people in cities are happier, more productive

Among the people with whom I grew up, there was a common folks wisdom that city life was miserable and bucolia was always better. Now there's evidence that people in cities are happier.

I get a daily email from Delancey Place, with a tidbit of nifty knowledge. Today's was about people in cities:

"Two hundred forty-three million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban. Thirty-six million people live in and around Tokyo, the most productive metropolitan area in the world. Twelve million people reside in central Mumbai, and Shanghai is almost as large. On a planet with vast amounts of space (all of humanity could fit in Texas -- each of us with a personal townhouse), we choose cities."

Why would we do that?

"... Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They're even the same if we take individual workers' IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even stronger in poorer nations. ..."

 "..."There is a myth that even if cities enhance prosperity, they still make people miserable. But people report being happier in those countries that are more urban. In those countries where more than half of the population is urban, 30 percent of people say that they are very happy and 17 percent say that they are not very or not at all happy. In nations where more than half of the population is rural, 25 percent of people report being very happy and 22 percent report unhappiness."

 Hrmph. Thought so. Smarter maybe?

"Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities -- whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways -- is to study nothing less than human progress."

(And don't kid yourself. Most of the people who see this blog live in cities, even if you have a lawn and a mailbox at the road.)

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