Agreed with your reasoning about the risk of the community falling apart if we tried to move it. It might not permanently fall apart, although that’s a risk, but even if it didn’t I expect it would set it back in size and development about 5 years in the process of trying to shift it, losing some people and infrastructure in the process.
To say something more general, I think much of the discussion around this topic has suffered from a bias for My Favorite City, or maybe more accurately My Favorite Tradeoff. That is, people want different things in different amounts, and for most people there is going to be some tradeoff that is better than the current one for them, all else equal. Of course, all else is not equal because these expression of preference tend to assume everything just moved with them to their favorite tradeoff, which isn’t realistic, as your analysis points out.
Your multiple recommendations do a nice job of navigating this, considering conditions that might be strong enough to precipitate a move and where that move should be to under those conditions, rather than directly trying to optimize for some favored tradeoffs. I don’t necessarily want to live in Boston or Oxford, for example, but I can appreciate why those might be the right choices under certain conditions and why I would have to reasonably chose if I wanted to move along with them or not.
Agreed with your reasoning about the risk of the community falling apart if we tried to move it. It might not permanently fall apart, although that’s a risk, but even if it didn’t I expect it would set it back in size and development about 5 years in the process of trying to shift it, losing some people and infrastructure in the process.
To say something more general, I think much of the discussion around this topic has suffered from a bias for My Favorite City, or maybe more accurately My Favorite Tradeoff. That is, people want different things in different amounts, and for most people there is going to be some tradeoff that is better than the current one for them, all else equal. Of course, all else is not equal because these expression of preference tend to assume everything just moved with them to their favorite tradeoff, which isn’t realistic, as your analysis points out.
Your multiple recommendations do a nice job of navigating this, considering conditions that might be strong enough to precipitate a move and where that move should be to under those conditions, rather than directly trying to optimize for some favored tradeoffs. I don’t necessarily want to live in Boston or Oxford, for example, but I can appreciate why those might be the right choices under certain conditions and why I would have to reasonably chose if I wanted to move along with them or not.