经济学人 | 大城市让我们的生活变得更好？

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年前的 15% 上升至 25% 。

Economists tend to think this is a great development. Cities, they argue, benefit from “ agglomeration ” , the consequence of so many people living in close quarters. For one thing, government and businesses can run more efficiently: scale helps everything from public transport to the recruitment of staff.

经济学家往往认为这是巨大的进步。他们指出，城市受益于 " 集聚效应 "—— 密集人口带来的优势。一方面，政府和企业能更高效运转：从公共交通到人才招聘，规模效应让一切事半功倍。

For another, finding the next big idea is easier when like-minded people crowd together. Although London makes up 15% of Britain’ s population, it counts for 22% of its economic output.

另一方面，当志同道合者聚集在一起时，更容易碰撞出伟大的新想法。伦敦虽仅占英国人口的 15% ，却贡献了全国经济产出的 22% 。

But have economists overestimated the benefits of big cities? That is what a new working paper by Matthew Turner and David Weil, both of Brown University, suggests.

但经济学家是否高估了大城市的益处？布朗大学的马修 · 特纳和大卫 · 威尔在一篇最新发布的工作论文中提出了这一质疑。

Their analysis applies existing estimates of the impact of agglomeration on economic efficiency and the pace of invention to a model of the American economy. This allows the researchers to answer a provocative question: how different would America look if, from 1900 to 2010, no urban area had grown to a population of more than 1m people?

他们通过将 " 集聚效应对经济效率与创新速度影响 " 的现有估算应用于美国经济模型，试图回答一个尖锐问题：如果

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