Comments by "Deborah Freedman" (@deborahfreedman333) on "Fareed: Coronavirus won't be a death knell for big cities. Here's why" video.

  1. Sure, populations came back somewhat after the plague, but not to the levels of today. Florence in the Renaissance held about 70,000 people, today it holds around 383,000. Since the city is about the same size, it is clearly more densely packed today. The more densely packed a city is, the more susceptible it is to a pandemic. And there was no teleconferencing in the Renaissance, so you had to live near one another to take part in trade and commerce, or the arts. Vaccination, modern plumbing, sanitation and modern transportation allow us to pack people more tightly, but cannot totally prevent infectious disease or difficulty obtaining food. If you like living cheek to jowl, huge cities are fine. But, a lot more people prefer less dense locales. And with the internet, they can live in a more affordable area, and go into the office once a week. When a commuter train was established between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo, the smaller city doubled in size with all the people using the train to commute into their office once or twice a week. A lack of decent transport into large cities is probably the only thing preventing those cities from emptying out. If a subway tunnel were built under the Hudson, many more people would live in New Jersey. If better transportation is put into place, watch Zakaria be proven wrong.
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