Your statement concerns a traditional economic analysis of efficiency. (time/value, convenience, relative $ costs, diversity of entertainment, existence of *some* high quality schools...) Remember, I lived in Manhattan for 27 years, so I'm not guessing here. The dependence on remote sourcing of energy, food, water, clothing...makes urban centers the most vulnerable of human settlements. Also, the waste generation and disposition is incredibly energy intensive.
You are missing, in my opinion, total caloric consumption and waste production (matter/energy throughput, Entropy to physicists) calculated via cradle to grave analysis of production, transportation, packaging, removal of waste, toxic additions to biosphere...
(excerpts)
No one in the regions could touch
what I have here on five times the salary.
Subjective evaluation. Most in regions (& even in NYC) may not value what you value aesthetically. This is a non-sequitor re overpop)
We don't use a lot of
energy and we don't have gas guzzlers as required by living in cities on the
plains or in the suburbs.
I bet the busses, trucks, & cabs running 24 hrs a day with one or two passengers amounts to the same (or greater) output of pollution per/sq.mile, if not per capita. And the electricity driving the subway isn't produced without pollution.
We also have several million people within a
ten mile radius.
All of them totally dependent upon remote d3elivery (from great distances) of their material needs.
I don't think the problem is over-population but poor planning and issues
freedom of mo vement that people are unwilling to give up. I don't go out
of town much and I often don't get out of the apartment unless for fun. It
isn't required. Would you live that way?
You are making normative judgements about how people should live. You are looking selectively at what you value, and dismissing or ignoring the physical constraints and dependencies involved. Another way of understanding my points is to look at ecological footprint analyses of cities and countries.
One final point: just because currently available inventories may be plentiful and keep prices reasonable (for energy, water, food...), there is absolutely no necessary connection to the duration that these items may continue to be available. When a well runs dry, cost goes from nearly free to infinity if another well isn't immediately available. These are the kinds of future studies and whole-system analyses that support overpop/ overshoot as real.
Best re gards,
Steve
-- http://magma.ca/~gpco/ http://www.scientists4pr.org/ Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.—Kenneth Boulding
