Oh yes, Marxism has proven to be such a great economic theory. China has proven Marx’s theories have worked so well during the Great Leap Forward. Compare to Deng Xiaoping’s great leap backward to neo capitalism.

Geebus, get a grip. I like Italian post feudalism economic theory.

How do you explain the high suicide rates of Seattle and San Francisco then?

Knowing that Glaeser was trained in Chicago makes me a lot more suspicious of his embrace of high rises.

@2, it's those damned bridges. They need to be banned.

There's also a pretty strong economic divide between cities - where most of the good jobs are - and rural areas, where good jobs have become few and far between.

As to Marxism, well, free market capitalism has spectacularly failed in recent years, so we might as well try something else.

Charles - as a young, educated, cosmopolitan woman with lots of city living under my belt, I read these with interest.

I voluntarily relocated to rural America to live on my ancestral property about a year ago. I love it here. While not claiming that it's right for everyone (your points about the superiority of many aspects of city life are well taken) I have to disagree about the general inferiority of rural life.

I love the solitude, peace and wide open spaces of the country. I eat vegetables grown a few miles away and game and home-grown beef provided by my neighbors. I have wonderful animals that I could never have in the city. I feel a sense of community that I have never felt in an urban setting. I lived in Seattle for three years and felt lonely, isolated and depressed. Now, living in one of the least populous counties in the state, I have a wonderful support network of friends and surrogate family. Many of my friends and neighbors are politically right leaning; and yet all are generous, kind and surprisingly open minded. I know that my way of life is a luxury and isn't sustainable on a large scale. But I love it and there are many people out here who feel the same.

Finally, maybe young people committing suicide at high rates is a rural problem. But mass incarceration of youth is a city problem. Just because particular bads correlate with a certain way of life doesn't negate the goods. And while gun ownership certainly plays a (major) role, I would add: less access to mental health services, poverty, depressing Northern climes (at least for the states listed). Gun ownership is a terrible idea in the city, but a necessity in a place where hunting and protection from predators is important for survival.

This illustrates why we should be wary of such statements from people who are in no way qualified to give them. This is such a causation and correlation nightmare.

I hope you realize that when you say all rural people are bible-thumping morons who hate gays and muslims, it is philosophically no different from someone saying that all black people are fried chicken loving, criminal welfare parasites, right?

Think about that when you are eating the food that was grown and sown by those some people you irrationally hate so much, people who do their part in making your city life possible. It is baffling that you can not see how your life supports theirs, and their life supports yours.

What @7 said.

@2: Seattle's suicide rate is never as high as people suppose.

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-suic…

@7 Beautifully put.

I think about the folks that grow my food whenever I contemplate how the urban county taxes support the rugged individualists on their proud tractors.

@7,

Hate to burst your bubble, but our food is grown and harvested by big corporations and illegal immigrants.

Cities are great places to live. If you like dirt, noise, and filthy air without a glimpse of greenery that is. I mean, it ain't breathing if you can't see the yellowish tint to the air, amiright? Who wants grass when you can have cracked concrete covered in trash? Heck, if you can't walk down the road without coffee cups and snack packaging fighting for space with used condoms and hypodermic needles on the sidewalk a morning walk just isn't hip and edgy enough! And if the panhandling bums don't populate every corner and defacate in every alley it just doesn't feel like home to me!

But the best part of city living is that heart warming cold loathing your neighbors have for every other person on the block! You know, the kind of neighbors who watch your home being burglarized from their front window while doing nothing whatever to stop the crime. Heck, some utterly wonderful neighbor types in the city will watch your home being robbed and spend the time writing an article about the robbery while watching it! You can't get that kind of neighbor in rural or suburban homes, nosir. Who wants to live where neighbors talk to each other and look out for each others property when you can have urban disdain for each other and willful disregard for the physical fact of the neigbors very existence!?

Spot on as usual, Chucky Boy, if your aim is being 100% wrong about everything all the time.

gee, thanks a lot chuck. you made me agree with seattleblues.

pluralism, charles. humans have predominantly lived in the countryside for, oh, 100k years, plus our ancestors. cities? concrete jungles? that past, oh 100 years for part of the population. while i like the culture and pedestrian convenience of cities, i and many other people find them intolerably stressful.
i love the city in theory. i love complexity. but jesus man, the city is just one more in an array of options. like political theories, there is no one better than all the others.

@14: I was talking about the people actually dirtying their hands, not the people funding it, or buying it wholesale to sell at market. Believe it or not, factory farms are worked by local people, not big automated tractors and milkers being run remotely by "the corporation."

Also, immigrants living in those areas are rural people, so I do not see how it applies that they are from another country, or here illegally.

@6 indeed. "ancestral property"??????????? sounds too good.

anyway, truth is rural people are on average much more friendly and helpful. if you are a minority in the country, wherever you are on the globe, that might be complicated, still rural people, no matter their ideology, are much nicer (if often less sophisticated).

@13: Right, which is why the produce you buy is dirt-cheap compared to many other nations. Without those farm subsidies, the food you buy would be twice as expensive, at least.

Why is it so hard to understand that the city builds the economy that keeps the farms running, and the farms grow the food that keeps the city running? It is a complicated and inextricably intertwined web of dependance.

Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming also have incredibly long, cold, dark winters. Even the cities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway (all countries with high standards of living, strong social safety net, universal healthcare, etc) have higher rates of suicide than other European countries thanks to half a year of snow, winter and darkness.

Not all rural areas are as backward though, look at rural New England. Vermont pretty much has no cities (Burlington is the biggest and has a population under 50K) yet it is just about the most liberal state in the country and also one of the least religious. Poverty and poor education are the biggest impediments to liberal thought that there are, it's no surprise that the states that are the most religious (except for Utah) are also the poorest, have the highest teen pregnancy rates, and the lowest rates of highschool graduation. It's no surprise that Vermont has the highest highschool graduation rate in the US (86.7%)* while Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Nevada can't manage even 60% (Nevada is actually under 50% graduation).

*This fact is one of the reasons I picked Vermont as the example, they do a great job at education.

Nobody wants to live in cities anymore. They're too crowded.

@19, "Ancestral property" - a tongue-in-cheek homage to CM. What I meant to say was "my grandparents' place" :-D

This is purely anecdotal and based on personal experience, but for what it's worth: I live in a very rural, very poor area. While attitudes are generally "conservative", people are warm and generous. On my first day of work at the local clinic, a coworker I'd never met loaned me $115 to get my car fixed when I couldn't access my bank account. A couple I'd just met "adopted" me and have been close and supportive ever since.

People have built fences for me, fixed stuff in my house, given me chickens and a coop to put them in, horses, hay for those horses, clothes, elk, venison, beef, vegetables... and I've cleaned people's houses, done their chores, helped them move, cooked them food. This type of reciprocal generosity feels so damn good, and is *in my experience* more readily available in rural areas.

Yes, people are more explicitly homophobic and racist in terms of the language they use. But "Ellen" is on TV at the diner in town. Gays come to the bar and it's a non-issue. There are out lesbians in town - business owners at that. My Mexican neighbors are respected pillars of the community. We've got a ways to go, but most people just live and let live, even if their politics reflect some (to my mind) fundamental misunderstandings. On an individual basis, I find people here less judgmental, more welcoming, and more genuine than in cities.

@15 Imaginary houses in Italy are soooo much better places to live, right Bluesy. Ahhh. Imaginary bucolic country bliss. The imagined scent of sun flowers. The sing song voices of imaginary italian children playing in the piazza.

Weird. Didn't you, after being busted for being a lying sack of shit, just stomp out of SLOG in a panty-twisted huff swearing never to return?

My oh my. Why. Yes. You did.

Blues, you just can't stay away from these godless commies can you? It's fascinating.

Anyway. It's not good for you. Tell your day nurse to close the browser window and wheel you back infront of the Tee Vee. One of your story shows is on.
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I got to give Charles credit. He does know how to whip up the plebes into a self-righteous froth.

@25

Aww, isn't that cute? You're still playing Encyclopedia Brown! I kinda got over that at about 12, but we all mature at different rates. Someday, if you're a good boy and eat your vegetables you might grow up too!

Anyway, why give up free amusement from weird incoherent commie morons like Mudede, or obsessive stalkers like you? It's like a circus freak show without the price of admission.

Now, go ask your mommy if you should be on grown up sites that talk about sex and stuff when they aren't writing how much they hate this country, okay little boy?

@26 HAHAHAHA You talk such shit. Encyclopedia Brown. You realize it hasn't been published since 1980. Hahahaha.

I swear if you didn't exist as such a pompous caricature of a Conserva-troll Shut-in and foil for the Seattle liberal, the Stranger would have to invent you.

So your defense is that I happen to remember what you say when you say it? And then I happen to have proved you're a lying sack of shit?

Really? This is your defense? The Scooby Doo Villain defense?

"Those meddling kids! Damn them for paying attention to my horse shit! And I would've gotten away with it too!"

Admit you LIED. You don't own a house in Italy. You certainly never went there in January. Because it was literally temporally impossible within the laws of physics. You had no idea how long it takes to fly from Seattle to Rome. And you got busted posting from here when you said you were there. it's not the end of the world to bullshit. IF you can admit it.

Why should anyone listen to another word out of your ridiculous lying hole if you cant man-up and admit you bull shitted? What is posting here about, then? This is the integrity of a conservative? Lying about irrelevant nonsense for no reason?

Jesus. Be a man for fuck sake. Just admit the truth and maybe somebody will pay attention to you, you lunatic.

I note that many people from rural areas I have met often say that their parents whipped them, especially women. Their fathers beat them. Later they develop low self esteem and alcoholism. I am always reading about someone being murdered out there in country lanes as well. I never leave the city myself, but each to his own. If I wanted nature, I would just go to the municipal park, but even there are two many mosquitoes.

On the other hand, some cities like New York are very hard to live in and expensive. When I think of New York for instance, I think of a city where every person is teetering on the edge of becoming homeless for only minor issues in their personal life, a ruthless place. I would live there only if it set itself up as a socialist state with free apartments and labor protection. It gets Dickensian there, like 19th century.