There's a reason Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix are our four fastest-growing areas. They offer an astonishingly high standard of living for ordinary Americans. New York City is a great place to be really rich and not a terrible place to be really poor, but it's a pretty hard place to live on $60,000 a year. You don't experience anywhere near the basic standard of living you would in Houston on the same income.

Knowledge is more important than space.

It's hard not to empathize with the mayor's anger, given the injustices he'd suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.

An economist's definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.

One classic paper compared the effects of right-to-work laws on factory jobs in neighboring counties, on either side of a right-to-work border. It found that manufacturing grew 23.1% faster between 1947 and 1992 on the anti-union side of the divide.

The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilisation's success and the primary reason why cities existwe must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.

Great cities are not static, they constantly change and take the world along with them.