(Cont....) Most cities, most of the time, will function far more efficiently as a replica of Houston. To reiterate the reason why: a low, flat urban land rent curve means that households and businesses can locate very efficiently relative to each other and to urban amenities; cities with a high, "peaky" urban land rent curve "sort" everyone and everything into locations NOT on the basis of efficiency of function, but on the basis of what they can AFFORD. See William Wheaton’s 2002 paper, “Commuting, Ricardian Rent and Housing Price Appreciation in Cities with Dispersed Employment and Mixed Land Use”. Peter Hall et al pointed out way back in 1973, in the massive 2-volume report "The Containment of Urban England", that the perverse and unintended consequence of the 1947 Town and Country Urban Planning system was to force people into LONGER commutes due to their inability to afford homes at efficient locations, combined with exponentially increased congestion at the few focal points of the carefully "planned" urban form.

Only 3 things really matter for efficient commute times, in most cities, most of the time: dispersion of employment and jobs-housing balance; road capacity; and the flatness of the urban land rent curve. Trying to start with mass public transport and work backwards regardless of the fact that most cities, most of the time, have to exist on inbound flows of money based on more land-intensive sources of employment than high finance, is the ultimate in “tail wags dog”, cargo-cult, physical determinism. The UK has this “one size fits all” planning policy, and look what it has done to every city outside London. The UK is covered in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo, only with high density, low quality, unaffordable houses, and chances of economic recovery close to nil, in contrast to Detroit. The fact that Detroit’s urban land prices have been allowed to fall so low, while UK cities remain strangled by planning-system rationing, massive economic rent transfers (to land owners), squeezed household discretionary incomes, and cost barriers to new enterprise, is the “decider”.

(Cont.....)

(Cont.....)

Not one of the international businesses that are moving in to huge blocks of cheap land in Detroit, would have bothered to even look at Liverpool or Newcastle or Sheffield; or, for that matter, NYC or California’s growth-contained, insanely expensive cities.

The USA's low density cities have over time, slaughtered the UK's high density cities hands down for commute times as well as housing affordability. This is a major inconvenient truth for the whining anti-sprawl activists. 95% of people in low density cities in the USA, can afford living space, housing quality, AND location efficiency of a kind that only the people in the top 5% of wealth can afford in a UK city. AND rates of marriage and child-bearing are higher in the affordable, low density US cities, and this means that MORE households are having to find locations relative to TWO jobs AND schools; yet this disadvantage is NOT reflected in commute times, which are still BETTER, not worse.

Besides the advantage of better spatial balance between jobs and workers, the decentralised urban form has far greater utilisation of road space in BOTH directions during BOTH of the day's rush hours. Neighbours are getting in their cars and driving off in the opposite direction to each other on secondary suburban routes, instead of some higher proportion of people all cramming onto the same highway to the centre.

So the free market wins hands down for urban efficiency. Utopian planning should have died with the former USSR.

Phil from NZ,

Not even von Mises can argue against the laws of physics and the ultimate limits they put on growth. The Do the Math blog of A/Prof Tom Murphy (Physics, University of California, San Diego) is very informative on this

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

While some Green organisations do appear hysterical and irrational on a number of issues, it lacks credibility to say that all of the scientists who have been claiming that there are serious problems, with the endorsement of their learned societies, must all be wild-eyed lunatics, grossly incompetent, or part of some conspiracy, simply because their findings are a threat to your financial interests or pet ideology. The Global Footprint Network (an international thinktank of scientists, engineers, and economists) has been adding up the accounts on environmental and resource issues based on UN and national government statistics. The graph on p. 21 of their 2010 atlas makes it clear that it would take the resources of 3 Earths to give everyone in the global population a modest Western European standard of living, even if the resources were divided equally.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010

It is completely hysterical to bring in issues like forced sterilisation or abortion in an Australian context. As I said in another post on this thread, our fertility rate is slightly below replacement level and has been since 1976. It is not a problem, and forced steriliasions and abortions wouldn't stop high population growth, which is overwhelmingly due to government immigration policy.

If it is impossible to stop population growth or decrease it drastically, how have they done it in Japan, Germany, Finland, South Korea, etc.?

(cont'd)

(cont'd)

I agree with you that decentralisation would actually make most people's lives better, be better for family life and raising children, and might well cost less in terms of infrastructure, although there are still limits in terms of how much agricultural land and habitat for other species that we want to cover up with housing and shopping centres.

There is also the issue of who should pay the infrastructure costs. You are in favour of forcing existing residents to share them. This might have made sense in the 1950s and 1960s when there really was full employment, and it could be argued that the population was below the optimum. This is no longer the case. The vast majority of wxisitng residents are not going to benefit from the population growth, and it will make life harder for many of them. Getting rid of growthist politicians is a far more attractive strategy than paying more to make our lives worse.

From the 2006 Productivity Commission report into Immigration, it is clear that the days when mass migration was a win/win proposition are long past. They found that the per capita growth in GDP was trivial, with the very modest benefits mostly distributed to the owners of capital and the migrants themselves. They found that the distributional effects would actually make most people worse off because the large number of migrants flooding onto the labour market depresses wages. See p. 154 and the graph on the following page

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/9438/migrationandpopulation.pdf

See also the executive summary of the Immigration Department's report on Long Term Physical Implications of Net Overseas Migration

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/physical-implications-migration-report-1.pdf

Phil

My comment was not related to development, so I will be a little clearer. You make much of the fact that urban planning is inefficient. I agree, but why is it inefficient? Is it inefficient because the process is restrictive and obscure, or for other reasons? And I would suggest that while the need for re-zonings and development approvals correlates with population growth, the per capita gdp does not. So while cities and economies might be bigger, there is no evidence to suggest that the inhabitants will be more prosperous. And going by the government debt growth in Australia, it would seem that the result is more likely a cost.

Yet you seem to think that everything would be just fine if only we would follow the right model. Been there and done that with far greater minds than yours, and with disastrous results. I would suggest that any model needs to be tested. It might be advantageous to trial a number of models on a small scale first, or at least base your predictions on real systems operating elsewhere.

Divergence, I said myself that population growth always levels off once a society reaches the modern "developed" condition. You do not have to “correct” me on this.

Energy use will not continue to increase in a linear fashion - besides population peaking, human activity becomes continually more energy efficient. I recommend the writings of the systems analyst Jesse Ausubel.

I did not argue that population growth or energy use "COULD" grow indefinitely; I argued that
1) there is no rational reason to "constrain urban growth", here and now, based on DISTANT FUTURE scare scenarios.
2) the market pricing system for scarce resources is no less moral a way of adjusting as necessary IF and when "limits" are reached, than compulsory population control and/or Statist rationing. The market is also superior in the here and now. The great conservative writer Theodore Dalrymple put it: "when I was young and idealistic, I despised the harsh and impersonal free market price system of rationing scarce resources, but then I travelled the world a bit and saw some alternatives in practice".

I am glad you agree re decentralised urban form – this is a “market price driven” solution.

I already pointed out that “the cost of infrastructure” for urban expansion would have been far lower than the excess debt accumulated by Australian households over the last 10 years for inflated cost of housing (actually land) thanks to “planning”. Is it better to accumulate SOME debt for more infrastructure, or MORE debt for NOTHING, and this debt mostly falling on the young?

I also pointed out that the immigration problem is an issue of quality. It would be crazy to exclude the kinds of people who HAVE become major contributors to our nations. We certainly should NOT let in riff-raff who do not assimilate and who remain unproductive.

But even this current growth is not “rapid” at all by historical standards.

I am glad you agree that many environmentalists are hysterical. But the "3 planets" calculation mainly applies to assumptions about "CO2 sink" forests, when there are better ways of dealing with climate change.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/earth-is-enough