Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Chelsea Follett. Chelsea is the managing editor of Human Progress.org,

a project of the Cato Institute that seeks to educate readers on global improvements in human

well-being. She's also the author of the recently published book, Centers of Progress, 40 Cities that

Change the World.

Chelsea, it's my distinct pleasure to host you on our show today.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Obviously, City Journal and the Manhattan Institute, more broadly, share your basic

thesis that cities are the drivers of prosperity.

But what led you to focus on this topic of cities and how did you land on your main idea?

Well, as managing editor of HumanProgress.org, I spend a lot of time thinking about the causes of progress and prosperity.

When I made a list of some of the different aspects of the modern world that we take for granted,

everything from sanitation you know,

sanitation, a staple food supply, to writing, I found that many of these different innovations

could be traced to particular places. And those places all tended to be cities or in the era

before cities, as we know them today existed, the closest thing that did exist at the time.

And that became the idea for this book, the answer to a simple question of where does

progress come from, focusing on 40 different cities throughout history?

What about the idea of the city itself?

You mentioned like the closest thing that approximates a city. How do you

think of cities as entities and how does it compare with the modern concept of town or village?

...