One interesting argument in the comments of the SSC NIMBY post is a lot of people are posting who don’t like cities, and are asking why metro areas have to keep expanding.
Which, well, as long as the population keeps growing, cities will grow. I guess you could have ever-sprawling suburbs, but at some point the commutes become impractical.
More telecommuting.
Seriously – given the size of the social gains that could result from decoupling productivity and geography on a large scale – the fact that most creative-class / knowledge-worker / whatever-you-want-to-call-it types are going in to work every day should be seen as a national disgrace.
The basic problem is that I get a depressing number of these on a daily basis and the correct answer generally ends up being “Come over to my desk and let’s talk”.
I think you could get some of the way there with screensharing, but… not all of the way.
/And it still doesn’t really solve the population growth problem. Trump might solve the population growth problem because the only people having kids in this country are First-generation Hispanic immigrants, but.
I understand that there are serious productivity issues with telecommuting (at this point on the tech tree, anyway). I just think about that, and then think about a world in which we didn’t have to cram all the educated ambitious people into six or seven metro areas, and always wind up saying your productivity issues so not matter enough to be dispositive here. You should be strongly encouraged to suck them up or find clever solutions.
There are enough wildly-divergent opinions regarding the “correct” state of population growth that I am, at the least, unconvinced that dealing with it (one way or another) needs to be an integral part of solutions to other major problems.
