A common oversight of the economics first crowd is that standard of living tells us anything about quality of life. The two terms aren’t synonymous. Food and housing and entertainment may be better in the cities on a per dollar basis (highly questionable), but then you have to subtract all the shitty aspects of urbanoid living that lower quality of life, such as noise, pollution, sweltering heat island effect, racial diversity, crime, claustrophobia, smelly mass transit, lack of authentic nature retreats, disconnection from the land and from ancient self-survival skills, being stuffed like sardines into grotesque dehumanizing chichi tenement housing, and of course the final blow to Quality of Life: a vulgar, degrading dating market that pushes men and women apart and delays and defiles family formation.
Rural living, and to a lesser extent suburban living, have it in spades over city living on any index of Quality of Life you choose to examine in good fatih.
And really, that last point I made says it all. Urbanoids have lower fertility than do ruralites. Cities are population and sanity sinks, where wombs go to die, hearts go to blacken, and minds go to rot. There’s no better real world evidence of a high quality of life than family formation and high fertility, ie investment in the future because you cherish the present and want to bequeath it to your progeny.
