens when there is a decentralized health system that is incredibly well endowed but has mis-identified objectives and little, if any, empowered leadership. Much of the blame for America’s poor performance during the pandemic has focused on President Trump and his administration. This is appropriate. The Trump administration broke every rule of crisis management during the COVID-19 outbreak. But that story is also incomplete. Personalizing the problem exonerates the broader health system of responsibility for the failure. In reality, the health system failed as well.

America’s health-care system focuses on private medical care, not public health. It worries about diseases that affect individual people, not the potential for an epidemic that envelops us all.

The system focuses on caring for the sick rather than promoting health. It encourages treatment of acute illness rather than prevention and spends vastly more on chronic than communicable diseases.

America is tolerant of enormous disparities in health care, as in everything else. While millions of Americans have superb medical insurance and live lifestyles that are as healthy as any German or Swiss, other Americans remain without any medical plan.

The US ranks last in life expectancy and last in infant mortality among the eleven wealthiest countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The US spends $11,000 per person on medical care. The next highest-spending country, Switzerland, spends under $8,000. The UK is under $5,000.

The US spends roughly $20,000 more per family on health care than do residents of other countries.

Warren Buffett has called health care a “tapeworm on the economic system.” The worm gets bigger by the yea through Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government spends enormous amounts of money on medical treatment yet has very little control over the system. The largest single budgetary agency in the US government is the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs those two programs. The budget for CMS is nearly $1 trillion annually. This budget is administered by a mere 6,000 people, which means that the average employee is overseeing $167 million of public spending. By contrast, the US military spends less money ($732 billion in 2019) and employs 1.3 million people. The federal commitment in health care is almost entirely to pay the bills, while the funding of the military reflects robust executive power.

The Jeffersonian model of a safety net meant that the government was there to pay, not to decide on appropriate health care. Medicare and Medicaid are open-ended entitlements, with a commitment to cover any “medically necessary or appropriate” therapy. These programs built on the existing private system of paying more for intensive, generally curative care. This safety net did not expand the federal government’s remit into protecting the nation’s health, nor did it empower the federal government to select investments that yielded the biggest health benefits per dollar. The flaws in the design have only become more obvious over time, and yet the political power of well-organised senior citizens alongside America’s overall political malaise have made Medicare weak, expensive, and seemingly impossible to touch.

Where does the US spend all its health-care money? One out of every four dollars in the US medical system goes to administration, which costs twice as much as cardiovascular disease and three times as much as cancer.

A vial of insulin costs ten times more in the US than in Canada. Some Americans die because they choose to limit insulin when they cannot afford it. Pharmaceutical companies charge more in the US than in other countries because they can.

In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) sets a limit on what it will pay for each new drug, which is again not very Jeffersonian; pharmaceutical companies must price below that level or they cannot sell. Since most drugs cost very little to produce once they have been developed, companies can make a profit even with a low price per user. In contrast, the US has no central negotiator.

The greatest failure of the US health system during the COVID-19 debacle was the death of tens of thousands in nursing homes.

Across the US, nearly four-tenths of deaths from COVID-19 occurred among people living in nursing homes. In Massachusetts, the share is higher. COVID-19 struck both poorly rated nursing homes and homes with high ratings. Preventative care for the frail is just not a focus of a medical care system oriented toward paying for intensive care for the acutely ill.

Apart from the unusual event of a criminal investigation, there is practically no accountability for nursing home operators. We designed a health insurance system to protect the elderly from acute hospital bills, but not to care for them when they suffer from long-term frailty.

Only a fool waits until the storm is brewing to repair a leaky roof.

Do Robots Spread Disease?

The influenza recession was so mild because the nature of work was so different in 1918 from what it is today. In 1910, 31 percent of Americans worked on farms and 38 percent were manual laborers. In 2015, farmers made up less than 1 percent of America’s workforce, and the share of manual laborers had dropped to 20 percent. In 1910, 44 percent of America’s nonagricultural employees were in manufacturing, transportation, and public utilities.

In 1910, only 14 percent of America’s non-farmers worked in service occupations outside the home, while 14.5 percent of workers not on farms were in “domestic service” or “personal service.” Those categories, which included vast numbers of live-in maids, have essentially disappeared. To be sure, many wealthy families have nannies or au pairs, but the number of such workers is relatively limited. Prosperous Americans are still paying other people to cook their food and iron their shirts, but these tasks are done by a professional outside the home, not by live-in servants.

The total number of Americans providing services rose from 24 million in 1944 to 131 million at the start of 2020. Eighty-six percent of American workers are service providers; the figures for the United Kingdom are comparable. Between 1945 and 2004, the number of Americans working in retail trade as salespeople, cashiers, and stockers rose from 3.5 million to 15.8 million. Over the same period, the number of workers in leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants and hotels, rose from under 2.2 million to over 12 million.

While retail trade employment stagnated between 2004 and 2020, leisure and hospitality continued to expand. On the eve of COVID-19, that sector employed 16.9 million workers. At the start of 2020, as many Americans worked in restaurants (12.3 million) as in factories (12.8 million).

If we group retail trade, hospitality, and leisure together, perhaps calling it the face-to-face service economy, it grew from under 5 million workers in 1939 to over 32 million workers in 2020. Before COVID-19, it employed one fifth of the American labor force. Whereas Americans without a college degree in 1953 could make good money working on an assembly line, by 2020 the face-to-face service economy was a better bet for someone who didn’t want to sit through more algebra.

Construction employment has remained relatively stable despite the economic chaos that has accompanied COVID-19. In July 2019, 7.75 million Americans worked in the building trades. A year later, the sector had 7.42 million workers, a drop of only 4.3 percent. Similarly, the number of workers in warehousing and storage has been rock steady, moving down only from 1.181 million to 1.178 million.

Over the past thirty years, the number of Americans working in restaurants has almost doubled, from 6.5 million in 1990 to 12.3 million in February 2020. The number of bartenders increased by almost 50 percent between 2010 and 2020, despite declining alcohol consumption. The numbers of people working as waiters and waitresses increased by 18 percent between 2010 and 2019. These are not well-paying, prestigious jobs, but they have offered reliable employment for millions of ordinary Americans, especially in cities where abundant numbers of educated urbanites are willing to spend on a pleasant personal interaction.

In 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act carried a cost of $2.2 trillion and sailed through the Senate 96-0. The CARES Act was easily the largest dollop of federal largesse in the history of America, and not a single senator argued against it.

The whole point of a face-to-face service economy is to be close to other humans. That can’t survive the threat of deadly contagion. Stopping the risk of illness is the first step toward creating the face-to-face jobs of the future.

Unfortunately, Urban leaders today typically embrace entrepreneurship in spirit, but then accept a web of local regulations that makes it difficult to start new businesses.

In places where joblessness is high, policies can do more to encourage job creation, like providing employment tax credits and allowing disabled workers to earn more money before they lose access to their disability insurance payments.

Joblessness, especially among prime aged men, is associated with misery, suicide, and divorce. The problem is not so much material deprivation as social isolation and a sense of worthlessness. When purpose and social interaction vanish, humans often drift and can become dejected.

Download

What is the Future Of Downtown?

In 1949, Americans allocated less than 1 percent of the country’s land areas, 18 million out of 2.27 billion acres, for “urban” living. That official definition of urban includes pretty much every US suburb. America used less land for city living in 1949 than it did for rural roads. Sixty years later, the nation’s “urban” land increased to 70 million acres, which is still less than 3 percent of the nation’s total acreage, and less than the US uses growing soybeans.

No industry moved itself more radically and quickly than New York City’s garment sector. In 1947, New York City had 140,000 workers making women’s outerwear alone, which was 45 percent of all US employment in that industry. By 1982, the number of women’s outerwear workers in New York had fallen to less than 70,000.

As long as the federal government fails to take action on causes like climate change and income inequality, urbanites will look to their city governments to respond. There is much to admire in activism that fights for the future of the planet and the fates of the poorest Americans. But that activism must recognize the limits that cities face, especially when the tax base is untethered.

Download

The Battle For Boyle Heights And The Closing Of The Metropolitan Frontier

Download

Inequality has widened. Many have come to see the police as oppressors rather than as the protectors who ran into the burning Twin Towers and died trying to save their fellow citizens. Gentrification has engendered conflict, and acrimony has replaced hope in the world’s wealthiest cities.

The work of urban and environmental economist Matthew Kahn shows that the same earthquake will kill far fewer people in a well-managed, well-educated society than in a country with a weak government and limited education. A 2020 earthquake in Chile, which has long prioritized education reform, killed only 525 people; a smaller earthquake in Haiti during the same year tragically killed over 100,000.

The limits that local regulations place on the entrepreneurship of the poor, is that our cities – like our societies as a whole – do too much to protect insiders and too little to empower outsiders.

It may seem as if we are stuck in the old fight of race against race, but the real fight pits the status quo against change. The real fight is the city’s need to expand against the enemies of urban growth.

We can make our metropolitan areas more equitable and humane, but only if we allow them to transform themselves. We can make space for all, but only if we understand that our real enemies are the artificial limits on growth, not out neighbours who happen to have a different skin color.

The paradox of diamonds and water is that diamonds are far more expensive than water despite the fact that water is essential for existence and diamonds are not. The explanation for this paradox is that water is abundant but diamonds are rare. If something is easy to get or to build, its price is likely to remain low even if it is vital or beautiful.

Historically, the migration of poor people into rich places helped smooth out income differences across space. As new workers came to high-wage areas, wages inevitably fell, just as they rose in low-wage areas after workers left. For 140 years, incomes rose more quickly in poorer parts of the country than in richer parts of the country.

We can make our metropolitan areas more equitable and humane, but only if we allow them to transform themselves. We can make space for all, but only if we understand that our real enemies are the artificial limits on growth, not our neighbours who happen to have a different skin color.

The paradox of diamonds and water is that diamonds are far more expensive than water despite the fact that water is essential for existence and diamonds are not. The explanation for this paradox is that water is abundant but diamonds are rare. If something is easy to get or to build, its price is likely to remain low even if it is vital or beautiful.

Historically, the migration of poor people into rich places helped smooth out income differences across space. As new workers came to high-wage areas, wages inevitably fell, just as they rose in low-wage areas after workers left. For 140 years, incomes rose more quickly in poorer parts of the country than in richer parts of the country.

Download

In 2018 alone, police killed 259 African Americans, twenty-eight of whom were, like Floyd, clearly unarmed, according to the Mapping Police Violence Database. Yet most killings do not lead to a murder conviction, because there is ambiguity.

Urban diversity can easily turn into distrust and then conflict, unless cities enable all of their residents to flourish. The enormous inequality of urban wealth is only tolerable when cities fulfil their historic role of transforming poorer children into richer adults.

American cities do a worse job of empowering poor kids than we would like to believe.

Urban schools and law enforcement both favor insiders over outsiders. With law enforcement, the insiders are wealthy urbanites, who demand safety, and police unions, who protect abusive officers from punishment. The outsiders are the young men who are stopped, frisked, and sentenced for life. With schools, the insiders are suburban parents (like us) and the teachers’ unions, who protect tenured teachers (again, like us) from being fired. The outsiders are the children of lower-income parents.

Between 1988 and 2006, the share of Americans who were incarcerated more than doubled.

The US homicide rate had risen only from 7.9 to 8.7 murders per 100,000 from 1984 to 1989. But since the time when Ida Ballasiotes turned twenty-one in 1957, the murder rate was up 118 percent. To many Americans of her generation, America seemed to have slipped from order to chaos.

Crime immediately started to fall after the three-strikes laws were passed. The national homicide rate dropped every year from 1993 to 2000, reaching 5.5 murders per 100,000 in the last year of Clinton’s presidency. The number of murders in New York City fell from 2,245 in 1990 to 673 in 2000. Between 2016 and 2019, New York saw fewer than 350 murders per year, which is less than 4 murders per 100,000. Not only is New York much safer than it was, but it is now safer than the nation as a whole, at least as measured by homicides.

It is appalling that more than 2 million Americans were incarcerated in 2018, and another 4.4 million were on probation and parole. Almost 500,000 of those Americans are imprisoned for drug crimes, and “nonviolent drug convictions remain a defining feature of the federal prison system.” No other democratic nation has numbers that look anything like those.

Between 2001 and 2007, the number of women murdered in New York City fell by 38 percent, and New York Magazine reported that “the big decline in domestic-violence murders occurred in households that police already knew were problem homes.”

Police unions will always try to protect their members. But why do cities and countries sign contracts that allow the suppression of disciplinary records after six months?

Defunding the police may seem like a natural response to the lawless behaviour displayed by Derek Chauvin. But an underfunded police department will not improve the safety of minority neighbourhoods. If fewer police lead to more crime, then the poor will suffer disproportionately. Moreover, a more stressed police force could easily become a more brutal police force.

In 2018, the police killed 259 African Americans and 490 whites. That same year, 7,407 African Americans and 6,088 whites were victims of non-police homicide. Non-police homicides are both much more frequent than police homicides and more likely to target African Americans.

Police reform needs to be about more than cutting spending or eliminating law enforcement. The key is recognizing that we care about more than just reducing crime.

Instead of thinking about police reform as a budgetary issue, we should start by thinking organizationally. Society has two goals: to keep crime as low as possible and to ensure that all citizens are treated with dignity and fairness. Rather than swing the pendulum one way or the other, we need to do both. That will require more spending, not less, and it will require us to start measuring dignity and fairness.

We need to accept that there is no free lunch. If we want the police to do more, we will need to pay them more. Unions will need to get higher wages if they are to agree that their members will be punished and fired more for misbehaviour.

Wages of rich and poor alike increase with the education of people around them, and that fact is particularly true in the developing world.

Schooling represents the single largest failure of America’s cities, and perhaps the largest failure of American society. Schools protect insiders, including poorly performing teachers with tenure, and fail outsiders, like the children of the poor.

We don’t know what will work, and what works today may not work in the future. We must innovate, test, and continually revise, using the best science.

Urbanization And Its Discontents

A Future With More Hope Than Fear

Download

Humanity is not meant to live alone. As isolated individuals, we are physically weak and psychologically vulnerable. The most important characteristics of our species, like our ability to communicate with language, enable us to survive collectively and achieve great things. There was no Zoom in the African habitats of our ancestors. We evolved to be together physically, not just in cyberspace.

Not money but leadership is lacking. There has been nothing to compel national governments to act. The World Health Organization’s A World At Risk report concludes, “What we need is leadership and the willingness to act forcefully and effectively.” Alas, the world failed to act, and we paid the costs of COVID-19.

Over the years, America’s test scores have fallen further behind. If one tenth or more of the children in Los Angeles and Boston dropped out of their virtual educations in 2020, as some reports suggest, then we risk another lost generation.

Policing reform will take years, effort, and expense, but sentence lengths can change whenever state governments choose to alter penalties for specific crimes. Smarter sentencing means evaluating when the benefits of longer jail time exceed the human costs of locking someone up. Prison sentences deter crime and incapacitate criminals. Yet there is little evidence that ultra-long jail times, like life sentences for drug dealers, achieve much extra deterrence. What nineteen-year-old cares if a crime carries a forty-five or fifty-year sentence? Yet five extra years of jail time is an enormous expense for the system, as well as for the elderly prisoner. Morepver, people change. Few sixty-year-olds pose the same risks to society or themselves as they did at twenty.

Of course, we need punishment to deter misbehaviour. For violent criminals, this will always mean prisons. For nonviolent crimes, cash fines that generate revenues are far more efficient than prison time. We should think harder about non-prison punishments of all forms, including community service.

Unfortunately, the US, along with many countries, has been riven by a political tribalism that drowns out the search for a more effective public sector. For forty years, Americans have been arguing about bigger or smaller government. This is a diversion; the real question is how to get better government. The governments of New Zealand, South Korea, and Germany were much more effective than the US in addressing the pandemic. These nations are not as wealthy as the US, although they are not starved for resources either. There is no reason the US could not have one of the strongest public sectors in the world. After World War II, we accomplished great things, in the military and space.

Blaming people obscures the fact that the system as a whole failed. Some leaders did perform terribly, but the world’s safety requires more than just changing the names at the top. Further, the world needs to step back from anger and hate and recognize just how much we depend on the rest of humanity.

Let us remember that every new person is also a possible source of joy, and that every city should be a place of hope and shared human strength.