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> They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one. It sounds like y

> They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one. It sounds like you are ascribing some special virtue to rural living that I just don't see. When I think about work that adds social value, very little of it requires rural living (farming, mostly) and most of it can be done anywhere (computer programming, skilled trades, manufacturing, etc.). Why is a person's contribution bigger if they are rural? What special value is there in doing these things in a place no one lives? Why do we need to increase growth in some arbitrary rural location. > There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services And ironically, you are arguing that we should be providing these people a public service, presumably because they are dependent on it. I fail to see where the cut off should be.

motohagiography 5y ago
Their marginal contribution is greater because they literally bring human civilization from where it is, to where it is not yet, and where there is more opportunity for growth by virtue of nobody else being there, and return what they produce there back to the urban economies. A marginal chicken in a mass feeding factory is less valuable than a marginal chicken in a backyard. It's a question of numbers and impact. The life of a marginal person in a city is not as valuable or meaningful to their neighbours as a marginal person in the country, as there are more strong ties in rural areas, and more weak ones in urban ones. In this sense of marginal numbers, cities cheapen lives. Maybe that's the point, where humans should switch our r/K selection strategy from high investment in K-selected lives to low investment r-selected lives, and try to exist and spread more like bugs than mammals, but that's not something I'd advocate. If you want the necessary growth and evolution of a civilization for long term survival, you need to diversify it over geography. The cut off for public services is the persons relationship to them. When you pull hydro lines into rural areas, you facilitate growth from each marginal person out there. When you supply power to a new suburb, you are facilitating marginal growth there at a lower rate. The public service dependency occurs when growth is a zero-sum competition for the attention of a provider (see Ivan Illich's radical monopoly and related ideas), instead of exogenously sourced growth in a rural setting, merely facilitated by public services. The crux of the policy disagreement is in different axioms about the value of individual life (v. collective "good"), which I don't think we reconcile here, but we can see how our assessments of a policy are certainly artifacts of them.
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motohagiography 5y ago

Their marginal contribution is greater because they literally bring human civilization from where it is, to where it is not yet, and where there is more opportunity for growth by virtue of nobody else being there, and return what they produce there back to the urban economies. A marginal chicken in a mass feeding factory is less valuable than a marginal chicken in a backyard. It's a question of numbers and impact. The life of a marginal person in a city is not as valuable or meaningful to their neighbours as a marginal person in the country, as there are more strong ties in rural areas, and more weak ones in urban ones. In this sense of marginal numbers, cities cheapen lives. Maybe that's the point, where humans should switch our r/K selection strategy from high investment in K-selected lives to low investment r-selected lives, and try to exist and spread more like bugs than mammals, but that's not something I'd advocate. If you want the necessary growth and evolution of a civilization for long term survival, you need to diversify it over geography. The cut off for public services is the persons relationship to them. When you pull hydro lines into rural areas, you facilitate growth from each marginal person out there. When you supply power to a new suburb, you are facilitating marginal growth there at a lower rate. The public service dependency occurs when growth is a zero-sum competition for the attention of a provider (see Ivan Illich's radical monopoly and related ideas), instead of exogenously sourced growth in a rural setting, merely facilitated by public services. The crux of the policy disagreement is in different axioms about the value of individual life (v. collective "good"), which I don't think we reconcile here, but we can see how our assessments of a policy are certainly artifacts of them.

deleted 5y ago
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