London makes a lot of money because it's dominated by high-return service industries, most famously the financial sector based in the City. It includes relatively little in the way of production, manufacturing and storage, which don't scale as well but are obviously essential to everything else being possible.

The vast majority of London commuters live in Greater London, so its housing is largely provided for by itself. Even if you assumed every human being in the "commuter belt" travelled to London daily, the GLA would still account for ~73% of the population, and this is plainly an absurd assumption.

While London may not contribute as much manufacturing, it still manages ~6% of the UK's manufacturing output. At the same time, just retail in London produces almost as much for the economy as rUK manufacturing.

Your whole thesis is laughable. You seem to be upset that the poorer parts of the nation can trade with London to provide it goods and services. Should you not be upset at the farming, storage and transportation rUK "harvests" from abroad? This dwarfs London's "harvesting" of rUK.

London itself has nothing to do with profits from this trade being unequally distributed. Westminster, sure, but London? No.

Not everything is about GDP. You belittle farming, but without food to eat, Londoners would not be generating a lot of economic output at all.

The original point here was that London generates disproportionate tax revenues, but only because it is home to more scalable service industries and relies on the less lucrative but essential supplies and infrastructure from elsewhere.

What other natural resources are being "harvested" to enrich London so much?

Almost none of the UK's electricity supply originates within London, even if we take that to mean Greater London.

London also has no major sources for fuels.

Your whole thesis is laughable. You seem to be upset

Why would I be upset about anything? I only commented that London is able to generate disproportionate tax returns because it's service-based and relies on the rest of the UK for support. That's not a "thesis", it's a simple economic fact, and everything I've mentioned in support it of is readily verifiable for the price of a Google search.

As does rUK, with rWorld. As do most UK cities with rUK. Similarly with farming; London _and rUK_ can (and do) fulfil a significant quantity of their demand from abroad; it is possible to fulfil more.

I do not belittle farming, but trading for food does not equal "extracting rents" as the OP you were responding to requested, and nor does farming constitute a huge industry rUK is somehow being defrauded of the profits for.

Almost none of the UK's electricity supply originates within London

Energy production is not a natural resource. The only "rUK" resource we input is Gas, but it's not clear how much of rUK can claim to be losing out here. Most of rUK would not be the natural "owners" of this resource, and - again - it is traded on the open market, so can be fulfilled from elsewhere.

Why would I be upset

To rephrase/reconsider: you seem to somehow confuse trade with rent extraction, unless you simply did not read the OP's point of contention you were contributing to.

If this were to be true, rUK would be one of the world's worst perpetuators of this form of wrong, given its greater dependency on rWorld in exactly the manners you describe.

But even if you can give that up and you have enough supply to import all your food from elsewhere in the world, how are those imports going to get into London? There's limited spare capacity for freight ports on the Thames. Even if you could finish the London Gateway -- which isn't actually in London anyway, and you probably couldn't build anything like it further in -- and significantly expand its capacity from what is currently planned, you'd still need the warehousing and logistics to go with it, and then you'd need all the staff to build and maintain and operate all of this, and then the supporting infrastructure and services to go with those staff. That's an awful lot of new space and new relatively low-paid workers to fit into your hypothetical newly-independent London, just to make up for not having land-based supply of food and drink.

So again, as I have said repeatedly, London is only disproportionately strong economically because it is primarily based on high-margin service industries and relies on the rest of the UK to supply much of the low-margin infrastructure it needs for the basic operation of a city that size. You can argue over whether that beneficial financial arrangement is literally rent-seeking, but certainly the economic effect is similar: London currently benefits disproportionately from the UK's public spending and government-supported infrastructure, but that spending and infrastructure development is only possible because of what is also going on elsewhere in the UK.

It's in, for example, Cambridge, which over the past decade has become living proof of the idea that improved links to London can make a place prosper.

I've been living in Cambridge for many years and over that time its acquired a very London-like vibe around the center, business/science and biomedical campuses. The second train station just opened, the 3rd is in planning, and a subway (or underground busway) system is being considered to link them together.

Part of the reason I hardly ever go into the city centre any more is that the transport system is so awful and expensive. At one point it was literally cheaper to park illegally and pay the fine promptly than to park in a major city centre car park! The new railway station and "new" trains into London have come in for plenty of criticism even in just a few weeks that they've been in use so far and, ironically, we're actually predicted to lose out from HS2 here as it pulls some of the attention over to the west.

There's still a scholarly feel around the university areas, of course, and a feeling of industry around the out-of-town science and business areas, but I'm not sure how much of that has anything to do with outside investment rather than the business and academic communities themselves.

If Cambridge is what "commitment" by the government to areas outside London looks like, they really need to up their game.

'...I hardly go into the city centre any more...'

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

When it is crowded these days, it seems to be more temporary visitors like tourists and summer school kids than locals. Even the students aren't around as much as they used to be, as some of the university departments that used to be based in the centre have moved a lot of their work to sites further out now.

I find it striking that I have met friends who live nearby down in London more often than I've met them in Cambridge lately. I've also done more of my bricks-and-mortar shopping in the big shopping centres down London way than in my local city centre. There's so much more to do and it's just generally so much more interesting and alive (and, frankly, clean) that contrary to krona, I find it very different to the feeling in central Cambridge these days.

Are you comparing similar areas of London and other cities? If you don't visit anywhere outside central London, it's only fair to compare that with the centre of other cities.

If they never make serious investments anywhere else, then nowhere else can develop the kind of economy that allows London to perform this well.

Either way, as somebody who has moved to the commuter belt for work, I think investing in the northern powerhouse and high speed rail would probably help the need for us to all be here which forces more taxes to be generated here.

I think trying to read anything into regional tax flows isn't very productive.

I think arguments like that ignore the interconnectivity of complex national systems (e.g.) a London business whose customers and suppliers are based around the country.

And indeed employees. I'm based in Cheshire (home worker), we have offices in most cities and large towns across the country (and indeed globally). How much of my income tax is counted towards 'rural northwest' and how much to 'London' where the HQ is. How much of the profit I generate gets allocated to London.

Not the same I know, but Milton Keynes (a UK garden city supposedly planned and designed like an American city) has a mostly interrupted cycle path network covering the whole city, which to some hugely preferable to a subway network. The only problem with this is that things are too spaced out for the average person to want to cycle so barely anyone uses it, which is strange because Milton Keynes buses charge £4-5 per person to travel only a couple of miles.

I think we have improved transport economics so much that the size of a metro area needs adjusting in our minds - London has commuters from Birmingham, Cambridge and beyond - in the same way that NYC has commuters from Pennsylvania and even Philly.

The winning City in an area sucks in all the surrounding populations - it's just now that transport links mean that those surrounding populations are in what used to be called other cities and are now just suburbs.

We need better town planning not ways to hold back cities to certain geographic locations

There are arguably more high end jobs in the suburbs surrounding these 3 major cities than in the city centers themselves. While this has removed the issue of one major city sucking in all of the surrounding resources, it has also distributed all of the problems of a major city center throughout an entire region - extremely high housing costs, horrendous traffic, etc.

Since each municipality in the Bay Area enjoys near ubiquitous power over local development and policy, it is also very difficult to implement effective regional plans to improve these issues.

I propose, instead, that New York City is a suburb of Philly.

I would be interested to know which cities are consolidating high density areas while growing such that they will have a Manhattan.

But I don't think every city needs Manhattan style density. Four, five story mid-rise density is the answer. Austin's urban core is building heavily in that style. I was just in Milwaukee for work as was surprised by the huge number of mid-rise buildings all over downtown. Just to show two midsized cities with insane growth at the core.

New York might be a huge metropolis, but it's by no means the only one.