Book Summaries
Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade after 5,000 Years Ago (The Rational Optimist)
*Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs.
Not long ago, demographers expected new technology tohollow out cities as people began to telecommute from tranquil suburbs. But no – even in weightless industries like finance people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other inglass towers to do their exchanging and specializing, and they are prepared to pay absurdly high rents to do so. By 2025, it looks as if there will be five billion people living in cities (and rural populations will actually be falling fast), and there will beeight cities with more than twenty million people each: Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, New York and Calcutta. As far as the planet is concerned, this is good news because city dwellers take up less space, use less energy and have less impact on natural ecosystems than country dwellers.
The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area. ‘Urban sprawl’ may disgust some American environmentalists, but on a global scale, the very opposite is happening: as villages empty, people are living in denser and denser anthills. As Edward Glaeser put it, ‘Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.
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Related posts:
- Prologue (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 3: The Manufacture of Virtue: barter, trust, and rules after 50,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus’s Trap: Population after 1200 (The Rational Optimist)
- Chapter 7: The Release of Slaves: Energy after 1700 (The Rational Optimist)
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Book Summaries
Chapter 15: Sex (Genome)
•In the Prado Museum in Madrid hangs a pair of paintings by the seventeenth-century court painter Juan Carreno de Miranda, called ‘La Monstrua vestida’ and ‘La Monstrua desnuda’: the monster clothed and the monster naked.
Book Summaries
Politics
- The Prince– Niccolo Machiavelli –Summary - Straw Dogs – John Gray –Summary - The Lucifer Principle – Howard Bloom –Summary YARPP List ### Related posts: 1. Will It Fly Summary (7/10) 2. Modern Man in Search of a Soul Summary (8/10) 3.
Book Summaries
The Myth of Sisyphus Summary (8.2/10)
## The Central Problem of Philosophy Camus starts [The Myth of Sisyphus](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525564454/unearnedwis05-20) by stating that the central problem of philosophy is to figure out whether life is worth living, everything else is details.
Book Summaries
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology Summary (8/10)
In [Technopoly](https://amzn.to/3JXmI9F), Postman argues that technology has become increasingly dominant in American culture. He contends that technology has not only changed what we do but how we think about ourselves and our world.