 It is a remarkable thing that we live in an age in which distance is dead, in which we can all telecommute in from whatever Sylvan's spot appeals to our love of nature. And yet, in so many ways, in so many places, we choose the inconveniences of urban density. Thirty years ago, the cyber-seers and the techno-profits were predicting that the internet, the fax machine, various forms of electronic communications, were going to make face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact obsolete. And indeed, as late as the 1980s, it seemed like that was possible. Indeed, when I was a kid growing up in New York City in the 1970s, it really seemed as if the age of the big city had come and gone and was never going to come again, because the manufacturing centers that had been the life-splot of our urban areas, those had de-urbanized, those had left the high-cost areas of the dense agglomeration, had moved to cheaper locales. But something amazing happened in this narrative of declining transportation costs killing face-to-face contact and killing cities. Just that cities kind of came back. The point of the basic perspective, I think, at the national level, should be a level playing field across space. The government, the business of the government is to charge people for various negative externalities, provide human capital investments, and then try not to pick winners and losers across space. Now, inevitably, things like infrastructure decisions are going to involve some degree of spatial management. I tend to think the best answer for most infrastructure is to have them paid for by user fees, which means you don't actually have a transfer from one area to the other, but you have the users themselves paid for them. I would be remiss not to mention that there's few areas which it's easier to waste many billions of dollars in infrastructure. I think as economists in the public realm, it's important for us to always emphasize the need for solid cost-benefit analysis of anything, because otherwise we risk wasting billions. Once you're involved in the magic of placemaking, all that rhetoric of the beauty of causing Detroit to come back can cause all logic to run out the window very, very quickly, which means the skills of the economist are even more important. It is so central as we look forward to these investments to keep the focus on helping people, not helping places. The goal of public policy has got to be to give choices to more people, to give them more resources, to enable them to do things, to increase in our language, to increase their utility levels, which I persist, following the basic logic of microeconomics in expanding their choice sets rather than increasing their happiness, since indeed that's how we actually formally model utility levels. But focusing on, however you define it, focusing on actually creating tangible gains for people, because so often place-based politicians just want to be able to say that their city has come back. And look, the federal government doesn't have an instinct, doesn't, the national government doesn't have a role in choosing and making sure that business goes to one place versus the other. They have a job in making sure that children grow up in safety and have access to decent education, but not that jobs float to one particular place or another. And I think that's a central perspective that economists should never lose in discussing place-based policies. That's what you said in your book, Triumph of the Cities. Government should help poor people, not poor cities. Government should help poor people, not poor places, that's right. And it's not even, you know, if you think about, if you think that people are mobile, it makes very, very little sense to try and bribe them to stay in declining areas. Now, it is probably true that place-based aid looks even worse in the U.S. than it does in Europe, both because it is, the geographic distances involved are so large and even the climate differences are very large in the U.S. It's very hard to imagine how in the world, you know, you would actually, even if you spent a huge amount of money on it, how you would get Detroit to come back. On top of that, the American population is much more mobile than the European population is, so it's much more natural to just say, look, you're going to leave, whereas Europeans tend to be a little bit more rooted. That being said, I still think the overwhelming danger is to throw more money. And this is true both at the nation level and even more so at the European Union level at declining regions rather than to focus on the policies that will yield the most returns because there are two ways of enriching the residents of a poor area, one of which is to try and somehow or other make it an attractive place for business to locate. But that may not be all that feasible and in general, by doing that, you're just moving business from one place to the other or you can educate the people and enable them to find great jobs somewhere else. Now, that seems like it's a win-win for everyone. So I think that's one of the reasons why focusing on helping poor people not poor places makes a lot of sense.