False Economy - Alan Beattie [37]
If current trends continue, there will be many more cities, but also, quite likely, a starker contrast between relative winners and losers. Just as globalization subjects companies to fiercer competition, increasing further the returns to successful businesses and reducing those to failing ones, so the gaps between the cities that are winning and those that are losing will become increasingly obvious.
All of this speaks not just to cities continuing to play a central role in the future of human well-being but to the way those cities are run becoming of ever greater importance. The golden eggs are getting bigger, and the geese more fractious. Single-industry cities are also susceptible to declines in that industry. Given the substantial damage being inflicted on the financial services industry by the economic crisis that spread so rapidly in 2008, cities like London and New York, where the bankers gathered, are likely to have to work harder to continue to thrive. Tolerance for pollution, congestion, high taxes, and poor transport will diminish along with pay bonuses. Clusters can disperse as well as gather. Florence, Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, even Amsterdam—all have at one time or another over the past millennium been city-state entrepots of huge international significance. All are now relative backwaters.
A successful city is a hard thing to build, and a world-class one even harder. But incompetent or wrongheaded governments have stunted and even destroyed so many in the past that complacency and fatalism in the face of urbanization are profoundly misplaced.
That said, I would suggest that the disenfranchisement of America's capital city has now pretty much done its job. With the tradition of stable democracy now so deeply rooted in U.S. society, we can probably risk extending its benefits to all. Perhaps it is time after all these years to draw a deep breath, take a chance, and give Washington, D.C., the vote.
Chapter 3. Trade: Why Does Egypt Import Half Its Staple Food?
If ever there was a place where the wheat of the world should be grown, it is Egypt. The Nile, the longest river in the world, each year floods its valley and a huge, spreading delta, thoroughly soaking the rich alluvial soil that the current has itself carried across Africa and deposited over thousands of years. The river and its delta have been compared to a lotus—a long, apparently fragile stem holding up a heavy blossom of intense vitality.
So fertile are the soils after the floods that farmers do not even have to plow or hoe. Eyewitnesses report them sowing grain once the flood-waters have receded and letting loose herds of pigs on the fields to tread the seed into the rich, damp earth. The pigs are brought out again for the harvest, threshing the reaped corn by trampling on it. The country is a granary for the region. The great cities of the Mediterranean depend on its barley and wheat exports to feed themselves.
Then again, why would anyone grow wheat in Egypt? A country with a large and swelling population, with very little rainfall of its own, its limited farmlands are watered by a river of highly variable flow. It is situated in one of the driest inhabited regions on earth, where water for drinking, let alone for agriculture, is preciously guarded. Wheat is a thirsty and not particularly valuable crop, and pouring away billions of liters of water on growing it would surely be a serious misallocation of resources. The country, along with almost all the rest of the Middle East, is one of the biggest grain importers in the world.
The country and the river are the same, and the rationales for exporting or importing wheat are in both cases absolutely sound. The difference between the two scenarios has been wrought by the effects of time and, crucially, trade. The first description was of Egypt during ancient times, when it was first