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Comment by vforgione | Hacker News Reader

> National governments debate and mostly dither. Cities act, cities do.

This is very similar to a sentiment that was shared by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel[0]. He made a case for running for mayor of a, albeit third largest city in the country, Midwestern city after being Chief of Staff in the Obama administration based on his feelings that meaningful change can no longer being effected on a federal level -- that cities are the correct place to start pulling levers and pushing buttons.

Are things that screwed up at the federal level, or is it just because we have largely become complacent at best and apathetic at worst? Or is it that politicians see an easier track to entrenched power on a local level?

[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2017/05/09/economy/make-me-smart...

Edit: after re-reading what I wrote, damn those options are cynical and depressing.

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The US federal gov’t overrereptesents the interests of the rural.

Each state is given two senators regardless of population.

Despite cities being the economic heart of the US and doing much better than rural areas, al of of policy making is driven by the economically backwards states.

It's unfortunate that urban and rural populations both see the other as parasites and themselves as the more important actors. Just as urban populations resent redistribution towards the countryside, rural populations resent what they see as city folk meddling in affairs they don't understand.

This is actually a great argument for the rise of the city state - without a shared governance structure that has to balance interests of such different voting blocks, city states could set any rules they wanted within their borders and deal with the rural population strictly through the markets.

The same can be said of the Japanese system --but even moreso. Their rural areas have an exaggerated influence in national politics. Not saying I agree but it's proof a country can do relatively well despite many disadvantages (geography, demographics, int'l politics, etc) and playing to the countryside.

If we look toward Mexico, we can say the cities have an oversized influence in the politics and the frustration form the countryside can boil over into internal conflict.

I feel like the Nikkei index would disagree with you insofar as a stock market index is an indicator of economic prosperity. That said, the US system was designed to protect less populous (rural) states from being bullied by the more populous (urban) states. It is hard to say that the system is not working as intended.

Their problems will be ours in 30 years' time. All industrialized nations will face declining populations and automation --given their demographics, I say they are doing a pretty good job. I don't think there are many economies which faced with Japan's demographics (together with their lack of natural resources, arable land, etc) would do as well as they are doing in their circumstances.

Now, work culture, that's a different topic. They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity, etc.

> All industrialized nations will face declining populations and automation

We like to complain so much about automation, but I think the main driver of our current economic woes is outsourcing. When Americans have to compete against people in countries that have $1/hr minimum wage, there's no way our lower class can compete. Not everyone has the skills or aptitude to make it to the middle or upper classes. Should they see a declining quality of life just so corporations can see larger profits?

> They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity

Japan has a low amount of economic inequality and a high quality of life, so I see little reason why it should change. In most countries, it's still considered a fact that men and women are different. I think it may be your Western values determining what you think should change in a culture completely different from our own.

> Not saying I agree but it's proof a country can do relatively well despite many disadvantages

Japan is far from doing well. It's in recession now, its demographics profile is going down the toilet, they have a massive public debt that they can never hope to repay, and a social security system that's constantly in the red. It's not going to end well no matter how optimistic you are.

There is no question they are going through a demographic restructuring and automating and becoming an elder-centered economy in the future.

I don't think granting the countryside the power they have has contributed negatively to their economic outlook.

What I am saying is allowing the countryside an outsized say in the politics of the country writ large does not seem to have negatively affected the economy given the structural realities.

Although, granted, the countryside with their bloc keeps successfully thwarting any agricultural reforms (import tariffs). On the other hand, buy local and grow your own critical sustenance (cuz embargoes: see Qatar).

> Although, granted, the countryside with their bloc keeps successfully thwarting any agricultural reforms (import tariffs). On the other hand, buy local and grow your own critical sustenance (cuz embargoes: see Qatar).

I'd rather have "make peace with your neighbors, promote commercial exchange instead of putting tariffs everywhere making eating fruits a luxury for 90% of your population".

Seriously, agriculture in Japan is retarded. Productivity is extremely low compared to any other developed country, and they use tons of pesticides (way more than anywhere else), because JA forces folks to use them if they want to sell in their right channels. It's just a big mafia at the national level.

If we were to make stuff at home, everything would be much more expensive (you would never get cheap smartphones like you have now) and the level of life would decrease sharply for everyone. Specialized regions for specific products, with proper exchange of goods is what has worked to make everyone richer in the end.

But how do you know they are doing well because of it or despite it?

They're also in terms of a country more likely to live around cities, and much more densely since Tokyo is one of the, if not most, densely populated megacities.

I would say any economic power they do have is because of the density and progressiveness of their cities.

Yes, cities are the heart of America, but the country produces the blood. Urbanization is only possible through hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources. We owe every technological advance, every great work of art, every soldier who defends us, to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career. Not being a rural guy myself, I feel like I owe them.

maybe 100 years ago, but not today. before the great depression, ~30% of the population worked on a farm. today, that number is closer to 3%. and most of them work on industrial farms where they can have a career. im not saying that we shouldnt be grateful, but i think folksy nostalgia of family farms and shit blind us from the realities.

Wow dude, go outside more often. Sure there are less farmers, but they are no less important. That is ignoring the natural resources, and your disagreeable prejudices.

im a self-described fat-ass, i eat constantly. im not ungrateful to people who work in the agricultural industries, but im no more grateful to them than i am to those who work in energy, water or telecomms. they are all necessities, and farmers aren't that special.

> hyper-efficient exploitation of rural resources

Can you expand on that a bit?

> ... to a farmer who refused to give up on a thankless, unrewarding career.

Why? How? What? Because food is relatively cheap? (Because supply is high?)

Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-gatherers, we didn't get much done other than some cave art. With the rise of farming came the priestly class, and Ur, the first city. Plows, granaries, preservation, crop rotation, selective breeding, refrigeration, and so on, further increased the number of people a single farmer could feed. As fewer people were engaged in the act of feeding everyone, more craftsmen, artists, administrators, and so on, could push civilization forward. As a nearby comment notes, over the history of the US, we have increased the efficiency of our farms by a factor of ten, and a tiny fraction of people are actually needed to work the land.

That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.

But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking!

And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love.

That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)

But you're still viewing farming in a vacuum. Whether you're punching the clock for Monsanto or scrabbling to run a private farm, you still need a grocer, a post office, a restaurant, a barber, and so on. A farming community is a whole ecosystem, and rural America makes up about 18% of the country.

One of the reasons America was organized the way it is, as a republic, and not a democracy, was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. And no racial, ideological, or religious minority is as necessary to protect as the minority that feeds all of us.

You're right, farmers can quit any time they like, and many have, and are. It's one of the forces driving the automation of agriculture. But we're not at a point where we can take the farmhand out of the equation safely, so let's give them some incentive to stay. While I agree that planned economies are dumb, because of the simple fact of information density, the government is also a market force, and we need to prevent government from working against the people who feed all of us.

Nothing wrong with the rural land or people, but the people in less dense parts of the US are overrepresented. Which means a person not living in the city has more say in government, while paying the same or less in taxes.

City dwellers are all getting their food from the rural, economically backwords areas, that's why. And that is precisely why floating cities are a pipe dream: no land for agriculture. They'd have to resort to fishing, clam farms and eating seaweed.

We get them from farmland, not rural people.

Even if your reasoning is true it's not justification for a person living outside of the city or densely populated areas to have less of a vote in government. Everyone should have an equal vote, no?

This is the most convincing argument in the comments.

City politics can arguably be too provincial. I feel individual cities in the SF Bay area are too provincial and a more unified regional area governing body would serve the pop better as it pertains planning and development of infrastructure (transport, housing, jobs, zoning, etc.) When SF thinks development they think "Peninsula should develop" Or, "what will make SF transit/housing better "rather than "what will make bay area transit/housing better".

From an administrative PoV some cities might benefit from being re-organized as prefectural-level cities or even direct-controlled municipalities (though, given W D.C. governance, I'm not sure it would fly in the US)

And Rahm has not improved things in Chicago as far as I can tell. What non "optics-minded" improvements has he made there?

I agree, there is an argument for broader regional governance (whether it's the bay area, or western King County in Washington), in between the city and state level... whether through expanding existing bodies (reforming city borders) as regions develop or forming new layers of legislative change.

For example, Seattle has a problem where the urbanized area around lake washington support expanding our public transportation - but we're chained down by eastern King County, largely rural citizens who don't want or need subway lines. However, rural districts depend on taxes redistributed from urban areas to fund programs like public education... so it's not clear that breaking up the district is the answer either. Ideally we'd have some type of adaptive democracy, where each issue is regulated by the scope of people impacted by the decisions.

There are plenty of nimbys around Lake Washington. Even if one was to improve transit more on the east side of the lake, population density is low enough because of the lack of multifamily housing that it's a losing game.

People with long commutes that don't want the corresponding increase in traffic are probably justified. I personally wanted light rail to go out to Redmond, but that seems hung up on three counties (not just King).

I left Seattle just before Capital Hill and the U-District were served by light rail though. Maybe things have changed.

The bizarre US insistence that places like San Francisco and Oakland are somehow separate cities baffles me.

Look at it from space, there's clearly only one damn city in the SF Bay Area, and it goes from San Francisco down to somewhere south of San Jose and back up to Richmond. That's a big city, but not one of the biggest.

Well, they are separate cities, since they have geographical boundaries and distinct city governments...

But yes, if the San Francisco Bay Area were merged into a single megacity with a unified, powerful municipal government, some of its persistent and increasingly painful issues (imbalance between commercial and residential real estate development, broken public transit system, etc.) might have a better chance of being solved.

Only in a legal sense are they different cities.

I mean you could legally declare that my legs and upper torso are different people, but it would be silly.

I realise there's history and San Francisco wasn't always joined to San Jose by unbroken urbanity, but arbitrary legal structures should keep up with geography.

I think if you looked at cities as density of buildings and people living/working as a set of gravity wells, then defining which direction things flow towards and from how far away would make where to draw the real lines less ambiguous.

In that respect places like New York, The (SF) Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle would make a lot more sense; and most of these mostly would be within one state.

Problematically cities spanning state lines would be obvious. DC, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City and St. Louis spring to mind as examples.

I believe it to be unfair for workers to escape the taxes of a city by driving across some human chosen line.

I believe it to be unfair for insular communities to exclude "less desirables" by NIMBY actions.

I believe we could actually solve congestion if these mega-city regions had regional planning and zoning to encourage a range of affordable housing close to the jobs, addressing the commutes instead of trying to fund their expansion.

I appreciate the concept of the "Northeast Megalopolis" here on the East Coast, where we consider Boston to Washington DC one continuous city:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis

Do mayors in the US actually control the whole city? Here in Melbourne, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne is actually just a local government position (despite the grand-sounding name), only managing issues in the CBD area (36 sq km of greater melbourne's 9990 sq km). Whole-city issues are managed by state-level politicians. I ask because I can't see our Lord Mayor actually being able to influence city-wide policy; I assume US city mayors have more grunt.

It depends on the city and the rules in the state where the city is located. Larger cities are pretty independent with taxation, police, fire, education, sanitation, and health services. Smaller cities can be overseen by regional governments. The smallest unincorporated cities buy services from larger neighbors. Lots of variation!

Cities in the US don't get militaries (but, technically, the federal military isn't allowed to carry out military operations inside cities).

The US is usually broadly categorized as "strong mayor" (very consolidated power) and "weak mayor" (board of supervisors form a coalition) depending on the municipality.

Where this distinction gets muddled is when a metro area is sprawling enough to have many governments. For example, City of Los Angeles has a mayor, but it only represents some of the major neighborhoods of the metro area, while Los Angeles County, which spans multiple cities, has a board of supervisors providing oversight on a more regional scale.

In contrast, San Francisco is a combined city and county with both mayor and board of supervisors: but the Bay Area has 9 counties(more if you count certain outlying cities) with a multitude of city governments, and there is no equivalent to the LA county board unifying representation at the "millions to one" scale - those issues are duked out between different county agencies or pushed up to the state level. Accordingly, Bay Area cities have some more individual freedoms but are much less inclined to cooperate on regional issues and will frequently export problems onto each other.

That's not universal in Australia. Brisbane encompasses all of the surrounding suburbs up to the satellite cities like Ipswich and Gold Coast, Frankston and Geelong would be the Melbourne equivalent of these I think but it's hard to say, I think Brisbane is much larger (in Area) than Melbourne. In the 00's Queensland pushed through council amalgamations state wide. I believe NSW has tried to do the same and the result was a mixed bag.

From what I understand looking around the world, the age of a city seems to define it's boundaries. Cities that were populous prior to the car are much smaller.

The stated objective of the Republican congress during their 6 Obama years was obstruction. For the 2 years before that Obama was able to get the stimulus and Obamacare. Before that Bush was able to get huge legislation around medicare and taxes as well as his wars. Clinton before him was also able to get through a bunch of legislation. Trump is pretty incompetent and is wasting his window to get big things done but he'll probably get something through. My point is that the last 6 years of total gridlock is a historical aberration.

On the other hand, conservatives have wanted the destruction of the federal government for a long time, maybe they've won and we're entering a new era.

The Dems seem to have take up that role now, so I think you may be right on Obama's presidency opening up a new era of sorts wherein the minority party just tells the majority party to pound sand.

> Cities act, cities do.

Then why do cities have such a hard time implementing suitable public transportation? Even the NYC subway system is a mess these days.

The NYC subway purse strings are controlled by the state.

You kind of just proved the point.

NYC has a majority power over the state purse strings and Albany has the majority of what's left.

If you want a mountain of money for the subway all you need to do is earmark it at the bottom of a repeal of NY-SAFE (or whatever you call that gun law that the rest of the state hates).

I'm ok with this. I'm also lazy. If you write a letter to our state assembly I'll co-sign it.

So they can get things done, but not without help from nation states?

exact opposite. NYC subway is in disarray partly because it is controlled by the state and the state political interests are not the same as the cities. The city effectively funds the state as NYC pays more in taxes than it takes out. Not true for upstate.

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