Amazon and Unaffordable Family Formation, by Steve Sailer.

Amazon famously looked all over the country for where to place a “second” headquarters. …

Some of these decisions no doubt are related to how much shakedown local officials were willing to pay. But an interesting point was made by Spotted Toad.

A couple of years ago he pointed out how smart capitalists, and Jeff Bezos didn’t get to be the Richest Man in the World by not being smart, like Unaffordable Family Formation. It helps them squeeze more work out of workers:

The firms like being in places too expensive to raise a family– families are distractions, at least in the short-run. And once the smart set is composed of people living with roommates in their late 20s and early 30s, in the kind of neighborhoods that Arab princes and Chinese tycoons use as credit mobility vehicles, in a metropolitan mating market that facilitates everything but commitment, one can’t help but feel that the concentration of economic activity in spots of white-hot unaffordability will intensify, rather than relax.