Replies

People also want stuff. If they have a surplus to trade, they want comfortable clothing and furniture, made by others whose knowledge produces superior products. In order to have stuff, you need factories. Factories need employees, and that forces them to be close to population centers. The cities necessarily come back.

Not sure I buy that one, at least totally. There's a lot of factories in the rural South and in the rural parts of the Great Lakes and Mid Atlantic states, so there is at least some level of manufacturing that you achieve in the absence of large cities. Perhaps it would be even more in the post-AS world with Galt's motor, as factories are sometimes located to be near very large electrical power sources, which might lead to clustering, and thence to urbanization.

In general though, excellent and thought provoking projections on your two posts.

There's a lot of factories in the rural South and in the rural parts of the Great Lakes and Mid Atlantic states, so there is at least some level of manufacturing that you achieve in the absence of large cities.

I thought about that as I considered the transition of my home town area in northern New Jersey from truck farms to commuters and industrial parks. The whole thing depends on roads, which are not simple stretches of asphalt. Roads have to be maintained or they become impassable. You'd be surprised if you counted the number of bridges in a small town.

The roads will fail in an anarchy. Transportation of employees and material to a rural factory will be undependable. Besides maintenance, nothing prevents people from blocking the road and imposing a tax. This might be the committee of citizens from Backwater Town, or it might be Auntie Entity and some heavily armed "cashiers." There must be fueling stations, repair facilities, and towing services. There must be truck makers and distributors of parts to the repair stations for broken down vehicles. There must be tool makers to supply tools to the repair stations so they can fix the trucks. An OTR transportation network is a profoundly complex thing. It took decades to evolve. Without all that stuff, I'm not going to load a truck full of goods to send 500 miles away because there's a good chance that it won't get there.

I found it a little humorous that Atlas Shrugged ended with Hank Rearden contemplating the high rates he will have to pay Dagny Taggart to ship his steel. Where is she going to get a railroad? They destroyed all of them.

The cities will have the most workers and the most potential buyers for whatever a company manufactures. A secondary system of middlemen will establish itself as some people realize that they can buy stuff in the city and sell it at a profit if they move it away from the manufacturer. People will eventually move away from the population centers to get cheap land and avoid congestion. They will bring the infrastructure with them. But it will take time.