People like crowding, so move towards the more crowded location, until everyone lives in the same location.
You have to read the whole post. He is not claiming that people like crowding, but if they do want to be around more people, then they will tend toward a single city.
My thinking is a bit more nuanced, but it pushes in a similar direction. I think that to some extent other people are amenities. For me, having enough folk dancers in an area is an important amenity. If you have young children, then other people with young children are important amenities. If you like pro sports, then having other sports fan in an area is an important amenity–otherwise, there won’t be local pro sports teams. If you like bluegrass music, then other bluegrass music fans become an important amenity. You get the idea.
In general, the more people an area has, the more likely you will find the people-as-amenities that you are looking for. So that is one factor in creating cities that are in some sense larger than they need to be. Of course, at some point, the negative externalities of crowding start to kick in. That is why we don’t all move to one big city.
There should be mathematical models of this, but I wouldn’t know what keywords to use to find them. It reminds me of this: https://mic.com/articles/103172/the-scientific-reason-all-hipsters-look-the-same#.BFUjDDwOi
Give it time. Or, as Zhou Enlai said, “Too soon to say.” Certainly we see that things can get a lot more crowded than we’re used to in other countries, and in a way that doesn’t seem to stop more urbanization, centralization, and concentration of production, despite crushing real estate and commuting costs and other problems.
Most countries in the world do indeed seem to be seeing everyone crowding into one, big, rich, dominant city, and this seems particularly true for developing countries that didn’t get rich while they were still more spread out. The US and a few other countries like Germany seem to be special, comparatively geographically decentralized cases for special historical reasons, but trends are still going in one direction everywhere you look. The Chinese government is actively intervening in many ways to prevent the whole population from continuing to crowd into the few biggest and richest cities, which tells us the negative externalities of some of the most intense crowding in the world are still not nearly enough on their own to prevent continued domestic immigation to those urban areas.
It is worth noting that one of the externalities of American pattern big cities is that urban sprawl works very much against the tendency of increased population to create a greater statistical likelihood of there being a critical mass of people with some niche interest. You can have an order of magnitude more people, but if it’s too damn hard for them to get together, then the viability of their groups may actually be lower than it is in some smaller town with easier, quicker options for physical convergence. This is one of the reasons city life is “paradoxically” often perceived as more alientating despite urbanites being in proximity to many more potential counter-parties for social interaction and connection.
For me, none of the ‘people amenities’ would be a determining factor in picking a new place to live. Any US metro area of a reasonable size would have people with young children, bluegrass musicians, folk dancers, and sports fans (even those not big enough for pro sports teams will have plenty of fans). Those are all givens. What would distinguish places for would be natural amenities — access to hiking and biking trails, forests, rivers, lakes, beaches, mountains. And for those amenities, crowds are a definite negative — the more people you’re trying to share them with, the worse they are.
I agree, but we seem to be in a minority. Time was, people thought that things like telecommuting and the internet would allow people to spread out more, but it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.
What I don’t like are the advocates of urban density who want to make us all live like that. If they want to, fine, but don’t make me live like that!
Greatly increased urban density would happen automatically in many places if building restrictions and other regulations were lifted. The trouble is that municipal government is awful, transit infrastructure cost disease is terrible, and it is too politically hard and takes forever to build anything these days.
So greater density would very suddenly increase congestion making living ‘far’ from work infeasible, and set off a positive feedback vicious cycle, drawing more people in and driving up central rents and congestion.
So, for example, could WMATA match a doubling of DC metro demand with additional service supply? Or are we “transit infrastructure capacity inelastic”?
We notice a crowd at the dance hall. We go through life allocating resources by observing relative crowd sizes. We adjust to keep the crowd sizes optimum.
Buchanan gave a lecture, “Why We Should All Work More” that describes the extra hours a person chooses to work as generating a positive externality. By working more, a person makes it possible for herself and for others to increase their level of specialization, thus increasing productivity.
Cities allow for increased specialization in production, and also in consumption, particularly joint consumption, aka ammenities.
There’s a solution where both the east and the west are in fully populated and in equilibrium: the Linear City. Think of a skyscraper on it’s side and you’re most of the way there.
Dreamt of by city planners since the late 1800’s, see wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city and the wonderful images here https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/instead-vertical-cities-should-we-be-thinking-about-linear-cities.html.
I think this is especially important given that the age of marriage has been pushed out of the college range. If you want to find a spouse, you have to go where other young adults are, which are the cities now.
Similar with jobs. Since employment is more tenuous these days, and people are more likely to switch jobs every few years, going to a city with a lot of potential employers is perhaps a safer/better strategy.
Allow me to add a different perspective: minorities have no option but to view other people as “amenities.” Under democratic political systems, hostile or greedy neighbors today may become one’s jailers–or worse–tomorrow.