My guest today Ed Glazer is a Harvard professor in the world's foremost economist of cities.

He's the author of the best-selling book Triumph of the City and now he's back with a new book

co-authored with economist David Cutler called Survival of the City.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

Have you ever noticed how all economists kind of sound the same when they talk?

We're not especially articulate and we tend to speak using the stupid language of academic writing.

We'd love to talk in great detail about the technical aspects of our research projects,

but more often than not, we have a hard time explaining why people should actually care about

the work we've done. Ed Glazer does not talk like an economist. He's almost poetic and so smart.

Whether it's over lunch in the faculty club or walking through favelas in Rio de Janeiro,

which I once did it with Ed many years ago, he always teaches me things.

I think this is going to be a real treat.

So back in 2008, Ed, you wrote a book called Triumph of the City.

And now 13 years later, you've got a new book called Survival of the City.

Has your optimism about cities dwindled over the last 13 years as much as the change in titles

would suggest? Probably not. And fundamentally, Survival is also an optimistic book,

but it can't be denied that the reappearance of pandemic has been something of a body blow for

urban life. If cities are the absence of physical space between people, then social distancing is

like the rapid fire de-urbanizing of the world. Now, certainly cities have survived bigger challenges

than COVID much worse. Yes, the black plague, all sorts of things. Do you think this is a passing

bad or do you think this is something more permanent that's going to transform cities by this

meaning COVID? I think it's both COVID and the work from home thing, which are sometimes seen

...