[lacker]

Urban areas are more efficient for almost all resources.

I don’t think this is true. If urban areas were more efficient than rural areas, it would be cheaper to live in an urban area.

Urban areas are generally inefficient for resources because you have bottlenecks on available space. Anything that requires physical space to do can be done more efficiently in a less urban area. This includes obvious things like raising children, but also includes any sort of minimum wage services, which are more efficiently provided in rural areas.

The main thing which is more efficient in an urban area is assembling a large well-paid professional workforce. I think if remote work became possible for a larger set of companies it has the potential to transform rural America.

[adrianN]

Consumption of resources and cost are only weakly correlated. Urban areas are expensive because people want to live there, for example because that's where the jobs and the cultural life are. There are more efficient in terms of land and energy use as well as in terms of infrastructure cost per tax payer.

[lacker]

Consumption of resources and cost are only weakly correlated.

The main types of economic resources are land, labor, capital, and natural resources. All of these cost money, and cost is a very reasonable way to measure resource consumption. The biggest inefficiencies of urban areas come from the cost of land and labor.

[adrianN]

Except the monetary costs of natural resources are generally not reflecting the actual damage done.

[triplee]

This and also poor zoning laws and NIMBYism allow for (and encourage) constant sprawl which also drives city prices up more because some people don't want to commute two hours each way.

[Blackthorn]

> If urban areas were more efficient than rural areas, it would be cheaper to live in an urban area.

This story might look different when you remove subsidies from the picture. NYC tax revenue subsidizes upstate life in the form of infrastructure etc. Imagine if the residents had to pay for that directly instead.

[epistasis]

Which definition of efficiency are you using here? I don't think it matches the one in the comment that you are responding to.

Urban areas are more efficient for resources because people generally use far less of them, per person, to accomplish the same economic activity.

That "bottleneck" of space is also equivalent to much greater access to all sorts of goods, because it is so much more efficient that what would basically be impossible in rural areas in terms of shipping and communication are extremely efficient in these spaces.

Efficiency is not the same thing as prices. Prices are high in urban areas because access to that space allows so much more economic activity; people are able to pay a lot more because they also have access to a lot more economic activity. That's economic efficiency.

If you're talking about needing a lot of a particular type of resource, like land, then yes it can be more efficient to put the jobs elsewhere. If you're looking for workers that don't have access to higher paying jobs, then yes, take those jobs out to rural areas.

As a person with children, I object heartily to the idea that it's more efficient to raise children in rural areas. I grew up in a rural area, but my child will not, because it is far more efficient to have access to more humans, more services, more education, more everything that urban areas provide.

[AnimalMuppet]

> If urban areas were more efficient than rural areas, it would be cheaper to live in an urban area.

If you subtract out the cost of the land, is it still more expensive to live in an urban area? (Honest question; I don't know the answer.)

[taeric]

Urban areas being more efficient also means it should be cheaper to do more variety of things with more variety of people. And it is hard to argue that is not the case.