| | Von Mises said that socialists and capitalists agree on the facts -- at certain time and place, a certain commodity had a price -- but they disagree on what the facts mean.
It is no coincidence that trade-obsessed cities—Tyre, Athens, Alexandria, Baghdad, Pisa, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo, San Francisco—are the places where invention and discovery happened. Think of them as well-endowed collective brains.
I like cities, too. Among the last two classes I took toward an MA in social science were geography classes in remote sensing and geographic information systems. Everyone wants to save the rain forests and deserts. I studied cities and wrote a term paper on agricultural areas in megacities. Jane Jacobs theorized that agriculture began in cities and only moved out when it needed space. She hypothesized that where you find a range of pastoralists, somewhere in the middle is a lost city.
The key word in the quote above is "trade-obsessed." In their time, those towns were not the largest. (London was the largest city in England, far and away. However, when the Spanish met the Aztecs, Tenochtitlan was larger. They had gold, but no bronze and the only wheeled artifact recovered was a toy.)
Cities do draw people. Statistically, where you have many people, you have many births, so cities can seem like the origins of ideas, innovations, and progress. In truth, however, who is an innovator is not predictable and as many innovators came from outside the city itself, but were drawn to it.
From Wikipedia biographies:
- Millikan went to high school in Maquoketa, Iowa. Millikan received a Bachelor's degree in the classics from Oberlin College in 1891 and his doctorate in physics from Columbia University in 1895 – he was the first to earn a Ph.D. from that department.
- William Reddington Hewlett (May 20, 1913 – January 12, 2001) was an engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan but moved to Oak Brook, Illinois, when he was two. Less than one year later, he moved to San Francisco at 3 years old. He attended Lowell High School and was accepted at Stanford University as a favor to his late father, Albion Walter Hewlett, who had died of a brain tumor in 1925.
- Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, ... When Glenn Seaborg was a boy, the family moved to the Seaborg Home in a subdivision called Home Gardens, that was later annexed to the City of South Gate, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. ... He did not take an interest in science until his junior year when he was inspired by Dwight Logan Reid, a chemistry and physics teacher at David Starr Jordan High School in Watts.'
One of the many puzzles with the origins of coinage is that coins were not invented in Babylon or Tyre. They came from a remote borderland, granted that they met the needs of city men who were renting themselves out as mercenaries. Once they were invented, then they moved quickly from place to place, but even so, the oldest known hoards from Egypt are copies of Athenian coins. The big, old urbanities did not innovate, per se, and did not for many reasons.
Athens was a harsh place for a foreigner to live, not basically open to new ideas. Aspasia, Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle all met bad ends there. (A1 was saved by her boyfriend, Pericles. A2 was exiled; S committed suicide; A3 left before his trial.) Metics never became citizens, no matter how many generations lived in Athens. But, they were, at least allowed to live there. They came to Athens more for reasons of culture (in the formal sense, not art and music) because the Ionian refugess spoke the same dialect as the Athenians.
Inventions of ideas came from all across Helliadas, not just Athens. Democritis, Zeno, Parmenides, Aristippus, ..., they came from all over, albeit, many of them came to Athens as it was a center, truly known in its own time as the "school of Hellas." But very few notable philosophers were actually born in Athens just as Newton was not born in London. The city draws innovations, but just throwing people together achieves little. Here are the largest cities on Earth. Which ones are centers of innovation?
Megacity Population
Tokyo 34,000,000
Seoul 24,200,000
Mexico City 23,400,000
Delhi 23,200,000
Mumbai (Bombay) 22,800,000
New York City 22,200,000
São Paulo 20,900,000
Manila 19,600,000
Shanghai 18,400,000
Los Angeles 17,900,000
Osaka 16,800,000
Kolkata 16,300,000
Karachi 16,200,000
Jakarta 15,400,000
Cairo 15,200,000
Moscow 13,600,000
Beijing 13,600,000
Dhaka 13,600,000
Buenos Aires 13,300,000
Istanbul 12,800,000
Tehran 12,800,000
Rio de Janeiro 12,600,000
London 12,400,000
Lagos 11,800,000
Paris (aire urbaine) 10,400,000
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