21st Century – When Big Cities Really Took Over

“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.” Benjamin Franklin

Absent some sort of ethnic challenge – like Flemish vs Walloons in Belgium or Catalan separatists in Spain – Europe has long-since focused less on the importance of provinces or states and much more on the dominance of cities. Their political systems were, for the most part, reconfigured in the 19th and 20th century. Created in the 18th century, the American political system, on the other hand, was heavily predicated on federalism, where political (especially voting) power is ceded to the states. There is no serious recognition in our Constitution of urban power. What’s more, our founding fathers were very careful to make that Constitution exceptionally difficult to amend.

The above quote from Benjamin Franklin is most representative of the feelings and motivations of our founding fathers as they architected a system of governance with deep suspicion of the centers of commerce and trade: cities. Agriculture ruled. The very voting construct of states, including House districts, according the same number of Senators to both sparsely-populated agrarian and densely populated urban states as well as the Electoral College, is heavily tilted toward rural power and slanted powerfully against urban concentrations.

Mechanization, the revulsion against slavery and the improvement in transportation and communications slowly drove wealth from farm to factory, later from factory to globally-connected technology centers. With under 2% of the American workforce laboring on farms today, that elevation of agriculture, which gave rise to the United States and its political system, seems anachronistic. The result? Today, the well-over 80% of the population of United States lives in an urban area. Our founding fathers would blanch. Given the disproportionate power our Constitution cedes to land mass over population, the struggle of urban modernity against an agrarian form of government is at the heart of the populism that is tearing our nation apart.

Understanding how modern cities, especially the biggest and most powerful urban centers, have evolved is key to understanding a second level of disconnect: big cities are linked more to global trade than to local supply-chain networks. In short, big cities with big companies are no longer dependent regional vendors. This is particularly true of service-sector, software-driven companies that don’t need manufactured components. It gets even more complex where what manufacturing does take place here is increasingly automated, a reality that is also rapidly making its presence felt increasingly in mining, mineral and oil extraction as well as on farms.

The dominance of Republican (rural-value) power in state legislatures, Congress and even the presidency (allowing an election where the victor lost the popular vote) is heavily dependent on maintaining rural political dominance despite that overwhelming urban reality. Which dramatically explains why the GOP is focused on undermining the accuracy of the upcoming 2020 Census. See my December 16th blog, GOP Public Enemy No 2 – The Census. But the rising wealth and power of big cities in the United States look more like an accelerating steamroller that cannot be stopped.

Emily Badger, writing for the December 22nd New York Times, explains this new urban reality: “A changing economy has been good to the region, and to a number of other predominantly coastal metros like New York, Boston and Seattle. But economists and geographers are now questioning what the nature of their success means for the rest of the country. What happens to America’s manufacturing heartland when Silicon Valley turns to China? Where do former mill and mining towns fit in when big cities shift to digital work? How does upstate New York benefit when New York City increases business with Tokyo?

“The answers have social and political implications at a time when broad swaths of the country feel alienated from and resentful of ‘elite’ cities that appear from a distance to have gone unscathed by the forces hollowing out smaller communities. To the extent that many Americans believe they’re disconnected from the prosperity in these major metros — even as they use the apps and services created there — perhaps they’re right.

“‘These types of urban economies need other major urban economies more than they need the standardized production economies of other cities in their country,’ said Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at Columbia who has long studied the global cities that occupy interdependent nodes in the world economy. New York, in other words, needs London. But what about Bethlehem, Pa.?

“Such a picture, Ms. Sassen said, ‘breaks a past pattern where a range of smaller, more provincial cities actually fed the rise of the major cities.’ Now major cities are feeding one another, and doing so across the globe.

“Ram Mudambi, a professor in the Fox School of Business at Temple University, offers an even more unnerving hypothesis, in two parts: The more globally connected a city, the more prosperous it is. And as such cities gain global ties, they may be shedding local ones to the ‘hinterland’ communities that have lost their roles in the modern economy or lost their jobs to other countries.”

If you unwrap the essence of Trump populism, you find a deep anti-big city bias. Making “America Great Again” is nothing more than unraveling modernity, crushing the power of the biggest cities, most of which are blue on blue. It’s almost as if rural America declared war on big-city America. The GOP tax reform legislation was particularly and intentionally punitive to states with the biggest cities (New York, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, etc.), those with the highest personal income taxes (significantly less deductible by reason of that tax bill).

But no society has ever been able to stop progress and survive. With artificial intelligence amplifying the value of automation, even on the farm, the GOP’s effort to take America backwards to an agrarian era is clearly doomed to failure. The tool that they have to fight that rear-guard effort is the rural-slanted Constitution and the instruments of power they are battling so hard to maintain: restricting blue voters with gerrymandering, voter ID and other forms of voter restrictions. Sooner or later, even if those efforts are supported by the Supreme Court, the rural bias will fade into history.

Make no mistake, those populists “left behind” by modernity and ignored by so many big city powers have a point. As America embraced innovation and globalization, as corporate America took advantage, we seem to have completely forgotten about “them.” They are angry. And before big city dwellers turn an angry or indifferent shoulder towards those displaced populists, they should realize that, sooner or later, escalating levels of artificial intelligence-driven technology will slam them as well. Populism may just be that canary in the coal mine (literally) for all Americans.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if Americans can put aside their differences to deal with a common issue that threatens to envelop us all… before we completely unravel as one of the most polarized nations in the world.