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A city is like a factory for wealth. It takes commodity inputs: food, minerals, labor and spits out value added goods. Yes, of course cities are reliant on rural inputs. Only a fool would deny that. Yes, people can live and have lived without cities. People can also live a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but few choose to do so voluntarily. What exactly is your point?
My point was simple and others caught it. Cities are more reliant on rural areas than vice versa. the two other bozos who jumped on this thread without thinking and think cities are creating all this wealth on their own...and that rural areas can DIE...this point was for them too. Subsidies are not the same as funneling money away to rural areas in states. Cities do not give nearly enough back. Far too much needless waste and we all know that.
Knowledge and innovation..very good answer...and shown to be just as important are rural resources, both social and natural. The city may generate wealth (and debt), but is also completely reliant on rural resources to do it!
And most innovation, in the real world anyway...doesnt spring as naturally or as freely from urban types as it does from people with suburban or rural backgrounds. Forget Ben Franklin ok? Not saying all city folks are airheads, but, they certainly are more into mindless consuming and spend more time opening their wallets or tinkering with cellphones than they are actually inventing and applying what they learn. Be honest. How many city innovators do you really know? Or even hear about? Most are in the medical field and come from suburban backgrounds. The "talent" from our cities best schools usually ends up as your manager or resident beancounter of some kind...definately with a part time service job..or gasp..a sales Rep...or even worse a LAWYER! and they create more problems than are solved, and those inventions and gadgets that cities rely on to function..check out sometime how many have their
engineering origins in rural resource. And very often in your urban or suburban production or manufacturing environments, problems are not handled as efficiently by the guy or gal with the shiny college degree from City University...usually its by the blue collar "rube" from Kenowhere Park who has more common sense and more hands on aptitude. Thats not to say that the city doesnt play a huge role generating the wealth FOR innovation.City dwelling requires more usage of technology, if that's what you mean. But the average college student pumped out of a city school is about as innovative as a pet rock.
Back on topic though...Over on the Daily Yonder, Bill Bishop obliterates the idea that rural residents are somehow sucking the life out of cities by sucking in all manner of subsidies. He shows that per-capita federal spending is actually slightly higher in metro counties than in non-metro counties. As for “community spending” from the federal government —housing, community assistance, environmental protection, regional development, and transportation, the kind of expenditures that directly impact “rural living”—metro residents get about 50 percent more than non-metro residents on a per-capita basis.
Straw argument? You have to see what's going on in America. The cities are dumbing people down. Big time. Wealth creation? ...so what? Everybody's on Facebook! Jobs are gone along with your wealth..to China and beyond and they keep going. The cities themselves are the straw. That's why they steadily become more "Disney" and service oriented, and offices and condos in downtowns of major cities are empty
Last edited by dosequis man; 09-29-2011 at 06:40 AM..
My argument clearly was not that the cities exist in a vacuum and are self-sufficient. Your argument is a straw man.
There really should be no argument then Gantz if you were essentially saying the same thing as me. Its symbiotic. We got that. Cities generate the wealth but need rural resources for almost all of it. My message was to those here who said cities are somehow "more important"..Lets take paper money and stack it 100 floors high and pave the streets with "wealth"...and please...make sure all engineering projects in all cities are 100% conducted by city residents..from now on! We all could use a good laugh..or cry!
And most innovation, in the real world anyway...doesnt spring as naturally or as freely from urban types as it does from people with suburban or rural backgrounds.
NYC gets its water supply from upstate reservoirs, constructed and built using NYC money. Not a single dollar was spent by the federal or state government for any of those projects, including Water Tunnel #3.
A city generates enough money to just buy everything they need with money, there is no intrinsic need to subsidize rural communities at all.
It is an absolute disgrace what NYC did to the citizens of the watershed.
Do you realize that those are examples of rural WA being subsidized by Seattle, not the other way around?
If someone from Seattle goes to a prison in Eastern WA; most of the cost is being paid by Seattle but Eastern WA gets all the jobs. Same holds true for people from NYC locked up in upstate NY.
Seattle benefits from those prisons, universities, and roads. How do the goods from Seattle/Tacoma ports get to market or arrive for export? Where does Seattle get its power? I don't see any giant hydroelectric dams in Seattle proper, but I know of a few along the Canadian border in both corners of the state.
The truth is Seattle greatly benefits from the activity elsewhere in the state. Being the dominate center, it can provide certain goods and services unavailable in smaller population centers. So people from the rest of the state have to come to the Seattle area (or Portland) for certain things. Having the adequate state highway system is a necessity for Seattle.
The densest metros have more patents and tech jobs? What a shocking revelation that is (yawn) Doesn't prove much other than ..that real life and selective stats are correlated far too much on city data.com....to complete your point you need to be all inclusive. Who..patented. Where are they from? Did they patent the item in said metro for a reason? Sure they did! Cities ARE indeed places to get things rolling financially and logistically. But the point still remains...the cities need, need, need rural resource and innovation far more than they need the next cell phone that makes flapjacks. Either of which could be patented by rural,suburban, or urban natives. Since the suburbs and rural areas tend to produce more inventors, they are the innovators, regardless of where their innovation naturally takes them. We all need money and official looking legal documents for our ideas, and those things are best dealt with in the metros of course! Rural resources are considered more valuable to the basic function of a city than city resources are to a rural community. They are symbiotic however
Last edited by dosequis man; 09-29-2011 at 10:20 PM..
The densest metros have more patents and tech jobs? What a shocking revelation that is (yawn) Doesn't prove much other than ..that real life and selective stats are correlated far too much on city data.com....to complete your point you need to be all inclusive. Who..patented. Where are they from? Did they patent the item in said metro for a reason? Sure they did! Cities ARE indeed places to get things rolling financially and logistically. But the point still remains...the cities need, need, need rural resource and innovation far more than they need the next cell phone that makes flapjacks. Either of which could be patented by rural,suburban, or urban natives. Since the suburbs and rural areas tend to produce more inventors, they are the innovators, regardless of where their innovation naturally takes them. We all need money and official looking legal documents for our ideas, and those things are best dealt with in the metros of course! Rural resources are considered more valuable to the basic function of a city than city resources are to a rural community. They are symbiotic however
So you ignore data to the contrary and just repeat your initial claim that rural areas produce more innovation?
Harvard Professor Edward Glaeser spells out very well and beyond dispute in his book "Triumph of the City" the link between prosperity, innovation, and a high standard of living to urbanization. The higher the percent of the urban population in a nation the higher the standard of living. Nations such as The Netherlands and Japan are great examples.
China is the process of moving 300 million of it's residents into cities in the next ten years. They realize that this is a must if they want to obtain a western standard to living.
The equation is simple: High urban population equals wealth, innovation and prosperity. High rural population equals high degrees of poverty, poor education, and generally is a third world nation.
Last edited by Allan Trafton; 09-30-2011 at 04:33 PM..
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