Why is no one asking the biggest question; why are people piling into cities when there are towns and smaller cities that could be developed instead and thereby lower cost of living. It’s a global phenomenon it seems, as much as it doesn’t make any sense regardless.
Please save yourself the quality of life arguments. Those are post hoc arguments that only express laziness.
What state governments should be doing is “redistributing the wealth” by heavily taxing successful cities to fund and develop less successful counties and districts and towns. When businesses stop clustering and concentrating in places like Silicon Valley and NYC then you know that taxation is at the right level to compensate for the cartel and monopolistic like behaviors and phenomenon of, e.g., Silicon Valley and SF.
In the USA that should look like heavily taxing Silicon Valley and NYC, etc and using that money to fund high speed Internet and education and companies and business centers in under developed regions like rural Alabama or Mississippi or North Dakota.
The bias you are falling for is the assumption that what you are reading when you open said history book is not just generally about things that actually happened, but far more importantly not just "how they actually happened, why they actually happened" but what has been omitted and left out intentionally to frame a certain narrative that is not in line with the interests of those who make you believe the history book you are opening is 100% accurate.
The difference being that far more in the past where there was an inherent interest in preserving the accuracy of certain classes of events where self-interests demanded and required accuracy, today what you think you are reading, whose accuracy is assumed by proximity to criteria that are surely far more accurate (i.e., order of things that were not fantasy), there is an inherent incentive to distort the perspective because those who record and disseminate the "history" are far less likely also self-interested in actual accuracy of the history. It's essentially the "to the winners go the myths and legends" problem. The accuracy of events actually goes down in many different ways when you start muddling interests as modern society has. Do you ever think, e.g., that we would have written a history in which the enemy is the "good guy", but we just happened to win the war? Reality though is that the history you read assumes an accuracy through formality or deliberateness ... it is the same reason that so many people are conned into thinking that NPR and the mainstream media are somehow inherently more accurate or right, let alone just not devious, because they talk in a deliberate and calm and precise tone.
In many ways the very precision the western world has obsessed about is contributing to the very corruption of its soul because we are obsessed with procedure and process to such a blinding and OCD degree that we miss the underlying message and lessons. It's a rather mentally unhealthy mentality that insists on the "accuracy" that "not all of those who want to conquer us have killed us yet...", thus, post hoc ergo propter hoc, "...our enemies are also just like us because they say they are and we believe their words over their actions". It's an odd obsession with formality and process that has totally negated spirit and emotion and just plain and simply most fundamental and instinctual self-preservation.
So here we are and instead of having learned a history that makes us realize that "socialism" is not about being social and friendly, and communism is not about being a community even if specific details are not perfectly captured; we say, "well, since they have not been done properly we will give it all another go."
Please save yourself the quality of life arguments. Those are post hoc arguments that only express laziness.
What state governments should be doing is “redistributing the wealth” by heavily taxing successful cities to fund and develop less successful counties and districts and towns. When businesses stop clustering and concentrating in places like Silicon Valley and NYC then you know that taxation is at the right level to compensate for the cartel and monopolistic like behaviors and phenomenon of, e.g., Silicon Valley and SF.
In the USA that should look like heavily taxing Silicon Valley and NYC, etc and using that money to fund high speed Internet and education and companies and business centers in under developed regions like rural Alabama or Mississippi or North Dakota.