Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city.
This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city.
People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.
"This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city."
That trope is a little bit of a trope.
It's one thing for young people from small towns to jump to a nice spot in the bigger city pyramid, but that doesn't speak to the fact that the poor, in cities, are still quite poor and have a low standard of living.
And frankly, nobody from a small town is impressed by someone 'making' it into a middle class lifestyle in the city anyhow.
Part of my family lived in a nice enough home in a small town, everyone knew each other, living was very cheap. Most people were actually technically poor, but how poor can you be if you own your own home, have access to basic resources, and material things, and very full social lives and hobbies, arguably more so than most city people?
The problem is that 'economic standing' is a crude assessment.
Toronto has these vast areas of older, ugly residential high rise buildings, you can hardly walk anywhere, there's maybe a crappy local strip mall nearby. No culture, no local institutions, no way to get away - you're just 'stuck at the bottom' in a pile of ugly concrete. Canadian winters are 'hard' but it's made 'ok' if there's space, places to play, trails and other activities which these areas tend not to have for both material and cultural reasons.
At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors.
All the 'working class' I know in small towns have either boats, RVs/Campers, often cottages while their peers in the city live in concrete jungles.
I feel that cities are far more likely to have fragmented communities, people are more individualist, which also means more opportunity in the technical sense for prosperity, but on the other end of the Bell Curve ... it's also bad.
The cities with less transient populations are probably a little better.
Cost of housing is probably a very fundamental factor.
> At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors.
Other than access to the outdoors I would say the rest of that doesn't apply to almost any small town in the USA - may just be a canadian thing. In the USA we have meth, heroin, and a 2/1 church to local business ratio.
Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city.
This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city.
People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.