Ed Glaeser
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
impacting the food supply seems sensible, though that requires New Yorkers to be very attentive about their trash, which is not something I remember all New Yorkers being, but perhaps that can be managed.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
I agree with that. That sounds perfectly reasonable, although you're still depending upon the New Yorker actively like shutting the plastic bin and keeping it effectively closed.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
Well, I would, of course, start with something like measurement. One article I saw is that Hong Kong seems to be doing a lot with heat vision things. So they're looking at the rats moving around at night. I imagine you could do that with some combination of drones and satellite in a way that would give you an effective idea of where the rat hotspots are. Why would measurement be important for you?
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
Because I want to know whether whatever I'm doing is working. These things might be right, but without measurement, who knows? And I think, you know, in everything where there's a problem and you don't feel like you've seen a solution that's been tried 50 times and always works, the first thing is to start with the humility to learn.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
You know, let's try the trash cans and let's see if the rat density goes down sufficiently in this region. Presumably, this should be compared with the traditional poisoning method.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
Is it that hard? I think it's pretty hard because a lot of them are indoors. Even if you could have drones full time on every alleyway in the city at night, that's not going to give you a full measure. And you don't even know if you're seeing a rat at 1 a.m. and a rat at 3 a.m. Are these the same rats or not? Are you actually going to know that?
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
Do you like that idea? So Sullivan claims that cats can't take down a fully grown rat, in which case you need terriers. Having enough terriers to take on, if you thought, let's say we were at two million rats in New York, that's a lot of terriers. And it's not like dogs don't potentially carry diseases as well.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
I'm always worried about introducing large numbers of some other species to get rid of one species. One thing we haven't talked about is the eating of rats. There's at least some tradition in parts of China for eating rats. That strikes me as being an enormously sensible thing, somewhat similar to the East Asian practice of selling night soil.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
So both Chinese and Japanese cities engaged in the practice of basically selling their human excrement. to farmers in nearby areas. And that created a very virtuous circle where the farmers had better land and the excrement got removed. Dealing with the problem by turning it into something that's desirable, like, you know, food, that seems kind of good.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
Now, most of the time in the West, we haven't been able to stomach it, but that strikes me as a thing to potentially think about.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
I do not know. I have never eaten either kinds of rat, but I would happily eat a bamboo rat in Fujian if I were there.
Freakonomics Radio
623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?
If prepared well, sure, I'm open. Is someone actually serving Norway rat?
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
One of the reasons why the rat-led plagues need to be slow is the rat has to die before the flea leaves the rat. So the flea stays on the rat as long as the rat's alive. It's only when the rat dies that the flea then hops to a human host. And that is Ed Glazer. I'm the Fred Neller Glimp, professor of economics at Harvard University.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I have now read enough in various academic journals that it seems like we have a consensus. This was not, by and large, rat-carried. They do seem to have played a critical role in the third bubonic plague explosion, although probably not in the first two.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
So blaming the rat is pretty much, you know, game over in terms of the rat's global reputation. I think we should also just object to using the word guilt on rats. It's not like they know what's going on. They're dying, too. I mean, let's push the guilt where it belongs. Let's go to Yersinia pestis itself. That's where the evil lies.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
When cities are at their best, they do enable people who are outsiders to thrive. It's hard to imagine more of an outsider than a rat.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Rats are, you know, they're agents of usually negative externalities within cities, right? So they're part of what enables diseases to spread across people. And consequently, they're somewhat risky.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I don't know what positive things we get out of rats, but there probably are some in the same sense that, you know, the four pest program that Mao followed, he thought getting rid of the sparrows was great. It turns out the sparrows kept the locusts under control. And without the sparrows, the locusts went haywire and destroyed the crops, leading to a massive famine.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Certainly, COVID seems to have played some kind of a role. I mean, there were a whole bunch of city services that diminished because people were working from home or just weren't going in and so forth. So I wouldn't rule that out completely. Certainly, changes in the food availability seem likely to be quite important. This would feel a lot better with some kind of measurement.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Oh, that seems a little bit far-fetched to think that it's such an important deal. I would say that what rats effectively do is they reduce the density level for people. And so they tend not to be density multipliers about the good things about cities, which are enabling us to learn from one another. I've never heard of a rat carrying a message that was effectively interpreted.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
But they do seem to carry the negative stuff that we get from being close to one another.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
So I think it is certainly true that the innate human reaction to rats, I don't know why, is largely revulsion. That, again, is the economist Ed Glazer. Certainly when you see them in an urban context surrounded by trash, right? So you associate the rats with the filth, with drinking the water and the subway, right? It's hard not to think of that as being sort of awful.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I think it's probably pretty small. That being said, I would still probably be in favor of policies that keep the rat population manageable. In the sense that who knows what happens if you let it get incredibly vast, who knows what new diseases occur or what spreads across things. So I think some control, but not making a fetish out of complete eradication.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
You know, it's hard not to think that rats have gotten something of a bad rap. They certainly are not healthy to have in vast numbers around you. But, you know, it's a very urban species and I tend to like that. They sort of co-live with humans. They're, in some sense, our natural city partner.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
It feels a little strong. It feels a little strong because it's not like this thing does not do anything, but something in that neighborhood sounds good.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Yes. Yes, I love it. I love it. And the echo, of course, with the Rolling Stones is great.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
I do. I do. I think in general, having sympathy for a creature that, you know, coexisted with us, that suffers many of the same negative sides from cities as we do, that enjoys many of the same positive sides of cities that we do, the ability to create this ecosystem, I think that's a very worthy aim.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
And even if we do have to control the rat, not viewing it with so much horror, but rather viewing it as being, you know, our urban partner, seems like it makes more sense.
Freakonomics Radio
622. Why Does Everyone Hate Rats?
Blaming the rat is pretty much, you know, game over in terms of the rat's global reputation.