But why does everyone want to move to dense urban areas? You assume that there’s some small, easy-to-offset group of factors, like public transit or “jobs programs,” and that if the government just did something with these things, it would equilibrate population dynamics appropriately.
I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high status” and a “glamorous” lifestyle. Even poor people in cities are glamorized as having greater access to sex, subculture groups, participation in civic functions like meaningfully large protests, proximity to celebrities or wealthy people.
I think it’s plausible to argue that as developed societies progress, competition between people becomes increasingly focused on intangible social status, and one side effect is that people become more and more willing to sacrifice material comforts to crowd into cities for the chance to possibly compete for higher social status.
It wouldn’t matter if you incentivized people with cheaper housing, “jobs programs,” or anything else, “Ruralness” itself would be such a direct negative thing, in terms of social convention, that people would pay to avoid it, in the form of impossible rents, overcrowded infrastructure, etc.
I conjecture you’d need a generational propaganda campaign to glamorize rural living, combined with some huge changes in how employment is structured, before anything could even start to incentivize meaningful redistribution of population to rural areas.
The jobs programs thing is especially tricky, because there is a chicken and egg problem with modern employment and rural areas. It’s not just a matter of retraining people, because they’ll still want to move to cities independently of jobs, and then employers will want to be located in cities to have high-status clans of employees and to be colocated with other high-status people.
Jobs training doesn’t really solve anything unless you change the underlying culture such that employers can participate in some virtue signalling by locating there.
It’s why you might see start-ups in Grand Rapids, MI, but you don’t see Google opening a new 500-engineer research lab there. The people who want those engineering jobs want a life with status signalling only found in big urban centers associated with cultural progressiveness.
I’m not saying any of this to argue one way is better or is right. Only that I think any theory about why people accumulate in dense cities has to be primarily based on social status effects that exist by convention and not by any material factor.
Google doesn't open a 500-engineer research lab in Grand Rapids, MI because there are not 500 Google-caliber engineers already living in Grand Rapids, MI. This is not a statement about the average talent there, but simply that the starting pool is not sufficiently large; hence the need to build offices in high density urban areas.
Google doesn't open an office in Denver so that Bay Area engineers have a slightly cheaper place to work, they do it to tap into the talent of folks who already live there.
Edit: I am basing these claims off of my own experience. I work at a satellite office of one of the big tech co's, and the vast majority of my coworkers are people who are either fresh out of a local university, or already lived here for many years before joining the company.
So Google only interviews candidates already living in the cities where the offices are? Google never relocates a candidate from somewhere else?
This is super false. Google doesn’t open an office in Denver because there is already a sufficient talent market in Denver to staff the whole place. There isn’t.
They open an office in Denver so that when a person passes the interviews and will need relocation they can be relocated more cheaply and paid a relatively lower salary in Denver.
They can only get away with this for certain cities that are granted high-status, like Austin, Seattle, Denver. Companies are trying to create similar status facades for e.g. Pittsburgh and Atlanta too.
It absolutely is wage arbitrage for the company— has nothing to do with the preexisting talent base in the given city, except insofar as that talent base confers some type of mitigating high-status effect.
For Denver it’s access to glamorized nature and skiing. For Pittsburgh it’s centralized around the presence of CMU. And even with these effects, these cities are not looked at as all that desirable for many, many candidates.
If you pass the interview as a generalist, Google absolutely prefers for people to work in their Mountain View office.
1. The cost of relocation is minuscule compared to the total cost of employing someone, so I don't buy that argument.
2. Do you have data to back up that Google engineers in Denver get paid less than their Mountain View counterparts? I believe this is true when comparing US to non-US salaries, but at least where I've worked, engineers get paid the same everywhere within the US (and indeed, you can relocate from the Bay Area to cheaper locales without taking a pay cut).
Based on salarytalk.org and h1bdata.info, median software engineer salary in MV is $127,000 - $129,000. In Pittsburgh: $113,000 - $114,000.
Relocating without a pay cut would be uncomparable, since it would involve pay cut dynamics for an established worker. Google is probably atypically generous in all these areas though, and I don’t think it counters the points about status. They want wage arbitrage to alleviate some headcount, doesn’t mean all headcount, and very likely Google would be among the least worried since revenue per headcount is so ludicrously higher than what they pay in total comp anyway. It still doesn’t suggest they open these office locations for some other reason than urban status or co-location with academic center status. Google US locations look mostly exactly like that’s what they are doing.
We are social beings. We live in a society. Being close to others is not a status symbol, it is what makes us, us. I eat at nice restaurants because the food is delicious. I enjoy the culture. I enjoy a wide variety live music. These are not status symbols, these are the essence of a joie de vivre. I enjoy walking to my local shops and boutiques, not for the status but because it is genuinely enjoyable of its own merit.
Your reply sounds like an absolutely classic reply of someone driven very much by social status signalling. Especially the whole “I don’t buy into status-seeking; I just like ‘quality’ experiences” thing — which just begs the question, where does your notion of quality come from?
“I enjoy walking to my local shops...” is the same as saying you like being high-status and commanding the existence of a local bazaar that caters to the tastes that you and other city-dwellers have glamorized.
> “These are not status symbols, these are the essence of a joie de vivre.”
I can scarcely think of a stronger appeal to status-seeking than this.
(I don’t say any of this to be critical of you. I live in a large city and am fully aware that part of why I enjoy it and identify with it is all based on deep-seated, culturally-ingrained, and even subconcious emphasis on status-seeking. I just mean that it’s so deeply woven into our lives that we don’t realize and often think we’re somehow “better” than that, which is just more virtue signalling.)
You most definitely can separate the fashionable, and status-seeking aspects out from urban culture.
I live in Canada. The traditional cuisine is bland, and fresh produce grows only a few months of the year. I see my love of sushi as a product of globalization and urbanization as much as is my ability to get decent fruit from the grocery store in the heart of winter. Sure I could have a root cellar and eat potatoes and beef all winter, but sushi is delicious.
It cannot be just status. High demand and low supply has a tendency to price the best cultural products in high status territory.
Somehow this reminds me of the history of lobster as cheap food for the poor and imprisoned. People detested it. Until of course the status of lobster changed.
Or the fact aluminium used to be extremely expensive and thus used for the most precious cutlery, ornaments etc. Until of course it became dirt cheap to produce.
Some things really are related to the ideas we hold, not reality itself. You can see this in blind tests of foods or drinks like wines, the blind ratings often don't correspond with their reputation or price.
Bourdieu's book la distinction is quite a good treatise on this topic. Taste and what we consider artful or high quality is much more constructed by our environment than by any innate or objective measure, we tend to fool ourselves on this point.
Not even close. For one, Waymo has offices in Detroit for obvious reasons. Ann Arbor offers direct connection to University of Michigan and proximity to Detroit and local airports.
In fact, the status effect difference between Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids is a perfect example of my point. What differentiates the two places when thinking of where to locate a new campus? Exactly status effects and network effects from secondary status effects. The talent pool in the two places and costs of living, etc., are not meaningfully different. The choice is down to what places carry a premium in status that is more attractive to workers.
I’m not convinced. I think people are more driven by status symbols and glamor. Living in a city is considered relatively more “high status” and a “glamorous” lifestyle. Even poor people in cities are glamorized as having greater access to sex, subculture groups, participation in civic functions like meaningfully large protests, proximity to celebrities or wealthy people.
I think it’s plausible to argue that as developed societies progress, competition between people becomes increasingly focused on intangible social status, and one side effect is that people become more and more willing to sacrifice material comforts to crowd into cities for the chance to possibly compete for higher social status.
It wouldn’t matter if you incentivized people with cheaper housing, “jobs programs,” or anything else, “Ruralness” itself would be such a direct negative thing, in terms of social convention, that people would pay to avoid it, in the form of impossible rents, overcrowded infrastructure, etc.
I conjecture you’d need a generational propaganda campaign to glamorize rural living, combined with some huge changes in how employment is structured, before anything could even start to incentivize meaningful redistribution of population to rural areas.
The jobs programs thing is especially tricky, because there is a chicken and egg problem with modern employment and rural areas. It’s not just a matter of retraining people, because they’ll still want to move to cities independently of jobs, and then employers will want to be located in cities to have high-status clans of employees and to be colocated with other high-status people.
Jobs training doesn’t really solve anything unless you change the underlying culture such that employers can participate in some virtue signalling by locating there.
It’s why you might see start-ups in Grand Rapids, MI, but you don’t see Google opening a new 500-engineer research lab there. The people who want those engineering jobs want a life with status signalling only found in big urban centers associated with cultural progressiveness.
I’m not saying any of this to argue one way is better or is right. Only that I think any theory about why people accumulate in dense cities has to be primarily based on social status effects that exist by convention and not by any material factor.