Two weeks ago, this map, created by the Reddit user atrubetskoy, began making the rounds:
It’s a striking visualization—a dramatic look at the metropolitan dominance of the United States economy. No doubt the map’s popularity was in part due to the self-satisfaction of urbanites who are proud to point out that, in spite of its relative paucity of 4-H clubs and tractor pulls, metropolitan America is its own economic heartland.
Some observers noted that the map, in failing to account for population densities, is actually not so interesting after all, and masks the inequality of GDP distribution both within and without metro areas. Fair enough. But for me, the real problem with this map is that it relies on a fundamentally problematic conception of how to geographically index “economic activity” in the first place.
GDP is a measure of economic exchange measured in monetary transactions; whenever two people or entities trade goods or services for money, they contribute to GDP. Now, since two people can never occupy exactly the same geography, if we are to say that the exchange which registers as GDP happens somewhere, we have to choose how to freeze that exchange in time and space. Typically we do this by measuring where the point of sale takes place.
And, of course, many sales take place in cities, whether or not the underlying goods and services which on which the exchange is based were originally urban products. After all, this is one of the main reasons we have cities in the first place! Market towns emerged as sites where farmers could come together in a single location in order to sell their agricultural products efficiently and purchase the manufactured goods they needed in a single trip. Understanding that GDP—and economic activity in a capitalist system more generally—is ultimately about exchange goes a long way to explaining why urban areas dominate in such a measure, since cities are, in their core reason for existence, engines of exchange.
But the rather clumsy (and highly reductionist) economic geography of measuring sales simply at their frozen, two-dimensional point of exchange obscures the geographic circulation of the people and things involved. If a farmer from Missouri brings a truckload of hogs to St. Louis to sell at a livestock auction, fills up his truck with gas in the city, then heads to Chicago to spend his earnings on a weekend vacation, then the economic activity his hogs have generated—as well as everything that cascades off from it (the gas-station owner investing in a new storefront, a Chicago waitress buying her son a new phone from the Missouri farmer’s generous tip, and so on ad infinitum) accrue to the orange half of this map, despite the fact that the hogs—on whom this particular pyramid of economic activity is built—come to the city only in the final moments leading up to their death. Imagine two financial speculators in New York City inking a deal to trade a few billion dollars worth of copper mines. Those billions will also accrue to the orange—but I’ll bet the copper mines are in the blue.
What’s misleading about this map, therefore, is that it makes one think that you could simply split the United States up into blue and orange bits, and they would both have 50% of the wealth of the current United States—two autarkic nations-within-a-nation. Far from it. The blue and orange are only as wealthy as they are only because they are so intricately economically interrelated. After all, economic activity, since it is a measure of exchange, is a measure of interrelatedness. In fact, the only genuinely accurate map of today’s economic activity would be a map of the world, under the heading “This map shows where 100% of economic activity takes place.”
http://viewshed.matinic.us/2014/03/04/679/