In principal yes. However there is the issue of “people are assholes.”
I’m not pretending to be an expert political scientist either, but if the bulk of political power is concentrated in the megacities, what’s to keep the people in the megacities from fucking over rural people other than some sort of “enlightened self-interest” that they need to keep those rural areas viable so that their cities can benefit from the goods and services only rural areas can provide? It would in fact be the exact opposite problem of what we’re seeing now with rural people fucking over the megacities due to they themselves having disproportionate power.
That said, the current method use to apportion representation has turned out to be flawed. It was conceived at a time when the balance between rural and city wasn’t as large as it is now, so it has failed to keep up with the times and increase in population, especially relative between those two types of areas. It doesn’t help that those who conceived of it pictured America as mostly an agrarian nation.
The representative power of the urban versus rural voter wouldn’t matter as much if geography, and how dense an area you lived in, wasn’t so related to political ideology.
I don’t think we’re ever going to successfully relocate the rural non-agricultural people. The solution then is to somehow figure out how to change their political beliefs and ideologies instead.
On the surface, I would not be opposed to requiring some sort of service in the military, AmericaCorps, or similar organizations to get government benefits once you reach adulthood. The devil is in the details, of course, but we already requires males to register for the draft in order to get certain benefits, so this isn’t that large of a stretch.
To relate this to climate change, encouraging more people to live in denser communities produces a significant economy of scale in terms of energy consumption, carbon footprint, etc…
How about we increase income taxes across the board, and make all suburban and urban mass transit free.
If working-from-home were widely accepted as a norm for jobs that it’s possible for, that would enable a larger slice of the population to live in rural areas. This might provide critical mass to keep rural towns alive and functioning without subsidies, and might entice more educated liberal-leaning people to populate rural areas.
Unlike other countries, our land is too big. Covering all of it with Internet isn’t feasible. Again, the economy of scale is best when you have all the people in a smaller area.
The problem with 100% remote work is that if the job can truly be done 100% remotely, no one wants to hire an expensive American (even a rural one) compared to a much much cheaper person overseas.
In most companies, remote work just turns into outsourcing.
That aside, the reality is many people can’t be trusted to work without supervision…
Also the best remote work is the kind of work that didn’t start as remote work. If you’re hired as remote, it’s trash (or you’re some kind of super genius that was poached from somewhere). If you transition into it, it’s pure gold.
Not that likely though. The main non-job reasons people cite for wanting to move to cities are:
Not having to own a car / walkable living
Large pool of people with whom to socialize
Access to entertainment and culture
Liberal culture (i.e., they don’t want to live in red counties)
It’s hard enough to find a tabletop gaming group in a city of 25MM people. Imagine finding a niche gaming group in East Bublefark on the Wold.
People with more liberal ideas and more education tend to prefer more urban living for a wide variety of reasons. There are definitely significant exceptions, but the trend is what it is for a reason.
I certainly wouldn’t want to live far upstate even if I could work 100% remotely. I want to live here. I only need the job to be able to live here in the first place.
It’s not JUST jobs that are driving young people to cities.
I think you might be a little fixated on people very similar to yourself (which includes me). People who want families have a different set of priories like cost of living and home/yard size.
Technology will only make it more and more possible for many (most) jobs to truly be done remotely, including many non-race-to-the-bottom jobs that can’t be outsourced – jobs that include an element of judgement, wisdom, creativity, responsibility, etc. But culture lags behind what tech makes possible.
As for people not being trustworthy to work without supervision, that’s an expression of the anti-remote culture I’m talking about. Lots of people already slack off or do a bad job at work with supervision, and I believe lots of people would actually accomplish more work in less time if allowed to ease out from under the boot. Modern workplace culture is more fixated on the appearance of productivity than on on actual results.
While you are correct, the stats show that people are flocking to cities. Especially young people. Especially young people who aren’t having kids. The cities and city-adjacent places are growing fast. And around many cities, the only reason many people live further away is that they can’t afford to move closer.
There are definitely many different kinds of people with different goals. But the fact remains that people are moving into cities if they can afford to at very high rates.
I’d agree with you, but I see it happen. I have managed people who were good enough when supervised, but not good enough if remote. If I had to let them work remote full-time, I probably would have let them go and hired different people…
While your general point about economies of scale is true, I believe it’s both possible and feasible to cover the entire planet with decent internet connectivity.
Sometimes I want to live an hour from everyone in the Sonoran desert, with an airplane, a 4x4, and an arsenal of various ‘funs’
Where people live or want to live is a bit tangental to all this. The only relevant aspects I can see are the political leanings of people in the US who grew up in rural areas and then the fact that these people individually may contribute more to warming than urban people.
Both are interesting points but are they significant factors in the actual ongoing causes of global warming as we know it? There’s the whole rest of the world for one… And there’s the fact that not everything happening is based on US federal policy.
Not to underestimate the huge imact that the US and it’s Fed Gov has on everything, I guess. But I wonder if its really the one problem preventing humanity from reaching harmony.
A combination of technologies and approaches like the balloons used by Loon, the microtrenching techniques used by Google Fiber in certain places, better satellite internet, and tying internet to existing infrastructure like electricity or roadways by design.