The Economy of Cities

When humble people, doing lowly work, are not also solving problems, nobody is apt to solve humble problems.

So what we have here, if this summary is correct, is another reciprocating system of growth, though more complex than the one described in the preceding chapter. Its workings can be stated this way: a city builds up its imports and thus becomes capable of replacing many of them. By doing so it becomes capable of generating more exports. It thus bui

Division of labor is a device for achieving operating efficiency, nothing more. Of itself, it has no power to promote further economic development. And because it does not, division of labor is even extraordinarily limited at improving operating efficiency in any given work. All further increases in efficiency, once existing work has been suitably

If we were to measure the economic development rate of a city, we could not do so just by measuring its output in a year or any group of years. We would have to measure, rather, the additions of new work to its older output, over a period of time, and the ratio of the new work to the older work. Then, to speak of a low or a high development rate, w

Japan, reinventing its agriculture, has accomplished abruptly and rapidly what the United States did somewhat more gradually and Western Europe more gradually still. It created rural productivity upon a foundation of city productivity. There is no inherent reason why this cannot be done by other nations even more rapidly. Modern productive agricult

in the highly developed economies of the future, it is probable that cities will become huge, rich and diverse mines of raw materials. These mines will differ from any now to be found because they will become richer the more and the longer they are exploited. The law of diminishing returns applies to other mining operations: the richest veins, havi

Existing divisions of labor multiply into more divisions of labor by grace of intervening added activities that yield up new sums of work to be divided. To me, the D + A nD formula seems a handy way of expressing the process,

We have been considering three different processes by which organizations can first become exporters: • They can add the export work to other people’s local work. • They can add the export work to different local work of their own. • They can export their own local work. The significant fact about these processes is that they all depend directly on

In all the cases so far mentioned, the export work not only arose upon the different local work; it was suggested by the local work. The producers, when they began their local work, had no foreknowledge of the export work they were eventually to create. But sometimes the sequence of suggestion is reversed. That is, a person planning to create an ex