Many argue about the need to protect/boost agriculture and industry. Those are declining areas of the economy, especially when it comes to jobs.
Yet little advocacy for making it cheaper to buy services and more expensive to buy goods? Even though most workers are employed in the service sector, and have been for some time.
@LeoSammallahti I find it unclear what you are getting at outside of the lobbying power of big ag/industry. Advocacy for cheaper services, but more expensive goods? Does that benefit the service worker?
I am similarly unsure of the intention here. Leo, are you making a lightweight economy argument, that the service sector permits economic growth with less resource use, while combining that with the observation that we're mostly a service sector economy anyway so why not?
I don't have a clear opinion one way or another on the idea of services stimulus (which I think is what you are arguing for), but I do think that if we intelligently redesigned agriculture and industry there would be more small scale production of necessary goods, which I think would tend to shift the job market away from services.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Services cheaper equals lower salaries for service workers or cost of overhead reductions. I assume goods means nonessential goods or the service worker gets a possible double negative impact.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Maybe I'm focusing on "cheaper" when the meaning is affordable. Cost of essential goods rising would have to be more than offset by tax cuts.
We are probably talking around each other. I think I now understand your original post as focus on services rather than consumption of goods, and achieve affordability through better government spending/more sensible taxing.
Yes I didn't express myself clearly enough.
Alongside taxation another thing that could be good would be to build dense urban areas. Services tend to do better in that sort of environment.
Set up a hot dog stand in a busy location in Tokyo and you will have more customers than you can possibly serve.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic I'm more for tearing down urban areas. I think high population density creates more problems than solutions; it's not ecologically sound, but the only way out is to put the human population into balance with the world resources. i.e., massive population reduction.
OTOH, you're absolutely right about higher population density easing access to services.
When trying to enable more ecological lifestyle, like drastically reducing car usage, would find it hard to pursue without more density.
Also skeptical about whether small farms can be productive enough to compete with big farms in providing affordable food to people without subsidies.
Of course people would be free to set up farms and live how they want to live, but don't think we should subsidise farming.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Small densities work just as well as big ones. The corner store, small medical centers, etc.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, Lee. I believe corner stores are largely an urban phenomenon?
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti I'm referring to scale. Small communities used to have stores, that were much like the corner store in a large urban neighborhood. Evan at smaller scale you have producers and services. The rush to capital has driven those things out of the community and into centralized bigger locations. The cost of cheaper goods has been lower wages and less jobs. Urbanization is largely a byproduct of a need for a cheaper local workforce.
Lee, I'm wondering if you can unpack the idea that urbanization is a byproduct of the need for cheaper labor. You probably have some context that I don't.
I don't know a whole lot about the history of urbanization, but thinking about serfs on medieval manors, slaves on U.S. southern plantations, and wage slaves in company towns, it seems like the owning classes have a ton of strategies for ensuring cheap labor that aren't necessarily related to density.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti IANAE. Why are big cities formed? It's surely not just about socializing. Most people don't have millions of friends and family they need to be in close proximity with. Trade for necessities doesn't require it. It limits travel for specialized needs, but how often do such needs arise? It would be hard to find any instance of a large city that wasn't formed around some centralized power structure. i.e., money, religion, government.
I think better articulation than "why are big cities formed" is "why do people want to move from rural areas to cities".
My guess would be that the main reason is because it's easier to provide a variety of opportunities to work and start a business than in a rural area.
You can have a lot of different pubs and restaurants to choose from.
People want more than bare necessities - they like to go to a barber instead of cutting their hair themselves etc.
@LeoSammallahti @dynamic Yes, some people don't want to be rats in a cage.
I agree with Leo that there's no reason to work against the existence of dense urban centers when there are so many people who choose that. To bring the conversation full circle, though, I'm interested to know whether Leo's model for decreasing the cost of services does or does not include subsidies. Saying that people in urban centers shouldn't subsidize agriculture should be balanced by saying that people who don't have as much need for luxury services shouldn't be forced to subsidize those services either.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti There seem to be a lot of physical and mental health reasons to work against dense urban centers. There's also the self-sustainment issues (food as well as natural resources).
@lwriemen @LeoSammallahti
In terms of natural resources, to some extent I agree with what you are saying, Lee, but I don't think that there's a clear environmental case for dedensification *except* in the cases of people who are directly engaged in acquiring natural resources (or the communities that directly support those people): doctors, merchants, etc.
Depending on how society is structured, the fraction of the total population that needs to engage in natural resource acquisition can vary. In an agrarian vision, it might be essentially everybody. In our current global society, it's less than half of the population and declining. In principle, the portion could fall anywhere in between. From a strictly environmental standpoint, I think the ideal situation is for everyone who isn't *needed* for rural economies to live at high densities.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti I think it's easier to visualise the limit of natural resources outside of an urban environment, but that's just me. It certainly isn't tied to density. I live near a city of ~70,000 that isn't very dense, and urbanites can be just as isolated from the rural.
I've started to wonder whether the real solution is to create a civic duty for everybody to spend some time working in agriculture, forestry, or similar.
@dynamic @LeoSammallahti Broad exposure is always good for broadening the mind. IME, segregation equals ignorance in racism, classism, etc.
