Comment 51050

By Ryan (registered) - website | Posted November 02, 2010 at 18:41:46

Has the author or the speaker at Mac ever heard of musicians jamming and creating music by sending music tracks back and forth?

The Postal Service comes to mind, but your point stands. The "World is Flat" model holds that place no longer matters, but the economic evidence seems to run against this.

If anything, as Richard Florida and others have argued, the world is becoming more "spiky" as dense clusters of concentrated wealth, innovation and entrepreneurial activity become progressively more concentrated.

The term I've seen used for this phenomenon is Jacobs externalities after Jane Jacobs, who noticed that dense urban environments confer a net boost in both the innovation rate and the productivity of municipal infrastructure. (It rather sounds like the concept of a Marshall space, though I haven't compared them yet.)

The reason vibrant cities have a premium cost of living over low density suburbs - and why people are increasingly willing to pay that premium - is that even at a higher price, the net benefits and opportunities of being in that dense, concentrated environment justify the higher cost.

The trick for a given city is to figure out what it's good at and leverage that specialty into innovation and growth.

Comment edited by administrator Ryan on 2010-11-02 19:46:11

Common sense is that which tells us the world is flat.
-- Stuart Chase

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