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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

I assume you mean because of the social engineering aspect of incentivizing "CNR workers" to move to big cities and discouraging other kinds of workers from being there.

If so, I agree. It's this idea of nationwide economic efficiency being the be-all and end-all goal of social policy, which completely ignores the actual "social" aspect of gutting small towns even more than already happens, not to mention instituting systems of effective apartheid that attempt to exclude people from important economic hubs.

Edit: ironically, Princeton itself is a pretty small town - 17,487 people in Princeton proper. Of course it's probably not what the study had in mind, and it's about 1.5 hours from NYC and an hour from Philadelphia, making it part of the Northeast megalopolis. Still, "small town" may not be the right term for what they're getting at.

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It's not only institutionalizing the social divide between 'rural' and 'city', it is effectively deepening that divide.

Nothing can bridge that divide, because of the simple nature of economics in an industrialized country. Unless you are dealing with raw resource extraction, cities are more productive, period.

The thing about living in an industrialized country is that raw resource extraction does not employ all that much labour.

It doesn't even matter how you structure your economic system. Even if we install radical socialism, with very heavy emphasis on wealth redistribution, there is still going to be a huge social divide between urban and rural.

We're better off not pretending that up is down, and black is white, and instead dealing with a world where we acknowledge that these differences exist, and will always exist.

A bit off-topic, but you citing 17k as the population of Princeton "proper" is quite wrong. While it is true that Princeton Township and Princeton Borough were once different municipalities, they shared most resources and, importantly, a cultural identity and school system.

The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.

The population of Princeton is 25k+.

Anyway the moral of my story is that calling the township Princeton "proper" attempts to create a divide that the residents don't care for, and dismisses many of them as not being from the "real" Princeton.

Source: native of Princeton (specifically township, but I actually have no idea which of the borough or township my friends lived in) with a slight stick up his butt.

I just picked the wrong number off Google - it comes up as a box result when searching for "Princeton population."

> The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.

That's exactly what I meant by "proper". As you know, there are a lot of e.g. medical and financial business headquarters in those other towns (including Plainsboro), making the Princeton region quite a business powerhouse.

My point was looking at the size of a town alone is not a good criterion for this kind of thing. You'd have to look at surrounding towns, whether there are nearby universities, what kind of businesses exist in the area, etc. (And whether it has an Institute for Advanced Study :))

This also suggests that an alternative to further entrenching the dystopian morlock vs. eloi divide might be to encourage more town groupings like Princeton's throughout the country. With modern communications, that's much more practical than it used to be. I.e., such regional hubs can fully participate in the global economy even though they're not within major cities, although it would probably be more challenging further from major cities.

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