Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, not that I need it. [laughter] Here’s a question that’s been bothering me for a long time. I feel only you know the answer. If I think about Ethiopia, it has more than 100 million people, yet its second largest city is only about 400,000 people. So you have some countries where the distribution of cities follows unusual patterns. Thailand has an income more or less the same as Mexico, but an urbanization rate close to that of Guatemala. Do you have a sense of what accounts for these cases? Politics. You could say the same thing about France, by the way. Paris, 12 millions. The next city . . . Well, I’m from Marseille. We claim we are the next city at one million. The people from Lyons claim it too. But the next city is about one million. So you go from 12 million to one million. I think you cannot change this. You cannot have a plan to say, “Let us develop smaller cities.” If you have this pattern, it’s because you have a political system which gives such an advantage to the major city that this is where people want to go. And if you are in a second-rate city, you are so much penalized. Unless you change the political system, you decentralize. For instance, French decentralization, which was done in the ’70s, ’80s, has not resulted in a change in the pattern of cities. Paris is still dominant and growing. Look at Russia also — the only city which is really growing is Moscow. I think it reflects a political system. I think that planners trying to spread, let’s say, cities without a change in the political system or even the culture . . . Centralization is a culture. In the case of my country, France, I think centralization is a cultural aspect. It’s not only political.…

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