BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

1/Lots of tech companies and workers are making noises about leaving San Francisco, LA, NYC, and other "superstar" cities.

Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.

Let's take a hard look at what that would actually

 2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.

Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.

https://t.co/nQVCJrKvrB
3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.

The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.
4/In order to escape the prison of the superstar cities, tech companies and other knowledge industries will have to overcome the Four Jailers of Industrial Clustering:

1. In-person office productivity

2. Thick market effects

3. Knowledge spillovers

4. City life amenities
5/I'm actually pretty optimistic that companies can find ways to make remote work productive.

Studies show that working from home *some* of the time actually tends to raise productivity.

https://t.co/HK9DW99qAl
6/Does that mean people can work productively away from the office ALL of the time?

It's not clear yet. But remember, in order to shift out of top cities, tech companies only need to shift PART of their workforce to 100% remote.

That seems very doable.
7/Then there's the "thick market" effect.

Lose your engineering job in SF, and it's easy to find another nearby.

Lose your engineering job in Tulsa and you're in trouble.

Same goes for companies who need to find new employees.
8/To beat the thick market effect, companies and workers will need to learn to do 100% remote job search and hiring. They'll need to get comfortable working closely with people they've never been in a room with.

That seems like a difficult but doable shift.
9/VCs will also have to get used to investing in companies remotely.

In fact, this was a shift that needed to happen long ago, because VCs' cultural preference for in-person investing means that a lot of cities unfairly lose out.
10/But remote work, hiring, job search, and investing are all things that are possible as technology improves.

Companies will look for solutions, and they will find solutions.

But a harder challenge will be replacing the good things about cities that companies DON'T generate.
11/One of those good effects of cities is knowledge spillovers.

Many economists believe that when knowledge workers (like engineers) live in close proximity, they exchange ideas that boost their productivity.

https://t.co/hROA2pMOsw
12/No one company is responsible for knowledge spillovers. They happen outside the company.

So companies can't really replace this benefit of cities.

Maybe the internet will naturally replace knowledge spillovers. Maybe Stack Overflow is all we really need.

...Maybe??
13/Maybe universities, or industry associations, or other actors can try to recreate virtual spaces where engineers can mix, mingle, and share ideas? Just spitballing here.

Anyway, this going to be a taller order than switching companies over to Zoom/Slack.
14/Now we come to the fourth benefit of cities, and the most difficult to replace.

Cities are great places to meet people and do fun stuff.
15/Here's an important but subtle point:

If distributed remote work means that tech workers just move to DIFFERENT SUPERSTAR CITIES, you haven't really changed anything!
16/To really distribute the workforce, you need more than for San Franciscans to work in Tokyo and New Yorkers to work in LA.

You need to get knowledge workers to work in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cleveland, Ohio.
17/One function of cities -- dating -- actually seems somewhat easy to replace, since it's basically just a 1-to-1 matching process.

But social discovery -- meeting whole groups of friends online -- is a problem that no social media company seems to have solved yet.
18/And restaurants will be even harder. I can't even think of how cities like Tulsa will be able to achieve the variety and quality of dining options of cities like Los Angeles.

Maybe there is a way, but it'll take some creative supply chaining and matching!!
19/Anyway, so there you have it. To escape the prison that cities like San Francisco have become, knowledge industries will need to UNBUNDLE THE CITY completely, for the first time in human history.

It's a tall order. We'll see if they can do it!

(end)

https://t.co/3XYIftJAHd
20/Oh and if you like stuff like this, make sure to sign up for my free email list, so you can get my newsletter delivered directly to your inbox! :-)

https://t.co/FGppA1M8W6

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Noah Smith
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1/Lately I've been reading a ton of books about immigration and diversity. The most recent one is "Americanism in the Twenty-First Century", by @debbiejsr.

https://t.co/neqzyYVaYS

What did I learn?

2/This book is not very "pop". It's a dry political science book that's basically a concatenation of several research papers, all based on one big survey that was done in 2004.

3/The survey, the 21-CAS, asks people about how they define their own identity - race, national origin, and/or "American".

It also asks them about what they think being an "American" entails.

4/Basically, the survey asks people about 5 types of "Americanism":
1. Feeling like an American
2. Believing traditional American values like freedom
3. Civic participation (voting, etc.)
4. Multiculturalism vs. blending in
5. Being white and/or Christian

5/I edited out a few others (e.g. being born in America, being a citizen, speaking English). Anyway.

The upshot is that except for being white/Christian, most of these definitions of "American" get broad endorsement from all groups of people surveyed.
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Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!
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Yes, we have been more divided than we are now. Within living memory.


Labor disputes used to kill hundreds of people!

In 1932 Douglas MacArthur called in tanks on protesting veterans, injuring over a thousand people!

In 1967 there were 159 race riots in cities across

In 1921, rioters used airplanes to bomb black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Hundreds were killed in the riot!
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Noahtogolpe \U0001f407
Noahtogolpe 🐇
@Noahpinion
1/OK, so. Let's talk about Left-NIMBYism.

We all know about Right-NIMBYs, rabidly protecting their white-flight suburbs from Those People. And there are plenty of liberal NIMBYs too.

But NIMBYs of the Left are also a force to be reckoned

2/Left-NIMBYs have developed a canon of interlocking, mutually reinforcing beliefs about housing and urbanism.

These beliefs are mostly false, but they form a powerful "canon" that quickly ossifies into a hardened worldview.

It looks something like this:


3/Fortunately, Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs has written an article that perfectly encapsulates the Left-NIMBY worldview (and quotes me in it!).

So this is a teachable

4/Robinson selectively quotes a Bloomberg article of mine (https://t.co/iamRrW6oei).

Look at the part he quoted, vs. what I actually wrote!

Pretty different, eh? 😉


5/In fact, as I wrote in the article that Robinson failed to read more than one line of, it's theoretically possible that Left-NIMBYs COULD be right that allowing market-rate housing drives up local rents.

I take that possibility very seriously, as do YIMBYs.
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/OK, data mystery time.

This New York Times feature shows China with a Gini Index of less than 30, which would make it more equal than Canada, France, or the Netherlands. https://t.co/g3Sv6DZTDE

That's weird. Income inequality in China is legendary.

Let's check this number.

2/The New York Times cites the World Bank's recent report, "Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations Around the World".

The report is available here:

3/The World Bank report has a graph in which it appears to show the same value for China's Gini - under 0.3.

The graph cites the World Development Indicators as its source for the income inequality data.


4/The World Development Indicators are available at the World Bank's website.

Here's the Gini index: https://t.co/MvylQzpX6A

It looks as if the latest estimate for China's Gini is 42.2.

That estimate is from 2012.

5/A Gini of 42.2 would put China in the same neighborhood as the U.S., whose Gini was estimated at 41 in 2013.

I can't find the <30 number anywhere. The only other estimate in the tables for China is from 2008, when it was estimated at 42.8.
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Academic staff at universities can't be open about the complaints against them - and most complaints of transphobia from students seem to be directed at staff. I'm just a final year PhD student, under no contractual requirement to be confidential, so I can share.

The original complaint against me was typical of the sort of thing directed at many female professional academics (and some male too). The strategies employed by my complainants are commonly used.

One of these is to perform vulnerability while behaving aggressively. Performing vulnerability is essential in order to trigger the university's awareness of its duties under the Equality Act, and establish an oppressor/victim dynamic to the case from the outset.

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