Call me stupid (I am not an economist) but I can't see how your conclusions follow from one another.

> That implies that that 5 million more people are now earning Boston-level salaries and 5 million more people were able to make the personal choice to move to Boston.

...How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know, a lot of people know one profession and don't want to ever learn another (assuming the jobs pertain to a different profession, but I'd say that's a safe bet that not all of them will cover the professions of these 5 million people).

> These 5 million people are on average doing higher-productivity jobs than before, which means economic growth.

Better salary rarely correlates with better productivity in my experience and observations. People love their titles and prestige and are chasing after them just for the extra salaries they bring. And even if we ignore that, a lot of companies pad budgets for well-known reasons: if you don't spend your entire department's budget then it will be reduced in the next quarter or fiscal year, and you as a manager are very likely to get skipped when handing out bonuses. This has often led to managers hiring expensive consultants that barely do anything. These people are laughing their way to the bank and the economy gains nothing from it (those consultants will not reinvest 100% of the money in the local economy; I'd count it as a huge win if they reinvest even 20% but I have no data proving that they do or that they don't).

So yes, while the new 5 million people could have better salaries, that says almost nothing about productivity or helping the economy at large with this theorized increased productivity.

> Yet at the same time, these 5 million people now have a lower ecological footprint than they would have had if they stayed where they lived before.

I am most of all challenging this one. I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago, some of them pile wood and small amounts of coal for 3-5 years ahead for prices I'd find laughable and a rounding error in my 3-month expense budget -- and before we talk about ecological impact or CO2 footprint, most of this wood was cut 5 years ago, it's not removing new forests. They manage their heating extremely efficiently. It really opened my eyes how much us the city people look down on others in terms of ecology when in fact we know next to nothing about how is our local electricity procured, how much CO2 it releases in the atmosphere, and how is it even subsidized (a huge topic for another thread / time).

So obviously this is down to context (and I have no idea where does Boston get its electricity, or any such city that your idea might pertain to) but to me this is not as clear and cut as you make it sound.

...And that's not even mentioning rural people getting solar panels and literally having 5-10% of their winter power bill during the summer.

......And it's also not mentioning that some of them did a combination of a family picnic + were gathering dead wood / twigs / dry leaves sometimes and these easily accounted for no less than 5% of all their heating in the cold months. This is not destroying the ecological system, it's merely being super efficient by removing mostly useless bio matter (and very far from such a huge scale that it will hamper enriching the soil, before you say it!).

> These 5 million people are arguably better off, and the rest of society is also better off.

As you yourself alluded to, that's not a given, like at all. 5 million people moving away from rural areas could arguably leave 10+ million elderly people without care or even ability to have their kids arrive to their location quickly if they have a medical emergency.

Which part of "society" is better off? City real estate renters for sure. Who else?

Local sandwich shops, laundromats, coffee joints, ice-cream truck? I'll give you all of those and I like how city people inter-mingle both in terms of physical presence and capital. But I remain skeptical that society as a huge entity is actually better off.

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IMO your take is a very idealistic one. Still, I do my best not to sound like I am attacking you, I am kind of confused that I can't see a single correlation in your string of assertions and I am curious if you can back them up with something more than aggregated (and very diluted) historical statistics.

I - genuinely - don’t have time to write a full response right now.

So I will just pick your first question as an example:

> How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created? How did the 5 million people connect with them? Not everyone is 18-25 y/o you know,

These jobs got created because companies were able to hire employees into roles that they would otherwise not have been able to fill. and yes, not everybody is 25, but a whole lot of people are…

>How did those 5 million better-paid jobs got created?

I don't think that matters in this argument because the author assumes that housing prices will rise, which would only be possible if there is growth in desirable jobs. If 5 million high paying jobs don't get created, you don't have to worry about rising home prices because very few people would want to live in a place more expensive place on the same income. Instead you'd have a situation like Tokyo where housing prices don't rise.

>I've known a lot of people in rural areas years ago

They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration. Your average country folk isn't going to suddenly decide to move to NYC. You need about 30 acres for an indefinite supply of firewood. You're probably not going to able to aquire that much land within a reasonable distance of an office, and if you can, you'd be wasting a lot of energy with commuting.

> Instead you'd have a situation like Tokyo where housing prices don't rise.

Agreed, that's what I am arguing for in fact. Prices either rise or stagnate, but for them to actually drop... it takes a while until the people who are very invested in the constant growth of the market to realize things don't always work that way, and correct their prices more in tune with reality.

Again though, it takes a long time.

> They are alluding to suburban rather than rural migration.

Ah, fair. Suburban living was economically viable for one brief dreamy moment in time but I am afraid it has not been that for a few decades now.

Heating an apartment takes far less energy than heating a detached house. Public transit takes far less energy than driving a car. Walking or biking takes even less.

There's no way that urban living isn't far more climate friendly than rural, even if the rural housing is getting some energy from solar or burning wood.

The greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.

Honestly, I even think detached houses beat most apartments. Apartments often depend on electric baseboard radiators and window AC units for heating and cooling. They often have multiple massive hot water heaters where the people on higher floors must leave their water running for 10-15 minutes before they start getting hot water. They also tend to have outdated appliances that are less energy efficient like electric ranges, and old refrigerators and ancient clothes washers/dryers. In most of the apartments I've lived in, it was firmly against the rules to hang your clothes on a line to be dried by wind and sun.

These appliances are often not as well maintained either. Tenants aren't pulling out the fridge to clean the coils and landlords rarely do either. Renters don't have the ability to make the kinds of improvements that would reduce their energy bills and landlords are incentivized to cut corners since it makes building much cheaper and the expensive utility payments are the renter's problem.

Public transportation is better than driving cars, but most people don't use public transpiration anyway and the number of cars on the road in dense urban settings is much higher than on rural streets. We can see that reflected in the air quality, which is abysmal in highly populated urban centers compared to rural areas.

Urban environments have fewer trees, fewer unpaved expanses of land, more pollution (air, water, light, noise), less wildlife (greater habitat destruction, more poisons and other dangers to animals) and more trash/litter.

Urban settings are by far less climate friendly than rural settings, but certainly we'd have new problems if everyone lived 2 miles from their nearest neighbor.

There's a middle ground that I don't think we've really reached yet but for now it's probably a good thing that we have masses of people concentrated into small tightly packed highly polluted pockets of filth and disease and also wide open spaces where it's clean and quiet, where animals can live, and the air is cleaner. We'd be smart to try to increase the efficiency of the spaces we move into while still avoiding going over the number of humans a given area can sustainably support, but I have a feeling that there will always be people who want to live farther way from anything else than is practical and people who want to live in areas that are too densely populated to be good for the environment.

That's nonsense. You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment.

The incentive to make improvements comes from ownership model, not form factor. Apartments can be owned and houses can be rented.

> You don't get less environmental impact by having every person take up more land. Urban living is much more environmentally friendly because the alternative is paving over more of the environment.

It's not about how much land a person uses, it's how that land is being used. Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt. Urban living is "paving over more the environment" and you can see that with just minutes spent with Google maps looking at satellite views of urban vs rural areas. Rural areas are filled with grasslands and trees (and farms) while urban areas are vast expanses of concrete and asphalt with tiny islands of grass and trees.

People in rural areas take up more land while at the same time using (and abusing) far less of it. Having largely unspoiled nature around you is a large part of the appeal to rural living, or so I'm told, I actually prefer living in cities.

I'm not debating that one acre of urban land is worse for the environment than one acre of rural land, but that's not a realistic tradeoff. You need hundreds or thousands of times as much land to house people in a rural setting than in an urban setting.

Rural people don't pave over all of the land that they have, but they certainly pave over more of it than each person's share of paved over land in an urban setting.

If all the people in the entirety of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota lived at the density of NYC, more than half a million square miles or more than 99.9% of the entire land area in those states would be completely untouched wilderness[1]. If you think that all human habitation in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota combined has a smaller impact on the environment than 469 square miles of NYC, then you are clearly delusional.

[1] https://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2014/10/popul...

It's true that if all the people in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western half of Minnesota were packed into a tiny space with the density of NYC all of the land they abandoned would be better off, but the land they were shoved into would be much much worse off for it.

Like I said: the greater the number of people in a given area the worse it will be for that environment.

We need to find a better balance between stacking people on top of each other and destroying the ecosystem in the places where we live without any thought to biocapacity or local wildlife, and spreading out so far that it's impractical and inefficient to deliver or provide the goods and services humans want.

Since every human takes a massive toll on the local ecosystem, spreading that impact out more than we do in highly packed cities would be better for the environment and also better for humans who also suffer under those types of conditions. As I said, I don't think I've seen that balance hit quite right just yet, but it's something we're going to have to start thinking about more carefully as resources like drinkable water grow scarce, climate refugees from around the world are taken in, people along the costs are forced inland or to higher ground, and much of the western US succumbs to desertification and high temperatures that threaten to make large population centers unsustainable.

The US is likely going to get a lot more crowed in the future. We'll need to find a better way than absolutely trashing the land we settle on and suffering all the effects that go with that.

The 469 sq miles they lived in would be more impacted, but the other half million miles would be far less impacted.

It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest that it's better for the environment to take up 1000 times as much of it.

I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".

And the parent commenter does not consider a garden "environment/nature".

Nature in general is important because it creates biodiversity and space to roam. Forests in particular are sequestering CO2 and are producing oxygen.

The average garden behind a detached house does approximately none of that.

> I guess the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you consider a garden "environment/nature".

It's cities that depend on gardens and parks to serve as the only available "nature". Rural areas are filled with forests and woods and grasslands and support far greater numbers and varieties of wildlife than cities do.

We could decide to pack people like sardines into the smallest possible space, completely destroy the local ecosystem in the areas where we live (allowing the pollution to spread outside of our overcrowded cities the same way China's pollution currently crosses the ocean to fill the skies in California), while also suffering the countless costs to our own health and safety those conditions cause in the process just so that we can have vast expanses of polluted but undeveloped land that no human can use for anything, but I propose something a bit more balanced, where we spread out enough so that the biocapacity of the land we settle on isn't exceeded, but still near enough to each other that we can still efficiently sustain a civilization. That means a population density that isn't overcrowded, but not so far apart that we lose all of the efficiencies we gain by living near each other. I'd much prefer to have biodiversity within the places we inhabit and keep space to roam for humans as well as the other animals.

You seem to have a very dim view of cities as medieval hellholes where people are dying of plague in streets filled with sewage under skies choked with soot. Modern cities are not unhealthy places. Life expectancy in New York City[0] compares favorably to most states[1], and this is 2020 pandemic data, where you might expect cities to fare relatively badly.

[0]:https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2023/2020-vital-s... [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/life_expectancy/li...

I don’t know man, have you made an effort to understand the argument?

You are saying “Rural areas have lots of forest”

Yea, but they do because not everybody is living there. If all the city people were moving to the countryside and building houses with big driveways and terraces like the country folk do, there would be much fewer forests.

That’s the point, I don’t know how to make it any clearer.

Cities are not the dirty hellholes you seem to think they are. Pollution doesn’t come from cities, it comes from power plants and factories. And that’s a totally solvable problem

> Nobody sitting on a 5 or 6 acre lot in the middle of hickville is going to build one house and pave the rest with asphalt.

I have actually seen this with concrete, but it is usually grass without trees. However, it isn't really the point. The point is this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...