Via Dustin Boyer:
"Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. Denser populations support not just more amenities (museums, baseball teams, restaurants) but more diverse amenities (Korean and Ethiopian and Peruvian joints!).
This is why so many people want to live in San Francisco in the first place, and why tourists like to visit Manhattan. The things there worth experiencing are there precisely because so many other people are, too.
The tight confines of cities make us more energy-efficient, too, as economist Ed Glaeser has argued, because 20 households in one apartment building devour fewer resources than 20 households in single-family homes.
Put more and more workers in one place, meanwhile, and you also get buzzing hubs like New York's Garment District or Boston's biotech corridor, where people working on the same problems bump into each other and share ideas and suppliers and become more productive. Put more people in a city, and the economy grows. It's the opposite of diminishing returns. The environmental costs, per person, can actually improve. In drought-stricken California, some of the lowest water consumption per capita is in San Francisco.
"To claim that an area can 'fill up' is to implicitly assume that there’s an ecological footprint relationship, like a law of physics, such that every extra person uses the same amount of resources," says Matthew Kahn, a visiting professor of economics at USC. "But the whole point of economics is that we can always substitute inputs. We can build up, build down. There’s always substitution possibilities such that you can achieve more with less.""
"Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. Denser populations support not just more amenities (museums, baseball teams, restaurants) but more diverse amenities (Korean and Ethiopian and Peruvian joints!).
This is why so many people want to live in San Francisco in the first place, and why tourists like to visit Manhattan. The things there worth experiencing are there precisely because so many other people are, too.
The tight confines of cities make us more energy-efficient, too, as economist Ed Glaeser has argued, because 20 households in one apartment building devour fewer resources than 20 households in single-family homes.
Put more and more workers in one place, meanwhile, and you also get buzzing hubs like New York's Garment District or Boston's biotech corridor, where people working on the same problems bump into each other and share ideas and suppliers and become more productive. Put more people in a city, and the economy grows. It's the opposite of diminishing returns. The environmental costs, per person, can actually improve. In drought-stricken California, some of the lowest water consumption per capita is in San Francisco.
"To claim that an area can 'fill up' is to implicitly assume that there’s an ecological footprint relationship, like a law of physics, such that every extra person uses the same amount of resources," says Matthew Kahn, a visiting professor of economics at USC. "But the whole point of economics is that we can always substitute inputs. We can build up, build down. There’s always substitution possibilities such that you can achieve more with less.""