Cities too big?

The usually sharp Ross Douthat of the NY Times has recently been writing about "implausible" or "ridiculous" (his words) policy proposals. What to do in the early days of a Trump administration?

Yesterday's version was "Break Up the Liberal City ... Cities as conspiracies against the public good." Douthat wants to treat the cities "as trusts that concentrate wealth and power and conspire against the public good."

He seems to confuse the city (the place, the economic entity) with city government.  When you say "Los Angeles" (or any other), be clear if you mean the place or the government.  Too bad that many people use them interchangeably.

What do we know about the place? (1) There are many flavors and sizes of cities; (2) The big cities like New York are complex jig-saw puzzles with many interlocking pieces (people); they are not uniformly "liberal"; (3) The cities (actually metropolitan areas that include city hinterlands) that grow (attract capital and labor) do so because they offer a winning combination of attributes and opportunities; (4) Cities are where interactions occur; new ideas are spawned, which is how and why they make labor and capital productive; this is why they are "engines of growth"; (5) The "breaking up" part is typically overdone in anti-trust actions anyway; lawyers and judges cannot easily tell who is "too big"; do prices fall? is innovation proceeding? That is the only relevant test. Amazon and Google are not (yet) "too big".

What do we know about city governments? Yes, too large and, therefore too awful. The scale diseconomies are clear.  Did post-war public school consolidation into large districts do any good?

There was a time when many preached the benefits of regional government. Too many small cities!  That would remove what choice there is and entrench all the wrong people. Extend the power and reach of big city governments into the suburbs? I think that Douthat is suggesting the very opposite.