Frontline ·
Human capital is the bedrock on which success of cities sits: Edward Glaeser
The author and renowned urban economics professor speaks about strategies for high-return investments that benefit the poor, the need for strong local governments, and regulations that make it easier to build and use space efficiently in India.
The professor of economics says that India should embrace its urbanisation and accept that the growth of cities will enable its economy to grow and provide opportunity for millions of new workers.
The academic and author Edward Glaeser, who is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, has consistently argued that cities become prosperous not because of grand physical infrastructure alone but because they enable the exchange of ideas, talent, and entrepreneurship. In this email interview with Frontline, Prof. Glaeser, who is the author of Triumph of the City (2011) and the co-author of Survival of the City (2022), shares his views on varied topics, including agglomeration economics, housing regulation, land-use policy, and urban governance. Edited excerpts:
user fees. He made the point—and it is still true today—that building infrastructure only when users can be expected to cover its costs is a great way to ensure that we build sensibly. While I accept that this ideal may be impossible in many contexts, both because of the difficulties of charging users and because equity considerations preclude imposing such charges on the poor, I remain convinced that we should strive to rely on user-fee financing as often as possible. This is particularly true for infrastructure used by businesses, like freight corridors, and infrastructure used predominantly by richer people, like airports.