There’s a great post by Edward Glaeser (in the Economix blog of the New York Times), titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City.”

In it, he describes how New York has managed to avoid the decay that has afflicted many large older cities, and, after a brief downturn in the 1970’s, came roaring back as arguably the most influential single city in the world.

His explanation? In a word – “smart people.”

“New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city. “

Glaeser continues, describing why dense cities succeed…

“They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.”

Now here’s what every city planner wants to know. Is this replicable? Can this success be engineered or encouraged, and are the effects measurable in 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime?

Does anyone have successful examples of campaigns and projects to replicate this resilient infrastructure? Or perhaps, examples of some cautionary unsuccessful attempts?

Best wishes to everyone for a creative and fruitful New Year!

Many economic development experts continue to insist that jobs are the key to economic growth. Attract the companies and the jobs and the people will follow? Consider this from a recent study by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and collaborators.

[W]hich way does the causality run? Are skilled industries moving into an area because there are an abundance of skilled workers, or are skilled workers moving to areas because of skill-oriented industries?

While surely both phenomena occur, we think that the evidence supports the view that industries are responding to the area’s skill distribution more than the view that the skill distribution is responding to the area’s industries mix. For example, the share of the population with college degrees in 1940 can explain 35 percent of the variation in the skill mix of industries today. By contrast, the skill composition of the industries in the metropolitan area in 1980 can only explain seven percent of the variation in growth of the population with college degrees since that date. The complex two-sided nature of this relationship makes it difficult to accurately assess the direction of causality, but there are reasons to think that much of the industrial mix in the area is actually responding to the skill distribution.