7 ms·

Yes. Countries were relevant back in the days when territory was the most prized thing and war was the best means of acquiring it. Countries evolved as a means

by nkoren 11y ago

Yes. Countries were relevant back in the days when territory was the most prized thing and war was the best means of acquiring it. Countries evolved as a means of ensuring territorial integrity, via means both explicit (borders enforced by militaries) and implicit (cultural/linguistic homogeneity, leading to xenophobia and other such barriers). But territories are no longer the most prized thing: economies are. And economies are produced by cities, not countries.[1] Moreover, the rise of the importance of cities is genuinely a challenge to the institutions of countries, not something that is merely happening in parallel to the ongoing importance of countries. This is because the factors which allow cities to thrive -- internal diversity and external trade -- are almost diametrically opposed to the factors which allow countries to maintain their territorial integrity. Of these two forms of power, I'm betting on cities. 1: http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
All you folks in the city will learn your lesson pretty quick once the food stops flowing in. Don't get too uppity!
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  In the US, less than 2% of the population works on farms. That's roughly 6 million people at a full 2%, less than the population of NYC alone. Should farmers decide to not ship out food for some reason, it would be easy for cities to keep them in line if they are facing an existential crisis.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    No, it would be impossible to get farmers to farm if they decide not to. And equally unlikely that city folks could do the job, cold. It'd be mass starvation and revolution.
    - Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
      If farmers don't grow, they might not get to live either. They don't get medicine, farming equipment, fertilizer, gasoline, electricity, cell phones, the Internet, clothes, or anything else they've come to depend on. A lot of farming is automated, using GPS and other systems to drive tractors with extreme accuracy. Without gasoline alone it would be impossible for many farmers to find the labor to grow what they do. Farming is a lot more high tech than you might think. In short, farmers are just as dependent on cities as cities are on them. They trade not out of the goodness of their hearts but for selfish reasons. Even farmers themselves must trade, as not all farmers grow food, and not all farmers that grow food can live on just what they grow. A cotton farmer in Alabama is going to have just as hard a time eating as a banker on Wall Street.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        ...thus my observation that cities are not the center of the universe - they depend on the whole ecosystem just like everybody else. And, here's a secret, every farmer has land and can have a garden. They will eat no matter what. Sure they need that oil and gps, to produce enough food for 10,000 people. But they just need their hands to feed themselves. So no, they aren't going to starve, or even suffer very much.
        Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
        > ...thus my observation that cities are not the center of the universe - they depend on the whole ecosystem just like everybody else. It goes both ways: cities depend on farms and farms depend on cities. Neither can sustain its way of life without the other. >And, here's a secret, every farmer has land and can have a garden. They will eat no matter what. Here's a secret: not every farmer owns land. There are about 6 million farm workers in the US and about 3 million owners of farmland. About half of farms are owner-operated and about half have a landlord renting out the land to a farmer or farmers. The landlords actually have fairly concentrated holdings, with roughly 8% of the landlords holding half of the rented out land, or about 25% of the total amount of farmland. In a situation in which farmers refuse to grow food, these landlords would lose their rents and have a very strong incentive to A) kick off the farmers who refuse to grow and B) get someone to grow food since the prices of foods would have gone through the roof. These farmers will starve. > Sure they need that oil and gps, to produce enough food for 10,000 people. But they just need their hands to feed themselves. So no, they aren't going to starve, or even suffer very much. They need oil and gas for things beyond food for themselves. Heating and cooking, for instance, require a good bit of firewood. In colder climates it can take many acres to keep warm. Even in the Southern United States it can get cold enough to kill during the winter. Many wells are deep enough that they require pumps to get water out. Guess what powers them? Electricity. Since lots of farmers own land in places that couldn't be grown on without irrigation, such as the desert, things are going to start sucking really quick. Electricity also powers refrigerators and freezers, which enable food to keep for much longer periods of time and reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Without trade, are these farmers going to have access to salt to cure meats? Are they going to know how to properly store food without any refrigeration? They certainly won't have the ice cutting industry of the 1800s. Gas also provides the transportation to get medicine, clothes, blankets, seeds, tools, pesticides, and fertilizer. Without cities, farmers would also not have accurate weather forecasting, something that is quite important for them. TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate the difficulties of subsistence farming without modern technology or the benefits of trade between cities and farms Source for statistics: https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb93_10.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb93_10.pdf
- chadgeidel 11y ago
  Your assumption that "city folks don't know how to farm" is fairly far-fetched.
pqs 11y ago
This is not new. History is full of powerful city states that were stable during centuries thanks to their trading networks. Venice is a very good example. There are many more examples.
agumonkey 11y ago
But since we're abstracting away from soil, cities are only the sum of people, structures and laws. It's all position independent.
- nkoren 11y ago
  Not in the slightest: cities are almost entirely about position. The whole point of a city is to provide easy and rapid access to a maximum diversity of goods, services, buyers, suppliers, needs, and ideas. If you took the people and laws and buildings of London or San Francisco and spread them homogeneously across the great plains, then this accessibility would be tremendously diminished and economic productivity would drop accordingly.
Spearchucker 11y ago
At some point an administration will need to guarantee supply of sustenance for the people in their city. It makes sense to me for a city to therefore still desire territory it controls, for agriculture.
- ogrisel 11y ago
  Cities also consume a lot of energy which primarily produced from oil, coal and nuclear power that is extracted and transformed outside of cities. Even if a city would only consume wind and solar, it's quite likely that the majority of solar panels and wind turbines would be installed outside of the cities themselves.
  - codingdave 11y ago
    And even if a city did produce its own power, where are the materials for all those panels and turbines coming from? Where is the sand coming from to melt into glass?
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  You don't have to control agricultural land. You just need to trade for food, which is beneficial to both farmers and city residents. Many cities do not control the lands that produce their food. In fact, many cities may not even be in the same province or even nation as the source of their food. For instance, Washington, D.C. produces no food of its own (excluding neighborhood gardens) as the District contains no farmland within its borders. The Potomac is polluted, meaning fishing is not a viable source of food either. Virginia and Maryland have farmland, though the counties and cities in either of these states in the DC metro area either do not have farmland or have very little farmland. All of these counties and cities get their food via truck, train, ship or some combination thereof. Modern transportation has made it so we no longer have to have farmland nearby to avoid spoiled food.
de_Selby 11y ago
There was an episode of the ted radio hour recently[1] about this very topic, it seems to be gaining a lot of traction. A lot of it makes sense, one of the big points is that democracy at a state level is broken, but it is still efficient at a city level. 1 http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/462178064/building-better-cities http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/462178064/buildin...
codingdave 11y ago
The cities run on resources produced by countries. Food, water, minerals, power. Even if power is generated locally, it probably burns fuels acquired from outside the city. So a strong economy can import everything it needs, and stand on its own. But that also exposes it to risk, as it cannot truly sustain itself in times of trouble. On the other hand, rural communities can be mostly self-sufficient, but when pushed to that extreme, life becomes harder and not quite as interesting. So the truth of the matter is that it is a symbiotic relationship. I'm not sure I see any practical value in pitting cities vs. countries.
- nkoren 11y ago
  I think you're conflating the concept of "countries" with the concept of "land". Cities do indeed need resources which are produced from the land, but the artefacts of countryhood (national identify, borders, etc.) don't really contribute to this production. In practice, cities are supplied by "city regions", which arise through natural economic and geographic forces, and which do their damnedest to ignore artificial jurisdictional boundaries. Hence the irrelevancy of countries as an institution. (For more on this line of thinking, see the Jane Jacobs link in the post you replied to).
  - walterbell 11y ago
    > Hence the irrelevancy of countries as an institution. How do you see the evolving boundaries of force monopolies between nations, cities and private entities. Pre-nations, it was complicated, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
    - nkoren 11y ago
      Well, in some ways it was more complicated; in other ways it was much simpler. Prior to Westphalia, the borders in Europe were predicated on religious affiliation. This made for a very complicated map. So Westphalia established the idea that a nation could be a superset which included both Catholics and Protestants. This makes for a simpler map -- if one is mapping the boundaries of the newly-established idea of nationhood, and then retroactively mapping that concept onto the past. However imagine drawing a map of the present, but with pre-Westphalian sensibilities. You'd want to know: where are the Catholics living, and where are the Protestants living? That map has gotten a lot more complicated (even before you try to account for all the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, etc.), and at this point the question hardly makes sense outside of certain bits of Ireland. Analogously, force monopolies are primarily of interest (at a national level) where territorial integrity is the primary name of the game. But if economic exchange (both competitive and cooperative) between cities were to become the acknowledged name of the game, then although force monopolies would almost certainly continue to exist, they'd be of as much interest as (say) the boundaries between different police departments. In other words, I suspect the mapmakers of the future draw on the basis of something other than force-monopoly boundaries. This may look more complicated to our eyes -- but we might also look more complicated to theirs. [edit: grammar]
vlehto 11y ago
Nobody ever gave shit about territory itself. Just that economic power used to come mostly from arable land. War has not gone away. We just happen to live an age of global hegemony, so it seems distant right now.
Spooky23 11y ago
Betting on cities is betting on continued decline of nations. Writing off the nation in exchange for the bright lights of the city is also a dangerous bet, because cities are very fragile.

by nkoren 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

All you folks in the city will learn your lesson pretty quick once the food stops flowing in. Don't get too uppity!

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
In the US, less than 2% of the population works on farms. That's roughly 6 million people at a full 2%, less than the population of NYC alone. Should farmers decide to not ship out food for some reason, it would be easy for cities to keep them in line if they are facing an existential crisis.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  No, it would be impossible to get farmers to farm if they decide not to. And equally unlikely that city folks could do the job, cold. It'd be mass starvation and revolution.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
    If farmers don't grow, they might not get to live either. They don't get medicine, farming equipment, fertilizer, gasoline, electricity, cell phones, the Internet, clothes, or anything else they've come to depend on. A lot of farming is automated, using GPS and other systems to drive tractors with extreme accuracy. Without gasoline alone it would be impossible for many farmers to find the labor to grow what they do. Farming is a lot more high tech than you might think. In short, farmers are just as dependent on cities as cities are on them. They trade not out of the goodness of their hearts but for selfish reasons. Even farmers themselves must trade, as not all farmers grow food, and not all farmers that grow food can live on just what they grow. A cotton farmer in Alabama is going to have just as hard a time eating as a banker on Wall Street.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      ...thus my observation that cities are not the center of the universe - they depend on the whole ecosystem just like everybody else. And, here's a secret, every farmer has land and can have a garden. They will eat no matter what. Sure they need that oil and gps, to produce enough food for 10,000 people. But they just need their hands to feed themselves. So no, they aren't going to starve, or even suffer very much.
      - Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
        > ...thus my observation that cities are not the center of the universe - they depend on the whole ecosystem just like everybody else. It goes both ways: cities depend on farms and farms depend on cities. Neither can sustain its way of life without the other. >And, here's a secret, every farmer has land and can have a garden. They will eat no matter what. Here's a secret: not every farmer owns land. There are about 6 million farm workers in the US and about 3 million owners of farmland. About half of farms are owner-operated and about half have a landlord renting out the land to a farmer or farmers. The landlords actually have fairly concentrated holdings, with roughly 8% of the landlords holding half of the rented out land, or about 25% of the total amount of farmland. In a situation in which farmers refuse to grow food, these landlords would lose their rents and have a very strong incentive to A) kick off the farmers who refuse to grow and B) get someone to grow food since the prices of foods would have gone through the roof. These farmers will starve. > Sure they need that oil and gps, to produce enough food for 10,000 people. But they just need their hands to feed themselves. So no, they aren't going to starve, or even suffer very much. They need oil and gas for things beyond food for themselves. Heating and cooking, for instance, require a good bit of firewood. In colder climates it can take many acres to keep warm. Even in the Southern United States it can get cold enough to kill during the winter. Many wells are deep enough that they require pumps to get water out. Guess what powers them? Electricity. Since lots of farmers own land in places that couldn't be grown on without irrigation, such as the desert, things are going to start sucking really quick. Electricity also powers refrigerators and freezers, which enable food to keep for much longer periods of time and reduce the risk of foodborne illness. Without trade, are these farmers going to have access to salt to cure meats? Are they going to know how to properly store food without any refrigeration? They certainly won't have the ice cutting industry of the 1800s. Gas also provides the transportation to get medicine, clothes, blankets, seeds, tools, pesticides, and fertilizer. Without cities, farmers would also not have accurate weather forecasting, something that is quite important for them. TL;DR I think you vastly underestimate the difficulties of subsistence farming without modern technology or the benefits of trade between cities and farms Source for statistics: https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb93_10.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/1/statbrief/sb93_10.pdf
chadgeidel 11y ago
Your assumption that "city folks don't know how to farm" is fairly far-fetched.

pqs 11y ago

This is not new. History is full of powerful city states that were stable during centuries thanks to their trading networks. Venice is a very good example. There are many more examples.

agumonkey 11y ago

But since we're abstracting away from soil, cities are only the sum of people, structures and laws. It's all position independent.

nkoren 11y ago
Not in the slightest: cities are almost entirely about position. The whole point of a city is to provide easy and rapid access to a maximum diversity of goods, services, buyers, suppliers, needs, and ideas. If you took the people and laws and buildings of London or San Francisco and spread them homogeneously across the great plains, then this accessibility would be tremendously diminished and economic productivity would drop accordingly.

Spearchucker 11y ago

At some point an administration will need to guarantee supply of sustenance for the people in their city. It makes sense to me for a city to therefore still desire territory it controls, for agriculture.

ogrisel 11y ago
Cities also consume a lot of energy which primarily produced from oil, coal and nuclear power that is extracted and transformed outside of cities. Even if a city would only consume wind and solar, it's quite likely that the majority of solar panels and wind turbines would be installed outside of the cities themselves.
- codingdave 11y ago
  And even if a city did produce its own power, where are the materials for all those panels and turbines coming from? Where is the sand coming from to melt into glass?
Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
You don't have to control agricultural land. You just need to trade for food, which is beneficial to both farmers and city residents. Many cities do not control the lands that produce their food. In fact, many cities may not even be in the same province or even nation as the source of their food. For instance, Washington, D.C. produces no food of its own (excluding neighborhood gardens) as the District contains no farmland within its borders. The Potomac is polluted, meaning fishing is not a viable source of food either. Virginia and Maryland have farmland, though the counties and cities in either of these states in the DC metro area either do not have farmland or have very little farmland. All of these counties and cities get their food via truck, train, ship or some combination thereof. Modern transportation has made it so we no longer have to have farmland nearby to avoid spoiled food.

de_Selby 11y ago

There was an episode of the ted radio hour recently[1] about this very topic, it seems to be gaining a lot of traction. A lot of it makes sense, one of the big points is that democracy at a state level is broken, but it is still efficient at a city level. 1 http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/462178064/building-better-cities http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/462178064/buildin...

codingdave 11y ago

The cities run on resources produced by countries. Food, water, minerals, power. Even if power is generated locally, it probably burns fuels acquired from outside the city. So a strong economy can import everything it needs, and stand on its own. But that also exposes it to risk, as it cannot truly sustain itself in times of trouble. On the other hand, rural communities can be mostly self-sufficient, but when pushed to that extreme, life becomes harder and not quite as interesting. So the truth of the matter is that it is a symbiotic relationship. I'm not sure I see any practical value in pitting cities vs. countries.

nkoren 11y ago
I think you're conflating the concept of "countries" with the concept of "land". Cities do indeed need resources which are produced from the land, but the artefacts of countryhood (national identify, borders, etc.) don't really contribute to this production. In practice, cities are supplied by "city regions", which arise through natural economic and geographic forces, and which do their damnedest to ignore artificial jurisdictional boundaries. Hence the irrelevancy of countries as an institution. (For more on this line of thinking, see the Jane Jacobs link in the post you replied to).
- walterbell 11y ago
  > Hence the irrelevancy of countries as an institution. How do you see the evolving boundaries of force monopolies between nations, cities and private entities. Pre-nations, it was complicated, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
  - nkoren 11y ago
    Well, in some ways it was more complicated; in other ways it was much simpler. Prior to Westphalia, the borders in Europe were predicated on religious affiliation. This made for a very complicated map. So Westphalia established the idea that a nation could be a superset which included both Catholics and Protestants. This makes for a simpler map -- if one is mapping the boundaries of the newly-established idea of nationhood, and then retroactively mapping that concept onto the past. However imagine drawing a map of the present, but with pre-Westphalian sensibilities. You'd want to know: where are the Catholics living, and where are the Protestants living? That map has gotten a lot more complicated (even before you try to account for all the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Pagans, etc.), and at this point the question hardly makes sense outside of certain bits of Ireland. Analogously, force monopolies are primarily of interest (at a national level) where territorial integrity is the primary name of the game. But if economic exchange (both competitive and cooperative) between cities were to become the acknowledged name of the game, then although force monopolies would almost certainly continue to exist, they'd be of as much interest as (say) the boundaries between different police departments. In other words, I suspect the mapmakers of the future draw on the basis of something other than force-monopoly boundaries. This may look more complicated to our eyes -- but we might also look more complicated to theirs. [edit: grammar]

vlehto 11y ago

Nobody ever gave shit about territory itself. Just that economic power used to come mostly from arable land. War has not gone away. We just happen to live an age of global hegemony, so it seems distant right now.

Spooky23 11y ago

Betting on cities is betting on continued decline of nations. Writing off the nation in exchange for the bright lights of the city is also a dangerous bet, because cities are very fragile.