Is the city concept wrong with human nature? Vertical vs. horizontal scaling

IMO, it's because of money printing. It makes everything about capital and human bodies. It creates a ponzi scheme which drives increasing centralization. Let's face it, most people who live in cities produce little to no value for society. Mostly doing bullshit jobs. Yet thanks to government money printing, their useless labour can be monetized. Places with high concentrations of people can now command large investments, real estate prices start to inflate due to artificial scarcity of land in central areas, this increases the 'value' of real estate collateral which allows city dwellers to take out large loans against it to fund even more bs ventures and jobs to attract even more people... The government keeps printing money and handing out huge contacts to large bs companies to do useless 'intellectual' work. Using job creation as a cover for the ridiculous inefficiencies they create.

The economy is hollowed out and the competitive market dynamics are replaced with inefficient monopolies... People lose valuable skills and gain useless skills instead because bs jobs pay better than useful ones. Nobody wants to do useful jobs simply because they don't pay... At the same time the intelligent ones among them recognize the uselessness of their high paying BS jobs and this demoralizes them, makes them feel guilty about everything and makes them vulnerable to woke and other self-loathing ideologies (though of course they won't acknowledge this, even to themselves).

Most of human history is before settlement and agriculture. How is it human nature to have robot lawn mowers and a picket fence? I'd argue that multiple family houses and cities are much more suitable for a social tribe species than suburbia. Not to mention that suburbia is completely unsustainable.

>Living in apartments feels disrespectful to humanity.

If you live in a good apartment, then it's fine.

Author doesn't properly touch on the subject that matters here.

Economists know what the optimal neighbourhood looks like. Optimal densities relative to culture. There's loads of these communities all around the world; very often with a strong religious theme. Jews are particularly good at forming these sorts of communities. Jehovahs, amish, etc. All really good at this.

There's nothing wrong with a city, you can build these inside a city. The more vertical you go, the easier it is to fit them in.

You can invest along this path rather successfully. One of the easier ways to beat S&P500 index funds.

What the author seems to have failed on is joining one of these communities. They live in a city on their own and obviously that's going to go poorly. Then they go to other extreme of lets move to the middle of nowhere and escape society. Which is also wrong.

You need to find your tribe that is you. That's how to get in touch with human nature.