Glaeser, for his part, says he feels the same about New Orleans as he does about many cities of the Rust Belt. “I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit,” he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. “There are no reasons why it can’t, and shouldn’t, decline,” Glaeser says. “And I would say that for many other cities. There’s no reason not to let decline go forward.” The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. “Places decline and places grow. We shouldn’t stand in the way of that.”

When a man works in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the rarified salons of learning there trying to penetrate pampered skulls of the progeny of affluent families and says things like he does in the above quote, it is rather amazing he is not pulled into Harvard Yard and shot. Gun control has its minor advantages at times.

Edward Glaeser is an economist and a very bright and interesting one at that. Since I sleep with one eye open cast upon academia in America, forever wary of the next catastrophic idea they may dress up in therapeutic drag, I am always pleasantly surprised to find a shining light of common sense in the maelstrom. The New York Times, in an extensive 2006 profile, describes this young academic who not only rankles his colleagues with unorthodox ideas, but clearly makes no concessions to the trappings of liberal images and habits in the Ivory Tower.

Glaeser is not heir to the tweedy, harrumphing, bad-haircut tradition of academics. He radiates a confidence that to some fellow economists borders on arrogance. He has a tendency to speak quickly and in paragraphs rather than sentences, while projecting an Old World decorousness more reminiscent of Edith Wharton’s New York than of today’s Boston. He is tall, broad-shouldered and patrician in his bearing; he began wearing three-piece suits 23 years ago, back when he was in prep school, he says. One afternoon last December in his Cambridge office, Glaeser sported a bespoke pinstriped get-up and a pale blue silk tie, which he had tucked into a matching, fully buttoned pinstripe vest draped with the gold fob from his pocket watch. His shoes shone. He seemed to have stepped from a hansom cab, missing only a top hat. As he began to explain some of his recent work on housing prices, his large silver cuff links clinked against the table.

Dressing like an investment banker is just emblematic of his departure from much of the staid liberal dogma weighting the conventional wisdom concerning the way we live and how we might live in the future in America. Refreshing as it is for an academic preoccupied with urban problems and issues in America to not blather on about cities sprawling and southern rednecks in their SUVs, he wrote today in the New York Sun the following:

New Yorkers are rightly proud of their city’s renaissance over the last two decades, but when it comes to growth, Gotham pales beside Houston. Between 2000 and 2007, the New York region grew by just 2.7%, while greater Houston — the country’s sixth-largest metropolitan area — grew by 19.4%, expanding to 5.6 million people from 4.7 million.

and in comparing families of the same income, he goes on to say:

After housing, taxes, and transportation, the New Yorkers have $26,000 left. The Houston family has $30,500, and those dollars go a lot further than they would in New York. The American Chamber of Commerce produces local price indexes for various areas, including Houston and Queens (though not Staten Island). The overall price index for Queens is 150, which means that it costs 50% more to live there than it does in the average American locale. The price index for Houston is 88.

and concluding:

Of course, Houston’s development isn’t costless. Like most growing places, it must struggle with water issues, sanitation, and congestion. For environmentalists who worry about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, Houston’s rapid growth is particularly worrisome, since Houstonians are among the biggest carbon emitters in the country — all those humid 90-degree days mean a lot of electricity to cool off, and all that driving gobbles plenty of gas.

But Houston’s success shows that a relatively deregulated free-market city, with a powerful urban growth machine, can do a much better job of taking care of middle-income Americans than the more “progressive” big governments of the Northeast and the West Coast.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, George Akerlof, of UC-Berkeley, said of Glaeser, “I think he’s a genius”, and prominent Harvard professor, David Cutler was quoted, “”I think Ed is probably the most exciting urban researcher in half a century, if not longer.”

We’re lucky to have Glaeser and you should keep an eye out for his future work. Read the entire New York Sun article here.