Vacuous Paragraphs, I

Richard Florida in the latest Atlantic:

Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega-regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings like the Boston–New York–Washington Corridor. In North America, these mega-regions include SunBelt centers like the Char-Lanta Corridor, Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle of Houston–San Antonio–Dallas, and Southern Florida’s Tampa-Orlando-Miami area; the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver; and both Greater Chicago and Tor-Buff-Chester in the old Rust Belt. Internationally, these mega-regions include Greater London, Greater Tokyo, Europe’s Am-Brus-Twerp, China’s Shanghai-Beijing Corridor, and India’s Bangalore-Mumbai area. Economic output is ever-more concentrated in these places as well. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population, produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.

Yes, when you get to define "mega-region" according to whatever criteria you feel like, you'll find you can associate a bunch of impressive figures with the top-40. Hmm, you might even define "mega-region" in order to maximize those impressive figures. Of course, like all concepts, regions are regions because people think of them as regions (nominalism, roughly). But in this case, many of these mega-regions are mega-regions because Richard Florida thinks of them as mega-regions. For the record, the "Shanghai-Beijing Corridor" stretches over 1000 kilometers:

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