This is kind of ignoring all the positive effects from density. Yes, housing for density is hard. Yes, there are some negatives. But you would not get anywhere near the economic productivity you do from 330 Million people uniformly spread across the US as you do from having huge spikes in NYC and LA (and other metropolitan zones).

You also have to face the fact that as you spread people out, most costs go up. Cities subsidize suburbia and rural areas in the sense that cities generate more tax revenues of all types relative to costs. Suburban and rural areas mostly fail to raise enough tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure and generally rely on various handouts from state and federal governments to build things like sewers and roads, which they then do not adequately maintain due to budget shortfalls.

There's a middle ground between spread out uniform, and having a few major population centers. Germany is a great example.

Big cities in Germany are richer than the small cities. And Germany is poorer than the US, too.

Is wealth the only factor? Is the materialistic perspective the only valid one left in the world?

The US has way more than 10 "cities" with over 1M population, unless you ignore ground truth (metro area) and only count people within random city boundaries

The US has 50-60 cities with 1+ million people. You may be conflating administrative boundaries with cities.

You may be conflating metro areas with cities. If you are, it's not a helpful distinction in either case, and not the point I am trying to illustrate.

For example, I could live in Wise County in Texas, and be technically counted towards the population of the Dallas/FW/Arlington Metro, but I would never dream of driving into Dallas from there daily for services, schooling, or work, and if I did, I would be severely disadvantaged, especially if I was poor or lacked resources.

I don't they are conflating metro areas, I think they're describing the accumulation of population a defined area. Metro area can make "cities" seem larger than they are because that population is spread out, but city is misleading as well because it ignores the surrounding population.

Let me put it this way. If you go by city population size, Columbus where I live is larger than San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Las Vegas, or Atlanta [1]. In fact, Columbus is almost the same size as Atlanta and and Miami combined. Does that seem right to you?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

If I were you, for your argument I would use population densities.

But you can’t bucket a million people living in thousands of square miles as the same as a million locked together in a suburban sprawl connected with rail and roads. Look at London. Take away the boroughs and what is really left?

China may have a 160 cities with a million+ people, but, do all of these cities have the infrastructure and opportunities that are the same as or come close to Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzen? IMO, this is a case where quantity alone is a poor metric.

This is a difficult question to accurately answer because the only source of this information is an unreliable one (the Chinese regime). We can, however, assume via observation of how efficient and diverse their manufacturing is, which leads to some baseline assumption they all have above average infrastructure, housing, and other services, in addition to affording salaries to those millions of people that does not result in unmanageable civil unrest. Plenty of experts believe China's infrastructure is ahead of the US at this point. They build 100 miles of high speed rail for the same cost we build 1 mile of tunnel, or 10 miles of toll lane that 90% of commuters won't use.

There are other educated assumptions we can make based on the rapid response to the Wuhan outbreak and the surrounding cities, but in my opinion, based on inference from what we can observe from the outside, the answer is firmly yes.

Yeah sounded weird to me. Australia has at least 5 such cities, with 25m people total.

Ok yeah ok Australia might as well be a hollow disk (no one lives in the middle) but still!

Well, compared to the rest of the world, I found US diversification much better than most of other countries, that have only one major city to where everything flows in.

The US is multi-centric. Similar to eg Germany, but different to UK or France.

Why is concentrating in cities a problem?

From an environmental point of view, it seems nearly ideal if most humans would live in a few big cities, than more of the rest of the earth could be given back to nature.