Item — HN Reader

>The fundamental force behind this is individualism. Every single technological innovation has made it easier for the individual to function better alone. Every societal change has emphasized the individual right over the (real or perceived) benefit of the collective. This trend seems to accelerate and absolutely nothing that is happening in western society even remotely suggests a possible turnaround.

I've long captured this by saying that a society based around the individual is a contradiction.

3 comments

> I've long captured this by saying that a society based around the individual is a contradiction.

I don’t personally seen the contradiction here. Mutualism is orthogonal in many ways to individualism. Even the lone hermit had parents, acquired the basic skills form somewhere, and probably uses some tool(s) made by others.

Individualists can take on any number of voluntary social obligations. The ability to exit destructive obligations is a safety valve, and makes the carrying out of those obligations more meaningful in some ways.

Narratives, customs, culture, and shared interests all bind people regardless of their place on the scale of individualism to collectivism.

I m somewhat surprised that big cities still exist and people aren't killing each other or run away

Believe it or not, big cities have pretty good quality of life and people who live there do actually have friends and social lives.

I grew up in the suburbs, and I've lived in big cities, urban areas in medium sized cities, and exurbs as well.

The cities aren't as different as non-urban people think. But also, they're better in a lot of the ways that most people would expect: more things to do, better food, better shopping. The only real downsides in my mind are less affordable real estate and higher local particle pollution.

By far my least favorite lifestyle of those choices was in the exurbs/rural areas. Incredibly boring, isolated, and it's not as quiet and tranquil as one might expect (you're probably near a highway where jake brakes are allowed or a 55 MPH country road).

Believe it or not, city areas seem to have better quality park space (because what most people who aren't into hardcore nature consider to be "a nice park" is usually quite heavily designed and built).

And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are.

> And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are.

We can and should change this as much as possible.

There are certain job occupations that only work when done at scale.

The ones I can point most directly to are service, retail, and healthcare. These need population densities in order to be efficient.

Unless you are looking at the classic old general store (or in the midwest - you do all your grocery shopping at Kwik Trip - the gas station), it is difficult to have a grocery store outside a city or town of sufficient size. Note that the prices and variety in the smaller stores are more than if you are able to go to a large store in a city.

Likewise, if you want to eat at a restaurant - sure, there are some that are in the "this is a restaurant located a 10 minute drive away from where you can see the window of your neighbor from your window". The norm for this, however, is in a town or city.

And then there's healthcare. Rural hospitals are failing. You don't find dentists on country roads.

These things (and more) 'conspire' to make it so that the services they offer are more efficiently done in a city and the ones in a city can out compete the ones that are located further away from others.

We can then bring up the carbon footprint of living outside a city. If you drive into a city to get goods ( https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimit... ) that can be a hefty footprint that is exacerbated by not being able to use public transportation. Another look at it - https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-ener... :

> But a different picture emerges when you look at per capita consumption rates — cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year, followed by towns (102 million) and suburbs (109 million).

And this then leads to that the jobs for the sectors of the economy where you need to physically be present somewhere (and that is a significant portion of them) are more efficient in a city. Coupled with the more efficent use of land and power with the city, this brings down the costs and maximizes the amount that a person makes... if they live in a city (all other things being equal).

The vaste majority of high paying jobs can be done remotely. I'm referring to lawyers, programmers, accountants, etc...

Rural areas are failing because we continue to extract wealth out of them. You actually get right up against talking about it in your wall of text but then just abruptly lose the thought.

Society, and especially the tech business, has been trying. Computers, internet, broadband internet, conference calls, video calls, group video calls.

Why?

In short, equity. In longer form, a lot of people don't have the chance to leave their towns and that is in part due to opportunity, another way of looking at it is that extracting people out of their communities and consolidating them in cities isn't very equitable. Historically we've relied on colleges to give people a ticket out of where they come from. In the long term that does real damage to those communities. Instead of building them up, using that newly found prosperity, that wealth gets consolidated in cities. If we let people stay near their families, or wherever they prefer to stay, it gives people choice and creates a much more sustainable economic environment.

I think you misunderstand. Their families are already in cities. (And "cities" includes suburban areas)

This isn't 1800's America where most families are on rural subsistence farms.

People can choose to stay wherever they want, but the networks that make up the economy have to physically exist. Factories, warehouses, etc...look at a satellite view of the Chicago River from Goose Island down to Midway airport. It's a bunch of physical industrial infrastructure: warehouses, factories, railyards, etc. Do you propose these all instead spread out and get located in random middle-of-nowhere places where there are no employees, shops, restaurants, schools, etc?

Even data centers need to be near population centers. Why put us-east-1 near Roanoke and Lynchburg, VA instead of Roy, New Mexico?

We can't all just become remote knowledge worker hermits. Heck, we all saw how terrible remote learning is for children with the pandemic. [1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss...

My family is not in a city, I do not misunderstand. A lot more than farmers live in rural areas.

The kind of take you have isn't unusual for HN though. Most people from HN have spent their entire lives in cities or suburbs, so their empathy is short.

Cities have much lower standard of living because no one can afford shelter. There’s too much traffic which means you can’t go anywhere except walking range. So there may actually be equal or less to do in the city simply because your range is so short. And crime is huge problem too, now more than ever

I used to think the same think having lived in the suburbs my whole life, but once I moved to a city (San Francisco), I came to see that while there was certainly truth to the media hooplah, a lot of it was just hype designed to polarize us.

There is no substitute for seeing something with your own eyes!

"Nobody goes there, it's too crowded"

I know you're not making those statements in good faith, but I'll still push back against the absurd generalizations. Of the top 20 biggest cities in America, what you said only applies to a couple of them at most.

Of course, crime, housing costs and traffic (caused in large part by bad urban design) are real issues in American cities to varying degrees. But it's not as if all cities are lawless slums without any way to move about.

I'll just wear myself out if I keep letting myself respond to feelings-based comments like yours with facts, like how NYC is below the national average in crime safety [1] and well below national average on obesity. [2]

I shouldn't exert myself pointing out that the average cost of a vehicle is about $5000 per year [3], which costs a lot more than the unlimited miles you can travel with a $75/month bus/train pass in Chicago. [4]

It would probably blow the minds of car-dwellers to find out that it only takes 20 minutes to walk a mile. [5]

[1] https://realestate.usnews.com/places/new-york/new-york-city/...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.pa...

[3] https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/

[4] https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/

[5] https://www.nike.com/a/how-long-does-it-take-to-walk-a-mile

> it only takes 20 minutes to walk a mile

Which means you have massive delays between stops, and can’t do much if you don’t have hours available.

You know in cities there's trains, buses, and cabs, right?

Especially in a city like NYC, essentially everything you need is within a mile. I live in Tokyo right now, and everything I need for daily life is within a quarter of a mile. I can get basically anywhere in the city in 30 minutes.

Awesome, you’ve named the features of the downtown of two of the densest and most expensive cities in the world.

You know cities aren’t all like that?

Cities have much better hospitals than rural areas, and that's not going to change until super advanced robots are developed.

This is an american problem and an american choice that started with white flight in the 50s and a lack of investment into public transit to make it you don't need a car in the city. Many other countries do cities correctly, for cheaper, and far more social order. Most american cities are also not cities, except maybe the grandfathered in choice of NYC and SF somewhat.

Big cities are much more efficient - especially for the single person - than living further away.

Personal vehicles scale up to their passenger count. The single person with a car in the suburbs or rural effectively pays 4x more for the car than the family of four.

How do you get rid of the car? Live somewhere where public transportation or walking is the more efficient means of transportation - larger cities do this better than smaller ones.

Many aspects of managing a house are best done with more people. I've got a list of repairs that need at least three hands to do - but get put off because I've only got two. It would be much easier to live in a nice apartment closer to the urban center of the city.

Every other utility scales that way - more efficient to run power lines, roads, internet, water and sewage to single buildings that house multiple people than single houses kilometers from each other.

Big cities feel easier than ever to avoid the individualism trap in the US. Likely they have SOME public transportation, attract similar minded individuals, have vibrant social scenes involving food/drink and so make it easier to find friends and keep them.

Individualism and collectivism are not mutually exclusive