Contrary to the assertion in the sub-title to Rahm Emanuel’s upbeat defense of cities, mayors don’t run the world. And while some of them have some pretty good approaches to intractable urban problems, there really is no substitute for effective governance at the national level, at least not yet.

What’s pretty clear in the 21st century is that some runaway corporations have an enormous impact on urban and rural life. Alibaba, amazon, facebook, Google, Microsoft, tencent, uBer, AirBnB, to name a few.

Cities, not even a federation of cities can really tell Google what to do and what not to do. Or who or what to surveil and who and when not to surveil.

International crime, money laundering, and tax havens are transnational problems. You want to know why residential real estate in Hong Kong, New York, London, and Toronto are haywire?

Well, there’s a lot of evil money parked in condos and not just in Sunny Isles, Florida.

California may ultimately have a lasting impact on the future of automobile manufacturing but LA won’t and neither will San Francisco.

I give you a simple case in point: the entire world except for the Unites States is run on the metric system. Here is one tiny reason the US is pricing itself out of the market. Cities will not change that/

Cities will have little effect on the xenophobic hinterlands, or on money in politics, or, as we’ve seen, on the transmission of microbes. These are things we deal with together or not at all. ( )