Wow, talk about a great assessment of Evansville...

Or Detroit, which has a tremendous backlog of buildings that are slated to be demolished.

Or Philadelphia, where the buildings fall apart by themselves.

So where would be the ideal place for low wage workers to live?

What do you mean by high productivity? As compared to lazy folks? Welfare folks? How about the Christian ideal of different types of folks living in the same community?

I was thinking of Detroit and Venice as two different types of urban declines, but the theory has wide validity (if it has any).

Joel, "high productivity" is a specific economic term--it means people who produce a lot of GDP for every unit of effort they put forth. In this model, as I understand it, productivity can come from several sources, among them high levels of human capital (or, even more precisely, highly-valued human capital). It isn't about "laziness" or moral worth; it's a model with no moral judgments. In the same way, it doesn't matter to the model what this or that religion says should be the best way to organize cities--all that matters is how cities actually work (more accurately, how this model of a city works).

Which people are the "high productivity" ones? Can worker productivity be predicted into the future?

I guess what I'm asking is, do we have any way to predict productivity into the future with a level of accuracy that would make us more money than the market average (in other words, average productivity) were we to invest in such production?

Becasue if we do, you need to quietly start a hedge fund and stop talking about this in public.

Or is it simply that the people who happen to work in (or move to) cities with booming productivity become high-productivity workers? And that of course those who move away to lower cost-of-living areas are become lower-productivity workers, because that's what you call people working in cities that aren't in productivity booms?

Um, this is a complicated question, but the short answer is that these objections don't appear to make any sense in relation to the model. There are some industries in which geographical concentration is important; there are other industries in which proximity to suppliers or other networks are more determinative factors; and there are certain industries in which these factors are both important. (Consider, for instance, software programmers, dockyard workers, and professionals respectively.) Generally, it is the case that more prosperous cities are also more productive, and that people who move there become themselves more productive (in the strictly economic sense)--at least they are paid higher wages. However, some reflections on the fate of workers in Manchester, the London dockyards, or the City of London will demonstrate that different industries and cities react differently to productivity shocks. (The productivity/prosperity relationship, by the way, is tautologous.)

But if you actually read the paper, you'll see that these factors don't come into this story, and they don't need to for the purposes of this part of the total story of urban decline.

I wasn't trying to object to anything, but to ask what exactly you are describing. Specifically, when you said:

"But who will be living in these decaying cities? Not the highest-productivity workers or workers who value the various amenities of well-off cities; they'll have left following the productivity shock. Instead, the people who will be attracted by areas that brag of their low cost-of-living will be low-productivity workers."

You seem to say that "high productivity workers" and "low productivity workers" can be identified by some characteristic other than the fact that they happen to work in high-productivity areas/industries. And imply that somehow, if we could attract high-productivity workers back to the low-productivity areas, stagnation would cease.

How do you identify these workers in any accurate way? Other than saying "they'll be the ones working in high-productivity areas/industries."

Or am I misreading thatparagraph? If so, I apologize -- maybe it's my own eagerness to be able to predict from whom and from where future productivity will arise.

Generally I tend to believe that it's not possible to predict future productivity levels with much confidence, although there does appear to be a broad relationship between increasing amounts of human (and physical) capital and providing good institutions and broadly increasing productivity. However, today's winners are often tomorrow's also-rans. This is why I don't support industrial policy.

So if a city is doing a good job at attracting high-productivity people, it's going a good job. A city can provide quality education (mainly amenities to attract parents), a safe living environment, a well-maintained transportation system, and so forth, and the model predicts that, ceteris paribus, you'll have more high-productivity workers. However, the points I raised earlier also have to be considered, and there are certainly cities that will not be able to make this transition no matter how hard they try. Detroit is never going to be as rich as it was.

Paul,

Yes, but of course I am then a "low productivity worker" as I contribute very little to GDP. Same perhaps for school teachers, starving artists, musicians, many writers and others. If a model negatively impacts the Christian ideal of community, it is not a morally neutral model.

One of the points I am getting at can be illustrated by a conversation I had with a friend about a neighborhood that had been "renewed" or "rejuvenated." He proclaimed what a wonderful community it had become and all the new cultural opportunities. I replied something to the effect, "But all the minorities are now gone from here, so the place is thriving economically but the community has been decimated."

Is it possible for a place to economically, culturally, socially and spiritually thrive all at the same time?

Economists would point out that they don't care about the spiritual bit, but that's not entirely true. I would suggest the answer is "Yes," and that generally richer areas tend to be--because richer--more culturally, socially and spiritually vibrant. I'd rather live in Athens during the Golden Age or Venice during its height than, well, Pittsburg today. But this notion of "community" is somewhat chimerical, since "community" really exists as a lived phenomenon in the sense you're implying at the neighborhood level--the great glory of modern cities is that they are vast, permissive and anonymous.

What about secondary effects of religion? Say, along the lines of the Protestant Work Ethic? Joel, maybe you could resolve this by giving your flock a little more Calvinism (though I know you're an Arminian).

Zach,

I could resolve the spiritual issues I raised by preaching that God has destined some for salvation and others for hell? Besides, that imminent Arminian John Wesley was a workaholic who taught quite a work ethic: "earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can."

I'd like to see someone break the model down further and apply it to the decaying sections of otherwise growing urban areas. Many of the Midwestern cities in the Glaeser and Gyourko study have lost population, but their metro areas have remained relatively stable or even gained population, which means there are some amenities in the growing areas of "declining" metros that the stagnant or declining areas don't have.

This might put a damper on the weather factor and lead us to another type of comfort factor. Sure, Evansville has lost population, but have any of you been to Newburgh lately? It just keeps growing. Same of Shelby (Louisville) and Boone (Cincy) counties in Kentucky. It may not be so much that Cleveland is declining as it is that people who work in Cleveland don't want to live on small lots, in small houses, and don't mind the extra 30 minutes spent in traffic each day. So they live in Westlake or Richfield (or whatever urb is popular now). The people left behind in the cities are those who can't afford to move to the urbs, not necessarily those who don't have the skills to move to Phoenix.

Of course I don't have any real data to back this up, but my observations seem to serve my hypothesis.

If I am right, the process of stagnation may be unreversible, and the decline of our old-growth urban areas just another badge of a suburban freeway/tract home culture.

How do I explain cities with vibrant inner cores, like Chicago, New York, or Seattle? One easy similarity is the scarcity of land. All three of these sit on water, limiting the extent to which sprawling urbs can suck population from the core city. All three also have dreadful commutes from urbs, which shows that there is a threshold point at which some people will stop commuting from outside and just deal with smaller homes, lots, and fewer big box amenities.

The model incorporates this to a certain extent with its emphasis on the amenities factor. And the questions that attain at the neighborhood level are different from those at the metropolitan level.

I would question, however, whether Manhattan isn't an example of residential urban decline: this page thinks it is. In this case, we're dealing again with factors that operate in equilibrium at the metropolitan level, but that can radically reshape an area (e.g., Harlem) as incentives change.