The global syndemic: a digression

Along with the near doubling of life expectancy in the wealthy countries, and many other radical changes in human life and society, the past century has seen a dramatic shift from the countryside to the city. In fact, even as population growth continues at an unsustainable rate, since 2000 the rural population globally has actually fallen. Of course this started much earlier in the wealthy countries.

 

 

 

Urbanization presents many challenges, including:

•Substandard housing

•Crowding

• Air pollution

•Insufficient or contaminated drinking water

•Inadequate sanitation and solid waste disposal services

•Industrial waste

•Increased motor vehicle traffic

•Stress associated with poverty and unemployment . . .

And more

Poverty and unemployment also happens in the countryside, of course -- that's why people move to cities, because increasingly, that's where the jobs are. But rural poverty can be less stressful.

 But there are also many benefits of urbanization -- again, people are choosing it voluntarily. These include:

 

•Better access to public health and general health care is possible.

•Shorter distance to transport goods and people, saves energy and time

•Increase in labor productivity

•People who live in urban areas earn more due to the availability of jobs

• Better sanitary services are possible (though not generally a reality yet in the poor countries): potable water, sanitation, transport of waste , recycling of waste.

•Tight grouping of people allows social and cultural integration at a level not available to the extended populations in rural areas.

•Economic opportunities to people who would otherwise be destined to subsist without hope of economic improvement.

•Faster technological improvement

•Reduced pressure on forest and wilderness areas from human population 

Creation and dissemination of knowledge is facilitated 

 

Cities are the drivers of national prosperity, technological innovation, and thought leadership. It would be impossible for the current human population to live dispersed throughout the countryside as we did 100 years ago. But cities and rural areas are two different worlds. The values, interests and way of life are so different that in the U.S., at least, it seems impossible for the two worlds to coexist in a unified political culture. 

As a former urbanite who now lives in the country, I can tell you that many rural people have a distorted vision of how the world works. They are not self-sufficient in the way they imagine. Everything that makes rural life possible depends on the infrastructure of cities, and in fact the government transfers huge amounts of money from cities, where most of the taxes are generated, to rural areas that cannot support their populations. But the folks out here will never believe it -- unless all that federal money goes away. Even then they won't understand what has happened to them, just as they don't understand what's happening now.