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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31922 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Do you think telling prospective parents "Look I know you say you don't have enough money to afford a home in a good area, but why aren't you willing to move to Detroit? The money you'd save on mortgage repayments would allow you to have an extra kid!" is actually a viable idea?

Moving to an inner city slum is not the only alternative to trying to live in the coastal elite bubble. There are dozens of smaller cities and towns in flyover country that have both a much lower cost of living and lower crime than the major metropolitan areas. Many of these are college towns that don't lack for quality schools and access to cultural or intellectual amenities either e.g. Ames, Ann Arbor, Athens, and that's just the A's. All it takes is giving up the conceit that anyone who doesn't live and work in New York or California is a miserable failure, but many of my peers seem to believe this deep in their bones.

At the end of the day though, I don't care much for or have any confidence in large-scale social engineering projects, so I'm not approaching any of this from a policy angle. Whoever ends up reproducing themselves gets to own the future, whether that's native-born Americans, Guatemalan immigrants, Hasidic Jews, or GPT-bots, and whatever opinions I have on which of those outcomes are better or worse are immaterial.

Moving to an inner city slum is not the only alternative to trying to live in the coastal elite bubble. There are dozens of smaller cities and towns in flyover country that have both a much lower cost of living and lower crime than the major metropolitan areas. Many of these are college towns that don't lack for quality schools and access to cultural or intellectual amenities either e.g. Ames, Ann Arbor, Athens, and that's just the A's. All it takes is giving up the conceit that anyone who doesn't live and work in New York or California is a miserable failure, but many of my peers seem to believe this deep in their bones.

I will freely admit to not being an American, and so the situation there might be different - but at least where I live, that approach isn't really a viable option because there just aren't enough jobs that pay well enough to keep a growing family out of the welfare class in a lot of those areas, and if everyone took that advice the problem would simply be relocated and redistributed. There are also significant capital and social costs associated with totally relocating your life that would make it even less viable (good luck getting help from the grandparents when you live 10 hours away or telling mothers of newborn children to completely extricate themselves from all their supportive social networks) Your proposals and ideas are just not capable of fixing anything, but given your last paragraph that doesn't really matter - you don't care about the outcome after all.

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