> Get out of the cities...

This is a terrible public policy if it's the plan. And while I think selfishly it might be better for individuals if they did, I don't think it's actually helping anyone. Cities used to be a place where you made a life for yourself and could earn more and innovate more than you could in rural/suburban areas. Now it's a luxury to live in one and that doesn't bode well for the future of the country.

But that was before tech became so common.

You don't need to live in the city to earn more and innovate.

Warren Buffet didn't move to Wall Street and he did ok...

Your argument seems to be, "That might be better, but it would mean change, and that's bad!"

Better for individuals in the short term but worse for society as a whole.

Cities have always been the most expensive option... they are meat grinders for careers. There's plenty of jobs but it is very diffcult to get ahead. Always has been that way.

I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.

I don’t think it has always been that way, actually. But I don’t have hard data.

Great, now most people can spend their lives driving. I see so many people on their phones on the road, and I'm sure that part of it is that they don't want to be commuting as much as they have to.

Not to mention, it's more inefficient to sprawl.

1/3 of the staff where I work are remote and it's a super conservative run factory. Most live within 20 minutes of the site.

Customer support, sales, accounting, HR, IT, etc., all don't need to go into the office most of the time. Why force them? It also opens up the job market to a larger pool, cuts health care and child care cost, insurance, etc.

As it should be. All I'd do is occasionally try to get staff onsite or offsite for team building or when it's crunch time. Most of the time, work can be done remote - it just dehumanizes things a bit. Some on/off site team building can mostly bridge the gap.

I promise you this is only a short term solution that will eventually ruin the small towns and their youth as well.

Canada is seeing that right now where so many people from big cities flooded small towns. All that has happened is something to the tune of 200% appreciation in small housing prices over the last decade with almost no appreciation in wages. It's crushed housing for the smaller towns and the individuals that lived there. It's truly just a kick the can down the road approach.

That’s just money supply increase cascading through different markets. Closest to money printer gets hit first, it goes out from there.

Your assertion seems intuitively correct, but I can't say I've seen any studies that explore the idea.

I think this is mainstream Austrian school thinking. They seem ideologically opposed to the kinds of studies that the branches that pretend to be a science do, though. I Am Not an Economist, though, open to being better informed by those more Austrian than myself.

This discussion is in the context of how creative scenes like those of 60s NYC develop.

We were discussing "one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: cheap rents".

Apparently we now need to discuss another crucial factor notably absent in small towns: "density of and proximity to other creative types"

Density has to be even higher today to reach the same quantity of interactions as the past, given how many in the city will sit in their apartment and be online instead of outside.