City Mouse vs. Country Mouse
One of the key assumptions behind the push for regionalism in Northeast Ohio is that cities matter—that they are important to the economic health and vitality of the entire region, regardless of how often (or even whether) you ever venture downtown yourself.
Tim Harford, an economic commentator for the Financial Times of London and the author of The Undercover Economist grew up (“to the extent,” he says, “that I have ever grown up”) in small English towns. His wife grew up in the English countryside but, as he continues in the opening paragraph of a recent FT essay, “Now we live in London and we are always dithering about whether to stay put with our young family, or move out to the countryside.”
Harford, as always, makes several fascinating observations about people’s preferences for city living (the cost of living in a successful city is always higher than the cost of living outside one; he cites separate studies by Daniel Gross and Edward Glaeser that, the former, demonstrate the purchasing power of a dollar in New York is only sixty-one cents relative to non-urban locations, with higher salaries making up less than half the difference and, courtesy of the latter, that this patter holds “across the US: real wages are lower, not higher, in the bigger cities.”
Harford argues that most people actually prefer city living, but our social and fiscal policies drive them to live elsewhere:
Many people wrongly think that our desire to gather in big cities comes with a big social cost. William Cobbett compared London, the “Great Wen”, to a seeping sore. Some of my rural friends think he was on target.
The irony is that cities are good for the planet. Recent headlines excoriating London for its poor record on recycling omitted the detail that Londoners produce less household waste than people elsewhere in the UK. Londoners have fewer cars. New York is much the same in this regard. Public transport may or may not work well in cities, but will never work in the countryside. And brute economic necessity keeps city dwellers in smaller, greener homes.
Cities are also hubs of commercial and technological innovation. Even the tools used on today’s farms were developed in places such as Chicago and Cambridge. Studies of patent data confirm that patents tend to spur other patents in the same region; studies of commercial innovation confirm that it is highly concentrated in urban areas. The arts, too, largely revolve around creative networks based in the great cities.
But apart from environmental frugality, innovation and the arts, what have cities ever done for us? There is one more thing and it is growing ever more important as global trade demands that our economies become more flexible: cities are resilient. Economies develop by changing; the process of change means that people are always being thrown out of work and always finding new jobs. That experience, never fun, is far less wrenching in a city than in a one-horse town. When a factory or a mine closes in a remote area, it can be an economic blow from which there is no coming back. In a big, diversified city, such closures take place constantly, but fresh jobs are far more likely to be on hand.
Why, then, have so many fled our cities? Because we pay them to. As Harford points out towards the end of the article:
Leaving aside the planning insanities, both the UK and the US do a splendid job of directing tax revenue away from the cities and towards the countryside. In 2006, Wyoming received almost six times as much anti-terrorism funding as New York, per person.
Harford goes on to detail several other mostly UK-based exmaples, but you can find plenty here as well. So many so, that it makes it very difficult to argue with his concluding paragraph:
People, of course, have the right to choose to live wherever suits them. But when they choose to live in cities, the rest of us benefit. Why, then, are we so keen to pay them to stay in the countryside?
Read the entire essay for yourself here.