That’s not to say that some of these cities weren’t huge though. Rome had ~750K at it’s peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
Yeah but you’re comparing the 18th largest city in the US to what were at the time the largest cities in the world. Apples to oranges. Why not compare Rome’s 700k to say… Shanghai? There’s 25 million people in the city proper. Just one city. The population of the Han Empire, recorded in the tax census of 156 AD, was 50.6 million people in 12,366,470 households. The entire empire could now fit in 2 cities.
Seattle could have a lot higher population if it wasn’t obsessed with single family homes and actually rezoned for high occupancy lower income housing. Not even “low income” just lower considering a 1-2 bedroom house can run into the millions in Seattle
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
That’s not to say that some of these cities weren’t huge though. Rome had ~750K at it’s peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html
Huge for that time, sure… But we’ve had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.
True, but a lot of cities that we think of as big are around those numbers. They couldn’t get much bigger because of infrastructure.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states
Seattle is about 800k https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/washington/seattle
Yeah but you’re comparing the 18th largest city in the US to what were at the time the largest cities in the world. Apples to oranges. Why not compare Rome’s 700k to say… Shanghai? There’s 25 million people in the city proper. Just one city. The population of the Han Empire, recorded in the tax census of 156 AD, was 50.6 million people in 12,366,470 households. The entire empire could now fit in 2 cities.
Seattle could have a lot higher population if it wasn’t obsessed with single family homes and actually rezoned for high occupancy lower income housing. Not even “low income” just lower considering a 1-2 bedroom house can run into the millions in Seattle
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)