Visiting his ancestral homeland in February, Glaeser told Glasgow officials that their city is teetering on a “knife edge.” He said Glasgow could follow Boston’s model of economic growth—or a Baltimore-style path of urban decay.

Glaeser brought a “breath of fresh air” to Glasgow and Edinburgh, according to The Scottsman, a daily newspaper.

But Glaeser—who extolled the virtues of the automobile to a country that has long prized alternative forms of transportation—drew fire from environmentalists.

“I was pilloried by the left wing of the Scottish press,” Glaeser said. “The car is so anathema to them that saying anything accepting of the automobile is considered outrageous.”

Meanwhile, other Scottish journalists displayed a perverse fascination with Glaeser’s gastronomic habits.

The Sunday Herald, a Glasgow-based newspaper, noted that Glaeser spent breaks from his lecture sipping Diet Irn-Bru.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

“I admit it, I do watch my carbs,” Glaeser told The Crimson.

But the professor has also been monitoring the eating habits of ordinary Americans—and his observations have formed the basis for his ground-breaking work on obesity.

“I’m interested in the world around me. That’s what motivates me to do research,” Glaeser said. “And I think weight is a fascinating topic.”

Last January, Glaeser co-authored a study that found the increasing ease of food preparation has increased Americans’ caloric intake. Since the growth of the pre-packaged food industry allows consumers to spend less time preparing meals, Americans are eating more—and their waist lines are expanding.

Associate Dean for Social Sciences David M. Cutler, another co-author of the obesity study, described Glaeser as “a model collaborator—wonderful to talk to, with great ideas [and] lots of energy.”

“We used to eat chocolate-covered espresso beans until our primary care physicians cut us off,” recounted Sacerdote, who earned his doctorate from Harvard and has co-written several papers with Glaeser. “He always had a great supply of Dominican cigars, and you can’t sleep for a day after having one of those. For many of his graduate students, including me, he’s the whole reason we stayed in economics and saw it as a worthwhile, fun and useful pursuit,” Sacerdote wrote.

BIG CITY BREAKIN’

News of Glaeser’s appointment has drawn a warm reception at the Taubman Center, which was formed in 1988 when an auction house mogul donated $15 million to have the Kennedy School study issues of state and local governance.