If cities are rich because of high concentrations of capital and talent, then it really is a choice between living in a poor area and living in a rich one. You can’t make the poor areas rich without giving them qualities of the rich areas, at which point they simply switch over and become “big cities”.
Trouble is that while cities may be rich, the people living there are not.
It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes, but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to be lower. This suggests that you have some people doing really well, and a whole lot of people doing not so great.
Which is all well and good if you are, say, a software developer and can move to the Bay Area to make $150,000+ per year, but that only describes a very small segment of the population who are able to do that. The typical person is going to find themselves in the "not so great" category. McDonalds pays more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town. The average rural (or urban, for that matter) resident is not going to become a software developer on a whim.
Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.
>Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.
Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.
The location-based pay differential is much larger for people who don't have a college degree than for those who do.
That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible.
> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.
There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...?
What they are probably referring to is the fact that the education system filters out people who are less capable. Someone with, say, down syndrome is unfortunately unlikely to withstand the academic rigour required to graduate from college, and is unlikely to possess the traits that employers want to see in order to pay the big bucks, leaving the data to show that this person who did not graduate from college is also paid poorly. But it is faulty logic to think that if you don't graduate from college that you will contract down syndrome.
> That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible.
Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)?
>Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)?
If I inherited a bunch of debt-free land and equipment from my dad rather than a bunch of tech skills and contacts? sure, things would be very different. But I didn't, and agriculture is less than 2% of the labor force, and most of those people are hired workers, not the owner-operators, which is usually what we mean by "farmer" rather than "farm hand"
For that matter, the farmers of my famiy's ancestral lands? Both inherited family lands and are highly educated. Yeah, there's still physical work involved, but figuring out how to operate these million dollar machines they use? at least as compex as operating the computers I use; and figuring how to fertalize and otherwise maintain the soil quality? I'd argue is probably a lot more complex, and higher risk.
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but my comment wasn't really about agriculture specifically. What I meant was that you are able to make more in the Bay Area doing tech than doing tech in points outside of the Bay Area because of it being the centre of tech. Farmers are able to make more in rural areas than they would doing farming in the city because rural areas are the centre of agriculture. Farmers would not make more money farming in the Bay Area simply due to it being a densely populated area. Quite the opposite. They would take a massive pay cut if they tried.
ah, yes, that is completely true; some products are better produced in some areas than in other areas.
My argument is generalizing this to "if you fix things or otherwise provide services, you are better off fixing things or otherwise providing services to wealthy people than doing the same for people who are less wealthy" (edit: you can substitute "productive" for "wealthy" here, if you want to change 'are better off' to 'add more productivity to the system' in the previous sentence. Or you can leave it as-is, either way works, really.)
Which seems to me to follow, because my tech job involves a whole lot of "service" type fixing things for people. I'm a SysAdmin, and let me tell you, getting woken up in the middle of the night for a billion dollar product is way more renumerative (and better in other ways, too) than getting woken up in the middle of the night for a million dollar product.
My argument is that what I experience as a sysadmin would probably be pretty similar if I fixed cars instead; Fixing cars for wealthy people is likely to be a lot more renumerative than doing the same for people who aren't wealthy, and regardless of the direction of causality, the correlation between degrees and money is very strong; that's where I was going with my original point that as a dude without a degree who fixes things and helps people, I'm better off around educated people than otherwise.
Of course, you would be totally right to come back with other location based jobs; like if I were a mechanic, the path to income maximization would probably be to upgrade my skills to large diesel, and then move near some oil fields or something; jobs that are dependent on location are totally a thing. But most jobs depend on the people you are around more than any other location.
>As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no.
so, my understanding is that most of the farming that happens outside of CA, cereal crops and the like, is super capital intensive, but not very labor intensive. On the farm I was speaking of before that has been in my family for some time (though it has consolidated; there's one nuclear family that operates land that used to belong to a bunch of family units) - that one farm is mostly operated by one couple (and, of course, a whole bunch of equipment) mostly growing things like corn, soybeans and wheat.
Of course, the sort of vegetables you see grown in California are a lot more labor intensive.
I actually think your perception of rent vs buying land might be reversed? Land near cities is in high demand for speculation... for building houses on. So the purchase price would be higher than rural land. But if you are renting it out for agricultural use? Growing cereal crops near town isn't going to generate a whole lot more value than growing cereal crops in very rural areas, so I don't imagine the rent is that much different (though there's probably more "I can sell it to a developer" clauses in land near towns) - I mean, the thing is that a lot of places have zoning restrictions that make it really hard to convert ag land to residential use.
Again, the equation is probably different if you are farming vegetables; I don't really care if my cereal grains are shipped halfway across the country, but I'm willing to pay a significant premium for local, fresh vegetables.
On the other hand, unless you are farming fresh vegetables and charging a premium, there's no benefit to farming near a city, and even then, it's probably small. So, uh, were I able to, I'd probably delete my comment that you responded to, just 'cause the question was "would you see a bump by moving your farm to a urban area" not "could you make a decent living at farming, and would you need to be educated"
Many points. I will address them and this is just my 2c:
1. I think there has to be local food and food security in the form of local urban Ag even for big cities. Why?
2. Because. Supply chain is convoluted. We are entering a whole diff timeline when fossil fuel based Ag is just not going to be sustainable.
3. We are losing habitat and degrading environment by compartmentalising Ag. Even in rural Ag areas, watertable is polluted and the pristine fruit orchards have to be spared. Even if you practice organic ag(assuming), just the act of timing releases fungal spores from the soil causing valley fever. It’s a big deal here in central California. Children of farmers suffer high rates of asthma. They are obese and farmers are increasingly diabetic. Obesity from fast food is also a form
of malnutrition.
4. It’s ironic that in the Bay Area, we have built housing on the most fertile soils in the country..the world even. It beggars belief!
5. During a drought, most of our Ag went outside as exports. Our food came from South America. The commodity crops of Midwest was exported or sold for ethanol or HFCS or as fodder for hogs which is another water thirsty commodity. Everything we do, we are not taking water into account. It’s the next ‘gold’ and will be scarce and climate change reliant. These are serious issues.
6. Another reason food must be grown in cities for local food security as well as wastage is because billions of dollars lost every year because of supply chain. Too long. Everything is from elsewhere.
7. It’s easier now because of technology and indoor Ag. We must start protecting watersheds and aquifers..rehabilitate soil and start redirecting. It’s possible now because we have knowledge and awareness ..and we have technology to make up. What we need is a change in attitude and the political will as in the people demanding politicians that we can no longer have ‘politics as usual’. Politics of water..politics of development...politics of food and trade in food.
8. Cities are quietly allowing zone changes from
Ag and protected lands to real estate development. In CA..developers lobby has tremendous clout and want to challenge even CEQA..which is our California environmental quality act.
9. A lot of Ag land is actually owned by foreign investors. China, Middle East investors especially. How can Ag land be owned by foreigners? But it happens. Farm REITs are tapped into by investors for pension funds and insurance companies.
10. The entire economy of the USA must go to Gamblers Anonymous because it’s run on speculation. And it’s not even intelligent speculation.
11. If I were the Queen of the world(sadly..for the world..I am not)...I would make sure half the land is returned back to nature. I wouldn’t incentivize procreation of humans at the cost of other species. There is a certainly a cost to introducing more humans to this planet. I would look into technology to produce more without destroying our planet. Until then, we must tread carefully.
12. I don’t see a future in farming unless we automate farming. And it’s possible. But right now, it seems like what we do is just fine. It’s not because the price we have paid for farming wrt loss of soil biome, pollution from petrochemical based Ag processes and subsidied food(esp grains and dairy) and the reliance on animal based food that has introduced a greater problem than co2. Methane. Loss of carbon sequestration from lost grasslands and forests. Not to mention the staggering number of species loss and habitat destruction.
13. Without pointing fingers, we must move forward and implement new strategies. Live on half the land mass and return the rest to nature. We now have technology and know-how to do least harm and still live well.
But why don’t we do that?
Please don’t delete anything you wrote. I enjoyed this opportunity to share my thoughts(even though some of them were digressions) as they have been weighing heavily. I wanted to buy a 40-100 acre farm some five years ago and not being a generational farmer, I wanted to get my toes wet, as it were..in a small acreage. As I framed my little acre and spoke to other farmers and read more about what’s happening, I don’t think I am interested in farming unless I can do it differently. Farming as we know it is wasteful and harmful. In more ways than one.
This will likely be my last year if I can’t find a whole systems design for intelligent automation in farms. It makes me sad but I can’t be part of this circus. I am losing anyways.
Hey, so first, I might be reading your post wrong, but... it seems like you might want to check out intentional communities; like I think visiting one might be what you are looking for in that sustainable agricultural lifestyle you want?
I just think it's really important to know that there are other people in the world like you, that you fit in somewhere; even if you don't end up living in that place, I personally find it hugely comforting to know there's a place where I fit in. (for me, that place is Silicon Valley. I totally understand that not everyone feels welcome here, but I feel welcome here in a way that I've never felt welcome anywhere else. I think the place like that is different for everyone, and that it's important to find it.) and from reading your post, I think you might find something like that feeling at one of these communes.
they do a bunch of agriculture related stuff, and have a culture that is also very concerned about sustainability, but that also is interested in automation; they have several agriculture-adjacent businesses, and they grow most of their own food. (I don't know how much food they grow to sell; they certainly process and sell a lot of nut-butters, with a focus on nutbutters for people who need careful separation of types of nuts: https://www.eastwindnutbutters.com ) and, in fact, some of their alumini have gone on to start serious companies: NASDAQ: AGNC
Cat Kincade was involved (though she was more involved with Twin Oaks, a similar commune in Canada) - I mention this because she's a pretty good author, and wrote a lot about her experiences at the commune, so if you want to read up on it before giving it a visit, I'd start with her.
I also know of a bunch of smaller communes that do agriculture on a more hobbyish basis (though still with a focus on sustainability) - I generally think you should check out the big ones, first, but if you are more comfortable with a smaller, more 'large family' sized group, my email should be in my profile and I can do a few introductions, or at least one I can certify as not crazy, who often will take in strangers who have agricultural interests. (I still think a major community like East Wind or Twin Oaks is probably better for long term living...)
Thank you!! I am not enamoured with that kind of lifestyle. I love living in the Bay Area and especially Silicon Valley..love the weather here. I like sci fi and going to opera in the city ..I like hiking and still be able to slink back into my cave or just spend time needing out on soil and gardening by myself. Where else can we find a place like Silicon Valley..the hype is so spot on. That’s why I fret when it keeps getting close to not so positive changes. I love that electric feeling and the new ideas buzzing around here. Of course, family too.
There is also a lot of hostility to technology in Ag. Even amongst the young people(and I am not young myself). I like robotics and really do believe we can check out Mars in our lifetimes. I make non PC jokes and can be embarrassing company for people who are into this with a deep abiding purpose. Maybe it’s my delusion but it’s too late for me to give that up.
I also find that the farming community is allergic to money. I don’t know why. I like money. If it’s not making money to support the business, it’s a hobby. The younger generation is always looking for all forms of justice and resisting something or other. I am an immigrant myself and I am VERY grateful to be here in the United States. And Bay Area. I love it here and can’t get myself worked up too much. Because I have seen worse. No matter how bad things gets here, it’s still better here than most other parts of the world and I appreciate that.
I only end up irritating them when I try to share my dreams and visions. I have been told that I don’t have a farmer’s work ethic because I want robots to do the work instead of ‘dirt under my nails’ or because I think food must be at least 4x more expensive given the manual work that goes into organic speciality foods. I also think standing in a farmers market and hawking tomatoes for $2/lb is an utter waste of my time. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t jump into farming and sell the house to buy a farm!! I just realized after all these years that I don’t fit in..just like I don’t fit in as the tech worker in Silicon Valley...and I am relieved. Now..I can look for something else but not before I put it to sleep after giving it a final shot for the next 12 more months.
I would be happy even if I can make a prototype or even a low hanging fruit of a white paper of a sustainable full automation of small acreages. It will be worth the 5+ years I tried farming. To me, anyways.
But if there a tech friendly ecological minded natural farming community, I might fit in! That the community you mentioned is into automation makes me want to look them up and perhaps I can hope for a west coast chapter? I appreciate your response!
> There is also a lot of hostility to technology in Ag.
There is? As a farmer myself, I find that agriculture runs at the forefront of technology. It is why I love agriculture as we get to play with the cool tech before the masses do.
There are pockets of people who are more interested in a homesteading lifestyle than farming, but any serious commercial operation will jump over any advantageous tech available to them. Of course, not all tech is advantageous; there has to be a compelling business case more than "that is really neat" to justify adoption.
> I also find that the farming community is allergic to money. I don’t know why.
It is a high risk, high reward business. I'm not sure that is the same as being allergic to money.
> I have been told that I don’t have a farmer’s work ethic because I want robots to do the work instead of ‘dirt under my nails’ or because I think food must be at least 4x more expensive given the manual work that goes into organic speciality foods. I also think standing in a farmers market and hawking tomatoes for $2/lb is an utter waste of my time.
Seems like you got caught in one of those homesteading pockets mentioned before. This is not how most farm businesses operate. Farming benefits from scale. Your tomatoes should be sold to a major buyer by the truckload if you're serious about farming and not just enjoying the lifestyle.
As agriculture is increasingly mechanized, fewer farmers are needed. So it doesn’t really matter if all you know is farming, moving to the city is your best bet if you aren’t inheriting the family farm. That’s just how economics works.
I feel like you have missed some important nuance in my comment or misunderstood the context of our discussion. Rural flight says nothing about moving farms into the city. But, statistically, farmers make substantially more than most. Moving to the city (to find a new career) would not be one's best bet if farming is what they know.
Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers. Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year.
Then most definitely, moving to the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know.
> Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers.
They are already farmers, so that's a moot point. How could you move your farm to the city if you did not have a farm to move?
> Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year.
Mechanization is causing attrition, but I am not convinced it is causing farms to fail. If you are established, it won't be mechanization that gets you.
> Then most definitely, moving tk the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know.
Or you could just sell your business, retire off of the proceeds, and live wherever you want (which is probably not the city; I've never heard of a retired farmer keen to move to the city – in fact, rural areas are often thought of as retirement communities for former city dwellers). Like you said, it is a capital intensive business. There is an incredible amount of capital at your disposal.
You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you, and you are often living year to year on whatever your income is (which you’ll need to use a lot to either pay down loans or save so you don’t have to take out loans). And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go?
Old farmers can probably retire, but what about young ones? They often just give up and move. This has been talked about a lot in the last decade, there is no big mystery or open question about it.
Other countries have it even worse than America; eg Japan.
> You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you
There are other ways to acquire capital. I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence.
> And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go?
The neighbour retires. If you are the neighbour, why would you sell your piece for any less than is required for you to retire? If you plan to keep working, you may as well keep working your farm.
> Old farmers can probably retire, but what about young ones? They often just give up and move.
The young ones generally don't start in the first place unless they have a line on capital that extends beyond the bank. And so, they also have that capital to sell. But why wouldn't they simply keep on farming?
> I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence.
That is just the Green Acres phenomenon, they are doing it because they have capital from other professions, not because they make a lot in farming.
You have a very strange interpretation of farming in the USA, if you could provide some links/articles that back up your understand, I would take your argument more seriously. I can find a hundred articles on why farming is dying profession, and not any on why it is booming one as you seem to suggest.
I am not entirely familiar with the reference. I have heard of the show, but never seen it. But indeed they are able to start farming because they are more likely to have the capital than someone who is barely making ends meet. Nobody is questioning that it takes capital to start farming.
> You have a very strange interpretation of farming in the USA, if you could provide some links/articles that back up your understand
Well, my understanding is based on being a farmer. I have no idea what I would link to? Anything I have ever read about farming online is so dumbed down that it is basically worthless. It is a lot like when the mainstream media tries to write about tech.
> and not any on why it is booming one as you seem to suggest.
I don't know if it is booming. It can be lucrative. It is certainly not for everyone, but what is?
The Green Acres phenomenon is that a lot of city folk think that if they get the capital, they could go buy some land, equipment, and have a reasonable chance of becoming successful farmers without a long period of education or apprenticeship; It's part of what I call the myth of unskilled labor.
The remaining farmers can make very good money. The median wage for ranchers and other agricultural managers is $66,360/year and this is for generally low cost of living areas.
It’s farm hands that that really benifit from moving to city’s.
Yes, but the number of farmers significantly decreases every single year. What happens to those that are squeezed out? They have to be going somewhere....
There where ~2.2 million us farms in 1982. It dropped to ~2 million in 2002 but it’s still ~2 million today.
Many of theses are more hobby projects than giant industrial operations. Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries.
> Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries.
The bulk of the massive subsidy received by farms is crop insurance premium assistance though. No doubt a huge benefit if you have a weather disaster, but not anything you see directly until you have a disaster, and that only provides stability in those freak years. I am not sure that alone is keeping farms from consolidating like other industries as most other industries don't have the same kind of instability from the weather.
I would argue that in North America mega-farms, by and large, simply cannot compete with smaller farms. It takes farm expertise to run a farm and one person can only manage so much. Hiring more people with farm expertise is exceedingly difficult as anyone who has farming expertise would prefer to have their own business.
If your thing is developing search engines, chances are you're going to have to align yourself with for Google or Microsoft for the network advantage. You have almost no chance of succeeding on your own in the search engine space at this point. But food is quite different. If you produce food, there is guaranteed to be a buyer for it. There is no real network advantage to working for someone else there like you see in other industries, so why let someone else take their cut off the profit of your labour?
Crop insurance is 8.5 billion out of $23 billion in subsidies directly given to farmers. Divide by 3.2 million farmers and that’s 7,200$ per year each.
>There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...?
all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this (mostly highly-educated) caste haven't risen dramatically in the last three decades?
> all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this
Tech workers make up, what, about 5% of the workforce at best? I know software developers only make up 0.8% of the workforce. We are talking about an exceedingly small group of people. And not all of them are doing well. There are a lot of low-paid tech workers around, especially if you look beyond the Bay Area and outside of software. The lowly network admin working at Mom and Pops in Nowheresville is probably not even making the median income.
In the US, about 35% of the population graduate with a four year college degree or more, and 45% with a two year degree or more. That is a lot of people. Practically half of the population. They are in no way they are all seeing their incomes rise (beyond inflation). Incomes are stagnant and have been for many decades.
There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase.
>There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase.
My model is that technology has allowed us to produce more per unit effort; Even in my field, I can manage a whole lot more computers than I could when I started in the mid to late '90s.
For that matter, even if I was still fixing desktop computers, if I'm fixing desktop computers for EEs this year who are massively more productive than they would have been in the late '90s because of improved technology, it's natural that I'd still get paid more, because even if I'm only saving those people the same number of work hours, those work hours produce more and thus there's more surplus to pay me.
It seems totally reasonable that increased productivity could lead to increased wages. (I mean, there are a bunch of failure modes where it wouldn't, to... but I'm just saying, anyone who is even slightly ideologically capitalist or market oriented is going to argue that increased productivity drives increased income)
> all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...?
There are two issues that explain that.
First, the stagnation period begins from an artificially high point. A point where US global economic dominance peaked in the ~20-25 years after WW2, because the other dominant powers were mostly busy rebuilding their decimated cities and infrastructure. The US was able to immediately swivel its industrial base to traditional economic output. It pushed the US share of global manufacturing to over 50%. That extraordinary share of global manufacturing output provided a vast, artificial over-abundance of blue collar jobs. That's a ridiculous comparison point to start from and impossible to replicate (short of blowing up the world again).
Second, most of the compensation growth has gone into benefits that aren't counted in the salary figures that show income stagnation. Per capita healthcare costs have increased by ~$10,000 in 35-40 or so years (a six fold increase), and about ~40% of the US gets its healthcare through an employer.
The median full-time wage is $50,000 in the US. The cost to insure a solo 35 or 40 year old earning that median full-time wage, has gone from $40-$60 per month in the early 1980s, to more like $500-$600 today at a minimum. If you're earning $80,000 as an engineer for example, your insurance compensation might cost the company more like $800 to $1,000 per month.
A family of four - two full-time employed adults - earning $150,000 per year can easily be spending $25k-$30k per year on health insurance.
If you have two people earning $90,000 together, with one child, their insurance cost is going to be $1,500 per month or more - $18,000 per year - representing the equivalent of 20% of their salary. All of our wage growth potential is going into that blackhole of healthcare cost expansion.
The UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, France (elite healthcare systems globally) are all spending $4,000 to $5,000 per capita per year on healthcare costs. The US is spending more like $11,000 to $12,000 ($3.6 to $3.8 trillion per year roughly). The US share of its GDP going to healthcare costs, has about tripled in 40 years, from ~6-7% to ~18-19% today.
That's where most of the wage gains have gone, to a $1.4 trillion per year giant wealth transfer to the people working in all the layers of healthcare. The wage gains have been diverted to subsidize the existence of jobs and wages in healthcare that otherwise would not exist. Admin, doctors, nurses, insurance salespersons, pharma reps, scientists, shareholders, buildings, janitors, and the zillions of other jobs and costs (artificially high wages) in that system that otherwise wouldn't exist if you adjusted the US per capita spending to match other developed nations.
Did you know the US has 3x to 4x (43 CT and 38 MRI units per million people) the number of CT and MRI systems per capita that Canada has (15 CT and 10 MRI units per million people), and about 2x to 3x the number that France has? An example of wage diversion to feed the healthcare monster. That provides jobs that shouldn't exist for healthcare professionals, jobs for repair & maintenance people, jobs for sales people, profit/revenue for GE & Toshiba and so on.
The city has a concentration of talent and capital, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other things also. In fact, cities are seen as stepping stones for many that lack much talent or capital, which is why they have a lot of poor people: the cities are not creating these people themselves, quite the opposite actually.
The kid working st Mcdonads in the big city is probably making $15/hour vs. $8 back in their rural home. Still not enough to live in the big city, but then again that isn’t the only thing they are doing there (they didn’t move to the big city to work in fast food, they have their side gig going on, be it acting or education or whatever). Back home, they would simply be stuck with not much hope for improvement. Ya, their chances of striking it rich aren’t great, but in Seattle it is non zero while in Marysville it is pretty much zero.
Absolutely. Humans have a very long history of trying to emulate the rich, and not only with respect to choice of residence, in hopes that doing what they the rich do is the missing link in why they are not rich. We have even seen in the past times where people were leaving the city because that is what the rich had done (favouring large rural estates at the time), leaving the conclusion to be that living in the city is why one is not rich. Which, admittedly, is a fairly rational decision given the incomplete information we have about what makes one rich, no doubt, but a faulty decision due to that lack of information.
But choice or residence, choice of fashion, or the many other things that people have tried to emulate over the years is not why they are not rich. The missing link is not nearly that simple. If it was, we would all be rich.
It isn’t that they are copying the rich, they are going from places where there are few opportunities to where their are many opportunities. The Great Migrations, for example, involved African Americans moving from poor southern areas to rich northern cities because they had nothing going on back home, just pointless sharecropping. And you know what: their descendants are probably much richer than of those who stayed back south. The same with the “okies” during the Great Depression going Friday Oklahoma to big cities in California.
They were not emulating the rich, this never had anything to do with “fashion”, they were (and still are) surviving and have hope that they or their children will have a better future. Rural areas can’t provide much of this unless their is a natural resource rush (eg fracking in the dakotas).
> It isn’t that they are copying the rich, they are going from places where there are few opportunities to where their are many opportunities.
The appearance of opportunities. Sometimes the opportunities are real, usually not. Plenty of people move to California in hopes of becoming a star, where opportunities are abound, but only end up in dead-end jobs. It is quite likely that those people would have been far better off in a mundane job where competition isn't fierce and where living costs won't destroy you.
> this never had anything to do with “fashion”
Fashion is very much driven by the rich, through hopes that dressing like the rich will result in riches. It has been for as long as we have historical records about fashion. Nobody goes out of their way to dress like a hobo, unless the rich are dressing like hobos for some reason.
Moving to california because you want to be a star is not "fashion", its a dream.
> It is quite likely that those people would have been far better off in a mundane job where competition isn't fierce and where living costs won't destroy you.
Or they would have regretted the rest of their lives not taking chances when they were young instead doing poop work on the farm or working a dead end job in a small town.
> Moving to california because you want to be a star is not "fashion", its a dream.
I think you may have misinterpreted what fashion means. Fashion refers to clothing. Throughout the ages, poor people have tried to wear clothing that rich people have been seen wearing with the belief that the right clothing will help them become rich. This is very well documented over centuries, and something that remains ever-present today. It was another example of how the poor emulate the rich, as is human nature.
> Or they would have regretted the rest of their lives not taking chances when they were young instead doing poop work on the farm or working a dead end job in a small town.
Okay. Sure. Humans are indeed emotional creatures. Emotions are also the reason why the poor try to emulate the rich as it feels right, even if it not based in anything substantiative. But as far as outcome goes, such a person would be better off in a mundane job than chasing a dream.
> McDonalds pays more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town.
...partially adjusted for local cost of living, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balassa-Samuelson_effect Which means that, yes, staying in the city is generally a bad deal for a low-productivity worker in the non-tradable sector. But not as much of a bad deal as it would be if those wage variations did not exist. And they might be able to make up for it and even come out ahead by being super frugal and saving most of their income (this is the archetypical "unskilled immigrant to a rich area" story).
That would suggest that it is not worth it for people who are only going to make a small amount of money over minimum income to move to SF, and that they shouldn't.
Alternatively, put a tax on rental income then use that to found more buildings. I am not a fan of taxes, but since rents will always expand they aren't a bad subject to tax.
> That would suggest that it is not worth it for people who are only going to make a small amount of money over minimum income to move to SF
Although, to be fair, it is debatable if most high earners even benefit from the move. It is not like you can't easily make $150,000+ in rural areas as well if you have the developer chops that the Bay Area seeks.
As unfortunate as it may be, poor areas are poor largely because of who lives there and them moving does not change who they are.
I'm a bit skeptical of the median income being lower than rural areas. I could see median income relative to cost of living being lower, but median income by itself being lower would be shocking. Do you have a source on that?
A reasonable solution is to start living in villages that are clustered to form bigger villages. The key is self governance and that would ensure self contained units.
The Dunbar number(for households) is a good number for each self sufficient ‘village city’. That would be 150 households with a max of 4 per household. 4-6 ‘village cities’ will make a networked cluster. They can share some common facilities(schools/parks) And so on.
Currently, in the Bay Area, the problem is centralized claw of Sacramento. We are a ‘mega region’. Infrastructure, essential services, schools, traffic, housing...everything is failing. Bay Area is starting to rot. One has to live here to feel the despair of the working stiff.
As an example: our city council has meetings every Tuesday starting at 7.00 pm. Nobody can attend and voice their ‘concerns’. Everyone is stuck in traffic. The other day, in one of our neighbourhood boards, a neighbour bemoaned Prop 13 and the retired ‘olds’ who aren’t pulling their weight. He said that he has two kids and his household makes only $500k and by the time he pays taxes and childcare and mortagage, he is broke. I had to shut down my computer and step away from the keyboard for a bit.
And he is not the only one. He isn’t the exception, but the norm. He is a Silicon Valley high tech worker statistic. The 2kid/2car/2million dollar home living/resentful BROKE paycheck-to-paycheck ..waiting for the windfall IPO because he doesn’t have a lifetime pension like the low paid clerk at PG&E or police officer..and is bitter because he is stuck in traffic ..because he is anxious..because he has to keep running faster to stay in the same place...because he can’t quit his job.
Meanwhile the govt is the mafia and we keep paying higher and higher taxes. Cities are getting denser, resources are getting thinner, schools overcrowded, roads are clogged. Everyone feels guilty because the average Silicon Valley worker is the poster child for unchecked privilege and the epitome of evil for promoting inequality.
This is Silicon Valley. This is the Bay Area. Let us contain our curse..our little dirty secret..our infectious virus..I hope we don’t spread it to other places.
How is it just a choice of living in a poor area vs a rich one? What if the people living in the poor areas don’t even have a high school degree? Can they suddenly decide they want to work and live in the rich area?
I’m a couple generations maybe. Moving from a poor area to a rich one and working your butt off for your kid’s education so they can reach professional successes you didn’t have the opportunity to is an archetypical immigrant story.
I'm convinced this is just another Protestant work ethic as secularized by capitalism, ala Max Weber. Each generation is supposed to work hard and devote everything (or almost everything) so their kids have it better, but who gets to say, I have it better, I'm not going to work hard anymore, so I can enjoy some of it? How the public general treats people who have amassed enough to live on but don't actively have a job, seems a testament to the religious foundations and origins of the idea, rather than anything drawn from what might be called reason.
It's not "move to a rich area". It's "move to an area with good opportunities for production (roughly 'good jobs', although self-employment is also a possibility of course)". That's a very different problem. An area with high cost of living, almost by definition, has a lower margin of production and thus lower real incomes for such, adjusting for productivity.
Well, until the rent seeking class figured out how to asset inflate the education and property market. If you look at exploding debt levels in property, education, housing, and personal credit something is extremely broken and shoving everyone in the big city is not the long term answer unless we are looking at some massive social upheaval in the near term.
Now that communication is quick, and data more available, more people have an idea of how to give themselves the best opportunity. The best school district you can send your kids to, the best colleges they can go to, the majors they can study, etc.
Problem is it's all concentrated to a handful of options, so everyone is chasing after those, and the sellers know it so they can price it such that almost all the value is extracted from the buyer.
It's funny to think that it could partly be a consequence of all the easily available school rankings, all the way form elementary to university, as people can sort themselves by socioeconomic class much easier. But it could go the other way too, with the concentration being a consequence widening gaps in socioeconomic class. Either way, it feels like a feedback loop to me.
True, but that applies to rural areas as well: how many farmers are renting their land these days, or are working for big farm corps that bought all the family farms in the area a long time ago?
