By the way, individual people aren't good at all at evaluating invisible, long-term costs like that of pollution and its health risks.
I don't think that's true, because of imperfect information. A person living in a remote rural location may believe that they can can have a better life in a city, then make the journey at a high price (relative to their own resources) then arrive and find that it's not what they expected and they have no way to get home. I will wager a significant proportion of those impacted by this policy fall into that category.
https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/population-change-1939-20...
And compared to the other belligerents, it was barely affected by the second, too. British colonial policies during the war killed more of their own subjects in India, then the Germans ever did on the home isles. (For anyone wondering why India sought independence... Well, that was a factor.)
If WW2 went on for much longer then the UK would have descended into universal abject poverty and total societal collapse.
Granted this universal suffering of the populace ushered in the social-welfare state Britain is so commonly known for nowadays, it was nonetheless devastating.
That total exhaustion of resources happened due to decolonization, and taking on much debt (Much of which was inflated away over the next decade.) As it turned out, the resource shortages didn't matter, either, due to free trade. 1945 to 1960 had the highest rate of economic growth that the UK has ever experienced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...
(0) https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/londons-population-ov...
Not many rurals gonna migrate to the big smoke and as you can tell from Brexit the Brits ain't too keen any more on inwards migration.
Let's not forget that from ~1825 to ~1925 London was the largest city in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
The rest of Europe.
Or would those stay in DC as the power in politics remains?
A good start could be just to make remote all the jobs that can be made remote, but of course this would not cover a big part of jobs which need a whole team in the same location and specialized machinery (Eg the whole manufacturing sector)
Marissa Mayer raised the question of in-office vs remote at Yahoo! and I am still not convinced either way. If we had a robust basic income, we should just let go of people who we feel are dead-weight on our team? https://archive.fo/ThVv9
On the other side of the spectrum, the concept of a "manufacturing city" in China PR is troubling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91s87s2Ar20 What happens when someone is not capable of working anymore?
Was the problem remote jobs? No, probably not. The problem was complacency: Complacent employees who didn't want to work and used remote jobs as an excuse not to do anything. Complacent managers who didn't know how to manage remote employees and didn't want to learn.
Did we have remote employees who were amazing? Hell yeah. Did lazy employees overwhelmingly choose to become remote because it was the easiest way not to do any work? Hell yeah. There were more than a few stories (not from management, even) about employees who hadn't even logged in in a couple months. It was beyond the typical "bad employee gets no work done," it was just "bad employee doesn't work one iota."
My takeaway was that managing remote employees is a skill that many managers don't possess, and bad employees knew that and capitalized on it very effectively.
So you're correct that it was a move to facilitate a rapid mass layoff, but the part that's unsaid there is that the people being laid off were overwhelmingly the worst employees anyway. Their managers should've been given the boot as well.
One policy I have found very interesting is to require developers to "invest" in the neighbourhood in exchange for building permits.
For example, the government could require developers to pay for public infrastructure before they can build (eg. they need to pay a part of a new subway line, or they need to renew the sewer system etc.)
This helps address the problem that there is lots of capital available for building new stuff, but nobody wants to pay for maintenance.
Or, long term, lease all properties at market rate.
2) Zone most blocks for (high quality, safe) towers and make others into parks.
Having lived in cities that are crumbling under poor infrastructure, unchecked growth, excessive pollution (from vehicles, stuck in endless traffic jams), shortage of water/electricity, I wonder what can be done to fix this. Everyone from across the country wants to migrate to a few big cities that provide good employment. We shouldn't stop them from seeking opportunities but at the same time the local government has to ensure a minimal quality of life for the existing residents. What would be a short term solution (implementable in 1-3 years) that can balance this ?