An interesting intellectual exercise, but your arguments favor a certain point of view, one that looks entirely at costs, infrastructure and your own personal preferences. I know you're talking about business locations, but you completely sidestep a larger body of evidence and the human and cultural elements that make cities far more desirable - for many - than suburbs or exurbs will ever be.

Cities are the traditional hubs for creativity, education and the arts, a melting pot of mutiple cultures and viewpoints that many believe do not and cannot exist elsewhere. The cities (and their universities) draw in the intellectuals and information workers that thriving businesses are now clamoring to hire. Establishing an office outside a city considerably diminishes the available pool of information workers that are preferentially living in cities and driving the economy.

Some of your listed wastes are negligable issues for many city dwellers. Yes, cities do often have a higher cost of living, but those within the city often use public transportation or even walk to work and local businesses. Why do you think everyone drives or even owns a car? There are many articles out there that document the move, especially for young professionals, BACK to the city.

Perhaps I missed something in my read of the article, but if the goal was to be more than just provocative, a comparison of city muda and external muda would have revealed a different conclusion. The wastes of living OUTSIDE the city include energy costs (gasoline as a necessity to get anywhere, need for personal transportation and insurance), envirnomental impacts (less recycling, higher energy use), and increased crime (a documented trend, see below).

Here's an interesting infographic on the topic: http://thehickoryhound.blogspot.com/2012/08/decline-of-suburbs-interest…. A Web search on "decline of the suburbs" will lead to additional statistics and details on the trend. Would this be happening if there was the widespread view that a city was an anachronism?

Mr. Levinson-  Too many of your articles focus on cost control (muda).  I take as evidence this article, as well as your article on how all schools should be replaced with remote learning.

There is more in life than cost control.  Not all costs are bad.  Societies and businesses incur costs if the marginal benefit are greater than the marginal costs, as is taught in basic economics, and indeed, life.

Cities and their supporting infrastructures grew and developed because the marginal benefits of centralized tranportation, communications, manufacturing, education, cultural development, religous worship and even government services exceeds the marginal costs of maintaining and supporting these infrastructures.  This marginal benefit still exists even in the wake of natural disasters, which have been occuring for thousands of years. Cities endure.

School building exist because students, as a whole, respond better to teachers, and centralized buildings, than a computer terminal.  Schools teach children how to relate to their peers and superiors, how to behave in groups, how to drive.  Sure, remote learning couldl be more efficient for some, but will our society be better off if there is a proliferation of people who have not had to relate to anyone but their family?

Is your life empty of cost?  Is there not a single photo or picture festooning your walls?  Is your home not burdened with a single printed book? If you live in the suburbs, have you paved over your lawn?  Using your logic, there should be none-it is all muda, waste.  Yet, I think you find value in these wasteful endeavors.  Why?  It may be you find a benefit to these expenditures, but maybe I am incorrect.

I would encourage your future columns to focus on investment.  Otherwise, I will consider your articles to be a broken record, and simply stop reading them.  This is the worst fate a writer could face.

Regards,

Tom Johnson