Here’s an interesting and encouraging NY Times article written by a Harvard economics professor about Seattle, its resiliency throughout economic downturns, and exceeding national growth trends, due in part to concentrating smart people in a dense city.
Here’s an excerpt:
As Boeing scaled back its Seattle employment, the city floundered. By 1971, a much-discussed billboard read “Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?”
But there was a crucial difference between Seattle and Detroit. Unlike Ford and General Motors, Boeing employed highly educated workers. Almost since its inception, Seattle has been committed to education and has benefited from the University of Washington, which is based there. Skills are the source of Seattle’s strength.
Over the last three decades, human capital has become increasingly linked with urban growth outside the Sun Belt.
The ability to attract skilled people was intimately tied to the success of Seattle’s star companies, such as Amazon; Nordstrom’s, whose strategy of empowering employees was more feasible because those workers were skilled; Starbucks, a coffee chain founded by educators; and Microsoft, which depends on a steady supply of smart software engineers. (Disclosure: I serve on the domestic advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.)
A great paradox of our age is that despite the declining cost of connecting across space, more people are clustering together in cities. The explanation of that strange fact is that globalization and technological change have increased the returns on being smart, and humans get smart by being around other smart people.
Dense, smart cities like Seattle succeed by attracting smart people who educate and employ one another.
