Okay so I was in Chicago for the first time and struck by its bigness and I wanted to know what’s up.

NYC —> Wall Street
LA —> Movies
DC —> The government

What’s the deal with Chicago? https://twitter.com/sfbots/status/1293736624401141761

So there’s a historical story about Chicago as a mega-regional transportation node. Where rail lines meet the Great Lakes and that’s why there’s a city there.

But this seemed a little unsatisfying because we’re not in a barge-based economy anymore.

In modern Chicago, though, most people’s jobs have nothing to do with that. They’re just there providing services to other residents of Chicagoland.

But the punchline is that even though I was puzzled by Chicago *all American cities are like this*

The people are mostly there because other people are there, because a modern economy is mostly just people doing stuff for each other.

So you can have positive and negative cycles, and infrastructure limits, and blah blah

But more people is good