Urban Death Traps

“Jefferson’s preference for yeoman farmers”: it was easy enough for the slave-driving gentry to romanticise farming, I suppose. Especially if a “revolution” lets them default on their debts and conquer more land from the Indians.

Pardon the argumentum ad fictum, please (and my pseudo-Latin).

The happy-go-lucky novel “The Wizard of Oz” has a mighty stark take on rural life. That said, perhaps life at the two extremes of social density were the ones that embodied the “happiness lottery” and that the transition zones, suburbs/exurbs/what-have-you, embodied the “safe bets” where there was little chance of great success or great failure.

Given that bit of dubious argument, for how many folks does the perceived chance of great success, even at the risk of great failure, determine their level of happiness? Yeah, the outcomes may have sucked, but were they happier anyway because of their perceptions of city life?

See “Oliver Twist” for a similar sentiment to what you are looking for.
Machiavelli was in political exile for trying to play both sides of the same coin – he himself didn’t want power, he sought a stable Italy and a place for himself in it in government. The prince might be an ode to the strong monarch, but his personal views favored the Republic morally.
He just didn’t expect Italy to pull a republic out of itself with all the internal strife it was suffering.
Machiavelli was right.

Re: cities – you have a duality – it was a haven for industrialization, ergo jobs for the poor. Unhealthy work environments and cramped quarters leads to diseases breeding, ergo cesspool of death. But at the same time, industrial cities were also investment centers, political centers, and religious centers.
Archeologically, cities clustered around a temple, part of which was dedicated to the local ruler(s). This duality of religion and military protection is what gathered people together – life was safer in a city, not more dangerous.
Conversely, the more successful you were as a collective, the more attractive a target you became.

BTW: what is the lower bound on “city” that we are talking about? There are many archeological cities that consistently thrived and could hardle be called a “death trap” apart from their eventual military fall.

Farming wasn’t a subsistence-starvation choice. Farming occurred because it brought profits the more you planted. you earn enough over your subsitence to trade and reinvest for a larger field and greater profits.
True, there was risk – there is always risk – but relegating it to mere subsitence farming is also painting a one sided history.

please note the modifier genetic black holes. despite the fact that moving to a city likely decreased one’s chances that copies of one’s genes would be floating around in 4-5 generations, it probably did still make one free. but mortality was an issue, e.g.:

In the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a substantial mortality ‘penalty’ to living in urban places. This circumstance was shared with other nations. By around 1940, this penalty had been largely eliminated, and it was healthier, in many cases, to reside in the city than in the countryside. Despite the lack of systematic national data before 1933, it is possible to describe the phenomenon of the urban mortality transition. Early in the 19th century, the United States was not particularly urban (only 6.1% in 1800), a circumstance which led to a relatively favorable mortality situation. A national crude death rate of 20-25 per thousand per year would have been likely. Some early data indicate that mortality was substantially higher in cities, was higher in larger relative to smaller cities, and was higher in the South relative to the North. By 1900, the nation had become about 40% urban (and 56% by 1940). It appears that death rates, especially in urban areas, actually rose (or at least did not decline) over the middle of the 19th century. Increased urbanization, as well as developments in transport and commercialization and increased movements of people into and throughout the nation, contributed to this. Rapid urban growth and an inadequate scientific understanding of disease processes contributed to the mortality crisis of the early and middle nineteenth century in American cities. The sustained mortality transition only began about the 1870s. Thereafter the decline of urban mortality proceeded faster than in rural places, assisted by significant public works improvements and advances in public health and eventually medical science. Much of the process had been completed by the 1940s. The urban penalty had been largely eliminated and mortality continued to decline despite the continued growth in the urban share of the population.

The British upper class spent their summers in London (“The Season”) when Parliament was in session and debutantes attended balls. That’s the lowest disease-burden season in a cool country. They preferred to live on their low density country estates the rest of the year. (The mild climate allowed hunting late into the fall.) The British upper class was notably healthy.

Rural areas traditionally had three kinds of farms.

Good farms on which you could grow enough to adequately feed your family even in the bad years, which traditionally occur every 7 years.

Average farms on which you might lose a child or two in a bad year.

Bad farms on which you would likely lose all your children in a bad year, and you might go with them.

I think you can figure out where immigrants to the cities came from. Hint: the farmers on the bad farms knew they were on bad farms.

And the younger sons of the good and the average farms had no choice but to move onto the vacant bad farms, or to the cities. When emigration to the city was not available, deaths on the bad farms kept the population stable despite the high birth rate.