Infotech will let you work anywhere, but you still need fixed infrastructure that is only possible to efficiently provide in a centralized way. Even suburbs are a net economic drain given their infrastructure costs, never mind dispersed rural living.
There's nothing efficient about big cities. Hours of commuting by millions of people every day. Tons of excess and waste. You become disconnected from the source of your food which has to be shipped in.
Technology is a lot more than InfoTech. It includes core engineering and infrastructure.
> There's nothing efficient about big cities. Hours of commuting by millions of people every day.
You have it backwards. Density makes mass transit feasible. You want to talk about commute times, spreading everyone out is going to magnify that.
Cities are efficient. At least, they can be. Busses and trains/subways work a hell of a lot better in urban cores than suburbs, and are effectively worthless from an efficient standpoint for moving individual people in a rural environment.
You seem to think that if you spread everyone out, they all need to commute back to the same place. That's not true at all however. With small cities/large towns I don't need to commute to "the big city" because the small city has all I need. My work, food, etc.. is less than a 5 minute drive away. Instead of ultra dense miserable housing, huge commute times, etc... we now have a much simpler lifestyle.
It's moving the need for everyone to commute (via mass transit or w/e) to just a much smaller amount of shipping to happen between cities to move goods.
