THE END OF THE MYTH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUE OF DENSE CITIES Now this is something

THE END OF THE MYTH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUE OF DENSE CITIES

Now this is something that I wasn’t sure was going to play out. But it appears that the data is starting to work in favor of suburbia (the ring around a city) more so than the downtown itself. The places that are experiencing growth are those that are not benefitting so much from the immigration of numbers (poor) but the immigration of talent.

So I suspect that the next progressive myth that science is going to undermine, is the virtue of well managed big cities, rather than a number of closely related suburbs.

I’ve sort of been watching the data that’s been slung around for the past decade and I assumed that it was just a matter of cities making it easier for bureaucrats to seek rents. And that’s actually the ‘first cause’. But it didn’t really occur to me that the “seattle/bellevue/redmond” model was actually the one that worked best.

Now, I’ve looked at various Georgist theories, and there is definitely something to e said there since density increases productivity (of smart people) so much. And I’ve also worked at my preferred solution: pay people to do the work of policing laws, commons and norms. And you know that they accomplish slightly different things. My solution would actually distribute the poor into the surrounding territory where their lower value in production is not hampering the productivity of more productive people by forcing them out. Unfortunately the less well off want the value of the city even if they’re a net drag on the generation of tax revenue because really all they serve to do is allow vote buying that allows political and bureaucratic rent seekers to capture more of the revenue for themselves. Also, normative pressure is higher in rural areas, so the more ‘troublesome’ populations are more subject to normative pressures to ‘behave’ than in urban environments. ALso we are stuck with the fact that raising children in a city in no way is as awesome as raising them in a suburban home. (Spoken as someone raised in a small rural farm town, but who has lived in cities or suburbia for most of his adult life.)

Anyway, I want to keep working on this a little more before taking a better position on it.

Net is, that the progressive fantasy is the walking dead at this point. The conservative fantasy is impossible. The Rothbardian fantasy is immoral and impossible. So, what is our solution to the problem of formal institutions that is both moral and possible, even if it’s not ‘efficient’.