20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 Quantitative factors [such as number of major corporate head quarters and percentage of local people working in high-level service fields like finance] are generally used in defining world city status... Beaverstock et al. (Iggo) have prepared a "roster of world cities"in terms of level of advanced producer services, namely, accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law. They combine their data into scoring systems in which London, Paris, New York and Tokyo score twelve, ith Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los angeles, Milan and Singapore scoring ten. These are Alpha world cities Beta world cities scoring more than six but less than ten Include san francisco Sydney,.. and Moscow. Gammas scoring less than seven but more than three include amster- dam, Melbourne, Boston, Warsaw, Atlanta, Kuala Lumpur and shanghai David byrne, Understanding the Urban (2001) he title of this essay alludes to a famous discussion of animal sym- bolism by Claude Levi- Strauss in his oft-cited book Totemism Whereas some earlier theorists had argued in a functionalist vein that types of animals are often used to stand for human groups because these beasts are"good to eat, " Levi-Strauss insisted that it is the fact that species are " good to think"that matters more 2 Drawing on Rousseau's earlier claim that rational thought depends on the ability to establish contrasts and homologies(to find various ways that enti- ties are different from and similar to one another ), levi- Strauss argued that totemic systems should not be seen as curious manifestations of the workings of the savage mind. Instead they were symbolic con structs that followed the same principles as modern categorization schemas What makes animals "good to think "in this view is that people can do more than simply describe them and revel in their unique qual- ities. We can also single out features that make them similar and dis I Thomas F Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), pp. 249-250; Jack F. Williams, " Cities of East Asia, "in Cities of the World: World Regional Urban Development, 2nd ed, ed. Stanley D. Brunn and Jack E. Wil liams(New York: Harper Collins, I993), pp. 454, 458; and David Byrne, Understanding the Urban(New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.92 2 Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. rodney Needham( Boston: Beacon, 1963) especially p 8 3 Levi-Strauss, Totemism, pp. 85-88, for comparative method in general, and pp 99-102, for Rousseau