This Atlantic article examines “Why do the most talented cluster together?” The author seems to have coined the term “means metros” which he uses throughout to refer to these growing concentrations of brains.
Most rural and many suburban areas, meanwhile, are being left behind. Significantly, young graduates are flocking in ever-greater numbers to the “means metros,” where they often live in penury until either making it or being forced out by the high cost of living.
Perhaps it is a term of demographics art - that I was not patient enough to search out. Whatever …
What’s behind this phenomenon? Some of the reasons for it are essentially aesthetic—many of the means metros are beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in. But there is another reason, rooted in economics: increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value.
The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth—in fact, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas declared the multiplier effects that stem from talent clustering to be the primary determinant of growth. That’s all the more true in a postindustrial economy dependent on creativity, intellectual property, and high-tech innovation.
Places that bring together diverse talent accelerate the local rate of economic evolution. When large numbers of entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, designers, and other smart, creative people are constantly bumping into one another inside and outside of work, business ideas are more quickly formed, sharpened, executed, and—if successful—expanded. The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes.
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