[surgical_fire]

This was a very balanced take.

But I don't understand why people make such a fuss about some cities losing prominence and eventually crumbling from a previous period of wealth. This happens as history and technology progress.

I don't see how wealth is lost when it is just being redistributed. The workers didn't disappeared, they are just living elsewhere, bringing business opportunities and improving across many different places. Perhaps it will be healthier for the economy as a whole than having only a handful of cities as beacons of investment.

[lukemercado]

> I don't see how wealth is lost when it is just being redistributed. The workers didn't disappeared, they are just living elsewhere, bringing business opportunities and improving across many different places.

If I'm recalling the theory of it correctly, the whole reason Business Clusters exist (and form) is because there is, essentially, value in being together. Or at least, there's economic value in reducing the logistics required to move goods from one part of the value chain to another. For this reason I don't suspect we'll see the dispersal of manufacturing business clusters.

A huge part of my digging was trying to understand whether this applied to Silicon Valley or not. I decided that it did, but not because of the software, instead it was because of the VC + Startup relationship. VC's want to meet the people they're giving millions of dollars to and startup founders want to meet the people they're giving control (or massive influence) of their company to. It remains to be seen whether Zoom satisfies this need or not.

> Perhaps it will be healthier for the economy as a whole than having only a handful of cities as beacons of investment.

It might. Technology has changed dramatically since we last had material distribution into the suburb and rural areas of the nation. Maybe that will overcome the benefits of centralization.

[nradov]

Traditionally VCs centered around Sand Hill Road wanted all of their portfolio companies within easy driving distance so that they could attend at least two in-person meetings per day. Obviously that requirement has started to break down.

Proximity to universities has also been a key factor. Silicon Valley has two world-class research universities plus numerous second and third tier schools nearby to act as sources for new technologies for commercialization.

In the early days proximity to Moffett Field and NASA Ames also helped to launch the Silicon Valley innovation engine. There was a lot of cross pollination of people and ideas with military and aerospace.

[surgical_fire]

I understand centralization in the sense that you so aptly put in bringing benefits in a very similar vein of economies of scale.

A bunch of businesses in the same city benefit from shared infrastructure (in a broader sense) and a large pool of labor.

But when we specifically talk about knowledge work, where the output is not a physical good (and even when the output is a physical good but that requires a lot of knowledge work before it can be produced) does the centralization even make sense? Technology vastly expanded the possibilities in terms of infrastructure and pool of labor. The limits now may be more in terms of the cultural shift and government regulations.

[bfeynman]

It's because politician's focus is to keep themselves employed and re elected, with entirely short term focus. They have special interests from the wealthy who try to influence policy, and usually wealthy people are in a system of making income off of others (i.e ownership).

To your point, it must just be a modern phenomena of the 24/7 news cycle and internet to get loud voices out there faster. Because if you look at the rust belt and places like Ohio that were thriving industrial cities you can clearly see that places come and go. Detroit is another good example of a new less glamorous normal. There are certain benefits of density w.r.t to economics and such but a river runs its course, if you try to mess with it one way it will eventually change in another.

[local_crmdgeon]

Some of us like those cities and don't want to see them die? That's a huge blow to the lives of millions of Americans.

[surgical_fire]

Don't want to see them die at the expense of people that don't want to live there?

Remember, what is being discussed here is the fact that with remote work, commercial real state is low in demand. So we are effectively talking that workers prefer not to live there, given a choice, and the companies are fine in employing them remote.

The place didn't die. It's still there. But many people prefer to live elsewhere. You can remain there if tou like it so much, no one is stopping you.