Byen eller nasjonen

Apropos metodologisk nasjonalisme: Don Boudreaux deler sitater fra Jane Jacobs' bok om byer og økonomisk vekst (Cities and the Wealth of Nations):

Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth.

Boudreaux legger til:

Anthropomorphizing any collective is dangerous intellectual business. Even more dangerous – intellectually and, potentially, physically – is anthropomorphizing the collection of people who claim membership in a nation and regarding that collective as possessing some unitary and transcendent reality, as well as assuming that the government that asserts sovereignty over that collective is much like the mind that governs an individual human being.

Flere sitater her. Relevant for mer enn økonomi.