“Glaeser, for his part, says he feels the same about New Orleans as he does about many cities of the Rust Belt. “I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit,” he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. “There are no reasons why it can’t, and shouldn’t, decline,” Glaeser says. “And I would say that for many other cities. There’s no reason not to let decline go forward.” The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. “Places decline and places grow. We shouldn’t stand in the way of that.”" -NYT Magazine article on some dufus from Harvard.