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Spatial inequality
1. A quick thread on why the threat from #coronavirus may do more that economics or national policy to address our winner-take-all geography and growing spatial inequality.
2. The market is adjusting slowly. There is some noticeable movement away from superstar cities & tech hubs. But not enough to make a noticeable difference.
3. Part of the reason is that tech companies & successful tech workers can *pay* to stay clustered in these places, whole others get pushed out.
4. It is a wonderful sentiment to say that federal policy *should* address spatial inequality. But good luck making anything like that happen with Trump in office & a divide Congress.
5. The history of federal urban policy does not provide any additional reasons to be hopeful here. It is doubtful a federal effort can happen quick enough or be big or effective enough to address our geographic divide.
6. But #coronavirus sets in motion a different dynamic. Already tech companies are cancelling conferences & having workers in leading tech hubs, notably Seattle, work from home.
7. The threat of such pandemics creates a dynamic where decentralizing and declustering investments is important for the economic resilience of these leading tech companies.
8. The threat from the coronavirus might do what economics and economic policy cannot: at long last encourage tech companies to start spreading out the investments and facilities to more smaller and medium-sized cities.
9. The same kind of density and clustering – the networking and face-to-face contact that spurs the productivity of tech companies and tech workers - also spurs the transmission of these viruses.
10. Working from home will help. But what would really make these companies – and our innovation systems generally – much more resilient is to spread these tech clusters and tech facilities to smaller cities and regions.
11. A tech system that is more geographically distributed would be far more able to cope with the disruption that comes from these kinds of pandemics.
12. The extreme clustering of tech and tech workers may be good for innovation and productivity, but it makes these place very vulnerable to massive disruption from pandemic like the #coronavirus.
13. The economic logic of innovation and talent begs for concentration. But the need for resilience says we are all better off if tech is spread across a wider range of tech hubs.
14. Companies have a herd mentality. Once one does this. Others will likely follow.
15. It may well be that concern for our health and well-being and the resiliency of our tech economy is what ultimately helps to make our economic geography more balanced.
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