difficulties of distance. But technology eroded their obvious advantages. Cities should have languished. They have, so often, been expected to languish. But they have stubbornly refused to accept their fate. Instead, they thrived, attaining a centrality in modernity they didn’t possess even in antiquity. This, Glaeser writes, is “the central paradox of the modern metropolis—proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.”
