[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.