Comment by andreygrehov
3 days ago
I don’t understand the point of concentrating everything in a megacity. Take New York as an example: the cost of living is through the roof, while the quality of life is often the opposite. Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work. The state should de-prioritize NYC and encourage companies to invest in smaller cities. This would bring jobs to those areas, reduce pressure on NYC, and support broader infrastructure development. Apply that approach across the country, and suddenly the entire nation can function more efficiently instead of relying on a few overloaded hubs.
There's a whole subfield of economics that studies clustering in cities ("agglomeration"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration There are lots of benefits.
Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
I think it's a situation akin to HOAs where there are absolutely people who prefer being in an HOA but it has this feedback loop which results in significantly more people being in an HOA than would prefer to be just because there are limited options and undoing an HOA is higher friction than new construction including one.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
> Corporations should stop renting offices in the most expensive areas of the country and instead prioritize locations where housing is affordable and people don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes commuting to work.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
Nobody's forcing anyone to live in a city, they want to because the jobs and culture and opportunities are there. And companies want to be there because that's where the workers are. It's a feedback loop, I guess cost is the main moderator. There is an argument for decentralizing a little but surely it's the governments job to incentivize that.
There are well known netowrk effects, that happen when economists study cities. You can just have each individual bank pick some random small town and set up an office there.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.
Density has some obvious advantages. It also has a bunch of disadvantages. The millions of people living there seem to think it's worth the tradeoff, at least to the point of having enough inertia not to move elsewhere.