make people poor. Cities attract poor people. They attract poor people because they deliver things that people need most of all—economic opportunity." Glaeser and Harvard economist Alberto Alesina compared public policies to reduce inequality and poverty in the United States with Europe (Alesina and Glaeser 2004). Differing attitudes towards those less fortunate partially explain differences in the redistribution of income from rich to poor. Sixty percent of Europeans and 29% of Americans believe that the poor are trapped in poverty. Only 30% of Americans believe that luck determines income compared with 60% of Europeans. Sixty percent of Americans believe the poor are lazy while only 24% of Europeans believe this to be true. But they conclude that racial diversity in the United States, with the dominant group being white and the poor mainly non-white, led to resistance to reduce inequality in the United States through redistribution. Surprisingly the United States political structures are centuries old and remain much more conservative than their European counterparts as the latter have undergone much political change. He has also made important contributions in the field of social capital by identifying underlying economic incentives for social association and volunteering. For example, he and colleague Denise DiPasquale found that homeowners are more engaged citizens than renters. In experimental work, he found that students reporting being more trusting also act in more trustworthy ways. In recent years, Glaeser has argued that human capital explains much of the variation in urban and metropolitan level prosperity." He has extended the argument to the international level, arguing that the high levels of human capital, embodied by European settlers in the New World and elsewhere, explains the development of freer institutions and economic growth in those countries over centuries. In other work, he finds that human capital is associated with reductions in corruption and other improvements in government performance. During the 2000s, Glaeser's empirical research has offered a distinctive explanation for the increase in housing prices in many parts of the United States over the past several decades. Unlike many pundits and commentators, who attribute skyrocketing housing prices to a housing bubble created by Alan Greenspan's monetary policies, Glaeser pointed out that the increase in housing prices was not uniform throughout the country (Glaeser and Gyourko 2002). Glaeser and Gyourko (2002) argued that while the price of housing was significantly higher than construction costs in Boston, Massachusetts and San Francisco and