The NYU Stern Urbanization Project harnesses the growth of cities to speed up global progress. The world’s cities will add more people in the 21st century than during all of human history to date. Never before have cities and the policy choices therein been more important. Watch the video below and visit urbanizationproject.org to learn more.

One of the newsletters I follow on China is Dragonomics, from GK Research. The head of research there, Arthur Kroeber, has a good command of economic theory but still shows his roots in journalism. His shop seems to stay close to the facts as best they can establish them, with little concern about a theoretical framework into which they must fit and little concern for whatever the fashion of the day happens to be: “China is unstoppable.

The population of the city of Detroit has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 714,000 in 2010. Could it be possible that after this decrease, Detroit is still more dense than Denver? Using US Census data from 2010, it appears that it is: My colleague Alain Bertaud says that any time someone reports a density for a city, they should show the map. This comparison nicely illustrates his point about why the maps are so informative.

For several years, I’ve been collecting examples that illustrate a general principle about incentives and the dynamics of policy: To create the incentives for better outcomes, rely on small stakes because they support good measurement. In short, SS=>GM. In other posts, I’ll cite some recent examples that include a new US policy toward investment in Myanmar, the quiet success of National Assessment of Educational Progress, the retreat from using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, and use of stoplight cameras as a source of revenue for local government.

In a recent article on urbanization in China The New York Times presented this graph of the urban population share versus GDP per capita in a selected set of countries: The NYTimes article seemed to suggest that China is trying to achieve an urban population share that is inappropriately high. If the idea was to suggest, for example, that China is trying to achieve the same urbanization rate as Japan but at a much lower level of income, it matters if the data point for Japan is in the right place.