How Cities Can Change the World

Landry Ayres: When you imagine a city, what comes to mind? Is it a crumbling locale jam packed with residents yet devoid of any sense of community? Or is it a densely populated but vibrant network of people coexisting in a kind of chaotic harmony? That and more on this episode of the Liberty Exchange.

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Paul Meany: Welcome to the Liberty Exchange. I’m Paul Meany. While humans have lived in rural areas for centuries, surviving by hunting and farming, cities have had a drastic impact on humanity. Today, 57% of the Earth’s population lives in urban areas. They’ve often been hotbeds of industrialism and creativity but why are cities so productive and why do they have so often a propensity to become tolerant and open societies? To answer these questions and a little bit more, I’m joined today by Chelsea Follett, the managing editor of Human​Progress​.org. Human Progress is a project of the Cato Institute that seeks to educate the public on global improvements and wellbeing by providing free empirical data on long-​term developments. Her new book is Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, which is out now by the way. In this episode, we discussed a wide variety of topics, including what exactly is a center of progress, what institutions help their development, and how do we combat the popular pessimistic view of cities as dark, cold and paradoxically isolating places? We hope you enjoy our conversation.

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Paul Meany: Welcome, Chelsea.

Chelsea Follett: Thanks for having me.

Paul Meany: Your book is about huge swaths of human progress and art literature, agriculture, medicine, philosophy, even sport kind originates from cities. But why do cities have such a disproportionate impact on the history of humanity and what makes them so special?

Chelsea Follett: The book didn’t set out to be about cities initially. I was just trying to find the origin points of these different achievements throughout history in these different areas as you mentioned, art, science, technology and so forth. But the pattern was overwhelmingly that they took place either in cities or in the era before cities were really a thing in the closest thing that existed at the time. That seems to be because when you have more people gathered together, concentrated with a higher population density, you have more potential for those people to engage in exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration and competition, and all of these things drive progress forward in different areas.

Paul Meany: And you talk about one of the first cities in human history, a place named Jericho. And I find that an extremely fascinating example because usually when we think of the early history of humanity, we think of hunter-​gatherers eventually settling down and figuring out agriculture. But actually the story’s a little bit different.

Chelsea Follett: That’s correct. It may seem strange to have a chapter on agriculture which we associate with rural areas in a book about cities. But permanent settlement which eventually led to cities was very much tied to the beginning of agriculture. It was a gradual process. But during the Neolithic revolution or the agricultural revolution in the fertile crescent region of the Middle East, people started to camp out for longer and longer periods of time throughout the year, eventually forming year-​round permanent settlements. And the Neolithic site in what is today, Jericho, is often considered to be the first city by archaeologists. And so that chapter explores the momentous transition to agriculture as well as permanent settlement. And while it would not have met the modern definition of a city, there weren’t very many people there, a few thousand. At the time, it represented an unprecedented concentration of humanity, and that led to some very innovative things. Wheat continues to be a staple crop that feeds much of the world. And while scientists disagree on how much credit exactly ought to be owed to the conscious efforts of the earliest farmers, over time whether through experimentation or just through those plants naturally evolving characteristics as they were sown into the ground, they were able to change a thin, wild grass into what we now know as wheat. And that’s an incredible story.

Paul Meany: Yeah, it’s a complete reversal of what we usually think. We usually think that the rural areas would’ve invented agriculture, but it turns out it might’ve been the urban areas actually.

Chelsea Follett: Right again. Not urban by modern standards. And the point of the book isn’t to say that everyone has to live in cities. Obviously as libertarians, we believe that people should be able to live wherever it is that they want to live. And yet the overwhelming trend throughout history is one of urbanization with more and more people throughout time are gathering together and moving into higher concentrations in cities.

Paul Meany: And the book, it doesn’t just cover Western examples, it covers examples from all over the globe. And it seems that no matter what the culture, the religion, the creed, humans when they congregate together tend to do better and tend to invent things. Is this a kind of universal theme of human nature almost that golden ages tend to occur in these kind of cities with concentrated populations?

Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. No matter what area of the world you are looking at. Even when the vast majority of humanity lived in rural areas, scattered, sparsely populated communities, it was cities from which the greatest innovations of those areas tended to emerge. Even today, we see the cities often being much more productive and innovative than rural areas. Now, this is not to discount the progress that has been made in rural areas, obviously. Flight, for example, which took place in an empty North Carolina field, an innovation created by the Wright brothers, who also came from a rural area, that would represent an exception to the rule. But the rule does seem to be that when you have more people engaging in that kind of debate and discussion, you’re just more likely to hit upon an idea that changes the world. And when more people are engaged in collaboration and exchange, they’re more likely to enrich themselves and their community, leading to economic development, artistic creation, and so much more.

Paul Meany: Could you talk a little bit about a particular example of a city that you find has contributed a huge amount to our history, but remains relatively under-​discussed, especially amongst libertarians?

Chelsea Follett: I think an example that is not as well known as it should be, and that is of particular interest or should be of particular interest to libertarians would be Dubrovnik, a city in Croatia today that was once an independent city state, the Republic of Ragusa. And they were devoted to freedom to an unusual degree throughout their history. Their flag was just the word Libertas, Latin for liberty. Their motto was Latin for liberty is not sold for all the gold in the world, and if you count them as a country of being a city state, they were among the first countries, possibly the first country to make the slave trade illegal. All because they were so proud of their freedom and they valued freedom so highly. And not only were they devoted to liberty in general, but they were also very much devoted to free enterprise.

Chelsea Follett: They were a free trading, a seafaring supernova, a sort of medieval Hong Kong. And when the Black Death pandemic struck Europe, killing often a third to half of the population of each city as wave upon wave of the pandemic moved through the continent. Dubrovnik or Ragusa as it was then called, was the first city to institute a comprehensive, rational response. They had limited waiting quarantine periods. They were the first to implement those and that allowed them to keep their ports open and continue to trade and even achieve significant mercantile expansion during the Black Death. While in similar city states such as the Republic of Venice, for example, had to close its doors entirely for a while, wall up and not allow anyone into their city to deal with outbreaks of the plague. And so, I think that Dubrovnik holds many lessons today about the value of freedom and responding rationally to crises and attempting to as much as it’s possible to do so, keep one’s city open, open for trade, open for people to come in and out and to exchange ideas and collaborate.

Paul Meany: It seems like the benefit of a city isn’t just that it’s a concentrated population of people or just more economic opportunities or capital goods being available. It seems to be a kind of culture that cities cultivate and it’s not a culture that cities cultivate in one place, it’s kind of a universal ethos that follows cities. They always seem no matter what part of the world they’re in, to be more open and relatively tolerant places for their time. Why does that happen?

Chelsea Follett: Not all cities obviously, are centers of innovation or freedom but it does seem that the greatest centers of innovation throughout history have been cities. I think that as you say, there is often a greater atmosphere of freedom in cities. It’s a sort of positive liberty, more choices available. Those choices come from living among more people. You’ve got more choices as to where to work, where to shop, who to interact with, who to befriend, who to marry, who to do business with, and all sorts of other things. And from that, you get many different subcultures. You allow different minority views and communities to thrive. Whereas in a much smaller community, it tends to be a uni-​culture. There tends to be much more conformity, uniformity, and when there isn’t a possibility of change, there also is a limit on how much positive change you can expect. And that seems to be why progress tends to emerge from cities with this greater atmosphere of openness and discovery and a discussion of different ideas.

Paul Meany: So when we’re talking about the history of progress, sometimes it might seem like the best way to do it is just to count how much the GDP per capita of a given nation or a given place at any time. But it seems like the history of progress is something much more complicated that can’t be captured by just one discipline because what we’re talking about is so complicated, so complex, there’s so many different aspects going into it. Is something like progress studies, if it was to be made an official discipline, would it be necessarily like interdisciplinary, multidiscipline kind of field?

Chelsea Follett: I think that the study of progress can be incorporated in many different existing areas of research. And I should take this opportunity to mention that there are actually lesson plans that the Sphere Education Initiative created that go along with the different chapters of centers of progress. And the feedback we’ve received has been that teachers in a great variety of disciplines, geography, history, English, the humanities, science, are all interested in utilizing this book. And that seems to be because progress is so tied into every different discipline, as you say, I think a discipline entirely composed of progress studies is also a wonderful idea. I think that it can be woven into any specific field. If you are a teacher in the arts, you can talk to your students about the history of innovation in that field. If you teach science, you can talk about the history of discovery within that and so forth. And so if anyone listening to this podcast is a teacher or you know a teacher, I would urge you to let them know about the free lesson plans available online that go along with the chapters of this book.

Paul Meany: Progress to us today is a really big word. We talk about it a lot and we see lots of new things. We’re used to seeing new things in the modern world, whether it’s a new phone, new TV show, new whatever. But for most people, there wasn’t many new things in human history. A lot of people would’ve lived with the same tools that their great-​great grandparents had lived with and eke out a living on the land. Were people aware that cities were such prosperous endemic places? Were there any observers who saw these golden ages and recognized that it was cities that caused them? Or is it something that only later historians have uncovered?

Chelsea Follett: Many people throughout history have noticed, Adam Smith, for example, observed that the prosperity and economic development that flowed from cities also benefited and uplifted living standards in rural areas. That’s one example. Although I should also note that he believed that in some ways, rural areas were less constrained than cities, which is sort of the opposite of the thesis of the book. But it is true that in some conditions, rural areas can be freer, for example, under authoritarian regimes, just because it’s harder to enforce rules and laws in remote areas. Sometimes remote areas can be havens of liberty in those circumstances. But in a free society, again, with the definition of positive liberty of more choices, cities stand out as being freer throughout history. You mentioned earlier how multidisciplinary the study of progress is. And I think that gets to something we haven’t discussed yet, which is what exactly do we mean by progress? And this book takes a very broad and hopefully, non-​controversial view of that, which is just that progress is anything that betters human wellbeing. Non-​controversially. Again, things everyone agrees better human wellbeing, whether that’s economic development, more prosperity, more literacy, more education, peace or inventions that improve our lives, a greater understanding of science and artistic achievements that enrich our lives and make us happier.

Paul Meany: A lot of what you’re talking about with progress is kind of a scientific view as well. It’s a very different view of the world and a way of constantly smashing old ideas and putting new ones in their place, and experimentation. And the intellectual revolution that we all call the Enlightenment changed the globe. And it seems that the enlightenment started in a handful of really, really important cities. Could you kinda talk a little bit about that?

Chelsea Follett: Certainly. There are two different chapters in the book that pertain to the enlightenment. There is a chapter on Paris, which was arguably the geographic center of the Enlightenment, although of course it was very dispersed. There was something called the Republic of Letters, with intellectuals exchanging ideas in many different countries. But the concentration of brilliant minds in Paris at the time was notable. It became known as the City of Light because it contained so many luminaries during this age of Enlightenment. And the Scottish Enlightenment, which was related, was arguably centered in Edinburgh, another chapter in the book. And of course, thinkers in these two cities often interacted both through letter writing and sometimes through physically visiting the other cities. So these are not separate islands of creativity. The thinkers in these different places were able to build on each other’s work. And yet when you do have a city with an unusual concentration of great minds who can then bounce ideas off of each other, the number of innovations that can result from that are incredible. The things that came out of the Enlightenment from ideas about new forms of government that later swept the globe, to the creation of everything from chloroform anaesthesia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is truly mind boggling.

Paul Meany: So a lot of the chapters in the book deal with these particular cities, and one thing I noticed is that a lot of these cities have a brilliant golden age but then quite a few fall into obscurity throughout history. So for example, Baghdad during the Islamic golden age was kind of like this seat of philosophy in the Middle East but then eventually that goes away. It seems that cities, while they can be amazing places for a period, eventually something happens that causes some sort of collapse or some sort of intellectual stagnation. And so part of the book seems to me to be, let’s celebrate progress. But another part is, how fragile progress really is and how it can really be destroyed in just one generation.

Chelsea Follett: I would agree with that completely. It’s a very heartening and inspiring book in some ways. But there’s also this very scary lesson in it as you read through the different histories of these cities and realize how short-​lived their periods of peak creativity were and how quickly a city that was once a beacon of openness, of creativity, of prosperity, how quickly that can all unravel. And Baghdad is of course, a great example. Today it’s considered one of the most dangerous cities in the world. But there was a time when it was the home of the House of Wisdom, one of the greatest centers of scholarship in the ancient world that attracted scholars from many different lands and backgrounds. And at the time, it was relatively open and tolerant and freedom of thought flourished.

Chelsea Follett: Then that all unraveled due to really two things. There was a loss of openness as one of the factions within Baghdad gained power, promoting a much more closed-​minded and an intolerant view of where the sources of knowledge could come from. And if you’re interested in learning more about this, in addition to the chapter in this book, I’d recommend the work of our colleague Mustafa Akyol, who’s written about this extensively, but essentially a much more xenophobic and closed-​minded faction took over and this completely changed the atmosphere in which the scholars were working. And then war and violence represented the ultimate unravelling of Baghdad’s status as this wonderful center of progress. And it said that the Tigris River actually ran black with ink from the number of scholarly works destroyed when it was invaded.

Chelsea Follett: So those really get at two of the conditions besides a higher population that contribute to progress, which are openness and freedom that we’ve discussed, but also peace, which we haven’t really discussed yet. When there is greater peace, when there is stability, those are really the conditions under which progress historically has thrived. Some people take a different view and claim that it’s war that drives progress forward through competition between different countries. But if you look at the greatest innovations of history, it seems that much more often it is in fact peace that fosters progress and war often leads only to destruction.

Paul Meany: We’ve been chatting a lot about the positives of cities and in the medieval ages, people would often say the city air is freer. They had a very positive association with cities in many ways. But today, it seems that people in modern America are starting to think that cities are just rat races, they’re crowded, and especially after COVID, people can move away from cities now more than ever. Is this a worrying trend in your opinion, that people are starting to turn their back on the city, possibly?

Chelsea Follett: Not at all. Again, as libertarians, it’s not our place to try to dictate where people should live. They should live wherever they freely choose to. Now, if we do end up seeing a reverse in the very long-​term trend that we’ve been experiencing up till now of increased urbanization, that will represent a huge change. Historically, seeking economic gain and seeking opportunity and greater freedom, young people have been moving to cities and this has been going on for quite some time. If that does reverse and people choose to live in more rural areas, then as long as that’s what they’re freely choosing, I don’t see that as an issue. And because of our incredible technology today that makes it possible to collaborate across longer distances, it may be possible that future innovation need not rely on ever higher levels of urbanization. Perhaps one day our virtual reality technology will be so effective that the rural areas will be just as productive as the urban ones because it’ll be possible to have a conversation with another person and then take off your VR headset or whatever it may be that you’re using to talk to them virtually and gaze out on your rural lands, where you actually live physically. But we’re not quite there yet. And today, urbanization still seems to be the trend.

Paul Meany: Can you talk a little bit about urbanization as a trend? ‘Cause when I hear people talk about how more and more people are living in urban areas, they say in almost like a negative way. When they talk about developing countries and more people moving to cities, they say, how terrible is that? They have to move from their home and the countryside. But what you’re saying is actually there’s more opportunity in the cities and this is a positive thing to talk about.

Chelsea Follett: We have to ask if we see people moving from the countryside into cities, why are they choosing to do that? For a long time it’s been the case that cities often offered more opportunity. As you said, even in the Middle Ages, there is the saying that city air is freer, the city air makes you free. Now, that was related to specific laws that allowed serfs to escape serfdom if they managed to escape to a city and live there for a year and a day. But there is a wider application arguably to that saying. If you look at the poor countries today and you see waves of people moving from the agricultural drudgery and limited opportunities and poverty that’s often found in the countryside into cities and bettering themselves and their families, their economic situation. Moving into the global middle class, I can only see this as a positive thing. Now again, that’s not to dictate what any individual person should do, and if a person does feel constrained living in a city and wants to move to the countryside, I think they should have every right to do that and every freedom to seek out opportunity and pursue happiness as they see fit, wherever they see fit. And that’s why freedom of movement is so important in part.

Paul Meany: And freedom of movement that cities are truly international and diverse places. It’s rare that you’d find a city with just one kind of person in it. Throughout the book and throughout history, cities are always international, multi-​faith places. And maybe that’s why they have such good ideas ’cause there’s so much competition in that regard. Not competition through war, but competition in ideas instead.

Speaker 1: It’s true that cities have varying levels of diversity, but the cities that have become the greatest centers of progress and innovation throughout history do tend to be incredibly cosmopolitan, open places. That’s partially because if a city is thriving, if it’s prospering, then that city attracts more migrants, both from within that country and that culture and from often neighboring or even vastly different cultures. But it’s also true that when you have people with many different perspectives gathered together, that just increases the diversity of thought within the city and increases further the chances that through all of the collaboration and discussion and debate happening in that city, that people happen upon a new idea that changes the world. And so it’s really a positive feedback loop. As the city is doing better, it attracts more people and having more people often helps the city to thrive and continue to do better.

Paul Meany: So cities rely upon markets, they rely upon diversity, they rely upon tolerance, and quite often a more scientific worldview. But all of these things are under attack today. And I was just reading Jane Jacobs, the excellent theorist on city planning, and she talked about the idea of societal dementia, the idea that there are institutions that are essential to the development of the Western world and how prosperous and wonderful it is today, but that we’re largely forgetting those institutions. That we’re largely forgetting those attitudes and outlooks that made the world as great as it is today, and that we might be suffering a little bit of memory loss, that we’re forgetting what makes cities so great in the first place.

Chelsea Follett: I think that’s definitely a danger. It’s been said of vaccination to explain the rise of the anti-​vax movement that through vaccination we’ve not only erased certain diseases, but we’ve erased the memory often of the disease. And you see often as countries become more prosperous, that people similarly forget what it was like before and what led to the prosperity they currently experience. And that’s how you can end up with youth movements, especially in countries favoring economic policies that go against what has been practiced historically in that society and allowed that society to rise up in the first place. So I think that idea of historical dementia, forgetting the past is something you see in many different areas of life and it does represent a huge danger. Talking about progress in the past sometimes gives rise to accusations that you have a Pollyanna-​ish outlook. You think things are just going to keep getting better. But actually, I think that the urgency of examining the policies and institutions that undergird our current prosperity and the modern world are so important because this is all very fragile. And as we’ve seen again and again with centers of progress, quickly unraveling, progress can be lost.

Paul Meany: And that fragility, one of your brilliant examples is the story of Hong Kong, which libertarians are quite familiar with. But can you just do me a little bit on why Hong Kong is such an amazing example of basically a small rock in the middle of the ocean becoming one of the most prosperous places on the planet?

Chelsea Follett: It truly is. Hong Kong was once so poor, the levels of poverty were almost unimaginable. They were comparable to some places in Sub-​Saharan Africa today. But this went from one of the poorest places in the world to one of the wealthiest. And very quickly, that whirlwind transformation of Hong Kong is the focus of a chapter of the book that is a little different from the others. Most of the chapter is either focused on Asti, that was the first to happen upon some incredible innovation or a city that in some way represents the pinnacle of a sort of achievement. For example, Vienna did not invent music, but many people believe it represents the epitome of musical achievements. Agra did not invent architecture, but many people believe it is the home to the most beautiful building in the world and so forth. But Hong Kong is a little bit different. It was included, not because it represents necessarily the pinnacle of any one form of achievement or because it was the origin points of a new innovation, but because it is such an incredible, remarkable example of how quickly economic development can occur with the right policies.

Chelsea Follett: And that historic policy lesson merits its place in the book. But as you point out, those pillars upon which Hong Kong’s prosperity were built are now rapidly crumbling. And so Hong Kong is also a warning and a reminder of, again, how easily progress and the conditions for progress can be undone.

Paul Meany: So places like Hong Kong, they’re so amazing because of certain kinds of policies, but as you mentioned, it’s also about peace. It’s about not having war around. And can you discuss a little bit, there are some people out there who tend to think that the competition of war is what drives human history. And a lot of men, especially, when they’re reading about history, it seems to be all the great battles and the great generals. But this is a very different book ’cause it’s about the average people who do great things. And that’s a very different focus that I don’t see in very many history books that normally talk very positively about war in some regards.

Chelsea Follett: I think that war obviously can lead to innovation when it comes to weaponry because that’s what people are focusing on at the time. But when it comes to innovations that raise living standards and that better the lives of everyday people, I don’t think you can beat peace. Now, the example people will often give for how war allegedly moves progress forward is the invention of the computer. Many people believe that it was made possible, or at least the invention of it was sped up by World War II and military competition. It’s true that we cannot rerun history without a World War II and see if the computer would’ve been created faster or not at all. But if you look at the different people at the time who were working on early computing technology, they were scattered in different countries. You can find an anecdote about this in the foreword of the book that was kindly provided by the brilliant Matt Ridley.

Chelsea Follett: But you had people at the time like Konrad Zuse in Berlin. You had various Americans and other Europeans all working on this early technology. And because of the secrecy inherent in war, even the various Americans were not able to work together closely. Everyone had to work separated, individually. And so arguably, the creation of the computer was slowed down by this. If all of these different innovators in different countries who were not able to work together due to the conflict between their nations and due to the secrecy inherent in war, had been able to put their heads together and discuss the problems they were working on, we might have had computers far earlier and then who knows where we could be technologically today. We can’t, again, rerun history and see whether that would truly be the case. But we see again and again throughout human history that when more people are working together to solve a problem, it often leads to faster solutions. And so I think it is quite feasible that peace rather than war fosters the kind of progress that we care most about. But it is true for weaponry technology, war is obviously something that cannot be beat in that area. I’m not sure how important that is for human wellbeing though. And none of the chapters of this book involve military technology or weaponry.

Paul Meany: For people who don’t like libertarianism, usually they would say libertarians just wanna work on their own. They don’t wanna cooperate with anyone. But what you’re saying is actually that being in a free market and being in a free society is actually about cooperating with the maximum number of people possible and having peaceful relations with as many people as you can. And it seems that cities are cosmopolitan places. Are they naturally inclined towards peace and cosmopolitanism as opposed to war and nationalism? Is that something that cities often veer towards?

Chelsea Follett: The cities that throughout history have become the greatest centers of progress and innovation have tended to be peaceful. It is of course true that as they prospered historically when there was a norm of conquest, that often made them targets. When a city prospered, it was sometimes more at risk of them being invaded or taken over by another power. So it’s not necessarily the case that they were safer, but cities could sometimes provide more security than the countryside. This is one of the points that Adam Smith raises again in favor of cities. Now, this is not to say that progress always occurs during peace time. There is one city in the book that serves as a sort of counter example, and that would be Mainz, back during the printing revolution when Johannes Gutenberg lived there. That city was subject to so much violence and turmoil with a civil war, various uprisings and worse, that there was a diaspora of printmaking apprentices and others fleeing the city.

Chelsea Follett: And the speed with which printing technology spread throughout Europe is arguably due to so many people fleeing from Mainz. And so that could be a sort of counter example where actually chaos and instability became a catalyst for positive change. But the lesson I took away from that historical anecdote is that even when you have all of the wrong conditions for progress, sometimes humanity still finds a way to innovate and good can come of it. And yet when you have all of the right ingredients for progress in place, peace, people, freedom, incredible progress is much more likely.

Paul Meany: Some people are skeptical of progress. They think the world is not becoming a better place daily. It’s in fact, maybe getting worse. What would you say to people who are naysayers in that regard?

Chelsea Follett: To gain some historical perspective, whether you do that by visiting Human​Progress​.org or by cracking open this book, a Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World or through some other means. Reading the wonderful historical pieces of scholarship on lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, for example, learning about the past, I think can put the modern world into perspective. Yes, there are many problems and there always will be. The world is very imperfect and there’s need for further progress. But we have come so far in celebrating each one of those milestones of all of the problems that humanity has overcome in the past, I think is incredibly important. And as you say, some people believe that libertarians are these incredibly individualistic people who don’t really believe in humanity or the community or whatnot. But if you actually look at where we believe progress comes from, which is again, people freely engaging in exchange and debates, it’s the least misanthropic philosophy.

Chelsea Follett: It says that there is a great trust for people and that yes, while people make many mistakes, when you have more people experimenting freely, the chances of hitting upon something that is world changing and positive are higher. Whereas if you have only a small number of people making decisions and you have concentrated decision making power among a tiny number of bureaucrats or other officials, then the probability of making positive change is much lower. You’re losing the information signals from markets. You’re losing the wisdom of billions of people making decisions freely based on the feedback that they’re getting from the real world on the ground. And when you have people who are so far removed from things, making all of the decisions. And so I think that if you do believe in people and you believe in their capacity to do amazing things together, then libertarianism makes a lot more sense. Whereas if you dislike people and you think that they cannot be trusted with any decisions, then another political philosophy may be better for you.

Paul Meany: When I think of progress, I think the same as you. I think of large amounts of people trying things out. But that’s because I’ve read lots of human progress. But I think when most people think of progress, they think of very smart people get in the room, make very smart decisions and create new technology. But the story of how we create all this technology is actually far far messier than that. And it’s actually the story of millions if not billions of people all working together. I was gonna ask, after studying all of these centers of progress, how did it change your perception of history?

Chelsea Follett: It made me appreciate more just how much progress has sped up due to those mechanisms you were mentioning. We have far more people alive today than we did in the past. And sometimes I’ve been asked, was there a particular center of progress in the book, a particular city that had a much longer golden age than the others that we could learn from? But actually, the periods in the book that are longest, the cities that are covered over the longest span of time are the earliest chapters. And that’s not because those cities are to be emulated, but because progress was so painfully slow back then. The earliest innovations such as agriculture and writing took place over multiple generations very, very gradually. When you’ve got far fewer people working on a problem, it takes more time to solve. Whereas the recent centers of progress featured in the book, they create incredible innovations and burn bright for a moment and then tend to fizzle out. Something often undoes the conditions for progress that were present in those cities and they’re only featured for a few decades, yet progress has sped up.

Chelsea Follett: And that’s because these cities have done so much in such a short period of time. That’s incredible and that’s something that should be celebrated. And so people sometimes act like, again, lacking historical perspective, as you said, things are much worse today in part sometimes because there are so many more people and there’s still this fear of overpopulation or that having so many people inherently leads to problems and yet it also has a much higher potential for innovation and positive change. And so it helps me, I think, appreciate just how much more rapid progress has become more recently in part likely due to the fact that there are just so many more people today.

Paul Meany: My last question for you today is how do we promote having great cities in America today? How do we cultivate the next centers of progress? What can we do?

Chelsea Follett: If you are a mayor or an urban leader and you want your city to become the next great center of progress, I have both good news and bad news. The bad news is that, some of the, this is due to random chance. Obviously you, if you are a mayor or an urban leader, probably, do not have it within your power to prevent a war from breaking out in your country that will affect your city. So you can’t guarantee peace, you can’t guarantee a lot of things. There could be outside conditions such as natural disasters that could strike and some of it is luck. Again, just as you in the example of Mainz, can have none of the conditions for progress and yet somehow still make progress. It’s also possible to have all of the right conditions and yet things just don’t work out for some reason.

Chelsea Follett: So, there are limits to what you can do, but the good news is that we do see that certain conditions drastically increase the chances of your city succeeding. And those are within your power. Fostering free enterprise within your city, allowing businesses to experiment and try new things and exchange goods and services will lead to greater prosperity, which will then in turn draw more people to your city. Openness and an attitude of tolerance and tolerance for a diversity of thought, allowing for freedom of speech and discussion of a broad diversity of views is incredibly important. I recently spoke with someone on a podcast regarding the city of Austin about this. And they’ve got that saying, keep Austin weird. I think that that suggests that they are doing something right there that might be, that’s certainly the kind of attitude to cultivate, to allow people to think differently and to express different viewpoints.

Chelsea Follett: Even ones that might seem a little bit weird or strange, or controversial. That is an incredibly important condition for progress. And you’ve seen this book again and again, that places that you wouldn’t expect, no one would’ve predicted, would rise up to take the world by storm like Edinburgh, which was this very small, inhospitable town, before suddenly reaching its golden age. It came out of nowhere. And so even if your town today is relatively small or unsuccessful, I wouldn’t count it out. With the right policies, you can improve its chances of thriving and possibly even becoming a world-​changing center of progress.

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Landry Ayres: Thank you for listening to the Liberty Exchange, a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. This episode was hosted by Paul Meany and produced by Landry Ayres. Special thanks to Chelsea Follett and the team at Human​Progress​.org as well as the rest of the lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org team, including Jonathan Fortier, Pericles Niarchos, Allison Yaffee, and Grant Babcock. If you like this and want more, you can visit us online at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.