Let People Move to Jobs

Yeah sure and that's where you decide to have one settlement spot where you can spend few months every year.

I am only pointing out that you are restricting yourself by not choosing remote work. Some people can't self restrict or enact behaviours required for it to work. I can still choose to settle on one place forever.

My hodgepodge of notions about jobs, people, geography.

I have a very Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) and Jane Jacobs (Life and Death of Cities) themed view of population centers. What would it take to recreate (clone) Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, etc? Rhetorical question, everyone is already trying to do this. It comes down to clarity of purpose, investment, and riding economic trends.

People getting married and starting families is mostly an economic decision. Consequently, young families will relocate as needed. Future employers and governments should be mindful and help.

There are always multiple trends working simultaneously. Cities, especially coastal, will continue to become more dense. But there's also a smaller trend (demand) to return to the land. So places like Kansas should invest in restoring locally owned, smaller farms and enterprises.

Modeled on how Washington State created a thriving ecosystem for wine. Apply that strategy to whatever.

> Yeah, and why bother making the country a mess by letting foreigners into your country?

I mean, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? And unless you’re a proponent for open borders, you advocate a similar position - just a different scale. I’m also not really a fan of the “deny others opportunities” grandstanding. I mean you do it right now. I bet someone wants the job you have. Why not give your money away so others have opportunities? It’s easy to talk the talk with that. We all, by nature of our global system, deny others opportunities. The Swiss deny me an opportunity to move to Switzerland since I don’t have a million bucks. New Zealand requires me to invest half a million. Canada has a points system for immigration.

> People moving for opportunity is a fundamental part of what America is. To deny others opportunities that you have by virtue of birthplace is nativism, and it's ugly.

Well, like towns, you shouldn’t expect the idea of America to not change. There is like 350mm people here. Personally I think that’s plenty and the Statue of Liberty mindset just reminds me of 2nd Amendment arguments. I don’t want to end up like India, China, or Bangladesh with crowds and crowds of people (whether they are here due to immigration or birth). I think the US is overpopulated as it is. My idea of America is a lot of untamed wilderness, clean air, national parks, peace and quiet. Increases on population don’t really fit my vision (but that’s mine).

> Massive rents, struggling families, hideously long commutes: all the result of NIMBYism.

And this isn’t solved by building skyscrapers and having more people. It’s solved by having fewer people and jobs less concentrated in specific areas.

PG talks about taboo topics. Population is one of those I think, for me. I feel uncomfortable saying anything about it publicly, and I feel as though people have largely been indoctrinated that growth=good and you shouldn’t challenge that. I really just don’t see the value in adding more and more people to the US (birth or immigration). If we could have fewer, better educated people and less wealth disparity this could be an even better place to live. Imagine getting rid of jobs that people don’t want to do and then paying people a lot more money to do jobs they do want to do? Pay a barista $100,000/year instead of two business analysts making $50,000. It’s not like we’re going to add enough jobs to keep up with the pace of growth, unless we add mind-numbing bullshit jobs or create another TSA.

But I think the whole raison d'être for everything here in this tiny post is that our economy is built on a growth model. It’s a huge Ponzi scheme (in function not intention), so if we don’t increase the population or increase global population and sell to them, the whole thing falls apart. But it’s also this growth mindset that’s destroying the pristine wilderness we have, causing global warming, and contributing to nonsense wars and terrorism.

I think you’re using extremes to support your argument, but it falls apart when the “arbitrage” is even slightly less immense.

I moved from the Bay Area where my 1300sqft rental house would have cost me $1.2M, to work remote from a high-income community in Michigan where my 5000sqft house cost me $700k.

My neighbors are not poor, the schools are great, people are in a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds (not just tech), and best of all, I live minutes away from my family and several of my best childhood friends, who I see every week.

You don’t need to move to the middle of nowhere for remote work to be a good idea, just anywhere even slightly more sane than the Bay Area. There’s loads of places all over the country that can strike a good balance here.

As someone currently having moved from the southwest, to bay area, to northeast, and now living in the south, you underestimate the cultural changes. I have relatively little in common with people who grew up here. They're fine people, but they're not people who I can talk to past small talk.

And in a fair number of these places, there's the same hostility to people moving in as the bay area.