Free to Choose in the American City

My new free book

Last month, I released my new book titled; An Introduction to Natural Disaster Economics. You can download a free copy here.

Today, I am releasing another new book. You can download Free to Choose in the American City by clicking on this link.

My productivity has been enabled by AI. These books were written in three steps. First, I used Zoom to create written transcripts of my audio recordings. Second, I fed the written transcripts through the AI program Grammarly to edit my sentences. I then used Grammarly’s grammar function to improve my prose. Third, I edited the entire document.

You will have to judge whether these books are worth their list price of $0!

In terms of content, let me briefly tell you about "Free to Choose in the American City”. I have taken what I have learned from these three books and written something new.

Here is a preview of my book as I reproduce the first 4 pages of my book.

Chapter One: Introduction

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to three economists who study the role of institutions in determining a nation’s long-term economic development. They sought to explain why some countries are wealthy while others remain poor. In this book, I will focus on the U.S urban institutions that I claim play a causal role in explaining why millions of urbanites are poor. I propose new institutions and "rules of the game" so that more urbanites flourish.

Ironically, my “new rules” are old rules. I take a critical look at the urban institutions that have been in place for decades in America's cities. If these rules were replaced with those proposed by Milton Friedman in 1962, millions of poor individuals and middle-class urban residents would experience an improved quality of life. Wealthy urbanites would benefit from living in safer cities, with fewer disturbed individuals acting out in public spaces, and a reduction in their tax dollars spent on supporting the poor, as there would be fewer impoverished people in cities.

New Ideas?

This book builds on many themes in modern economics but three books merit mentioning up front. In 1962, Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom and in 1980 he co-authored Free to Choose with Rose Friedman. Throughout this book, I will return to citing key themes from these books. I also incorporate many ideas from Edward Glaeser’s 2010 book Triumph of the City. His book is more ambitious in scope than my book. He studies the world’s cities over thousands of years while I focus on the recent history and the possible future of U.S cities. Both works share our common University of Chicago training.

Glaeser's book celebrates cities as our most outstanding achievement. He emphasizes the fundamental role that cities play as engines of idea creation and innovation. He also writes about the “demons of density” (pollution, crime, congestion). I build on his points by delving into urban demography. For a child born in a city such as Baltimore in 2005, what opportunities and challenges await this young person as he ages? I place a greater emphasis on the coordination failures often caused by urban government monopolies and critique the system's role in limiting upward mobility for disadvantaged individuals. Glaeser offers a long run history of cities around the world. I focus on U.S cities over the last sixty years. I explore what has gone wrong and present a microeconomic perspective on the benefits of phasing in new incentives so that future urbanites enjoy a better standard of living than recent cohorts. Given that many urbanites are not achieving their goals, why isn’t there greater demand for the introduction of new rules to help them flourish? In this sense, I focus on what could be unlocked if we “bend the curve”.

My urban focus is prospective. How do we structure new incentives to help more urbanites to thrive? Why haven’t we already enacted these rules? Going forward, cities will continue to be our centers of trading, and learning. Yet, many cities are under-performing as they fail to create schooling and job opportunities for millions of poor and middle class people who live there. Given the continued failure of the urban poor to achieve their dreams, it is time to consider new rules of the game that introduce pro-market incentives so that more young people anticipate that they will have a brighter future. I hope that my book encourages innovative thinking (and open debate) about the benefits of adopting rules of the game that promote more competition in cities.