What Is a City When Its Wealthiest Leave?
wsj.comI think a lot of people refuse to be clear-eyed about entitlement programs. They cost money, and some portion of the population will indefinitely be a negative tax burden. Totally ignoring the moral issues here -- this means that you end up hitting breakpoints where entitlement programs stop making sense -- but of course -- with the right population, policy, and tax base, those programs can continue indefinitely. I seldom see any real calculation or discussion of these issues with regard to specifics, but instead just seem two camps who either want more entitlements and fewer entitlements, and seem to only argue from dispositional perspectives.
Livable.
There's a long forgotten argument that there are just too many people in capital cities
https://books.google.com/books/about/Dispersing_Population.h...
I think that "powerlesness corrupts" in places like NYC. If you grew up in Kansas you might see a seed grow and have some mental model for how a civilization can create wealth. If you look from a poor part of queens at the skyline of Manhattan wouldn't you conclude, instead, that it was all about theft, all one giant crime? Wouldn't you elect the kind of state rep who wants to subsidize off-track betting to save jobs?
Maybe places like NYC, LA and San Francisco should get broken up. How many more movie tickets could the industry sell if there was a little more diversity in the process that makes them?