Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser

Last night I finished Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, and instead of a traditional review I am going to do two things: first, make one tangential inspired by Glaeser's text; second, write a bit about who should read this book and why.

On p. 76 Glaeser writes:

If the government provides health care and education in the city but not in the countryside, then those services will attract more poor to urban areas. Any attempt to fix the poverty level in a single city may well backfire and increase the level of poverty in a city by attracting more poor people.

Hence why illegal immigration will never go away. So long as the United States is a "shining city on a hill," people are going to try to get in, and attempts to ameliorate the lot of American poor will serve as a shining beacon luring the world's poor to America. Taking into account Bryan Caplan's argument that increasing population=increasing prosperity, I still support open borders, even if they will draw those hoping to sponge off our welfare state.

Further, I think an insight from the arguments against drug prohibition applies here- making the natural impulse of people to want certain things (whether chemically enhanced moods or migration to a nicer place to live) illegal won't blunt these desires, but will create a fertile ground for malefactors. Legal barriers to migration don't keep migrants out; instead these barriers put migrants on the wrong side of the law. Increasing the penalties for illegal immigration will simply decrease the incentive for illegal immigrants to avoid violating other laws.

Overall I think Glaeser's book is important for those who haven't thought very seriously about the impact of human beings on their environment, such as most environmentalists. Glaeser doesn't come right out and say it, but implied throughout his work is the deep insight that cities are to human beings what hives are to bees and dams are to beavers- our natural mode of living, the one that brings us into the most harmonious relation with the natural world. Chapters seven and eight are particularly key to this insight, the former explaining the government policies that have caused the suburban sprawl marking much current development and the latter, provocatively titled "Is Anything Greener Than Blacktop," convincingly making the case that denser development is "greener" than the low-density developments typically favored by greens. Glaeser never makes it explicit, but the juxtaposition of these two points makes clear where much of the fault for our environmental problems lies: at the feet of the state. If it were in my power, I'd make these two chapters required reading for all prospective members of Greenpeace.