"The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo"
About this Quote
Abortion is the point: Galbraith reaches for a deliberately clinical, moralized verb to make “the metropolis” sound less like an achievement than a runaway pregnancy nobody had the courage to terminate. Coming from an economist famous for puncturing self-congratulation, the line weaponizes shock to reframe big-city triumphalism as policy failure: what looks like dynamism is, to him, an accumulation of unpriced costs and avoidable path dependence.
The specific intent isn’t to sneer at New York, London, or Tokyo as cultural miracles; it’s to indict the political economy that treats scale as destiny. Galbraith spent a career arguing that markets don’t automatically deliver social balance, and here he’s implying that urban gigantism is not an organic outcome but a constructed one, subsidized by infrastructure decisions, land policy, corporate clustering, and the prestige economy that keeps capital and attention piling into the same few zip codes. “Should have been” suggests missed off-ramps: earlier moments when decentralization, regional investment, or stronger public planning could have prevented overconcentration.
The subtext is almost heretical for modern urban boosters: the metropolis doesn’t merely produce inequality; it feeds on it. Mega-cities become magnets that justify neglect elsewhere while normalizing congestion, housing scarcity, and a constant arms race for space. By naming three global icons, Galbraith also punctures the idea that this is an American quirk; it’s a late-industrial pattern. The cynicism lands because it reverses the usual narrative. The metropolis isn’t civilization’s pinnacle. It’s civilization’s failure to govern growth before growth governs it.
The specific intent isn’t to sneer at New York, London, or Tokyo as cultural miracles; it’s to indict the political economy that treats scale as destiny. Galbraith spent a career arguing that markets don’t automatically deliver social balance, and here he’s implying that urban gigantism is not an organic outcome but a constructed one, subsidized by infrastructure decisions, land policy, corporate clustering, and the prestige economy that keeps capital and attention piling into the same few zip codes. “Should have been” suggests missed off-ramps: earlier moments when decentralization, regional investment, or stronger public planning could have prevented overconcentration.
The subtext is almost heretical for modern urban boosters: the metropolis doesn’t merely produce inequality; it feeds on it. Mega-cities become magnets that justify neglect elsewhere while normalizing congestion, housing scarcity, and a constant arms race for space. By naming three global icons, Galbraith also punctures the idea that this is an American quirk; it’s a late-industrial pattern. The cynicism lands because it reverses the usual narrative. The metropolis isn’t civilization’s pinnacle. It’s civilization’s failure to govern growth before growth governs it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
