Quote:
Originally Posted by Yuri
I mentioned on one of those threads (or maybe in this one, on the first pages) that the US urban historical demographic is very unique. No other country showed this pattern where you have some cities booming and others shrinking.
Every country have (and had) faster and slower areas, but nothing as extreme and universal as in the US.
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Pretty much every other political system internationally is either:
a. Unitary—usually develops a primate city which is less likely to experience boom-bust cycles, whereas their secondary towns and rural areas do exhibit boom-bust cycles. The primate city starts to bust only if the whole country starts to bust.
b. Federal, but with some constitutional mechanism to redistribute funds among units.
Canada (Equalization)
Mexico/Brazil (General Participations)
India (Finance Commission)
Australia (Horizontalism)
European Union (Cohesion and Structural Funds)
Germany (Länderfinanzausgleich)
Switzerland (Finanzausgleich)
Russia (Equalization and Subventions)
The United States does none of these things, preferring to let states handle their own affairs internally, and any monetary transfers between them are secondary effects of country-wide tax policy’s affects on individuals. In almost every other system, states make their own decisions, but the rest of the states have to help each other out once those decisions have been made. Their federalist design isn’t simply a layering of a federal government over constituent states, but also mandating that the constituent states coordinate their financial affairs directly. Everywhere else uses a form of “cooperative federalism” (their units cooperate horizontally) whereas the United States uses “competitive federalism” (its units compete horizontally) and pretty much all modern federal systems use one of coordinated, coercive, or collaborative federalism to manage the vertical relationship between the federal and state governments (none of which allow competition from the states to the federal level).
Hence why U.S. cities see independent boom-bust cycles more than pretty much anywhere other country in the world. Each of the states essentially acts as a unitary “country” with one primate city (and they do exhibit this pattern of growth as under point a). Because there is no constitutional framework to transfer funds directly from one state to another (as under b), once a state starts to go bust there’s nothing stopping its city from going bust also. This lack of transfers also means that when one state and its primate city go bust, that other states and cities are not on the financial hook for that bust and thus don’t go bust themselves.
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