Name: Triumph of the City
ISBN: 9780143120544

Triumph of the City

A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future. America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America's income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites. Glaeser travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Even the worst cities-Kinshasa, Kolkata, Lagos- confer surprising benefits on the people who flock to them, including better health and more jobs than the rural areas that surround them. Glaeser visits Bangalore and Silicon Valley, whose strangely similar histories prove how essential education is to urban success and how new technology actually encourages people to gather together physically. He discovers why Detroit is dying while other old industrial cities-Chicago, Boston, New York-thrive.

What Hacker News says

mrDmrTmrJMay 2026

If you're curious, why this scenario hasn't panned out. I'd highly recommend you read: The Triumph of the City

https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healt...

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JumpCrisscrossMay 2026

If you have a refutation of Triumph of the City, it will be groundbreaking. Until it’s published, throwing in like one credible source would make your comments more serious.

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cyberaxMay 2026

I read "Triumph of the City" about 15 years ago. It's a well-researched book, and it literally makes the same points as I do. In particular, it describes the density death spiral much better than I can. It's a bit outdated regarding the carbon footprint because it was written before the EVs and self-driving but that's a fairly minor point.

Its biggest problem is that it was written before the negatives of the density death spiral became apparent.

The cities in the early 2000-s were the main benefactors of the global crime collapse. So suddenly, Times Square in NYC transformed from a blighted area into the world's most valuable real estate. How could you be negative about urbanism seeing that? Housing in cities was also relatively cheap because cities used to be less desirable than suburbs.

If I were to summarize, "Triumph of the City" is factually correct. Just as the statement: "coal power plants are a triumph of engineering, providing cheap, reliable, and accessible power".

Edit: another important thing that he's missing is the end of the population growth. So now it's a nearly zero-sum game: a new housing unit in Manhattan means one more dilapidated house in rural Ohio.

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neomApr 2025

Similar to Ed Glaeser. I've spent a lot of time with Ed, I'm for sure a socialist, he's very right leaning, yet Ed and I always have great conversations, and funnily: Ed thinks Jane is great. Highly recommend Eds books, I started a whole startup after I read Triumph of the City, heh.

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fullsendSep 2022

I enjoy content that adds curious new information and different views to topics full of cliches, while still being relatively respectable or well researched.

Coming Apart - this book described the coming separation of the US into two “classes” long before it was widely talked about. Today most talk about it as a political divide. This book tackles it as a divide between knowledge workers and the rest. A controversial take that adds much needed food for thought to the conversation. If you’ve lived poor and you’ve also lived in a place like Palo Alto, you’ll be astounded by how readily you can point and say, “that’s me”. Lots of fascinating statistics.

Bowling Alone - a great book about the collapse of US social life. Dense, lots of statistics, but a clear picture is laid out of increasing isolation and alienation. Read it alongside something like Consumer’s Republic to understand how so much of this stems from the selfishness and individuality encouraged by consumerism in post-war America.

Triumph of the City - an excellent take that can be used as food for thought when people are talking about how dirty cities are. In truth, the author argues, they are our greenest “invention” ever. Lots of good evidence. Imagine collecting the trash if every human lived on their own acre of land. The sewage, the energy usage. Cities are incredibly efficient and clean.

The Man Who Solved The Market - everyone interested in finance needs to read this and it’s precursor More Money Than God. The Bogleheads and their index fund ilk are often correct when they say “money managers all lose to an index after fees”. Beating the market is nigh on impossible for all but a few. Most of those few work at Renaissance Technologies. Their Medallion Fund has made 36% after fees every single year since 1989. The fund does its best in market crash years. Closed to outside investors. A story of mathematicians essentially building models that can predict the future reliably. Utterly fascinating, the most successful money printer ever built. As a bonus, we learn that Jim Simons originally controlled this printer and spent the money helping US math teachers. He then ceded control to Robert Mercer, who used the printer’s output to fund Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, Trump, etc.

The Snowball - a biography of Warren Buffet that tells an incredible story. The story is one of total obsession. Of a human who literally started from a few dollars, learned about some principles like compounding at age 6, and applied the exact same principles every day for the rest of his life with very little deviation. The craziest part of this story is how every 10 years, he’s surrounded by people saying “times have changed, you’re missing out”. Then those people get blown up by whatever black swan, and Warren’s snowball just grows and grows. He didn’t become a billionaire till he was in his 50’s but the snowball is still growing and he’s one of the richest people alive.

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jseligerJul 2019

This piece verges on daft or disingenuous. The major problems are major cities (SF, NYC, Seattle, LA, and so on) that have artificially restricted housing since the '70s (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-...) and yet we've also seen increasing economic returns since then to those superstar cluster cities (The Triumph of the City is a good and readable description: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.htm...).

So yeah, there's no housing crisis in Eastern Oregon, but there are also no jobs and none of the economic clustering and spillover effects that one gets from superstar cities. So you can try to live in cities and first-tier suburbs where the jobs are, but where exclusionary zoning has made housing ungodly expensive (https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu...), or you can live in the boonies where there are no jobs but (relatively) cheap housing.

Those of you who are going to reply about remote work: remote work is lovely, but it doesn't generate knowledge spillovers and has a bunch of other problems as well. See again the Glaeser book. It is not a practical, mass solution, although I'm glad it works well for you.

Part of this problem can and should be solved at the state level, but DC should also tell states and municipalities that, if they don't end exclusionary zoning, they're also not getting federal highway funding and other federal transit funding. That's the stick DC has.

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