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If only Americans reignited their imagination and didn't just settle on having a few big cities in opposite corners of the country. America is huge. There's la
by dimitrios1 4y ago
If only Americans reignited their imagination and didn't just settle on having a few big cities in opposite corners of the country.
America is huge. There's land everywhere. Start dreaming. China has 160 cities with 1+ million people. We have 10. Granted, there is a massive population difference, but we should most definitely have more than 10.
There are major issues when you only have a few cities with the bulk of the opportunity and high salaries for given fields. It stymies growth for the rest of the country, and for all the people we claim to care about: the poor and uneducated.
Greece has this issue with Athens being the only realistic metropolitan location. All the resources are there, and those left in the villages and small towns are finding it harder and harder to advance. If you aren't going to Athens (or immigrating to another country), you aren't succeeding. This is a big problem.
- deepsun 4y agoWell, compared to the rest of the world, I found US diversification much better than most of other countries, that have only one major city to where everything flows in.
- eru 4y agoThe US is multi-centric. Similar to eg Germany, but different to UK or France.
- cwalv 4y agoThe US has way more than 10 "cities" with over 1M population, unless you ignore ground truth (metro area) and only count people within random city boundaries
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jandrewrogers 4y agoThe US has 50-60 cities with 1+ million people. You may be conflating administrative boundaries with cities.
- dimitrios1 4y agoYou may be conflating metro areas with cities. If you are, it's not a helpful distinction in either case, and not the point I am trying to illustrate. For example, I could live in Wise County in Texas, and be technically counted towards the population of the Dallas/FW/Arlington Metro, but I would never dream of driving into Dallas from there daily for services, schooling, or work, and if I did, I would be severely disadvantaged, especially if I was poor or lacked resources.
- ericmay 4y agoI don't they are conflating metro areas, I think they're describing the accumulation of population a defined area. Metro area can make "cities" seem larger than they are because that population is spread out, but city is misleading as well because it ignores the surrounding population. Let me put it this way. If you go by city population size, Columbus where I live is larger than San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas, or Atlanta [1]. In fact, Columbus is almost the same size as Atlanta and and Miami combined. Does that seem right to you? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
- quickthrower2 4y agoIf I were you, for your argument I would use population densities. But you can’t bucket a million people living in thousands of square miles as the same as a million locked together in a suburban sprawl connected with rail and roads. Look at London. Take away the boroughs and what is really left?
- TimPC 4y agoThis is kind of ignoring all the positive effects from density. Yes, housing for density is hard. Yes, there are some negatives. But you would not get anywhere near the economic productivity you do from 330 Million people uniformly spread across the US as you do from having huge spikes in NYC and LA (and other metropolitan zones). You also have to face the fact that as you spread people out, most costs go up. Cities subsidize suburbia and rural areas in the sense that cities generate more tax revenues of all types relative to costs. Suburban and rural areas mostly fail to raise enough tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure and generally rely on various handouts from state and federal governments to build things like sewers and roads, which they then do not adequately maintain due to budget shortfalls.
- dimitrios1 4y agoThere's a middle ground between spread out uniform, and having a few major population centers. Germany is a great example.
- eru 4y agoBig cities in Germany are richer than the small cities. And Germany is poorer than the US, too.
- dimitrios1 4y agoIs wealth the only factor? Is the materialistic perspective the only valid one left in the world?
- 22SAS 4y agoChina may have a 160 cities with a million+ people, but, do all of these cities have the infrastructure and opportunities that are the same as or come close to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzen? IMO, this is a case where quantity alone is a poor metric.
- quickthrower2 4y agoYeah sounded weird to me. Australia has at least 5 such cities, with 25m people total. Ok yeah ok Australia might as well be a hollow disk (no one lives in the middle) but still!
- dimitrios1 4y agoThis is a difficult question to accurately answer because the only source of this information is an unreliable one (the Chinese regime). We can, however, assume via observation of how efficient and diverse their manufacturing is, which leads to some baseline assumption they all have above average infrastructure, housing, and other services, in addition to affording salaries to those millions of people that does not result in unmanageable civil unrest. Plenty of experts believe China's infrastructure is ahead of the US at this point. They build 100 miles of high speed rail for the same cost we build 1 mile of tunnel, or 10 miles of toll lane that 90% of commuters won't use. There are other educated assumptions we can make based on the rapid response to the Wuhan outbreak and the surrounding cities, but in my opinion, based on inference from what we can observe from the outside, the answer is firmly yes.
- eru 4y agoWhy is concentrating in cities a problem? From an environmental point of view, it seems nearly ideal if most humans would live in a few big cities, than more of the rest of the earth could be given back to nature.