Comment by moomin
2 days ago
The thing is, we used to do this. Walk around London or Florence or Rome and you will see era-adjusted sights that are equally impressive. For that matter, go check out Blenheim Palace. It’s a reasonable question to ask: What happened? But the answer is prosaic. These sights all come from times of _incredible_ inequality. Which you don’t see in these pictures but is vastly more relevant to the day to day lives of most citizens.
Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
You are just describing every western European country.
I mean, my family and i just spent 5 weeks over Christmas in Rome, Paris and London.
I live in Toronto where we have our share of homelessness and those 3 cities put Toronto to shame with the amount of poverty and homelessness we saw.
Europe is beautiful and does many things better than North America and Asia but hunger and poverty are area's where its just as bad if not worse.
That’s something that’s developed over the last couple decades. Europe didn’t have vast amounts of homelessness and poverty. My guess is Schengen plus lax immigration policies. That is compare requirements for entering the UAE vs Europe. Europe is less selective.
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Every Western European country now. Not in the time those sights were built.
No true Scotland.
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Really? So why are there food banks in the UK? Why does Google search remove links to personal details of multiple politicians in multiple European countries? For someone poor the top end of NHS dental treatment is a worry - even assuming they can find a dentist willing to take on NHS patients in the first place.
I could go on, but there are plenty of flaws in western Europe
the UK is a special case, not comparable to most of Europe. I work all over Europe(300+ travel days a year) and the UK is the only country I see young homeless men everywhere on the streets.
I think it’s a misread to attribute large-scale construction mainly to inequality. While inequality funded grand projects historically, today it’s effective planning, strong state capacity, and streamlined execution that make the real difference.
China’s development is impressive because it prioritizes coordination and scale, whereas Europe struggles more with political and organizational fragmentation and lack of initiative.
The strong state capacity collects the resources of large areas and concentrates them into large-scale construction projects in a handful of places. China has a small number of megacities with large, wealthy, modern urban cores and a very large population that lives somewhere else. There are about a hundred cities with more than a million inhabitants but only 47 have urban rail transit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_rail_transit_in_China That's inequality.
Knowing how China designates cities[0], citation needed on the number of cities.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing > The municipality covers a large geographical area roughly the size of Austria,[14] which includes several disjunct urban areas in addition to Chongqing proper.
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That's fair, but the number of cities with urban rail transit is increasing over time. Whether it's the smaller cities paying for the bigger ones... I don't feel like that's the whole picture, but I don't know enough to dispute that.
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(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.
> Show me a place that looks like that where no-one goes hungry, has to worry about medical bills and doesn’t live in fear of the rich and powerful and then I’ll be impressed.
I think you’re still speaking about Chongqing. China builds these and closes the wage gap.
Oh come on.
Lower socio economic Chinese definitely still fear the rich and worry about being homeless and not getting medical treatment.
Tell me one way that your statement doesn’t apply to the US or many other wealthy developed nations.
The GINI coefficient is higher in the USA than it is in China.
China in recent years has reduced inequality while the US has done absolutely nothing to curb discontent, the same discontent that has led to the election of a fascist leader.
Don’t believe me, look up the data.
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It is an insight into human irrationality to see a country where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of crushing absolute poverty, that has built one of the world's best infrastructure from nothing...in the 70s, China was poorer than every country in Africa bar one.
...the problem is that some people are concerned only with how things are done, this is feudal government, this is pre-industrial economic growth, who does things, how they do it, make sure nothing new is every tried because that is dangerous and might lead to the elite losing control. China (and much of East Asia) succeeded because they are concerned only with outcomes, and this is all that people care about anyway. Unfortunately, the West is now controlled by people who see change as dangerous, and nothing is more dangerous than a country leapfrogging them in development because it proves that their leadership is bankrupt and incompetent.
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I mean, people go hungry today in plenty of places that fail to build (the U.K. for example) and they went hungry or lived in fear of the powerful in plenty of places before they were able to build at impressive scales.
I’m not sure if it’s what you are thinking of, but I don’t think the massive expansion of cities in the Industrial Revolution was caused by incredible inequality (unless you count inequality between urban and rural areas?).
I guess you could be thinking of ‘monuments’ built by the rich and saying they are due to inequality but I would think the analogue to Chongqing would be the constructing of the ‘megacities’ of the past, which is mostly about building lots of residential, industrial, and office space rather than palaces.
it's a social experiment. "if we don't do it top-down, will the educated and driven try to make us do better or do it themselves?". the answer revealed itself when architecture and design remained procedural but failed to emphasize and to build around the goal of social evolution and identity seeking. instead we got Gentrification, efficiency nobody asked for and wealth wasted on uninspired and demotivating pseudo-game theorists.
it's funny how nobody noticed in time that the side effects of these many experiments destroyed more beauty & opportunities, especially in urban convolution and social convection than they have revealed in data about human nature and civilized networks ... "we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own" is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.
“‘we happened to become a community and build around the growing desires of our children and our own’ is something you only hear on garden plots, even though on the country side everywhere, people are now third and fourth generation heirs.”
Meanwhile, in the US, small towns across the country are greying and dying out as wealth and opportunity are increasingly concentrated in urban areas.
I don't understand what this means, or how it fits with the comment it's replying to.