Book Summaries
Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade after 5,000 Years Ago (The Rational Optimist)
*Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs.
Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs. But no – even in weightless industries like finance people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other inglass towers to do their exchanging and specializing, and they are prepared to pay absurdly high rents to do so. By 2025, it looks as if there will be five billion people living in cities (and rural populations will actually be falling fast), and there will beeight cities with more than twenty million people each: Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, New York and Calcutta. As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers.
The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ‘Urban sprawl’ may disgust some American environmentalists, but on a global scale, the very opposite is happening: as villages empty, people are living in denser and denser anthills. As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
YARPP List
Related posts:
- Prologue (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue: barter, trust, and rules after 50,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus’s Trap: Population after 1200 (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 7: The Release of Slaves: Energy after 1700 (The Rational Optimist)
Keep Reading
Related Articles
Book Summaries
The Art of Worldly Wisdom Summary (8.3/10)
“[The Art of Worldly Wisdom](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1494740060/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1494740060&linkCode=as2&tag=unearnedwis05-20&linkId=31010337742d0ac47f64bd0015e78745)” by Baltasar Gracian is an enduring compilation of aphorisms providing insightful
Book Summaries
How to Read Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed a new way of thinking about our sense of meaning in life. His work combines psychology with philosophy, offering readers a way to find significance in their lives. **1.
Book Summaries
Moravec’s Paradox and the Hierarchy of Human Labor
The history of technology is a history of human aspiration—our ceaseless desire to transcend the limits of muscle and mind.
Book Summaries
William Poundstone (What to think about machines that think)
William Poundstone reflects on the question of whether machines can think and the relevance of that question. He likens it to asking whether submarines can swim, emphasizing that the focus on how closely machine intelligence can duplicate human intelligence might not be the real point.