Watch
Listen
“We can never do merely one thing.”
Garrett Hardin
Bill Gates spent more than a billion dollars making high schools smaller and later wrote that test scores barely moved.
His 2009 annual letter said it plainly: “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.”
Small schools crowded the top of the test-score tables, so his foundation funded more of them. Then Howard Wainer sorted all 1,662 in Pennsylvania and checked the bottom of the table too.
Six of the 50 best were among the 50 smallest. So were 9 of the 50 worst.
A small group’s average swings wide and the same swing put those schools at both ends.
Crime is worse in big cities, so the same reasoning is running on them now. The place is big and going wrong, so live somewhere small.
Geoffrey West and his collaborators measured how a long list of city quantities change with population.
The socioeconomic ones change together. Crime, wages, GDP and patents all rise by about 2.2 times each time the population doubles.
Roads and cables go the other way. They rise by only about 80% per doubling, so a bigger city needs less of both for each resident.
Set a town of 50,000 beside a city 100 times its size.
In the big city you need about half the road and produce about double the wages, patents and output.
People read the crime number and start looking at smaller places. I watched that reasoning spread after the numbers went around.
So take the salary and leave?
You can keep the salary. West traces a city’s high wages to the number of people packed close enough to work with each other.
Move out and you keep the wage. You stop being one of the people who produce it.
That works while the city stays full.
The patent rate stays behind too. The town also needs about twice the road for each resident, which you help pay for now.
The lower crime does come with you.
Pennsylvania’s small schools were a measurement problem.
City crime is measured and real. It rises at the same rate as the wages and the patents, so a place gives you all three together.
Working remotely separates them for one person for a while. The town still has the town’s patent rate and the town’s road cost per resident.
Lower crime, fewer patents, lower wages and more road per resident is a package you might actually want.
The number you want lowered comes in the same package as the numbers you want kept. Picking a size is the whole decision.
🏙️
Which tradeoff could you start making on purpose?
