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I would suggest that the number 75,000 is east coast thinking. Glasgow an wolf point are not really nowhere. And the travel time criteria suggests an attention

by wglb 9y ago

I would suggest that the number 75,000 is east coast thinking. Glasgow an wolf point are not really nowhere. And the travel time criteria suggests an attention span deficit common to city life. I would suggest another metric. That is the percentage of people living in an area who have not seen the Milky Way. There is likely a whole seath of the Sprawl where that metric would be zero.

jsjohnst 9y ago
Funny, we had a discussion on Slack at work where numerous folks hadn’t ever seen the Milky Way yesterday. I think many on the east coast haven’t, especially in NYC, and it’s rather sad.
- wgerard 9y ago
  > it’s rather sad. Why? The antipathy city dwellers feel for "flyover country" is silly, but the reverse is pretty silly too. I might think it's strange that some people have never gone hiking or camping, but they think it's just as strange that I had never seen a symphony performance until recently. People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other.
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    > Why? You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? > People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other. I don’t think one needs to be more sad than the other. If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives.
    - wgerard 9y ago
      > You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? Not to be too much of an armchair psychologist, but I think that says more about you than it does about them. Again, there are people who think it's sad that I've never been to a professional ballet performance. Or that I've never gone wheelin. Or that I have yet to go to the statue of liberty. Should we all drop everything we're doing to satisfy someone else's idea of a measured life? > If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives. You can have an incredible wealth of experiences without traveling very far. Especially in a major city. A visit to Lincoln Center is very different from a visit to Flushing, and both are very different from a visit to Staten Island.
- salgernon 9y ago
  I grew up about an hour north of NYC and fondly remember the Milky Way - our subdivision didn’t have streetlights. I can’t see it now from my house in the Santa Cruz mountains (15 miles from Silicon Valley) but the night sky is far more brilliant than just over the hill.
justin66 9y ago
The point of such a study (the KCUR article is essentially blogspam, someone below posted a link to the study in Nature) has nothing to do with "east coast thinking" or whatever culture war thing you're alluding to. It's this: Although DHS surveys primarily cover low-to-middle-income countries, and thus do not fully represent all socioeconomic contexts, our results illustrate reciprocal relationships between accessibility and key metrics of human wellbeing in many geographical, political, and economic settings. We found a clear association between higher household wealth and greater accessibility to population centres (Fig. 3a). Similar patterns emerged for measures of educational attainment (Fig. 3b) and treatment of fever among children under five (Fig. 3c). Although exceptions occurred (for example, there were wealthy household clusters far from cities and vice versa), and the selected metrics were strongly collinear, the association between accessibility to cities and indicators of human wellbeing in low-to-middle-income countries was unequivocal. Some of the small towns listed by WAPO probably are the statistical outliers mentioned in the paper. A town on a major freeway and with an airport isn't necessarily in the "middle of nowhere" in the way the paper's authors are really worried about, which is access to services and economic activity. (On the other hand, in a few measurable ways, like crime, such crossroads towns are sometimes worse off than towns truly in the middle of nowhere, so if you're looking for a place to live you'd want to take it on case by case basis rather than making generalizations.)

by wglb 9y ago

jsjohnst 9y ago

Funny, we had a discussion on Slack at work where numerous folks hadn’t ever seen the Milky Way yesterday. I think many on the east coast haven’t, especially in NYC, and it’s rather sad.

wgerard 9y ago
> it’s rather sad. Why? The antipathy city dwellers feel for "flyover country" is silly, but the reverse is pretty silly too. I might think it's strange that some people have never gone hiking or camping, but they think it's just as strange that I had never seen a symphony performance until recently. People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  > Why? You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? > People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other. I don’t think one needs to be more sad than the other. If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives.
  - wgerard 9y ago
    > You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? Not to be too much of an armchair psychologist, but I think that says more about you than it does about them. Again, there are people who think it's sad that I've never been to a professional ballet performance. Or that I've never gone wheelin. Or that I have yet to go to the statue of liberty. Should we all drop everything we're doing to satisfy someone else's idea of a measured life? > If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives. You can have an incredible wealth of experiences without traveling very far. Especially in a major city. A visit to Lincoln Center is very different from a visit to Flushing, and both are very different from a visit to Staten Island.
salgernon 9y ago
I grew up about an hour north of NYC and fondly remember the Milky Way - our subdivision didn’t have streetlights. I can’t see it now from my house in the Santa Cruz mountains (15 miles from Silicon Valley) but the night sky is far more brilliant than just over the hill.

justin66 9y ago

The point of such a study (the KCUR article is essentially blogspam, someone below posted a link to the study in Nature) has nothing to do with "east coast thinking" or whatever culture war thing you're alluding to. It's this: Although DHS surveys primarily cover low-to-middle-income countries, and thus do not fully represent all socioeconomic contexts, our results illustrate reciprocal relationships between accessibility and key metrics of human wellbeing in many geographical, political, and economic settings. We found a clear association between higher household wealth and greater accessibility to population centres (Fig. 3a). Similar patterns emerged for measures of educational attainment (Fig. 3b) and treatment of fever among children under five (Fig. 3c). Although exceptions occurred (for example, there were wealthy household clusters far from cities and vice versa), and the selected metrics were strongly collinear, the association between accessibility to cities and indicators of human wellbeing in low-to-middle-income countries was unequivocal. Some of the small towns listed by WAPO probably are the statistical outliers mentioned in the paper. A town on a major freeway and with an airport isn't necessarily in the "middle of nowhere" in the way the paper's authors are really worried about, which is access to services and economic activity. (On the other hand, in a few measurable ways, like crime, such crossroads towns are sometimes worse off than towns truly in the middle of nowhere, so if you're looking for a place to live you'd want to take it on case by case basis rather than making generalizations.)