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by bilbo0s 1157 days ago
I'm not the person you're responding to but I believe the point is that people leaving, doesn't make Bay Area degeneration a fact. Only actual Bay Area degeneration, can make Bay Area degeneration a fact. We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.

A blog post about a guy who didn't like the dog poo in the Mission is not nearly enough data to draw the conclusions most of us were drawing. That includes myself. But after the glaring intellectual lapses I engaged in subsequent to the Asian mass shootings and the killing of the crypto exec, the inner me is attempting to reassert rational order by demanding intellectual honesty and logic. All of which is now firmly demonstrating to me that facts don't care about feelings, and will gleefully bite you in the ass if they don't align with the world view or narrative that you're emotionally comfortable with.
2 comments
stanfordkid 1157 days ago
Just because an economist wrote a utilitarian calculus saying "this is what makes a city great" doesn't make it so. The logic they use to define "good" ultimately has, at it's deepest core a morality. The morality that "longevity is good" "per capita GDP good", "average happiness good" ... is not an objective fact and has no bearing on how human beings measure greatness. The anesthetized bug-brained western homo-economicus would probably be laughed at by a Spartan warrior ... is one objectively a "better" human than the other?
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bryananderson 1157 days ago
> We need to know who is moving, who is coming in, the economics of the region, geological suitability to population demands, needs of the larger state and nation as it relates to the region. And on and on and on.

Exactly. And it turns out we know the answer: California has been hemorrhaging residents for 30 years and they are overwhelmingly lower-income, albeit with a recent surge in higher-income departures which correlates with the shift to remote work.

https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-m... https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2020/01/not-the-gol...

It's the housing, y'all.

All of it.

The homelessness vastly out of proportion to the area's drug-addiction and mental-illness rates. The property crime. The exodus.

All of it. It's all the housing.

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