Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

> Put another way, if my last job had been using Java instead of C# I would have done the same thing with ~80% of my time. You would be reading the same requirements of the code was in another language.

That works well for languages, yes, but what about data scientists, business intelligence, cyber security, and machine learning experts? Those are all jobs that launched off the dev backbone, but are very different, have unique, specific knowledge and require training past what a normal degree requires. Dev-Ops may be a generalist position, but you'd need see someone who does Dev-Ops do those jobs.

Don't many of them actually teach (for bargain-basement wages)? At least, most of my friends who went to grad school had to teach undergrads at some point.

There's probably some artificial barriers to entry for education as well - it's hard to explain how Ph.Ds have no job prospects at the same time that college tuition keeps on rising. And I suspect that has to do with college's role as a signaling device for job prospects. If a bunch of Ph.Ds wanted to open a new college where they personally tutor a bunch of incoming college freshmen for much less than college costs, those kids would probably get a better education than any of their college-bound peers, but they also wouldn't have a degree from any credible university or much in the way of job prospects.

...come to think of it, I wonder if colleges know that their primary value is as a signaling mechanism, and intentionally restrict the size of the incoming class to preserve that signal. In other words, they're aware that they don't actually add any educational value, they just ensure that they only admit students who would've succeeded anyway and then point to all their successful graduates.

IME the work broke down into three groups:

1) QA - the tech industry bleats about its automation putting people out of work and then creates millions of jobs mindlessly clicking buttons. shrug

2) Lean startup - creating jobs that are designed to be automated but giving them to Indians to do manually first to test if the idea has legs and the job is even worth doing. This type of work isn't going anywhere even if the individual jobs get automated (as they were designed to be).

3) Semi-skilled work - reading contracts and picking out relevant terms. So far most attempts at solving this problem have been a riotous joke.

> The interests of rural people in the US are, depending on the state, protected by the electoral college and Senate allocation. Look for more attempts to abolish these things, which would be civil war-risking changes to government.

The reason why there are attempts to abolish these things is because rural states have, arguably, been abusing that advantage to the point where the larger states are getting frustrated. The situation where a minority of a population can not just veto the majority policies, but impose its own, even in face of the supermajority (the US system allows the constitution to be amended with support of less than 25% people, so long as they vote in the right places), is not going to be sustainable for long.

And, by the way, the people who have set the system up knew that putting it on paper is not enough. There's a warning in the Federalist Papers (#22):

"It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

Originally it was about something else, but in a very similar context (small states trying to get a unicameral 1-vote-per-state).

In terms of material costs for the structure, no, high rises aren't the optimum of affordability. But when you factor in the infrastructure requirements on the scale of demand for "the city" you can easily find that building miles and miles of brownstones gets you the worst of both worlds - you need to maintain the infrastructure of high rises with public transit, cleaners, etc but you are only getting a fraction the density you could if you spent more on the building.

You can think of it from the perspective of how cities grow - there is pressure inward to grow up the core and people will push from the outsides in. That push can result in low density sprawl or upsizing density, but they are pushing in to get closer to the actual city core where maximum interconnectedness and locality can happen.

In the naive way most US cities have grown individual townships and developments manage themselves and protect their own to the detriment of the whole. Its how you get situations like what Strong Towns talks about all the time[1] where sprawling out has quadratic expenses. As metro areas grow, and certainly when you are in the tens of millions, you are looking at spending preposterous amounts of money on your suburban infrastructure that way eclipses the per-unit costs of building denser buildings in a smaller footprint.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/9/18/more-math