> social capital matters and reputation matters. Of course those are disadvantages to misbehavers.

This is something that many young adults have forgotten, because it's increasingly more trendy to move around a lot in your 20s while developing your career. Nobody cares in a big city if you're an asshole, because there's a million other people to associate with and most likely the asshole and everyone around them aren't going to still be there in five years.

The downside of the small town social setting is that it can be cliquey.

What?! This runs completely counter to my experience living in a small town. A town small enough that the post office doesn’t do to door delivery, you’ve got to go pick it up and the closest DMV is an hour away in the city. Small towns don’t generally have services like that at all.

Of course, everyone's definition of a small town, and the kinds of small towns that they've experienced, are going to differ. I'm not too far (just a county over) from a quaint little town with under a thousand people; the post office there delivers to homes, and the nearest DMV is a 15-minute drive away, in a "city" of almost 15k.

Come to think of it, in my own county, which is not highly urban by any stretch of the imagination, you'd be maximum a half-hour drive away from the nearest DMV starting from any main road. Obviously, that doesn't hold if it takes you 15 minutes to get down your own driveway ;-)

I could easily see some of the much more remote Western small towns being further away from anything.