Crossrail 2 remains an un-costed idea with an unknown route but will doubtless require another £15bn infusion to get it rolling. Meanwhile, ThamesLink is halfway through a nine-year, £6bn splurge as it seeks to connect those great satellite towns of Bedford and Brighton. The apex of these fixes took place in the summer of 2012, with a two-week £12bn Olympic circus for the Metropolitan mob.

Network Rail knows how to play the game of tractor-production statistics with élan. It regularly points out that rail traffic has increased 40% in the last 10 years while, with equal consistency, it fails to note that its annual subsidy during that same period rose 283%, from £1.2bn to £4.6bn. The problem with this focus on outputs is that expenditure becomes self-reinforcing. That is, additional expenditure increases traffic flows, which in turn precipitates the need for even greater additional investment in new terminals, tunnels and tracks. It prompts a certain amount of nostalgia for those old lectures in Soviet Economics, elements of which can still be found on courses at the LSE.

Whether we focus on relative or absolute numbers, London and its environs overwhelm. In 2010-11 London received £774 per head on transport spending compared with the next highest region: £337 for the North West and £328 for the East. The Mayor's cycle plans alone are the equivalent of the entire transport budget for Leeds in the past decade.

Kit Malthouse, the Deputy Consul at City Hall, in a recent Radio 4 interview, claimed that the rest of the country benefits from these grand infrastructure schemes. However, he ignored the value-added that accrues to London and the southeast, while Midlands metal bashers hammer away for the few remaining economic benefits. Not unlike the Scotch whisky industry in fact, which may be based in Scotland but is taxed in London. One might have thought that the British had outgrown archaic ideas of empires built upon cheap labour, access to raw materials and inequality.

Of course none of this would matter if London's region-wide economic might brought national benefits in much the same way that Aberdeen's oil industry alleviated much of the UK's economic trauma throughout the early 1980s. Instead, technology is rendering London's key industries obsolete. Within a generation Canary Wharf's office towers will likely have about as much relevance to the British economy as a Clydeside shipyard.

For sure the day may come when all those shiny plate-glass, white-collar factories are transformed into houses, workshops, galleries and free schools. The same happened to mills in Bradford, warehouses in Newcastle and factories in Glasgow, but not without a considerable amount of grim economic adjustment, the effects of which still shape the outlooks of these previously proud, but ultimately provincial cities.

Such a transformation also suggests that the hard core of London will likely become more a citadel and less a broad inclusive city. It also points towards the death of the suburbs. Those suburbs have long fed central London with its half million — heavily subsidised — daily commuters, workers and producers, but they too are under threat from technological advances and shifting social trends.

Moreover, given London's accent towards absolute headline numbers and suburbs extending deep into the Home Counties, a suburban decline will have a devastating impact on the city in which most of them live. Like the planned economy, the era of the suburban dream is passing and London appears ill equipped to adapt.

Of course, London's vested interests will ensure increased transport fixes to bring more people within its orbit and to maintain the illusion of substance. Technology, on the other hand, suggests everything is going the other way. Jones Lang LaSalle noted recently, "Footloose businesses — particularly in the technology sector — rely more on being close to their clients and competitors, than they used to..."

Really? Surely technology has the opposite effect? After all, the India-based analyst, looking though the accounts of a Singapore-based company with operations in Brazil and Nigeria, is physically distant from his clients and competitors but technology has already shrunk his or her world dramatically. Even Jones Lang LaSalle concedes that for every technology start up centred on Shoreditch there is another TMT giant downsizing. In short, the trend to disperse is only beginning.

By the early 1980s the UK was heavily subsiding failing shipbuilding, coal, steel and auto industries as successive governments refused to admit that these dinosaurs could no longer compete in a changing world. This patronage hindered the development of new industries, entrepreneurship and innovation. Today's largesse, focused on vast infrastructure projects in the southeast of England is the modern equivalent of these subsidies, while Canary Wharf's glass towers have all the relevance of the docks below that once serviced an earlier Empire.

The classicist consul, when considering the latest transport fix for London might want to ponder the words he undoubtedly recalls from his earlier life, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus — 
"mountains will be in labour and an absurd mouse will be born".

No wonder Russians, with their deep sense of nostalgia, like London.