Uma Fascinante História Econômica de New York City

Escrita pelo economista urbano de Harvard, Ed Glaeser. Entre seus achados estão: "No variable better explains the ability of cities to thrive than human capital.(...) The dominance of the garment industry highlights two important lessons. First, urban success is built on the maelstrom of competition. Cities with abundant small firms have done much better than cities with stagnant giants. (...) Second, the competitive maelstrom ignites industrial diversity and innovation. (...) Urban density has a remarkable ability to set off chains of innovation, in which one smart person learns from another and collectively they create something huge.(...) financial booms have usually been followed by painful crashes. Good ideas usually get pushed too far. The nature of capitalism is that opportunity creates both real achievement and misbehavior (...) Today, New York thrives by making ideas, which will remain a good business for urban areas. (...) New York’s government faces three additional challenges to keeping the city attractive to smart innovators. One is the public school system, whose problems have long pushed people out of New York. Another is local taxes, which are among the highest in the nation and constitute another incentive to leave (see “Life in Taxopolis”). The third challenge is New York’s housing prices. Despite the current real-estate crash, New York still has some of the highest housing prices in the nation, and only new construction will lower them significantly" .