| Great question. The short answer is that there are many social goods which are only available when people of like mind are in the same physical location. Among other things: 1) Walkable communities where everyone has some things in common are extremely popular (e.g. college). 2) By contrast, today many of us live corridored lives in anonymous apartment complexes, knowing more people at work than at home. Just from an efficiency perspective, that is a huge waste of time and life. Every single person there has to do a commute (or get on the internet) to meet people they know. 3) The specific location that people end up concentrated at is unimportant. But being located near someone else will be extremely important for the foreseeable future; among other things: you can't read body language, you can't yet easily collaborate on physical objects, and people can't yet reproduce over the internet :) 4) In more detail, it's a bit like dinner. Whether you meet your friends at place X or place Y doesn't matter. What matters is that you meet your friends in person. You could be more technically precise and say only the variance in location matters, and not really the mean (the specific spot on the surface of the earth). Anyway, I have a much longer version of the essay (really, a short book) that I had to edit down which went into this and related qs. I'll post that at balajis.com soon. |