Quickies: Population And The Economic Model

Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman makes some observations about population trends and their relation to the Industrial Revolution:

     The industrial socio-economic model required lots of employees, large factories, proximity to resources, whether raw or manufactured, and the city provided these features. During the early phases of the IR the cost of transporting steel, coal, and other parts and resources was so expensive that cities grew up to allow everything necessary from raw materials to energy to final manufacturing or assembly to occur in one place, a place with guaranteed numbers of people looking for work.
     We are at the end of the IR socio-economic model. Whatever is to come will not look like the IR any more than the IR looked like the socio-economic model, which was the Agricultural Revolution which preceded it.
     Will cities make the jump to the next socio-economic model? They were all but non-existent before the IR, why would we need the city after the denouement of the IR? Perhaps we will, I don't know, but I don't see a reason we would.

Indeed. The city dominated the industrial economy for many reasons. Mark mentions several above. I would add that industrial efficiency militates toward geographic concentration; the costs and difficulties of running a distributed enterprise that requires large amounts of physical capital will always exceed those of running a concentrated one. Also, the typical industrial city is usually on a waterway that supports inexpensive transportation of both resources and goods.

It’s possible that a major driver of the Information Revolution has been the desire for redispersal. Given a choice, people generally prefer to have some space around them, some green, and the sense of freedom of movement that accompanies those things. But whether that’s been any part of the motivation is irrelevant to the effects of such developments as high-speed digital communications, robotics, and the like. Those things have allowed Americans to spread out yet retain the prosperity and most of the other advantages of Industrial Era patterns.

As the great Lawrence Peter Berra would tell you, prediction is difficult, especially when it’s about the future. But the trends in motion appear to me to indicate that dispersal will continue, at least in the near term. Some of that dispersal might even be upward, but that must await still further developments.