Wealth and Centers

Wealth in the modern age can be considered as the layering of centers, different from the older form of absorptive unicenters. A center is a highly developed material construction such as a laptop, a chair, and so on—the physical forms of representative ideas. Ideas + labor + materials = capital/centers. Centers are built into centers, such as camera modules into phones, phones into Apple product lines. In the old days these centers may have been a town square or church, or a Ziggurat temple—because transportation and communication/trade was limited, no layering of centers could occur. Only slow absorption of surrounding wealth into a unicenter was possible.

The reasons that cities are the form that they are, are because in a manufacturing process the outputs of one process are the inputs to another. Thus a variety of small centers/worlds feed into other ones, meaning the form of a city is essentially layered worlds. This is different from a factory being the single factory in the town (a unicenter). Q: how do levels of efficiency differ between manufacturing unicenters and layered manufacturing centers? (horizontal/vertical integration).

This leads to the distinct megaregion form of living, where numerous people cluster around cities for what is kind of like a layered waterfall of resources. Some people there are well paid, and hire service workers. There are stores with resources not available in your hometown. This is an upgrade compared to the single isolated city based around primary resource extraction, as young people continue to move to megaregions.

The failure mode of the layering of centers is that each center fails to be distinct in any way; it is essentially a morass of small stores, and secondhand goods. This would be a city or country that fails to attract external investment. A city with Costco + Hmart + IKEA + Whole Foods is more distinct than one that only has regular supermarkets: Food Lion, Krogers, Walmarts, and Publixes, which seem not that distinct from each other.

I identify this pattern of life of unicenters versus layering of centers as in The Consolidator and the Coalition as a consistent form seen over and over again. I largely think their existences are not necessarily opposed to each other; and that the success of any one over the other temporarily is like the ebb and flow of waves.

Given that the reproduction of megaregions is tenable; that is, high amounts of urbanization are associated with fertility decline, it seems that to create new frontiers we need either the duplication of unicenters (organizations that are completely self-contained in their food/construction/information/materials) or the development of layered centers in specific areas to manage the obscene land/building costs in major cities. Plop down a mini-Costco and IKEA in some random place, connect it with good transportation, and suddenly that may relax the demands on large urban areas. Nevertheless mathematical studies would need to be conducted to evaluate whether small stores in distributed cities or large megaregions are more efficient economically. A real-world example may be comparing USA/China versus Europe. It seems that the main tradeoff is economic versus health/biocapital.