A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities

A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities

"The city with the largest population in any country is generally twice as large as the next-biggest, and so on. Incredibly, Zipf's law for cities has held true for every country in the world, for the past century."

Every country? What the fuck, man? I tested it on the first countries I thought of (places where I lived, or worked for a very long time), and the ratio of the top two cities didn't work for any of them except the USA and Norway. And it wasn't even close.

UK: greater London is about four times as large as greater Manchester.

Peru: Lima is something like ten times larger than Arequipa

Hungary: Budapest is about ten times the size of Debrecen

Mexico: Mexico City is at least five times as large as the next largest city, possibly as much as ten times.

Australia: Melbourne and Sydney are about the same size.

Austria: Vienna is many, many times larger than Graz (six to seven times)

Chile: Santiago is many, many times larger than Concepcion or Valparaiso (about six times)

I don't get it.