Abstract
Great cities attract ambitious people, and each one sends a distinct message about what kind of ambition counts — a message strong enough that the environment, rather than individual determination, largely determines what people end up working on. Since this force is too strong to fight, the strategic move is to use it: live in several places while young and find the city whose message matches the kind of ambition you have.
The central claim
- Great cities attract ambitious people, and you can sense that in the message a city sends: it tells you, above all, that you should be doing more.
- Each ambition centre concentrates on a single type of ambition, because admiration is roughly zero-sum — competing messages don’t coexist well in one place.
- The essay redefines “city” as a collection of ambitious people rather than a geographic unit: Cambridge is only part of a city, and Silicon Valley isn’t even one (San Jose alone is 178 square miles).
- Whether internet-based communities could eventually replace physical ones is raised and doubted, on the grounds that high-bandwidth in-person interaction still matters.
The messages of specific cities
- New York — you should make more money. Secondary messages concern hipness and physical attractiveness.
- Cambridge (Massachusetts) — you should be smarter. Calling it the intellectual capital of the world sounds preposterous but is defensible, resting on the strength of American universities and on Harvard and MIT sitting next to one another, surrounded by 20+ further institutions.
- Silicon Valley — you should be more powerful. The measure is not money but how much effect you have on the world; Larry and Sergey retaining control of Google is the cited example.
- Berkeley — you should live better: a civilised quality of life rather than ambition. Cambridge’s expense and grubby weather work as a filter, selecting for people who care more about intellectual achievement than about comfort.
- San Francisco — at the time of writing, Berkeley’s “live better” message, though this could shift if good startups migrate there from the Valley.
- Los Angeles — you should be more famous, with membership of the A List as the goal; a secondary message resembling New York’s, with more emphasis on physical attractiveness.
- Washington DC — you should know more about what’s really going on, with insider status and relationships structured much like LA’s A List.
- Oxford and Cambridge (England) — the same intellectual message as American Cambridge, but not as strong.
- Paris — once the intellectual centre (circa 1300), now: you should do things with style. Described as the only city the author lived in where people genuinely cared about art, and as having the best eavesdropping — visually, in that people care what things look like.
- London — a faint echo of aristocratic values, everywhere much fainter than a century ago.
- Not every city sends a message; only genuine centres of ambition do.
Why the environment wins
- Achievement clusters historically: practically every notable fifteenth-century Italian painter came from Florence, though Milan was equally large. If a Leonardo born in Milan would have been lost, individual determination is not enough to overcome the environment.
- The mechanism runs mainly through discouragement rather than encouragement: it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you, and you get discouraged when nobody nearby cares about the same things you do. Few people are strong enough to keep working on something no one around them values.
- Messages arrive incidentally rather than by design — through windows, overheard conversations, chance encounters. Cambridge windows show shelves full of promising-looking books; Palo Alto windows show the blue glow of TVs. A friend named “the low quality of the eavesdropping” as the worst thing about 1990s Silicon Valley.
- In cities organised around one ambition, people pursuing others become second-class citizens: professors in New York and the Bay Area occupy that position until they start a hedge fund or a startup respectively.
New York and startups
- New York is unlikely to rival Silicon Valley as a startup hub, because founders there feel like second-class citizens relative to people in finance.
- Prioritising money over power may cost New York in the long run, since the power of important new technology eventually converts into money.
- Evidence offered: the ratio of Forbes 400 members resident in New York to those in California fell from 1.45 (81:56) in 1982 to 0.83 (73:88) in 2007.
How the list of ambitions is changing
- Physical attractiveness was not on the list a century ago, at least for men; increasing female power, the influence of actors, and the shift to office work are given as causes.
- Hipness — knowing what’s what — is likewise new, and may have taken over the component of social class concerned with being au fait.
- Economic power increasingly means directing technology rather than controlling resources, with leaders of open-source projects as an example.
- Economic power, wealth and social class are described as the same thing at different stages of life, with attention shifting upstream towards economic power as social class declines in importance.
Whether you need a great city
- Not absolutely, but it depends on the field. In mathematics or physics it’s enough to have the right colleagues in your department, and ability is relatively easy to judge.
- Arts, writing and technology need a larger surrounding environment: talent is harder to judge, practitioners aren’t concentrated in universities, and the encouragement that comes from feeling the people around you care matters more.
- The critical period is early and middle career — not childhood, and not college, where a few thousand people is enough. The harder task later is discovering new problems to work on.
- The Impressionists were born all over France and died all over France; what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.
Practical advice
- Since information about cities is unreliable, the way to choose is trial and error: live in several places while you’re young.
- The author’s own examples: living in Florence at 25 expecting an art centre and being 450 years too late; being initially excited by New York’s energy but concluding he wasn’t like the people there, and looking for “the Cambridge of New York,” which turned out to be way, way uptown — by air.
- Most ambitious people know they want to do something great without yet knowing in what; finding the city where you feel at home is a way of finding out what sort of ambition you have.
Footnotes
- [1] American universities can cluster because they’re independent of government control, unlike systems where resources are allocated geographically for political reasons.
- [2] Palo Alto is changing as old professors die and their houses are replaced by developers’ McMansions.
- [3] Dress as a signal: San Francisco accepts jeans and a t-shirt, reflecting uncertainty about who matters, whereas in New York the same outfit would read as disrespect. Restaurants requiring jackets as an inverse indicator of being a technology centre: none in San Francisco, LA, Boston or Seattle; 4 in DC; 6 in Chicago; 8 in London; 13 in New York; 20 in Paris.
- [4] Speculation that intellectual centres might eventually rival Silicon Valley if the path from hacker to startup founder keeps getting smoother, without predicting it.
- [5] Paris values art while New York dominates the art business, because the twentieth century split art as a brand from art as an object, and New York has the richest buyers, who want only the brand.