Freakonomics why cities rock

The fundamental difference is that schooling requires a long term investment with potentially life long consequences. Whereas if I get food poisoning at one restaurant, I can go to a different one the next day. Therefor fairness issues and consumer protections are much more necessary as compared to the arena of food catering.

That unfettered private operators will abuse a school voucher system the restaurant analogue is amply demonstrated by the current crop of unscrupulous for profit schools who saddle their student with loans while providing basically useless trainings.

This is what would likely happen in a full schoool voucher system leading to inadequate eductaion for at least a portion of our children.

In contrast, I do support charter schools which can experiment with the support of the community and parents. Hopefully, their successful and proven ideas will then be incorprated into the main stream school system. Has it occurred to you that allowing restaurants to compete on taste and by offering large portions of cheap, high calorie food may be one reason we have such high rates of obesity and chronic illness? Your analysis fails to take into account long run opportunity cost.

By offering consumers what they want in the moment, the processed food industry can adversely affect the long run health of these same consumers. This can require government intervention to fix, as New York City has tried to do recently with trans fats and sweetened sodas.

If you don't want to properly price the negative externalities, then people have to be educated to eat for nutrition and their long run economic health instead succumbing to short-term market forces in the food processing industry's race to the bottom line.

Foods that taste good, release dopamine in the brain, stimulate our hunger to eat more and are cheap to process, ship and store are not healthy staples of any human diet in large quantities, yet that's where market competition has driven the food industry.

That's where your untempered love of free market restaurants has driven us. Similarly, sometimes schools simply have a job to do with educating new citizens. As Fish has pointed out in his columns, measuring economic returns to individual students and pursuing perceived "market efficiency" may, in fact, lead to long term depreciation of the common good and a loss of overall economic growth potential.

Forcing students to study the constitution or evolution may not directly affect their ability to get a higher paying job but it does make for better educated voters. Here is more reading on some further "green" aspects of city living. Things like shared heat gain moving up a high rise building and other such "hmm I never thought of that" bits are well-stated in this readable New Yorker article I know, I know, these city slickers are so biased.

The one thing in Glaeser's bit I had a hard time with is the market analogy on schooling. Schools are not restaurants, they aren't even close. It's simply a bad analogy. What has "competition" done for health care results in the US?

Produced middling results at an astonishingly high cost. It is not a panacea for all things and being taught is certainly not being served a plate of food.

It's acquiring critical thinking skills and instilling a basic moral compass in future citizens. It is not being done terribly well of late, but this is mostly due to problems that transcend schooling, namely poverty and other large societal problems. Here is an article I forwarded to you some weeks ago Steve D, which critiques both the alleged substance and the outsized influence of the proponents of school "choice, competition" etc. It'd be interesting to try to measure the various impacts - environmental, social, financial, waistline - of restaurants.

I suspect that they're buried down in the iceberg-like mass of urban impacts that're invisible to Glaeser and his ilk. Wade - I was going to save this for the Freakonomics most recent post on obesity, but since you mention it A researcher in Birmingham found that the rise in obesity may not be much related to the American diet, but rather to a decline in the bacteria in our guts that extract calories from food.

Also BPA and lack of sleep may be factors. The odds of that happening by chance are 8 million to 1. I don't see how cities make people healthier. Asthma and allergies occur with much higher frequency in people who live in cities.

The countryside is our natural habitat we're all descended from hunter-gatherers who didn't live in concrete jungles. Sure, lawns are beautiful and useful and they smell great. But are the costs — financial, Bren Smith, who grew up fishing and fighting, is now part of a movement that seeks to feed the planet while putting less environmental But she admits that her In this sneak preview of the Why Cities Rock.

Why Cities Rock Freakonomics Radio. Is the U. Really Less Corrupt Than China? Why Is U. Media So Negative? And that leads to lower electricity usage, lower home heating usage, and those are the facts that make cities seem, at least to my eyes, significantly greener. I think this is really important when we think about the future of countries like China and India. People have looked at their local situation and thought that by stopping a building they were making things greener.

It turns on in the desert outside of Phoenix, it turns on in Houston. And the place where the new building is going on is almost surely going to be more carbon intensive than coastal California. So implicitly by pushing development away from California, many environmentalists have actually increased carbon emissions for the country as a whole. Now you teach at Harvard, so you live near Boston. Persuade me that your conclusions about the greatness of the city are not a result of personal bias, whether subconscious or otherwise.

But it is true that about five years ago when I started acquiring small children, my wife and I did move out to a fairly sylvan suburb. So I certainly have had the experience of living in suburbs, which has pluses and negatives.

So, I go to work in the city. We go to Boston for museums and restaurants, and all sorts of things that I drag my kids to in spite of their protests. But, unquestionably we actually have the experience of living in a suburb, and certainly nothing in the book suggests that people who choose suburban life are necessarily making a mistake by doing that.

Talk to me about the feedback along those lines to your book. I differentiate myself from the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, her wonderful ideas of cities, many of which show up in the book and have changed my views of this. But Jacobs seemed to have a very particular view of what urban life was supposed to be like. She believed in the Greenwich Village neighborhood in which she lived. And that led her to champion strong limits on building up, strong preservation of older areas, and a particular vision of urban life that was her vision, her area.

And it is certainly true that one of the things I try to fight against is the historic misconception, the prejudice that that cities are somehow or other decaying and corrupt. Dyja isn't arguing that Chicago is still in its heyday -- it is almost certainly not -- but he make a persuasive case that it is underappreciated on many dimensions, and that the world would be a very different place if Chicago hadn't been so busy being Chicago.

This week's Freakonomics Radio podcast is a bit unusual in that, instead of featuring a variety of guests, it has only one. But I think you'll understand why once you've listened to it. The guest is Ed Glaeser, author of the compelling and provocative and empirical! Season 9, Episode 30 There are a lot of upsides to urban density — but viral contagion is not one of them. The Perfect Crime Ep. The Middle of Everywhere Ep. Why Cities Rock Ep.