This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can facilitate socialization and learning; and it provides psychological motivation. We discuss each of these features in turn, and develop formal economic models of two of them. Face-to-face is particularly important in environments where information is imperfect, rapidly changing, and not easily codified, key features of many creative activities.

Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow hist...

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Additional evidence from within-country comparisons of city populations and adult heights also confirms the cross-country findings.

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The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment

This paper describes a tool for long-term global change studies; it is an update of the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) with estimates of some of the underlying demographic drivin...

Long-term dynamic modeling of global population and built-up area in a spatially explicit way: HYDE 3.1

Introduction and Summary PART I CONTOURS OF WORLD DEVELOPMENT, 1-2003 AD 1. The Roman Empire and its Economy 2. The Resurrection of the West and the Transformation of the Americas 3. Interaction between Asia and the West, 1500-2030 4. The Impact of Islam and Europe on African Development, 1-2003 A D PART II ADVANCES IN MACRO-MEASUREMENT SINCE 1665 5. Political Arithmeticians and Historical Demographers: The Pioneers of Macro-measurement 6. Modern Macro-measurement: How Far Have We Come? PART III THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 7. The World Economy in 2030 Statistical Appendix A Statistical Appendix B

D. M. Palliser

Papers

European Urbanization 1500-1800