>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.
replyProductivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.
Urbanization is a problem and not enough people acknowledge it.
replyThe urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.
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