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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

Cities grow by drawing in people from around them. They can exist only thanks to the unproductive rural regions.

If we separate cities from their region - it just means the money generated in cities won't be used (among other things) for fixing problems in the countryside. It's just hiding the externalities.

Also from history I know of at least 3 unifications of small states and it was beneficial in all cases (at least for the people involved) - see Polish, German, and Italian unification. Why do we think it's different now?

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The article isn't about rural versus urban. But even so, a question: why does the countryside have to be unproductive for people to leave? From what I've seen it's more often that it's productive, but too efficient. The people aren't needed for working the land. Or, fewer people are needed to work larger plots of land.

I meant it's by its nature less productive per square meter than cities.

Modern country could manage with <5% of population working the land, but I don't think we have any countries where 95% live in cities. And I don't think it's obviously good idea to force them to migrate (by putting a border between them and their jobs).

I don't think we have any countries where 95% live in cities.

Suprisingly we do, and not just microstates. Belgium is listed at 97.5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country

If you set the threshold at 90% instead of 95%, that includes much of South America: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela.

It doesn't seem to bother anyone that folks in poor rural countries with no functional cities are separated from their potential jobs by a border. Why would we care more about rural New York State'ers being excluded from NYC than we would about Haitians being excluded from Davenport, Iowa? The latter exclusion has a much higher humanitarian cost, and most of the justifications for strong national borders can be used in a hypothetical world where the NYC metro area was sovereign, just like they are already used for city-states like Singapore and Monaco.

I'm exactly as worried about haitans as about new yorkers. Not much, because I don't know them :) But yes you should fix the situation with haitans. It doesn't make sense.

I just think introducing new borders is painful (I can speak from my family experience with new borders - I live in Poland), and dismantling borders is great (personal experience with EU).

The point is that it's not the XIX century anymore. Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Cheap transportation costs mean that markets are distributed and not as heavily reliant on local expansion as they were. Before, if an industrial business wanted to expand, doing it locally was the easiest and cheapest option; that's not true anymore, and in fact it's often counter-productive for some types of businesses (ones that can get critical mass online but not necessarily in their own country).

The only real barrier left, IMHO, is linguistic. English works in most cases but not all, and especially in some European regions there is still a heavy preference for localized languages.

Better communication is a point against the urbanization if anything? Why cram millions of people, endure traffic jams and pay outrageous rent when you can telecommute?

A lot of people actually enjoy meeting in meatspace.

Telecommunications and airplanes allow people to literally bypass the countryside and hop from city to city. Telecommunications were supposed to let us bypass the city, so that we could live in the countryside.

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