I probably made a mistake when I moved to a sparsely populated area, but I like it; the space, air and quiet.
But, from Joseph Henrich’s “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar“:
Knowing the population of a city allows us to explain 70 percent of the variation among U.S. cities in innovation. The size of this relationship […] tells us that cities have synergy. For each 10-fold in population size […] there’s 13 times more innovation. If all cities did was concentrate individuals, we’d expect a ten-fold increase in population size to create a proportional increase in inventions. Instead, we get a 13-fold increase.
Henning's blog 