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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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In the long term, the problem in the US and the wider developed world is that people no longer move to where the economic growth is.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York. I get fed-up of seeing this touted as the answer: just move to where the jobs are! We have that in my own country, which means that Dublin (though tiny by international standards) is bloated by Irish standards, attracting away all investment to the capital, and the concurrent vicious circle which means that the jobs are there because everything is there so when new businesses start they want to go where everything is so they go to Dublin which is where the jobs are.

There's rent crisis, housing crisis, etc. because there isn't enough housing for people and yes that is an entire problem of its own which the government would have been better off addressing rather than wasting time on "sexist language in the Constitution".

But people in my country are moving to where the jobs are, only to find when they get there that there's nowhere to live, or if there is, what the job pays them won't cover that. So they move to another country altogether.

"Jest move to where duh jerbs are" is not a solution.

The entire reason their great grandparents moved to Detroit is Detroit was where the growth was. I'm not really sure I understand the argument here.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York.

The number of people who currently live in NYC is more than double the entire population of the country at independence. I don't mean to be flippant, but every major city now was once tiny. The process of urbanization is centuries old. The US is lucky in that unlike Ireland (or the UK, or France) economic growth is pretty dispersed between several major urban areas, all of which could attract new internal migrants. Obviously there are big policy challenges (see the issues discussed in the infrastructure comment today elsewhere), but sure, I don't see the issue with NYC becoming as populous as, say, Tokyo.

Building more homes where the economic activity is tends to be more viable than trying to artificially disperse economic activity to where the homes are, which as far as I know has mostly been a huge failure historically.

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