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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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stay in of one of the only two alpha+ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves

What on earth does this even mean? Is the other one NYC? You don't think any other cities on earth have a "alpha"? They're the largest Financial hubs, I won't dispute that and as that's your business I'm sure that looms large in your view. but there are other industries and plenty of places that are booming with them. Hollywood/LA don't have alpha? Silicon valley, no alpha? Hell, I think there are multiple cities in Texas alone that can be described as having alpha.

There's a think tank called Globalization and World Cities Research Network which basically ranks cities periodically based on how important to the global economy they are. They rank cities in terms of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Sufficincy where cities are less important as you go down the list. Also alpha,beta,gamma get +- signs based on where they fall in their category. You can find their most recent rankings here (naturally there is a lot of subjectivity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities_Research_Network

And my bad, I misremembered London and NYC are alpha++ in their rankings, not alpha+.

Hollywood/LA don't have alpha?

LA is an alpha city in their rankings. SF is alpha-.

Other city ranking thinktanks do exist, but GaWC is one of the most used ones and they all have London+NYC at the top of the world.

The list is very weird. I can't really fathom why LA is not in the Alpha+ tier. It just seems obviously more like those cities than any of the cities in regular Alpha.

Ah, it's a measure of interconnectedness, this framing does color the complaint of being unable to live in an alpha+ city a little differently. I suppose the foreign influx of cities that are particularly connected to the rest of the world might reasonably increase the demand and thus make supply of housing more scarce for natives, but I'm not sure this makes me more or less sympathetic to native claims to the right to live in their own society's greatest city over foreign claims. It's essentially the same reasoning behind denying their claims that is used to advocate for open borders, "This is more economically efficient and you have no rights over the more naturally talented foreigner". On the flip side I am generally not sympathetic to people who feel entitled to live in expensive cities for more mundane reasons.

Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.

how is Boston ranked higher than Houston?

Boston's top universities

Houston's top universities

Boston also beats Houston on GDP per capita $80k to $63k, and is often known as the most educated major city in America (thought I don't know the stats on it outside of Harvard and MIT being nearby). Also the Red Sox and the Patriots have been annoyingly good for years, and the Celtics are young and good; while the Astros cheat and the Texans and Rockets suck. On the other hand, Houston has Meg while Boston hasn't produced a great band since This is Boston Not L.A. came out. But the Boston Pops are legendary, while I don't know of anything out of Houston.

Point is there's more to city quality than GDP and population.

while the Astros cheat

I mean, so do the Patriots.

True, but I've forgiven the Patriots, since they had the decency to lose to Philly.

Don't ask me, I didn't make it, and as I said it's very very subjective once you get below the first few top cities. You can find a summary of rankings from many different organisations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city#Summary_of_rankings and they pretty much all have NYC+London as the top two.

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