Could the Human Race Fit in a Single City?

The human urge to own land sometimes borders on the absurd. Earlier this week, Richard Florida and I took a look at the question of whether the size of American cities was economically optimized: Do we have too many cities with too few people in them? (Answer: Yes!) But there’s an implicit question embedded in that notion of anti-NIMBY place-making, once posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How much land does a man need?”

Tolstoy’s answer was pretty grim. But leave it to a YouTuber to take that existential literary question literally by asking, “How much land does humanity need?”