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Editor's Introduction
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2001
This group of essays and case studies was gathered in two steps. First, during the Fall of 1999, a call for papers was circulated electronically and also published in a number of important scholarly journals. The net was cast wide so as to recruit scholars from several disciplines and on several continents. The papers that follow are testimony to our success at recruiting interesting work. Second, I journeyed through the many proposals, identifying a group of papers that if passed by our referees might work well together and with other essays already accepted. My goal has been to provide a coherent and thought-provoking issue. I think that this collection is both interesting and interdisciplinary as its title suggests.
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Initially, I expected a spate of papers on the contrasts between the psychological "lifeworld," both in the modern city where space is scarce and in the modern countryside where it is not. Indeed, the title for this volume, "City and Country," was borrowed from an important essay written by the social reformer Henry George and published in his text Social Problems (George 1953 [1883], pp. 234-240). In 1883, George complained that "the cities grow, unwholesomely crowding people together till they are packed in tiers, family above family, so are they [also] unwholesomely separated in the country" (1953 [1883], p. 236). Several papers in this volume examine the processes by which cities grow and how current public policy, both in the areas of zoning and town planning, respond to this process. The coauthored paper by Professors Nathan B. Anderson and William T. Bogart explain that in the monocentric city of the nineteenth century, the main employment center was the central business district (CBD). With the polyc entrism that now characterizes most of the cities of the contemporary world, the main employment centers have expanded from the historic CBD and ended up located near highway crossings and the like. Their paper demonstrates a novel statistical method for identifying these employment centers, which are essential for the analysis of polycentrism. In another paper, Professors David L. McKee and Yosra A. McKee summarize and extend Joel Garreaus notion of edge cities. Edge cities grow up around older metropolitan areas and supply mostly economic services such as accounting, advertising, and legal advice. Are edge cities a global phenomenon or simply part of the American lifestyle?
One of the most important global regularities in all economics if not in all social sciences is Zipf's law. According to Zipf's law, the number of cities with a population size greater than some number, say, S, is inversely proportional to S itself! But not only for cities and towns? Zipf's law holds for the size distribution of firms in any industry as Professor Knudsen carefully shows for Denmark. Professor Thorbjorn Knudsen claims that this is "one of the outstanding empirical success stories in economics." But why does this law hold true in so many contexts? What impersonal, unintended, market-like processes could produce such an awesome empirical reality? Using insights provided by R. Gibrat and X. Gabaix, Knudsen is able to show that when growth is a dynamic stochastic process of a particular sort, Zipf's law is the unintended outcome. Knudsen's paper breaks new ground, as does the above-mentioned paper by Professors Anderson and Bogart which also discusses the relevance of Zipfs law to the distributio n of intrametropolitan employment centers.
Professor Mark Jelavich tries to determine whether or not durable goods manufacturers have a preference for locating in rural areas rather than metropolitan areas. This comparison is also carried out for non-durable manufacturers, which are found to have locational preference for rural areas. The single factor that seems to shape locational preferences is state taxation. The fact that public policy interventions can produce measurable patterns of economic development is a topic that several of our contributors emphasize in their essays. Professor Thomas L. Daniels tries to reconcile what some might term "opposite approaches" toward trying to influence urban growth and urban sprawl. Land value taxation discourages idle land speculation and creates an incentive for getting land back into use. At the same time, efforts are underway to remove land from commercial development to provide open spaces and even public spaces where community life can flourish. Can the two approaches be reconciled? Professor Daniels tr ies to do so in his paper.
The relevance of land value taxation to modern methods of infrastructure improvement has been asserted time and time again by Henry George enthusiasts. I am delighted that Mr. H. William Batt shows us a specific example of how land value taxation can work. He examines how a well-traveled stretch of the New York state highway system near Albany, New York could have been financed differently and more equitably than it was financed. Assessments of betterments charged against the huge changes in land valuation caused by the new highway constructions would have provided more than enough financing for the highway without having to clip down into the general tax fund for the whole state. By taxing what the followers of Henry George have termed the "unearned" capital gains and preventing the unjust enrichment of the political speculators, far greater fairness could have been introduced into the New York state tax system.
