Triumph of the City: Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.

[FayeforCure]

As I've said before, cities like New York are the most sustainable way to live!

The Daily Show host interviews Edward Glaeser of Harvard University to discuss his new book, "Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier."

http://www.planetizen.com/node/48137

[FayeforCure]

Vancouver tops the list of most liveable cities!!

Hard to believe, but based on a combination of environment, health care, culture and infrastructure, apparently Pittsburg is the top US city to live in, but it came in 29th place behind a host of Australian, Canadian and European cities.

Four cities in Australia make it to the top ten: Melbourne, Sydney, Perth,  and Adelaide

Two cities in Europe: Paris and Vienna

Three in Canada: Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary

One in New Zealand: Auckland

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/21/worlds-most-liveable-cities_n_825964.html#s243566&title=8__Perth

[Captain Zissou]

This thread was already created last week.

http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,11228.0.html

[FayeforCure]

This thread was already created last week.

http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,11228.0.html

Capt Zissou, thanks for that referral to a post made a day before mine. It is interesting to see that Gleaser is actually considered the Anti-Planner who believes in "markets and free choice," yet conveniently ignores the reality that there are too many constraints that make true "free choice"  even possible:

In that respect I agree with Lisa Schweitzer on her Sustainable Cities and Transport Blog

Sustainable Cities and Transport
Ethics, markets


Ed Glaeser, Richard Green, economics, and freedomIn Ethics on 01/27/2011 at 12:44

My wonderful colleague Richard Green takes issue with Ed Glaeser’s essay in the New York Times about how economics has a moral core centered on freedom of choice. Let’s just say: barf. I don’t think we should be in the business of conflating economics with markets, for one.

Richard smartly points out that most tenured professors, particularly somebody like Ed Glaeser, have never had their backs up against the wall when it comes to anything, let alone having to chose between letting your husband beat your face in or be a single mother making minimum wage with a toddler. Yes, she’s got choices, but the rest of us have a moral obligation to her, her child, and her abuser and that obligation is not to lecture her about her choicesâ€"it’s to reflexively examine her constraints and ask how we socially and economically have co-constructed those constraintsâ€"with her and with him. And to deal with the crisis.

Poverty affects what you can even dream, let alone choose. Why that’s hard to understand is beyond me. When everybody you see on television and movies are from the city and trust funders, there is no reason to believe that you will have a better life leaving your coal mining town than you would living in a city where you know no one and where you are basically in the same labor market as unskilled rural labor from anywhere else in the world.

What markets have as their more core: the freedom for individuals to optimize, given their constraints. I do think markets can shift constraints, and lift them outwards. But don’t blow smoke up my butt about how there are no social, political, and cultural constraints for individuals in markets, or that markets make those magically disappear.

Please God, Ed, use your big brain to make useful points. I’m too old for a freaky deaky Milton Friedmann renaissance. Aren’t there any young libertarian philosophers out there with new points to make? Thomas Sowell HAS to have some students running around with something new and clever to say about freedom rather than rehashing this stuff.

http://lisaschweitzer.com/2011/01/27/ed-glaeser-richard-green-economics-and-freedom/