[The] declining cost of distance is changing where you live and work. That has massive implications for real estate prices, your lifestyle, and cost of living. Why live in a city, when the declining cost of distance is making it possible to live rurally and still earn a city wage?
That doesn't apply to military power (and I recently noted my dabbling with quantitative analysis of power factoring in distance, so this is of interest to me) although reachback concepts reduce the costs of distance a bit (ultimately you can't tele-conquer or tele-defend a place). So this is really an economics development.
But in regard to the tele-commuting and wage issues, won't businesses at some point assume tele-commuting is an option for nearly their entire workforce and refuse to pay a wage premium for hiring someone in (or within commuting distance of) the city in which the business is physically located?
Seriously, why would a business pay city wages when their employees don't need to even live near that city? Isn't that advantage of living rurally while still earning a city wage only a temporary gap until businesses catch on and simply pay less?
Or maybe the wage gap disappears less from a business decision than the effect of depopulating a city that reduces costs of living and the need to pay more for the employees who remain in the city. That could level the pay rates, too.
And what does that do to the social structure and tax revenue of big cities that won't have highly paid residents to afford the high-cost city housing and living amenities?
Will taxation of income have to change to reflect the widespread division between where you earn your money and where you live (and require services paid by taxes). How will municipalities compete to attract the tele-commuters who provide tax dollars (from property tax or other resident taxes and fees) without the need to attract the businesses that hire them--which is the current field of battle between municipalities? What does it even mean to be a business from City X if hardly any of your employees are even physically commuting to X let alone living in X?
So much for light commuter rail.
Maybe rather than ending the dominance of cities, this trend homogenizes cities in terms of costs and services, and even density and size.
Cities arose to concentrate people to produce wealth. And they did despite the societal and health problems that arose with people crowded together.
When you don't have to concentrate people to produce wealth, what is the incentive to live in cities with all their problems?
What's kind of funny is that the tech industry that thrived on the Internet is being affected too:
The conventional wisdom sees tech concentrating in a handful of places, many dense urban cores that offer the best jobs and draw talented young people. These places are seen as so powerful that, as The New York Times recently put it, they have little need to relate to other, less fashionable cities.
To a considerable extent, that was true – until it wasn’t. The most recent data on STEM jobs – in science, technology, engineering or mathematics – suggests that tech jobs, with some exceptions, are shifting to smaller, generally more affordable places.
And how will our governance, politics, and society--and cities themselves--change if cities lose their place of prominence?
Just a random thought out of my usual lane.
