Citizens consider the whole picture, utopians tend to be mono-manically focused on single measures in multi-causal systems.

This is a never-ending form of debate in the US.  

I think the difficulty with this is that China is not a country where “women, elderly, and the youth thrive” more than in other countries. The Chinese equivalents to twitter are consumed by a never ending discussions of just how terrible life is for Chinese children (both the… https://t.co/fFR6ltnHRb

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) April 14, 2024

All life - individual, family, community, class, society, religious - is the result of outcomes arising from different trade-off decisions within the constraints of each of those frames.  The more free individuals are within a society, the greater the variance in decisions and the greater the v iariance in outcomes.

Only authoritarian and/or totalitarian systems can even aspire to equality of outcome or planned outcome.  And they always fail before they achieve.

You can plan and build dense cities with "walkable" amenities.  But only if you have a totalitarian and authoritarian system in which people are only allowed to make minor decisions.  If they are free to make decisions which best suit their values, needs, and aspirations, then you end up with urban sprawl.  

It is not that one is better than the other.  It is that one is the product of different trade-off choices than the other.  

The original poster. Patricia Mou, admires the outcome of dense Chinese cities.  And indeed, the depth and breadth of increased prosperity arising from the initial move to a more market based society has been a godsend to human well-being.  Three quarters of a billion people moved out of back breaking, lower productivity labor on the land and into cities over the past thirty years.  Cities which exploded in size and amenities.

If your goal is dense cities, then China is a world beater and the US doesn't rank.  That is what Mou is admiring.  And T. Greer is pointing out that there are all these other goals and objectives which are important as well such as the well-being, happiness, prosperity of individuals and the state of women and the elderly.  One could go on and on.  

The Mou's of the world admire the spectacles which totalitarian systems can produce.  And they can be remarkable.  But all system cannot be judged by their parts but must be judged by their whole.  Dense cities, but at what cost in happiness, and choice, and well-being?  It is not that there is no homelessness in China, it is that Mou can't see it.  It is hidden in the countryside and small towns and villages or in prisons or in hospitals.  

The Classical Liberal model with natural rights, rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of speech and movement, property rights, right to self-defense, due process, judgment by one's peers, based on government of the people, by the people and for the people, and grounded in empirical rationalism and the scientific method is the system which we know produces the greatest prosperity and well-being for the most people over the longest periods of time.  It works and it works everywhere.  Nice to have a cultural grounding in the values cultivated in Christianity, but it can work wherever those values exist.  

What is the mean and mode of income productivity in a nation?  What is the longevity and morbidity?  What is the record of innovation?  How well does the nation sustain itself?  These are measurable outcomes.  At any snapshot in time, any particular nation, any particular government is usually able to produce at least one singular accomplishment superior to others.  Tallest building.  Densest cities.  Fastest trains.  Best defense weaponry.  Most leisure time.  Shortest commutes.  Longest life spans.  Lowest number of hours worked.  Best education outcomes.  Sustainable fertility rates.  Cleaner air, water, earth, and cities.  Lowest cost of living.  Highest employment rate.  Least crime.  Smallest prison population.  Lowest taxes.  Best sustained growth in productivity.  Highest yield in innovation.  

All potentially desirable and all the result of ongoing trade-offs.  You want denser cities?  That comes at the cost of lower fertility rates.  You want less crime, that comes at the cost of larger prison populations.  You want more income, that comes at the cost of lowering your number of hours worked.  On and on.  The tradeoffs are legion and never ending.  The socioeconomic system is intricately complex and not easily managed much less controlled.  And it is always self-regulating.  

Mou's admiration of dense cities is either simply an admiration of authoritarian and totalitarian systems in which citizen choices are constrained to those which she most prefers or, and more likely, she is like most utopians, blind to complexity, risk, and trade-offs.  

You would not want to have been part of the Chinese system fifty years ago and I think there is a great probability that most people won't want to be a part of what it becomes in fifty years.  Indeed, between the economic crisis, demographic crisis, the environmental crisis, and the cultural trends producing the lying flat movement and other similar social tensions, you could argue that the current system is already in crisis.  No matter how many dense cities they have.

The charge X country does it better than us, always has to be answered with:  Give me ten desirable socioeconomic measures and lets look at the mean, median and mode comparison of those ten measure between the two countries.  We are not the best at everything but we tend to be better at most things for most people more of the time than any other country.  

One way of looking at the success of a country's culture, society and form of government is to compare the socioeconomic metrics (income, consumption, morbidity, education attainment, wealth accumulation, etc.) for the bottom quintile of your country to the middle quintile of others.  This tends to highlight disparities in overall performance.

As an example, the bottom quintile of Americans tend to exceed household income (including transfers), consumption, wealth, education attainment, etc. for the middle quintile of most, if not all, other OECD countries.  That is remarkable.  

Is it worth reducing that outcome in order to have denser cities?  That's the difference between utopians and citizens.  Citizens consider the whole picture, utopians tend to be mono-manically focused on single measures in multi-causal systems.