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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

Moving makes sense I think, not just because of environmental issues but because it's not healthy to have all the country's leadership and wealth concentrated in one place. Hopefully they can figure out a way to move the capital that results in less consolidation of power and not more, and that isn't bad for the people and environment around where the new capital is placed.

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"because it's not healthy to have all the country's leadership and wealth concentrated in one place."

Has there been any research on this? It seems a pretty common pattern to have the gov't capital, financial center, largest population center and largest GDP producing cities all be the same place. This holds true in (more or less) stable industrialized countries like France, Japan, S. Korea, etc. as well as in many 3rd world countries.

I have a vague feeling its unhealthy, but that's admittedly probably at least partly because I grew up in the States, where it isn't the case and gives me something of a bias against it. And presumably there's a reason its such a popular model, even if it hasn't been a conscious decision in most cases.

Congrats for identifying a potential bias and trying to address it. It’s out of topic (albeit at the core of the reason they try to move Jakarta, so worth studying), but more importantly, extremely large amounts of people, even among very clever ones even on HN, forget to identify the bias that they may not notice because they’re inside it. Would you have any guess on what gave you this reflex?

I believe I took this reflex by moving to 4 different countries. It makes it easy to notice locality-based bias. But I always wonder how people learnt, when they notice a potential political or environmental bias.

I was going to say it's pretty common not to have the major city (largest finance/population/GDP, pretty much all correlates of one another), but it's actually not. Excluding countries that explicitly moved their capital from the largest city (e.g., Brazil), the major countries with this setup are Australia, Bolivia, Cameroon, Canada, Ecuador, Morocco, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, US, and Vietnam. And most of those countries boil down to "we took several regions and agglomerated them into one entity," where the capital is either unchanged from one of the old constituents (e.g., Turkey--Ankara was the capital during the Turkish rebellion) or was sited in a middle point to not favor one constituent (e.g., Canada).

It's just that I'm more familiar with the exceptions than the rule.

This list is suspiciously incomplete, how are China and India not on it? In both of the world's most populous countries, the largest city and indisputable financial centre is not the capital. I would guess the majority of the world's population lives in countries where this is the situation, so it's not just you.

In India, the metropolitan region of Delhi is larger than the metropolitan region of Mumbai, even if the cities proper are reversed. For China, I wasn't certain of the metropolitan region comparison between Shanghai and Beijing.

The commercial cities in question, Mumbai and Shanghai, have never been the capitals of India or China.

Delhi was built as a new capital by the British Raj, taking over from Calcutta. Beijing's history is long and complicated, but it has been the capital of unified China since 1421, give or take a few blips during wars.

I don't know of any specific research. I've been to Jakarta and have friends who live in Indonesia, so my opinion is based largely on their impressions of the political situation there, that it's a basically a geographical hierarchy: Jakarta is where the money and power are, Java is fairly modern and somewhat middle-class and is where the majority of the population live, and the other islands are mostly treated as primitive and as a source of natural resources to be exploited.

I don't know if that's still true or if Indonesia has made progress in recent years in balancing out the political power.

Alternatively, if you move the capital from where most of the people are, there's less opportunities for the governed to interact with the government, and more murky behavior can happen in odd corners of the faraway capital.

Yeah, if they move the capital to, say, a private estate in New Zealand, that would be bad. Or anywhere similarly inaccessible to average Indonesians.

There is no such thing as average Indonesian though. Sure, around 50% of Indonesian population lives in Java Island (where Jakarta is) but I won't call people in Java "average Indonesian".

Keep in mind that Indonesia is a large archipelagic nation so wherever the capital is, chances are its "inaccessible" to the majority of Indonesians.

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