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Comment by barcadad | Hacker News Reader

There is a great deal of research (eg., see Enrico Moretti and Ed Glaeser) that documents that you’re statement isn’t accurate. There are very strong network effects of educated cities, and unless you believe all future post-COVID network will be over Zoom or Slack (which feels rather dystopian), then post-COVID cities will do just fine.

In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times. Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).

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> There are very strong network effects of educated cities.

According to the research you mentioned[1], the "network effect" you mentioned raises wages moderately for uneducated people and a little for educated people. But still nowhere near enough to account for the astronomical rent prices in a city.

They also show that educated cities grow faster than uneducated cities, but don't make a comparison to smaller towns and suburbs.

I see no reason why cities are objectively better. They are convenient for some segment of the population, and they are very unenjoyable for some segment of the population.

[1]https://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2011/02/ode-to-cities.html?m=1

The business network effect is mostly beneficial to the companies, not to the employees. The employees are simply attracted because of the better employment opportunities.

Most of it is centralization. Google is in the bay area so everyone must go there if they want a job. Now apply this to a hundred different companies. Now that major city is absolutely essential if you want a high salary.

Rent prices are just a matter of greed. Cities make themselves business friendly to bring in more taxes but do not pay attention of how to house workers. If they wanted to prevent gentrification they'd start by kicking out companies, not the people that have lived there for decades. The reality is that all this bullshit is about making money. Land owners want a higher ROI so kicking out companies is a no go but building more housing is a no go too.

A lot of research looks like this looks to be deciding on car less way of life and collect facts only to prove that. Seems most people look for ulterior motive in case of oil and tobacco companies research while everything else is obviously right 'science'.

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