I feel like this is at least the third article that's showed up here recently making the claim that "cities are more important than countries for economic development" with no real argument behind it.
It's all based on the same book (Connectography). I highly recommend instead reading The Stack that just came out from MIT Press, which gives a much deeper analysis on the relationship between cities, software and geopolitics: http://thestack.org
There was a big discussion about the relative price of eBooks on HN recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207209 . Points include (i) big publishing houses trying to prevent discounting of eBooks, and (ii) physical production not being the main cost of books.
looking at the pictorial map representative and suggestive of "hyperconnected cities" looks rather like trade routes.. which of course have been around for milenia
And its evidence for the breaking down borders of nation states is pretty scant too. A big map showing oil pipelines isn't really much evidence for Eurasia being a "seamless megacontinent" when communication takes place via telephone/internet and transport by air, and contrary to the argument put forward I'm a lot "closer" to Sydney or San Francisco than I am to Beijing, Dubai or Kinshasa when it comes to integration of culture, economies and flow of actual people. Relatively speaking, it's less of a "megacontinent" than when my ancestors could obtain produce traded by Silk Road caravans but didn't realise the Americas or Australia actually existed.
Connected people always existed. Maybe they connect nowadays more than they did before (but there is a biological limit to that, nevertheless), maybe they connect over greater distances than they did before given the technological means, but they were and are a minority (even if a loud one). The bulk of the populace are not like that. The bulk of the populace connect and live in a physically delimited place. Yes, you give them cars and make it easier with other forms of transportation, enlarging those limits, but that only produce results when it couples with an internal drive like a desire to travel, which again has its limits. Place proximity still holds a great weight in shaping human relations on a very broad level and that is a fact given by our human nature. "Geography is destiny" is here to stay, and so are all the local things that affect most of us.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] threadThat's actually probably pretty close to correct.
Not defending the Kindle pricing but printing and distribution of physical books is a lot cheaper than many assume it is.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/cities-and-the-wealth-of-nati...