Thriving from the Center: Freeing Urban Innovation from Ideology

In last Autumn’s edition of City Journal, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser set forth a conservative agenda for urban progress, which bemoaned a perceived resurgence of interest in redistribution and regulation across America’s urban centers. Today’s civic challenges are not unique in their need for balanced, accountable, and equitable solutions; requiring a combination of mindful reforms with sincere hope for more egalitarian prosperity. Glaeser’s unabashed partiality makes it difficult to accept his proposals without a degree of skepticism. Although littered with parochial right-wing barbs and talking points his plan does embrace some innovative solutions that can responsibly achieve civic progress. We are left to separate the efficacious wheat from the ideological chaff.

The first prong of Glaeser’s agenda calls for policies that will promote and support entrepreneurship, which includes evaluating public loan programs and lifting burdensome new business regulations. His call for evaluation, though well-intentioned, seems somewhat biased toward failure, as he cites his own statistically insignificant studies that nevertheless suggest loan ineffectiveness. Glaeser further suggests pooling several loan programs together, accepting applications from a large sample size of qualifying businesses but only providing loans to a select group in order to compare those that received public financing to those that did not. Despite difficulties for controlling the differences in competition and markets across cities, using a randomized approach could help make the case for public loans.