This seems a very important point, if it's correct. It affects so many of the big stories we see in the news, from SV's housing shortage to the widening gap between Republicans and Democrats. It would also mean that Y Combinator making founders move to SV (at least temporarily) turns out to be perfectly aligned with the times.
"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process. To succeed, cities need a critical mass of highly educated workers engaged in the regular, often informal, exchange of ideas. Once this critical mass comes into being, it feeds on itself: Innovation hubs attract new innovators in a self-reinforcing process, while areas lacking this critical mass fall further behind.
In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger.
This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."
"Economies of agglomeration" [0] have explained the phenomenon of urbanization for quite a while. It's not a stretch to think that there's an intellectual corollary. Why do university researchers work in centralized walkable enclaves?
Greater connectivity amplifies the productivity of headquarters cities by enabling them to more readily project their power and distribute their output globally. With easy access to the output of Silicon Valley/Seattle/New York, there's less reason for each Nowheresville to have its own knowledge-work economy. The once-powerful bank manager of your local Chase is replaced by an algorithm in New York. The once-lucrative IT systems engineering work at your local manufacturer is replaced by AWS in Seattle. And so on.
... which is a terrible, terrible thing and a recipe for the rise of disastrous politics or even the descent of the majority of humanity into a new dark age.
The phenomenon you describe is a problem. It's one of the greatest problems of the early 21st century.
Personally, I think it's a golden opportunity to transition from a nation of sprawled-out houses and freeways to one of dense condo towers and subways. The social and environmental damage of 50 years of car-centric white-flight suburban sprawl cannot be walked back soon enough; a mass migration to transit-centric megacities is one of few realistic prospects for averting climate change.
But the ascendant cities have decided not to accommodate any substantial population growth, so it's just another grotesque episode of gentrification and displacement, replacing city populations without really growing them, and only the most affluent from small cities and towns have a chance of making it in the more productive ones.
I'm not sure what the problem is. Land prices for multifamily-residential zoned parcels would reflect the most efficient multifamily-residential structures allowed. I'm not terribly concerned with the price of land in my neighborhood: I split ~5 houses' worth with 500 neighbors via a 35-story building.
Given the premise that cities have a fundamental advantage, what's the problem? Just wait a bit and liberals in cities will vastly outnumber rural conservatives, no?
This would eventually result in violent revolution. Suppressing that revolution will require a complete forfeit of civil liberties.
There's another reason it's bad too, and it's economic: in this world you will not be able to get ahead. These super-concentrated mega-cities will see runaway real estate inflation due to the "law of rent," while jobs will be scarce elsewhere. The choice will be: move to a "real" city and spend all of your surplus income on rent, or live elsewhere and have no opportunity to advance your career. The urban model looks a lot like the old "company store" model, which is a form of feudalism more or less.
In the end this future looks like a 1980s B-grade cyberpunk dystopia: endless slums and rural wastelands patrolled by drones and special forces officers and dotted by gated totalitarian enclaves for the super-rich. "DNA sample and body scan are required for entry..."
This is the direction we're headed if the cities that are absorbing the economy continue to reject population growth. But there's no reason they can't affordably include a much greater proportion of the population in denser structures.
I think Trump's rise isn't explicable only in the light of _economic_ stagnation in small towns. Growing insularity and racism (or maybe a climate where those are freely expressed?) are to blame as well.
Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?
Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.
> Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?
Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is sometimes available for copy-paste.
The point is to compare the experience of collaborating deeply with someone who is physically present vs. someone who isn't, not the organizational dynamics of a partial-remote team. I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier. It might be rational to make a conscious tradeoff to optimize for labor and real estate costs vs. collaboration efficiency, especially if you only need to coordinate your separate tasks vs. genuinely work together on the same design and problem-solving activities. But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams.
> I don't think it's terribly controversial that collaborating in person is much, much easier.
It's fairly controversial, especially among engineers. Not all engineers, but a sizable percentage of engineers are not comfortable in social collaboration - especially forced social collaboration stretching over multiple hours for difficult tasks.
As far as 'easier' goes, 'easier' isn't always 'better'. While that online collaboration across a slack channel may have higher friction, it would also have many benefits as well. Other people can follow the entire process, so continuous status updates aren't required. The chat can be stored so if the issue happens again, it's easy to reference back to what was done.
> But it's entirely unsurprising to me that innovation is more likely to come from collocated teams.
I don't think this is proven anywhere, and may be one of those things where you think it is correct, but it really isn't. Fully integrated remote work as we have today is a very new phenomenon and there hasn't been much research into it. Further, many quick growing startups that are looking very promising are taking the 'remote first' approach and seem to be benefiting from it from an outsider's perspective.
> a sizable percentage of engineers are not comfortable in social collaboration
There's some upper limit on what you can accomplish as a sequestered lone-wolf genius. I don't deny that people with such working styles have made impressive contributions, but the bar for "innovation" is rapidly climbing and will soon surpass what anyone can do in isolation. That's a pretty normal thing to happen as a field matures.
The detached, contractor-like model where you only need to communicate to receive well-defined tasks and deliver well-defined output has substantial benefits for fulfilling many business needs. If I worked on a software assembly line, there would be no need for communication outside the ticketing system. But when you're doing something new, not yet understood, and bigger than one person, you're going to need to talk about it. (Obviously you can still do that with phone/videoconferencing, but the friction it imposes on conversation is real).
> There's some upper limit on what you can accomplish as a sequestered lone-wolf genius. I don't deny that people with such working styles have made impressive contributions, but the bar for "innovation" is rapidly climbing and will soon surpass what anyone can do in isolation. That's a pretty normal thing to happen as a field matures.
I don't think this part is up for debate. It's more about how that social collaboration is handled in the best manner for everyone involved that would be up for debate.
Just because social collaboration is needed, doesn't mean everyone has to go out for drinks together or live together in a small apartment. That part is obvious, right? But just because social collaboration is needed doesn't mean people have to be together in the same physical space either.
I think the main point is that the type of social collaboration that is inducive for creative innovation fall within the realm of close physical proximity and whatever benefits that entails.
I don't know if this is substantive but I think that's the argument.
This answer does not jive with my experience working remotely nor my experience working in an office while working with a majority remote co-workers. The problems a remote team faces when it comes to producing good technology are not solved that simply IMO.
I've found that, in broad strokes, communication doesn't happen as often as it should, even when all developers are collocated in the same office. It's easier to keep plugging away at something than ask for help, and many would rather develop their own ideas solo than solicit input early on and give up that control.
It's been my experience across three different jobs and many more teams that these problems all get much worse when developers are no longer collocated.
And I know there's always someone like yourself popping up in the comments saying that it can work well, but I've never personally experienced this.
I have to wonder if we can’t learn something from newer social media platforms and apply it to productivity ecosystems. The fact it’s almost tough to not share any activity may be important. There’s so much effort we have to expend to construct thoughts professionally but in office situations besides personal connections that are only possible offline (sports and other non-digital recreation) we tend to have a lot of half-baked ideas and easily overhear conversations from others against our normal flow of thought (why open floor plans are oftentimes highly criticized). When we’re heads down coding we’ll miss all this even if people are physically colocated.
Among higher level folks that don’t code or design or other technical work perhaps it’s more important for the ad hoc communication styles.
Maybe it’s even just rate of communication though? I type easily over 100 wpm and my typing is probably faster than I can talk. But when typing it’s synchronous versus conversations are streamed protocols with chances for interruption and such to reclarify meaning that is much slower when you have to buffer everything first in one payload and wait for ack. Maybe someone that’s studied communication can actually give some concrete data on my hunch?
That's really the crux of it. Remote work is a cultural problem, not technical...
I've worked on very remote-friendly teams, the tendency to work in isolation was a constant problem. But properly using tools like email/slack/wikies was sufficient once we addressed the cultural aspect.
I’d agree with this. In environments that are partially remote the people in the office often leave the remotes out of conversations they should be involved in. On remote focused teams, the problem goes away because the communication medium is the same for everybody.
Time zones and work schedule discrepancies are a bigger hindrance for remote teams in my experience.
So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local? I guess if your intention is to prove a point, but the cost in overhead and diminished output from those who are local seems a bit excessive for my taste.
> So for the sake of pretending that the remote team members are able to contribute as much as the local ones you hobble those who are local?
Even when everyone is local, I have found the best communication occurs when forcing everyone to pretend they are remote. So many times person A talks to B and they make some incorrect decision or assumption that person C would have been able to head off if they were involved.
Having the same conversation in group chat or group email does two things. First, it lets others engage if they need to without being actively interrupted. In my example above person C could have stepped in when noticing the conversation in group chat.
Second, the conversation is now perfectly documented. "What was that decision we made 2 weeks ago? Oh yeah, it's in chat/email." I also find that writing really makes people think. Bezos is famous for forcing people to write their ideas down in memos before meetings[1].
The missing person scenario above can be worked around if everyone is in the same office, but people hate sharing open spaces today. It also does not solve the documentation issue.
I'd suggest that if you've made up your mind that distributed teams are not going to work together effectively, you probably shouldn't have distributed teams. Not that best practices are always followed, but it's pretty standard practice that distributed teams should try to avoid things like offline decision-making by co-located workers as much as possible.
Yeah, I work in an open space environment but we get to work at home from time to time when the need arises. I'd say I'm at least twice as productive at home than in the office.
The time working remotely worked best for me, I spent three to three and a half days a week interacting with coworkers, meeting, troubleshooting and identifying problems. Then on fridays I sat in a coffee shop coding like mad to address one or more of the things I learned by talking to people.
My code (central library six products used to interchange data) was good because I saw it reflected in the experiences of my coworkers.
To experience that I had to train people to interact with me when they got stuck. I needed to be absent one day a week so that I had an opportunity to do something about what I learned. To execute the plan I had built up all week. Almost half of the code I wrote all week was done on fridays. But it was often the most useful.
Open office is the complete disaster result of an unholy alliance of management trying to skate by on the cheap and agile consultants pimping their latest slogans.
Even without open office, there is so much chit-chat, gossip, politics, posturing (how about a meeting to discuss the upcoming meeting), and other crap that gets swept under the rug as collaboration.
Don't forget that certain personality types just can't handle working from home or in a quiet environment. They'll just go bonkers, so they run around telling everybody else that you can't be creative and collaborate without chatting someone up in the urinal next to you.
The top comment spin is so humorous that you would almost think it's a troll, but probably not.
I'm about twice as productive at home too, when I have a concrete solo task. But early in a project, when we're not sure what it is yet, collaboration matters.
Time differences also play a big part in effective remote collaboration. I'm not just talking about the obvious 12 hour-ish time differences between something like California and Hyderabad. Even the 3 hour difference between east coast and west coast can have a big impact.
For instance, after my second cup of coffee I'm ready to really start cranking through some ideas, troubleshooting, solutioning, etc. But my colleague in New York has just finished a big lunch and is settling in to spend the rest of his afternoon focusing on the problem he researched that morning. He is understandably annoyed at having to deal with my caffeine fueled mania.
Sure. Practically every open-source project with more than a single contributor does it all the time. In commercial projects, decisions about location aren't made by developers.
Large open source projects are often created by, and receive the bulk of their contributions from, tech company offices where real-time face-to-face communication is happening behind the scenes. Just last week, a few people on my team in San Francisco working on something related to a Google open source project drove down to Mountian View for lunch to discuss it with the authors.
When you don’t have that luxury, it takes so much longer to get patches upstreamed precisely because the design controversies have to be hammered out in asynchronous text. Even then, it’s often down to a benevolent dictator for the project or the topic area to approve or deny, there’s nothing like the genuine collaboration of two employees in the same building working towards consensus.
Even for Google — when I was on the Chrome team a few years ago (to pick a nice open example, in case anyone wants to stalk my commit history) my most important collaborators were three and twelve time zones away.
What many projects don't discover until too late is that the practices that let you work effectively across ∆x are the same ones you need to work effectively across ∆t, and no airline can fly the new hires to last year's face-to-face.
Agree! In my experience successful remote work is associated with 2 things:
1. extremely well defined problem domains
2. incrementalism
For lots of engineers, those 2 points describe their job. Lots of (incremental) value is created that way.
But I'd argue that the larger gains accrue to those companies -- or those cities -- where work is being done in non-well-defined problem domains. And not incrementally, but by big leaps, experiments, and messy failures.
In fact, you could go farther and argue that in a competitive landscape, companies will quickly match each other in their performance in well-defined problem spaces, and the only way to actually compete at the margins is in problem areas that are, by definition, newer and not well defined.
It's hard to find niche forums where you have small communities these days. Or maybe I lost touch with what the young crowd is doing. From my school times, I remember hanging out on forums where we worked on things like reverse engineering Siemens feature phones. Or my town's IRC channel. Or weird international places like cdc discussions (or was it nsf?).
I don't even know we're I could find people with commitment to such ideas anymore. Maybe some private slack instances, or diving into one of the distributed Twitter replacements?
I'm not saying these were placed where invocation actually happened, but I know they were a jump start place for many people. It's hard to have meaningful, small, dedicated communities online these days. Anything good gets popular and anything too popular gets bad in the end.
I think to a degree the runaway success of Stackoverflow had the unfortunate side effect of sucking enough of the oxygen away from some dedicated forums to kill the critical mass needed to maintain these communities on an ongoing basis.
I'm a long-time FOSS advocate; but I don't see this. I read the Open Source example to suggest that interested participants can overcome the disadvantages of remote collaboration. Oh, and getting (and giving) tiny slices of time from The Right Person overwhelms the utility of lots of time from Random People.
Most people working on a FOSS project work in a corporate office with others who rely on the project and have an interest in its future direction and quality.
I believe it’s true, yet some of the best work of man was done largely alone. Einstein had his miracle year not at a university but by himself at the patent agency in which he worked and at home in his apartment in Bern. He was all but isolated from peers with very little face-to-face time with anyone who understood just a little about advanced physics. In our time, he could have been working from home somewhere in a small town, couldn’t he?
He actually had a little club of three people, who discussed physics. However, I'm not sure of the time line, I think it was before his miracle year.
Explaining an idea to someone (rubber ducking) can help a lot. It may be that he had the hint of the ideas before, and spent a year working out the details, and writing them up.
Everybody likes to pick these miraculous examples. Sure, Einstein worked alone. Did the people who expanded and industrialized his theories also worked alone?
I’d say solo genius, lone wolf kind of work is the minority of work. And it’s probably not enough to keep employed huge masses of people.
In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to
argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do
creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on
earth with the flick of a finger.
I think that effect is true to a limited extent. People could do creative work in countries such as Vietnam, India, Thailand and communicate their ideas to anywhere on Earth;
The equalisation of Geography didn't apply between rural vs urban. It applied between developed and developing countries.
I can speculate several reasons why, but without deep enough research or sources I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader. (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bsder is an interesting comment)
I used to agree with this 100%, particularly as I was teaching myself to program. Now I don't. Not even a little bit.
I learned to program, almost entirely, on my own, in a vacuum. I started learning to program just before I was pulled into my second military deployment, years on the job at Travelocity, and then refined my skills during my third military deployment.
It wasn't completely a vacuum as I could talk to people online. I learned most of my early architectural concepts from practicing against the recommendations of Douglas Crockford. I had nobody in the real world I talked to about my programming. In reflection this made me a substantially better programmer, and I never realized it until somebody in the military explained why.
I am a JavaScript developer. I first started learning to program just before abstraction libraries became the religious dogma that nobody could live without and ultimately coalesced around jQuery. This was not a technology phenomenon it was a social phenomenon. I largely missed the insanity that was so popular in the social business world as I was bouncing around various FOBs in Afghanistan without an internet connection. I learned to write against the vanilla DOM and optimize my code to perform quickly, cross browser, with simplified logic. I didn't an abstraction library and a bunch of dependencies to slow me down.
When I came back to Travelocity my ability to write fast code in the browser that just always seemed to work earned me a promotion and I became a senior developer and the A/B test experiment guy for the company.
When I started my second deployment I taught myself to program by writing an open source code beautification tool that worked in the browser. Node.js was just invented and I wasn't aware of it just yet, so my tool was limited to the browser. I taught myself language parsing for various different kinds of grammars. Much of this code mostly worked but it was poorly constructed and certainly not 100%.
When I was sucked into my third deployment I wasn't skilled enough to be a software architect. I had more learning to do, but a few months in I really learned to refine my approach to architecture and wrote some new language parsers from scratch that turned out to be solid and extensible. At this time while I was again out of the mix from the corporate world large MVC frameworks became the rave that suddenly became the thing developers could not live without. I learned to live without them and continued programming on my own refining and extending my little open source application. I was easily able to apply the architectural concepts I taught myself in place of large generic MVC frameworks to produce code that is significantly smaller and generally executes much faster.
Late into my third deployment I overheard a conversation about the origins of Best Buy. The key guy, Richard Schulze, never went to industry trade conventions or focused on common industry practices for doing business of his new "Best Buy" store model. He had found the concept by accident and refined it over time into a more retail without commission concept that allowed his stores to out sell the competition. This was a process of refinement and reward over time by practice and experimentation. The concept was successful because it discard the social process of industry peers!
The social process is a means of validation. It lets you know how you fare against the median population you are competing against. If your goal is to be average the social process is your guide. If you want to be more than that you have to be willing to step back from what is popular.
> I learned to program, almost entirely, on my own, in a vacuum.
Innovation is what requires a critical mass. You can learn from books, or nowadays from the internet, any skill.
But what makes you move thousands of kilometers to a more vibrant city is the opportunity to grow beyond the old trends to create new ones.
Your achievement is impressive, but it just benefits you and your employer. Innovation is copied and used by the community as a whole.
That you are developing software for web browsers and are still able to maintain the notion that your innovations exist in a vacuum is flabbergasting. Who built the browser and made its API discoverable? Who made it so that you can write nearly the same code and target different browsers? Who built the operating systems browsers run on? The network protocols and infrastructure without which your webapps would at best be interesting diversions for the developer? Neither of these involved social processes? Your innovation, in the greater scope of things, is inconsequential. You reinvented the wheel because you had none, but you still reinvented the wheel.
> That you are developing software for web browsers and are still able to maintain the notion that your innovations exist in a vacuum is flabbergasting.
Who invented the software language you use or designed the earliest forms of hardware you use or discovered the electron? The fact that you type on a keyboard and yet consider your imagination innovative is flabbergasting.
The difference is that I don't type on the keyboard under the pretense that I am somehow particularly innovative in doing so. It's not even a question about the "earliest forms of hardware" or discoveries, it's about software that you directly use to make your work possible.
From your post I gather:
- You built a web application with some client side logic
- You didn't use any external dependencies (except, say, the web browser and its API specifically designed for this purpose)
- You taught yourself language parsing (a widely understood and documented problem)
- You architected some solution to couple data to a user interface, (like every other web developer before what, 2006?)
I'm not saying that this isn't impressive or interesting, and I'm not questioning your ingenuity in the absence of communication, but with respect to the argument that you innovated in a vacuum, where's the innovation and what's the vacuum?
My point is that if you had been able to communicate and collaborate with other developers and had a good idea of what problems were already solved and what problems needed to be solved, you might have turned that ingenuity into useful innovation rather than new wheels.
> My point is that if you had been able to communicate and collaborate with other developers and had a good idea of what problems were already solved and what problems needed to be solved, you might have turned that ingenuity into useful innovation rather than new wheels.
My point is that if you ask nearly any web or JavaScript developer everything new is always "a reinvented wheel". I do mean always. Most of these guys need a popular framework just to turn on their monitors and even when you take the framework away they generally consider any code written still some kind of a framework.
This isn't a technology problem it is a social problem of bad developers striving for normalcy when everything they see is "invented here" syndrome. The fastest way to solve for that problem is to separate yourself from trends and socially acceptable approaches. You have to keep those opinions to yourself though, because it shines a spotlight on peoples' insecurities.
I have spent nearly the entirety of my career learning this the hard way. Most developers don't want to be expert rockstars. They want to be employable. Urban centers are where you go to increase your chances of employment. You can innovate from anywhere.
> My point is that if you ask nearly any web or JavaScript developer everything new is always "a reinvented wheel". I do mean always. Most of these guys need a popular framework just to turn on their monitors and even when you take the framework away they generally consider any code written still some kind of a framework.
So this is about web or Javascript developers, not about the ideal conditions for innovation? It seems we're heading off topic.
> This isn't a technology problem it is a social problem of bad developers striving for normalcy when everything they see is "invented here" syndrome. The fastest way to solve for that problem is to separate yourself from trends and socially acceptable approaches.
How do you go about deliberately separating yourself from trends and socially acceptable approaches without knowing the current trends and socially acceptable approaches? The only other way I can think of is to stumble around re-inventing obvious things until you accidentally invent something new.
> You have to keep those opinions to yourself though, because it shines a spotlight on peoples' insecurities.
Maybe look for a different job? Perhaps one that isn't basically just about creating GUI-to-API bindings, a problem that has been solved so many times it isn't even funny?
> I have spent nearly the entirety of my career learning this the hard way. Most developers don't want to be expert rockstars. They want to be employable. Urban centers are where you go to increase your chances of employment. You can innovate from anywhere.
I don't doubt that you can innovate from anywhere. The question is whether innovation is at least partly a social process. You use yourself as an example to the contrary but IMO the example fails to prove your point. I have explained why I think so but you haven't really responded with a convincing argument as to why you are a good example of this.
That is merely my experience perspective. The ideal conditions for innovation are the problems you are willing to solve for.
> How do you go about deliberately separating yourself from trends and socially acceptable approaches...
You solve for valid problems that you encounter (or are brought to you) opposed to dreaming up imaginary problems to solve for. This is the kind of madness that YCombinator says to never do: invent a business problem merely to start a business. Trends are not problems you encounter. They are reactionary marketplace hysteria.
> Maybe look for a different job?
I enjoy writing software. I am not going to give this up because there are a lot of insecure developers who frequently whine and cry, as frustrating as that is.
> The question is whether innovation is at least partly a social process.
The question was whether movement to cities is important because innovation is a social process. I am merely suggesting that innovation is better when not dictated by social processes therefore the whole conversation about cities is completely orthogonal. People move to cities for employment, not for innovation.
Yes, but your perspective as a Javascript developer and what else software development wise?
> The ideal conditions for innovation are the problems you are willing to solve for.
Care to elaborate? If the problems I'm willing to solve have already been solved, how would that make for ideal conditions, for example?
> You solve for valid problems that you encounter (or are brought to you) opposed to dreaming up imaginary problems to solve for. This is the kind of madness that YCombinator says to never do: invent a business problem merely to start a business. Trends are not problems you encounter. They are reactionary marketplace hysteria.
What do you have to go by, in isolation, other than your imagination?
> I enjoy writing software. I am not going to give this up because there are a lot of insecure developers who frequently whine and cry, as frustrating as that is.
No, I mean, where do you even work where your coworkers whine and cry over your solutions? Sounds like a really shitty workplace. There are plenty of jobs writing software where this isn't the case. If you really want, there are entire categories of software development jobs where people would roll their eyes if you introduced a dependency for a 1000-line problem and rather re-invent everything, possibly finding novel ways to do it along the way. As a Javascript developer you're currently in a profession where the state of the art is to use hundreds of dependencies to scratch your earlobes, with a low enough barrier of entry that there are people making a living off of it having no idea how to use it outside Angular or React.
> The question was whether movement to cities is important because innovation is a social process. I am merely suggesting that innovation is better when not dictated by social processes therefore the whole conversation about cities is completely orthogonal. People move to cities for employment, not for innovation.
I agree that the conversation about moving to cities is completely orthogonal. What I don't agree with is that innovation isn't a social process, "not even one bit". I think I've made this clear, and I think I've made my argument clear.
> Who invented the software language you use or designed the earliest forms of hardware you use ...
Some of us here actually worked on badly made/failing hardware and computers without (dev) software ; let alone internet and mostly not even books or mags to check out.
I for one had no modem, no places to get literature/mags and no friends who had computers; whatever I needed as tools, I had to write myself (sprite editor, assembler, etc) based on 1 book that a colleague of my father got from Japan.
I learned about the hardware because computers where freakishly expensive but luckily had 74series (and before logic made up out of transistors) inside and when you would buy a computer, it would then often contain all the circuit diagrams so you could figure out what was happening and expand memory, make extensions etc.
Now, I'm not a very smart person and this is not a pissing contest, but what you are saying is just not accurate. You have a wealth of information and tooling at your fingertips that was out of reach for almost everyone but big companies in the 70s/begin 80s. Many people worked 'from first principles' with no help and continuously crashing systems without being about to ask anything. And yet we made interfaces, programs, ultimately everything you have now is based on the people who figured all this out back then.
A browser is the furthest from the hardware I can imagine; it is a (badly done imho) abstraction over the sheer bizarre power you have in front of you.
You might be brilliant at what you do, but let's be real about it.
> If your goal is to be average the social process is your guide. If you want to be more than that you have to be willing to step back from what is popular.
As much as I love Linux and GNU, neither is especially innovative. Just about every FOSS tool was invented elsewhere in a commercial setting before it was cloned or reinterpreted into open software.
The question is whether novel products or services can arise among distributed cultures. In my 30+ years in this business (software R&D), I've seen lots of examples that it cannot and few/none that it can. Those few people who grok a new problem that needs a mousetrap when nobody else has ever seen a mouse, somehow they need to communicate this problem / opportunity to the scientists and engineers who must build that first trap. In my experience, this is a LOT easier done in person than remotely, especially if you don't already know your makers well. Until remote communication improves at least ten fold, addressing new problems remotely will remain vastly inferior to doing it locally.
But the original goal of Linux was to create a personal free OS that had feature parity with Unix. It wasn't solving a previously unsolved problem, because the requirements were already given by Unix.
The stage of software that benefits the most from close collaboration defining the requirements in the first place. That's very hard to do in isolation, unless the requirement is trivial/obvious.
No doubt, later on, Linux developers came up with innovative new-to-the-world features for the OS, but a lot of these were developed by collaborative institutions like universities, companies, and governments.
He is also one of the biggest proponents of working only through online communication. He, as the sole contributor to Linux at that point with famed single line license, release linux to the open internet.
The entire philosophy is based on the idea of:
1. Being open to skepticism (this includes being technically evaluated on your work, which is possible through public submission of that work)
2. Allowing people to work on the things at which they excel.
If you don't subscribe to these ideas, it doesn't matter where you work, how you work or what you do. It will not be 'innovative'.
Over 20 percent of kernel contributions come from Intel and Red Hat. Over 90 percent of patches are written by people who work for corporations. Linux wouldn't be 10 percent of what it is now if it relied solely on volunteers communicating on the LKML.
The power structures (formal and informal) in towns are stifling. They tend to be fairly unified or homogenous.
Formal (new businesses challenging established players, even indirectly such as competing for talent) and informal (personal and/or political nonconformity) challenges to these power structures are punished mercilessly.
This is less true in cities, because with greater scale (and broader power structures with more players,) small "threats" to the established order can emerge and incubate, or even be nurtured by large competitors (think VC) without being directly crushed.
Having lived in both, I have found that informal challenges to power structures in cities are much more merciless. Ask any (nonconforming) conservative in nearly any large city, especially on either coast. Or in any online forum dominated by people from such places, for that matter.
On the other hand, people in the small towns and small cities that I have lived in are much more tolerant of the nonconforming aspects of my personal views and lifestyle -- which, ironically, they tend to view as 'liberal,' even though objectively I am much more 'conservative' than they are in most respects.
This new world driven by the constant emphasis on differences rather than on commonalities is exhausting, frankly.
> This new world driven by the constant emphasis on differences rather than on commonalities is exhausting, frankly.
I know this is technically off-topic and I'll likely be down-voted for an "Amen" post. But, Amen.
I seek, and have yet to find, a venue where folks regularly embrace commonalities, much less celebrate them, while together seeking solutions to society's ills from politically-competing perspectives.
This is absolutely backward. Cities enforce cultural homogeneity _much_ more than small towns. Try being conservative (or even moderate) in NYC or San Francisco.
NYC is home to one of the biggest Hasidic communities in the world. You can hardly get more conservative than that, and they seem to do just fine.
Also, the perceived mainstream culture of a city should not lead you to ignore the presence of ample subcultures within that city that are opposed to it. In those big cities, it might be hard to be a conservative if you still insist on having liberals be the main demographic of your social life, but if you actually seek out those with similar views to network and build community with, then the conservative population of definitely NYC and probably even SF is more than big enough to live your life among.
A Hasidic community is an identifiable minority group so would receive no criticism, similar to how ultra-conservative Islamic people are given a free pass by progressives and feminists.
> ultra-conservative Islamic people are given a free pass by progressives and feminists.
This is not how the world works; if you are in a group with differing opinions it's a bad strategy to think that everyone who do not share your ideas are colluding against you. Over here ultra-conservative religous people are much more likely to agree on topics, than some strange mismatch of other ideologies.
I also find it strange to state that Hasidic communities receive no criticism, I know nothing about how they live in NYC but based on world events I doubt they live a frictionless life.
> This is not how the world works; if you are in a group with differing opinions it's a bad strategy to think that everyone who do not share your ideas are colluding against you.
This is fine advice, if I personally did that I would certainly take it under consideration.
> I doubt they live a frictionless life
Considering no one leads a frictionless life, you're probably correct. However, you may have noticed that criticizing Jewish people is generally frowned upon moreso than other groups. Or, would you have me believe that all groups are treated mathematically identically by all other groups across all cultures?
I'm sorry, I've must have misinterpreted your post, but it seems unlikely based these short comments, you concentrate on how other groups affect you but seems to miss the reason the people might have for saying or doing certain things, and these ideas seldome represent homogeneous groups. From my perspective you should always take a step back when you think "those OTHER GROUP are so SOMETHING". The long european monotheistic struggle is a sign post of fear, uncertainty and doubt (I'm sure the Islamic conquests also did something similar, re: my comment above).
I'm not sure what part you mean should be mathematically identical it seems like a strange measure for social interaction, too many unknown variables, and too many individuals.
I suspect the problem might be on topics like this, the human mind has a bad habit of becoming impractically pedantic. So, when I write "ultra-conservative Islamic people are given a free pass by progressives and feminists", your mind interprets that (correctly) as an absolute statement, rather than a (correct) generalization.
> I'm not sure what part you mean should be mathematically identical it seems like a strange measure for social interaction, too many unknown variables, and too many individuals.
This was me returning the sentiment of extreme pedantry.
I've seen your meme before and I wondered why this specific connection is popular. Because your statement goes beyond being a generalization it might be acceptable in a closely knit group where everyone know who specifically you are talking about, but know this there are alot of feminists, you might as well be generalizing about drivers. So unless you are aiming for a chuckle from your friends the statement above will get you nowhere.
Your statement is a very radicalized view of reality, in this specific context and worse without context.
There are even Bay Area towns that are majority Republican (Atherton, Hillsborough). If we are talking San Francisco, look at the recent organized opposition to marijuana dispensaries for evidence of conservative values in action.
If I'm in a city, the airport is probably less than 30 minutes away. A town means 2+ hours to the airport or a ticket that is triple or quadruple from the tiny commuter airport.
If I'm in a city, a lot of office space already has a fiber connection. If I'm in a town, people will shrug and wonder what I'm talking about.
If I'm in a city, I probably get daily early deliveries from UPS and FedEx--maybe even multiple ones. If I'm in a town, I get a late delivery and pickup and that's it. In my hometown, the FedEx office wasn't open 3 days a week.
I can go on and on.
Running a business is risky enough without adding all that friction on top of it.
There's also friction for workers. If you work in a town, and your job sucks or your employer fails, you may have to move to another town. In a city, you pick up your bag and walk across the street.
On the other hand if you live in a city and the schools fail, then you're hosed.
Another theory I've seen: As the middle class gets squeezed, fewer families can maintain that standard of living with only one parent working.
In order for both parents to stay reliably employed, you need to be in a location where jobs are dense, so that spouse-A can find a new job without spouse-B quitting theirs... And vice-versa.
In contrast, when you can support the family on just one income it's easier to relocate as employment changes.
I’ll take my economic chances before having to live in the city. The quality of life just isn’t there.
Lower costs in the suburbs or rural areas means my runway is much longer than in the city, which offsets the job availability (6 months of city non-discretionary expenses is a year or more outside the city). I can also afford a 4 bed/2.5 bath house with a pool on a quarter acre, which would be impossible in the city.
Then again, the types of businesses you find in small towns often don't have to worry about how close the airport is, or having a fiber connection. By the time they're successful enough to have these requirements, they've likely already figured out answers to these problems.
That's also really self selecting. If your company depends on having any of those things you can't really open up in a city without those things to start with. Even if you do try competitors probably are opening in cities with those services and the combined advantages.
True, but that's true with anything. You don't hear people talking about how hard it is to open an Atlantic salmon farm in Ames, Iowa. You don't hear people talking about how hard it is to farm avocados in Nome, Alaska. If your business depends on fiber Internet service and close proximity to an airport, you're going to select your business with that in mind. I'd wager most businesses don't have those requirements, though.
I can name a multinational I've worked with in the past, East Jordan Iron Works. They're headquartered three hours away from the nearest major airport in a town of 2,000 people. The nearest airport where the smallest Delta or American flight will land is over an hour away in a city of just 15,000 people. That didn't matter when they started, and it certainly didn't stop them from expanding their business operations to Ireland or France in recent years.
> That didn't matter when they started, and it certainly didn't stop them from expanding their business operations to Ireland or France in recent years.
Actually, you're not quite correct on this.
EJ opened where it did specifically because it was close to what they were servicing--the logging industry.
The fact that they could continue operating without moving is probably more of a testament to inertia than value.
Fair points. I'd add that EJIW has a lot of infrastructure and can still get iron ore from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan on freighters that fit through the draw bridge in Charlevoix and then ship out to the Atlantic if necessary. So it kind of makes sense to stay there. Plus the summers in that area are absolutely incredible.
I wonder if a good portion of that is due to the continued collapse in manufacturing, mining, timber, and other areas that are now predominantly imports.
I don't really see how it could be that, since manufacturing in the USA is more valuable today than it has ever been, has a higher output than any other country but one, and more than some other continents, and makes up 1/3rd of GDP.
The GDP was relative, so even if the pie did get larger it doesn't mean the ratio couldn't go down.
"Manufacturing gross output and value added shares of the economy declined steadily between 1997 and 2013, as shown in Figure A. One reason for this decline is the rapid growth of manufactured imports, which have reduced the demand for domestically manufactured goods. Total imports of manufactured goods increased from $744 billion in 1997 to $1.83 trillion in 2014, rising from 8.6 percent of GDP in 1997 to 10.9 percent in 2013. Had it not been for the increase in manufactured imports, and of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods, manufacturing output and GDP would have been significantly higher in 2013"
You can hardly talk about cities booming, while ignoring the obvious and dramatic other examples.
The big epicenters of intense poverty and murder are all hyper concentrated in the cities, not in towns or rural areas. Baltimore has a murder rate 20-25 times that of a typical US town.
Or: LA's massive homeless encampments. Chicago. Detroit. etc.
West Virginia is really poor right? Considered one of the poorest states in the US, and has among the highest unemployment rates. You won't see homelessness, murder and extreme poverty in the towns around Morgantown like you do in the aforementioned cities.
The entire state of West Virginia has 1/5th as many murders as Baltimore, with three times the population.
Cities partially just make the poverty more visible. There's extreme deep wells of poverty all over the country, it's just more spread out so it goes unnoticed. In a city with tight space though the homeless get pushed together with the rest of society so they get noticed more. Cities do exacerbate it some because of tight housing supply and cost where other places poverty means they might just have a really bad house in the city there's not the space for it. It is also partially self feeding because there's just a lack of services for the homeless/poor outside of big cities and because cities are booming and productive there's just a lot of extra that can support a homeless person than in a rural or small town.
Rent in West Virginia is a joke. Rent in Los Angeles or Chicago is murder.
Also being homeless in West Virginia is a death sentence. You're going to have to get on a bus and go somewhere you can survive, which is usually a major city.
Cities are the future for the foreseeable future. Beyond benefits in information exchange they are also much more efficient in terms of energy usage and hence a great way to reduce energy consumption until we’ve finally solved our energy-related issues
On the other hand, in Canada, a smaller share of the Canadian population live in cities now than did in 2011. Small towns saw the largest growth.
It would appear to me that the efficiencies cities can provide are at odds with the cost of being able to provide sufficient shelter for the people of those cities. The high cost of housing, which is a large concern in Canada's major cities, is pushing people from these cities.
I’m not sure if high housing costs are really a long-term detriment to urbanization. It’s seems to me it’s more a sign of mid-term market inefficiencies (it simply takes time for housing to be build, urban planning to happen, regulations to change, ...). When population flows stabilize things will hopefully balance out. Still, it’d be really interesting if people in Canada would really truly move back to the countryside (and not just the suburbs)
Interesting! Do you have a source for that? I’d like to learn more. Is it really small towns, or just suburbs/exurbs/bedroom communities? Regardless, it’s a good reason to focus on making housing more affordable in cities (build more!).
Statscan[1]. The actual numbers are by population size. I use the term town and city colloquially here (technically speaking Canada has towns with hundreds of thousands of people and cities with thousands).
> Regardless, it’s a good reason to focus on making housing more affordable in cities (build more!).
I am going to have to disagree. Seeing the economic activity spread out to smaller communities has been the best thing to happen to Canada in a long time. I would argue that much of the countries woes are directly related to the drive into the big city that happened 10-20 years ago. As we've seen in Germany, a decentralized economy comes with many benefits.
> As we've seen in Germany, a decentralized economy comes with many benefits.
I’m not sure if I would call it decentralized. The economic powerhouses remain the big metropolitan areas (which are sometimes just a bunch of merged mid-sized cities). But yes, some of the richest cities are quite small such as Wolfsburg and Ingolstadt. However, that’s mostly driven by a single big company and not really by a truly sustainable network of economic activity. In addition, I know few people who’d really love to live in Wolfsburg...
Towns were hot where they had to motivate people to move there. Most of towns are XX century phenomena.
Now that people are already there and many of them are unemployed, they can pay peanuts and still expect workers to show up. The dynamics became toxic.
Only when local business sees such need in work that they need to expand, they have to offer good salaries to be competitive.
Looking at data for the small town I grew up in (current population: 1,200), it has grown by nearly 20% in the last five years. Compared to the nearest major city (~150 miles away), the median household income is 16% higher and the median individual income is 32% higher. The unemployment rate is 22% lower. None of that seems to indicate struggle to me, and anecdotally being able to get back and visit time to time, it doesn't feel like it is struggling. Booming seems more appropriate.
What may be notable is that the largest employer in town is a tech company who seems to have done quite well for itself, now employing about 150 people. I would suggest the town is doing well because of this company and the spinoffs that have come from it's success. That suggests to me that it may simply be that success begets success. Cities boom because they have have preexisting success stories to build from, small towns not necessarily.
That was partially my point though. If success begets success, cities are biased by the fact that they have already been successful. All communities started with nobody. A major business success of some kind is why these particular locations became cities over other communities.
Without a major success story under the belt of a small town, there is lack of capital, lack of expertise, lack of attention from the rest of the world, etc. that places with those success stories are able to thrive with. I mentioned my hometown because it would appear that if a small town can break out with a success story, then it starts to attract all the same things that cities do, suggesting to me that it is not so much the people as much as it the history that has resulted in cities booming.
Also anecdotally, I completely agree with you. I actually run a company that's still very small and only focused on two neighboring towns right now as case studies, but we're cataloging all the things that "boom towns" (as opposed to boom cities) are doing right to continue to grow and find success. And then we're leveraging that to push harder for the things these cities have done right and correct the things they're doing wrong. Outside of these two towns, we hope to find more towns with similar structures that could be successes in the future.
Every town can succeed with the right structures in place. The biggest thing is human capital: having people, and not only that, but keeping them in your town as much as possible. Easier said than done. Your idea of a "success story" driving that human capital is a great example of like-begets-like. The more successes you can point to, the more successes will exist.
What have you found in “boom towns” that may be taken for granted (or not exist at all) in “boom cities”? In other words, it’s easy for us to think of things that cities have and towns don’t; have you found a counter example?
I think it's really easy to point to things that successful towns have that successful cities don't have. The only hard part about it is somewhere out there, there is of course going to be exceptions to everything. If I say "a good town has this thing that a city doesn't", of course somewhere there will be a city that has that thing. So it's always a bit of a comparison, but that's how most people approach their city selection anyway: they know what general area they want to live in (likely close to work or family) and then they compare towns and cities in that area. It's rare to find someone comparison shopping between Austin, Texas and Lebanon, New Hampshire. I'm just prefacing my answer because of course this being the Internet, someone will find an exception to the rule and use it to say the rule is completely invalid.
The biggest difference between successful towns and successful cities, I think, is the exclusivity. If you're one of five million, you're going to look for smaller groups to align yourself with. You're not connected with New York, you're connected with SoHo. You're connected with the Upper East Side. You're connected with the Village. But in a small town, you tend to identify with basically the entire town. You can feel the pulse, you know the rhythms. It's your "stomping grounds".
There are a ton of other elements we're still working on feeling out. People in towns are more likely to own their own transportation than people in cities, so any activity or business that depends on that factor will thrive more. People in towns seem more likely to stay put longer term. They're more likely to own a home. They're more likely to be connected with nature, and those towns are more likely to be centered around recreational activities like recreational (as opposed to commercial) rivers or lakes. You're less likely to have to pay for parking, which makes getting in and out of town easier.
Sure you may not be able to walk to a Starbucks. You might not have fiber Internet. You can't find a Uber, and good luck with Postmates. Amazon doesn't have same-day delivery and UPS comes later in the day, and you might have to drive a bit to get to the city. But by far the biggest thing I've found about people who live in "boom towns"? They don't care about that, because they never go to the city. They have everything they need right in their own backyard, only cheaper and easier.
No, I read the article, not the book. Apparently he does consider the other cities which are declining (based on a quick read of the Amazon description), but it isn't clear how much time he spends on them.
But this would belie the title 'Why Cities Boom...' and comments here implying that urban centers are destined to prosper compared to rural areas. The reality is that some cities prosper and some cities are more horrible than nearly any rural area.
Great towns near great cities are the best compromise, IMHO. Cities are too noisy and stinky for me. But I need to have one close by for events that only a city can host. And for better air transport.
"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant innovation, which turns out to be a social process. To succeed, cities need a critical mass of highly educated workers engaged in the regular, often informal, exchange of ideas. Once this critical mass comes into being, it feeds on itself: Innovation hubs attract new innovators in a self-reinforcing process, while areas lacking this critical mass fall further behind.
In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick of a finger.
This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."