Urbanization is the defining trend of the industrial revolution. Economists triumphantly glorify urbanization, globalization and specialization as the three pillars of human progress and the present global trend is yet more urbanization. A United Nations report, predicting continued urbanization, estimates that, by 2050, 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. Most people (especially economists) believe that urbanization can and should continue.
Nevertheless, I believe urbanization will reverse before 2050.
Why do Cities Exist?
Cities exist for the same reason as microchips or brains. By bringing processes closer together, interaction times can be reduced. In pre-industrial times, the city had three main roles:
- A marketplace
- A theatre
- A centre of power
Production was a cottage industry, but ancient cities still facilitated distribution. Craftsmen that manufactured tools which farmers only occasionally replaced (perhaps a shovel, or a plough) had to set up shop near large crowds so that the small fraction requiring – say – shovels would suffice to earn them a living.
Ancient cities also hosted performances such as theatre and song. Since poets, or actors, can perform as easily to a large audience as a small one, there are economies of scale to be gained from crowds.
Ancient cities were also power centres. Kings of old employed loyal thugs to go around with weapons threatening peasants and seizing a portion of their harvest as tax. At the very least, a king needed royal guards and messenger boys to raise an army on short notice, and stone masons to maintain fortifications. This entourage of specialized professionals who didn’t farm, was most suitably located somewhere that food and other wealth flowed into such as a town where farmers brought their food to buy goods manufactured by craftsmen and artisans. Cathedrals and bishops were also in cities making them centres of religious power as well.
The Roman Empire achieved peak urbanization rates of about 25-30% (Counting villages with populations of 10,000 as “urban”). While medieval England achieved peak urbanization rates of 15-20%. However, these large, populous kingdoms were the exception and the global average for urbanization in ancient times was about 2% of the world’s population.
In the 19th century countries surpassed the record urbanization levels set by Rome. This happened for two reasons:
- Industrialization created the production line, where specialists worked in close proximity to increase productive efficiency.
- Mechanization reduced the manpower required to grow and transport food, and other resources, to industrial cities.
In the ancient world, specialized craftsmen lived in cities with their large markets. Since the industrial revolution, the modern factory gave urban labour an added productivity bonus, while mechanization reduced the labour required in the countryside.
Why Urbanization May Reverse After 2050
While urbanization is current increasing, after 2050, technological developments undermine much of the rational for having cities.
The underlying rational for factories, production lines and economies of scale is the high cost of knowledge and skill. It takes time to train an excellent clothes maker. But if you divide the process into many less skilled tasks, teach different people to perform each task, hand the unfinished product to the next person and add some labour-saving machines, more units can be manufactured at a much lower per unit cost.
The second reason for economies of scale is that, by building big, you can get more relative precision from a given absolute precision. A large steam piston requires less absolute tolerance in the precision of the piston and tube diameter than a smaller piston. Workers with crude tools could achieve greater relative precision by building large machines.
The inexorable trend towards cheaper information and higher precision undermine both cases for economies of scale and may reverse urbanization after 2050. We no longer need a factory of workers to put together massive quantities of just one product – a single 3D printer can make many products. While the instructions on how to build sophisticated products may be complex, information is cheap, so the cost of instructing a 3D printer to build all manner of shapes is negligible. Furthermore, these 3D printers and CNC machines can be small, as absolute precision has vastly increased. Modern manufacturing systems are both small and sophisticated.
If a small box, no larger than a car, can build everything, then every village can have one (after all, most households own cars). And if every village has its own build-everything-machine, then why have large factories or cities to support them?
This abundance of cheap information and high absolute precision undermines the rational for economies of scale and specialization, which was originally why urbanization surpassed roman levels.
Cheap information also undermines the rational for ancient cities. Generalized, miniaturized manufacturing eliminates the need for mass markets while distributed cheap communication eliminates the need for large audiences in the same locality. This same communication technology could also enable the distributed coordination of power.
So again…what’s the point of cities?
A Surgery Room In Every House
But what about public services? Hospitals, mental health clinics, schools, universities, utilities such as electricity, internet etc.,
Hospitals are giant illness-treatment factories. Doctors are scarce. Therefore, the best way to deploy them is to cram ill people into the same building to reduce the time doctors spend travelling between patients. Furthermore, complex illnesses often involve multiple specialists and expensive equipment. Hospitals enable you to mix and match specialists by bringing them all under one roof where they can rapidly recombine into teams optimized to address a wide range of diseases. The underlying rational for hospitals is:
- The expense of skills
- The expense of specialized precision equipment
Ditto with psychiatry. Psychiatric wards are massive sanity production factories. Due to a scarcity of psychiatrists with skills to make crazy people sane (or less crazy), the optimal answer is to cram all the crazy people into a small crowded space, giving psychiatrist access to the maximum density of patients. This minimizes transit times between patients and maximizes the rate that psychiatrists can treat crazy people and make them sane (in theory).
Hospitals do three things:
- Diagnose illnesses
- Perform surgery
- Administer complex regimens of drugs
The trend towards generalization, miniaturization and cost reduction will impact diagnosis machines (such as X-rays, CAT scans, blood analysis, etc.,) like everything else. It will also apply to the manufacturing of drugs. In the future, generalized drug manufacturing systems, the size of 3D printers, will stores primary organic compounds and be able to synthesize any drug under the sun, while robotic surgery systems have already been developed.
The end point of this trend is that, in the not too distant future (say, 30 years), every house will have a surgery room that can perform every conceivable operation from open heart surgery to cancer removal to hernia treatment as well as administering complex regimens of drugs.
As for mental health, all the skills that psychiatrists or psychiatric nurses possess could be downloaded into mass-produced androids giving everyone their own robot psychologist/psychiatrist that can also fix the plumbing, or teach the children.
Eliminating mass-production in hospitals and asylums has considerable advantages. Mass production is all right for surgery, but concentrating lots infected people in the same space can spread germs, and indeed hospital born infections are a major source of complications and even death. Psychiatric wards may bring lots of crazy people into contact with psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, but while it is sometimes helpful to bring crazy people together in controlled conditions (such as support groups) crazy people can also egg each other on to get crazier and crazier – so for psychiatry as well, home treatment by a fully trained android would be preferable to a lunatic asylum.
What about education and access to high quality schools and universities? Amazon and google have all the information you could possibly want and with free Lectures on YouTube – what else is there? While human educators are needed to kickstart the learning process, that human component will get a lot less specialized. Instead of separate teachers for history, geography, physics, biology, French, German, etc., a single human educator will train people to use search engines effectively, think critically and judge the credibility of different sources effectively. In the future, human educators will teach information management skills, but the internet and books downloaded onto Kindles will provide all the specific information.
In the future, a village with 100 people, an internet connection and one info management coach will be able to educate children to be more knowledgeable than today’s Harvard graduates. While 3D printers will produce equipment for laboratory demonstrations.
Even policing can be done with drones, but since rural areas, in the U.K. at least, have lower crime rates when compared to urban areas it’s quite likely that not that much policing may be required.
Home entertainment systems with large screen and surround sound will replace theatres.
So, if tomorrow’s technology can provide education, health, policing and entertainment, if anything, more efficiently in the countryside…what’s the point of urban living?
Should We Reverse Urbanization?
But should we reverse urbanization? Some say urbanization will lift billions out of poverty, others argue that cities use energy and resources more efficiently, yet others point to the lower fertility rates in cities compared to the countryside, (a reduction of between 1.5 and 2 children per woman in all countries) as evidence that urbanization will stabilize population size.
Lifting billions out of poverty: While cities currently do this, a whole slew of technology will soon greatly raise rural living standards. Solar panels, mobile phones and 4G internet already have this effect.
More efficient resource use: Rural inhabitants only consume more than city-dwellers in developed countries where they constantly commute to town for work or shopping. In developing countries, where rural populations live off the land and so travel less and have a smaller environmental footprint, urbanization massively increases consumption, car ownership and commuting.
Market societies, filled with specialists, are inherently energy intensive with buyers constantly buzzing about looking for sellers and vice versa. If we must live in a market society, high population densities increase their efficiency. However, flexible manufacturing, AI and ever cheaper information may render such societies obsolete. To reduce market dependence, our backyards must have enough resources to provide for us. However, this requires a larger backyard. Since rural living facilitates lower market dependence, and since less market dependence (with less goods and service-providers buzzing around) is more energy efficient, rural living (if done right) increases the efficient use of energy and resources.
Overpopulation: The narrative we are told is that by giving women the “opportunity” to live in cities they are “liberated” from the need to have children and therefore “choose” to have less. It is true that some traditional societies oppress their women, yet if fewer children are a sign of women’s “liberation”, why do many highly successful, affluent women such as Victoria Beckham, or Demi Moore, or wealthy women in general have more children than average? While women may choose affluence and material comforts over children and abusive relationships, those who can have it all (money, a loving husband and lots of kids) choose large families.
So, does urbanization “allow” women to have small families or does it force them to make a difficult choice between material wealth, no time for childcare and no kids – or a large family in a poor, crime-ridden neighbourhood?
If urbanization reduces the concern of overpopulation, it does so by pressurizing women to remain childless, often against their will. Furthermore, studies robustly show that cities have higher levels of mental illness compared to rural areas and higher crime rates.
If population growth really is a problem, we should simply have a two-child policy (or exchangeable child quotas like carbon quotas) as opposed to manipulatively putting financial pressure on women to live in stressful, crowded urban environments where they have less children because they are generally uncomfortable and then saying: “Look everyone! Women are ‘spontaneously’ deciding to have less children! Isn’t it great! We don’t have to worry about overpopulation anymore!” It’s absurd to say we should not reverse urbanization because high population densities create emotional distress which discourages people from having children.
Basic Income Is The Catalyst
Cities remain important centres of manufacturing, education and art and culture to this day. But less and less people work in the factories that do the manufacturing. Increasingly city jobs (psychiatrists, social workers, policemen) are produced by city problems – along with hype to sell overpriced merchandise and tickets to overrated events (advertising executives, tabloid journalists, etc.). Additionally, large corporations, headquartered in cities, are buying up the countryside – farmland, forests and mines – and funneling the profits from harvesting (or pillaging) nature into the salaries of executives located in the city.
Furthermore, debt creates money and the dominant form of debt is mortgages to buy town housing. Banks lend money out of thin air to people who buy houses in the city. As this lending continues, the last batch of borrowers find their city house has gone up in value. They celebrate and spend the money in cocktail bars, restaurants, and the local economy. In this way, newly printed money preferentially goes to city dwellers.
There are two ways to make money: work for someone who has money or buy a speculative asset that goes up in value. Since lots of money flows into the city and since town housing is the speculative asset with the highest value, this means that those looking for a decent wage must often move into the city as the countryside is starved of cash.
Basic income could change all that. Capital is always getting cheaper. Items like, toasters, computers, 3D printers, mobile phones, bicycles and many other gizmos are all falling below the £100 mark. If purchased second hand, many can be procured below the £10 mark. In the developed world, people’s main expenses are rent, transport and food (perhaps alcohol and drugs as well). A small basic income that enables people to procure the capital they need to live and grow food on cheap rural land without travelling to the city could simultaneously reduce the cost of rent, food and transportation. While communication technology, along with flexible manufacturing, will make rural communities increasingly “with it” and raise their quality of life.
An income delivered to everyone, independent of their location, would let people live everywhere. It seems likely many would use this income to move somewhere with more personal space and a lower cost of living. Many pensioners today move out of the city the instant they retire, so there’s every reason to believe that basic income could be the catalyst that enables people to live a better life in the countryside while raising wages and lowering rents in the city.
The Countryside Living Allowance provides the details of how a basic income could be introduced to transform the countryside and the city on a realistic budget.
John
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