Bad Places. Really Bad Places.

I really don't want to be pessimistic but I've got some articles about hellish cities.

The City of Dis is the term for the lower four layers of Dante's Inferno. Here is a handy cross section of Hell. Clicking the Down Arrow brings you to Dis.

Feral Cities

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power.

Its even got a handy graph to determine if your town is "goin' feral."

The idea of "rent seeking" was totally new to me. It's really pretty simple, but the economic definition is really opaque. Basically it means that a group (government or corporation) is trying to extract revenue without investing in improvements. An illegitimate, corrupt government is rent seeking by collecting taxes for pure profit (not invested in public services). A corporation is rent seeking if it lobbies to exclude outside competition. That would lead to higher prices for the corporation's product without any actual improvement in quality.

I found out about rent seeking when I was researching Kleptocracies.