Sure, if you're looking for anecdotal data I can provide some. I don't know about 'more', but I'd argue it was definitely not 'less' social.

I can't speak to the income stuff because I also worked remote during this time, but I will say there were less divisions along economic lines out there than there are in the city, for sure. People share meat and produce with each other regardless of whether they are pulling in a bay-area tech salary or they are working HVAC for the county. We're more similar than you think around a bonfire or with fishing poles in our hands.

I live in a city now so these thoughts are comparing some of my experiences in both places:

- I spent more time with my neighbors helping each other, sitting around a fire, cooking and sharing food than I do in the city. - seasonal help was much more of a thing in the country - we'd help each other every spring with brush clearing and burning, fall harvests, culling and processing. - I'd go to bars just as much as I would here in town, and there was a coffeeshop from which I'd work (though much more rarely compared to now). - We'd drive in to town to go to sporting events or concerts together, like I drive across town now for the same thing with my friends. - we'd go hunting/fishing together, I guess sort of like I'd go paddling boarding here in town. - volunteering and charity work was very different - you'd mostly go directly help whoever needed help; there weren't as much donation drives or petitions signed.

In coming up with that little list it occurred to me that just like in a city there are people that stay to themselves, there's definitely folks in the rural areas that do that also. It might vary so much from person to person that it's not a good comparison to make between rural/urban environments.

> farm was more social than a city

The farm has less overall "social points", but if you subtract the antisocial behaviors your are subject to in many cities the rural areas can come out ahead.

Take all the interesting subway conversations you have had on one hand, then subtract all the times you have smelled human urine or stepped over a heroin needle.

Dubar's number suggests that there's a limit to how many deep meaningful friendships/relationships one person can have so living in cities of millions isn't really something anyone needs. As for income it's all abstract. True, rural areas don't provide complex services like software that facilitates the integration of two other softwares to generate paper GDP points, but they make food. Rural areas can exist without cities but cities can't exist without rural areas.

> A couple of things off the cuff, but economies of scale affect infrastructure costs, so centralized areas take far less money per person to operate. For example, a dozen busses provide much better return on investment in an urban area than suburban or rural because they can each complete a single route quickly and service more people per mile and thus you have service every 10-15 minutes. When you spread those same busses out over a larger, less dense, area you have much longer between stops and far fewer people to use them for the same cost. Water, sewer, electrical, communications all scale better with more dense living as well. Bigger pipes are far cheaper than much longer runs. Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961508

I can't and won't disagree with what you're saying. If we're talking about how much money it costs to bring services out to rural areas, you're 100% correct. However, I'm not sure what your point is, because rural folks also pay taxes for services, like urban residents. It makes total sense to me that a concentration of people paying taxes for the cost of services to serve the entire city/county/state would of course be paying more than necessary for those services if they excluded rural citizens from those services. The grandparent didn't mention anything like this though, except maying saying "cheaper" (but I took that to mean day-to-day life honestly):

> Cities are cheaper, safer, greener, more social, places to live with higher incomes, better educational and health outcomes. We need to stop subsidising rural under performance.

> Crime and violence rates similarly don't match up with what we might expect, though it's a complex topic. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

I agree this is super complicated! Anecdotally I felt much safer when I lived rurally. I have experienced unsafe situations more than a handful of times since being back in the city. That's not real data, just a single data point from my experience though.

> I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.

I don't disagree - rural communities tend to monocultures and some of the social activities are hard to do out there. Other activities are much easier though: bonfires, hunting, fishing, harvesting, etc. The same way some folks might go to a book club to discuss a sci-fi novel they are reading, my neighbors and I went to a fence-building workshop on the weekends to learn about building better fences that involved erecting livestock fence on a pasture. Definitely wouldn't have the interest or ability to do that in a city.

I like cities, but I never see the urbanists talk about the housing for a large family in the city, I guess Japan is different in this regard where each family still gets their own house. Only thing being built near me is 2-BR apartments with crummy balconies.

> I mean these are all obvious points now.

They are not obvious at all to me, someone who has lived extensively in both worlds.

Per capita murder rates and robbery rates are much higher in cities. All of the most dangerous places in the US are mid to large cities. Detroit, Baltimore, St Louis etc and it's been that way for decades.

Just saying it again doesn't make it so.

And rural areas subsidize cities calorically.

You can't eat money.

And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning through money in services but they don't actually produce most of the things that they use.

So yeah if you look just at dollars, cities produce more. But they would fail utterly without the rural areas, I don't think cities give enough credit to that.

Strong towns is very myopic in what they focus on. They are not considering the second order of effects of things like reducing the scale of the interstate system.

Where does the wheat come from to make the bread? Where do the cows come from to make the hamburger?

For that matter, where does the grain come from to feed the chickens? Where does the molasses come from to make the rum?

Pretty sure the answer to all of these is "from a lot further than five miles down the road"...