[yowlingcat]

Excellent points. I'm again reminded of this 2S[1] investment article about the value of gross margins. I find particularly insightful your comment about tech work done in tech hubs which is CapEx, creativity and presumably margin heavy as well (to support the first two). One could say, well isn't it possible for this work to dry up? And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of investing is to perennially keep a portfolio fresh and full of the most cutting edge, margin heavy firms (when adjusted for risk adjusted returns compared to the nominal risk free return rate). Well, theoretically anyways.

[1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...

[danans]

> And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of investing is to perennially keep a portfolio fresh and full of the most cutting edge, margin heavy firms (when adjusted for risk adjusted returns compared to the nominal risk free return rate). Well, theoretically anyways.

I understand what you are saying here, but this perspective sees investment as the driver of the creativity of cities, while another perspective that I put more weight on is that the creativity of cities and the culture they create is a byproduct of human social/group psychology, itself a result of the fundamental reality that there is more security in numbers.

Investment, whether private or public, is then just a way of incentivizing the creativity machine of natural human agglomerations to produce ever more novel stuff.

Or put more succinctly: culture leads, investment follows.

[yowlingcat]

It's an argument with a lot of merit. I think there's a chicken and the egg situation, but I think you're right in that the prime mover is probably the culture rather than investment. That goes along with another saying I think I've seen a lot of mileage, which is that politics is downstream from culture. Seems to follow that investment would follow too from there as well.