May 2008Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when youwalk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you amessage: you could do more; you should try harder.The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. NewYork tells you, above all: you should make more money. There areother messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You shouldbe better looking. But the clearest message is that you should bericher.What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the messagethere is: you should be smarter. You really should get around toreading all those books you've been meaning to.When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprisinganswers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, themessage the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.That's not quite the same message New York sends. Power mattersin New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by abillion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valleyno one would care except a few real estate agents. What mattersin Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. Thereason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealthbut the fact that they control Google, which affects practicallyeveryone.How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically,the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you hadenough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcendyour environment. Where you live should make at most a couplepercent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence,it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great thingswere clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing wasdone at the time.You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote aboutearlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically everyfifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence,even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren'tgenetically different, so you have to assume there was someone bornin Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happenedto him?If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardocouldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can?I don't. I'm fairly stubborn, but I wouldn't try to fight thisforce. I'd rather use it. So I've thought a lot about where tolive.I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place — thatit would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when Ifinally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out notto be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Lifein Berkeley is very civilized. It's probably the place in Americawhere someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. Butit's not humming with ambition.In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place sopleasant would attract people interested above all in quality oflife. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge.The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. Youhave to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhatgrubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people youfind in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where thesmartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive,grubby place with bad weather.As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capitalof the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. Whatmakes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhereelse. American universities currently seem to be the best, judgingfrom the flow of ambitious students. And what US city has a strongerclaim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by amuch larger number of neanderthals in suits. The Bay Area has alot of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are two greatuniversities, but they're far apart. Harvard and MIT are practicallyadjacent by West Coast standards, and they're surrounded by about20 other colleges and universities.[1]Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry isideas, while New York's is finance and Silicon Valley's is startups.When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're reallytalking about is collections of people. For a long time citieswere the only large collections of people, so you could use the twoideas interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changingfrom the examples I've mentioned. New York is a classic great city.But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is noteven that. (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capitalof Silicon Valley. It's just 178 square miles at one end of it.)Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day themost important community you belong to will be a virtual one, andit won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet onit. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of theways cities send you messages are quite subtle.One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge everyspring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can seeinto the houses. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening,you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you seeshelves full of promising-looking books. Palo Alto was probablymuch like Cambridge in 1960, but you'd never guess now that therewas a university nearby. Now it's just one of the richer neighborhoodsin Silicon Valley. [2]A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you seethrough windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not somethingyou have to seek out, but something you can't turn off. One of theoccupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing theconversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarativesentences. But on average I'll take Cambridge conversations overNew York or Silicon Valley ones.A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worstthing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping.At the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric. Sure,it can be interesting to eavesdrop on people, but is good qualityeavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose tolive? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations youoverhear tell you what sort of people you're among.No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influencedby the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever acity expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one aroundyou cares about the same things you do.There's an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement likethat between gaining and losing money. Most people overvaluenegative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losinga dollar than to gain one. Similarly, although there are plenty ofpeople strong enough to resist doing something just because that'swhat one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are fewstrong enough to keep working on something no one around them caresabout.Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admirationis a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition.The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just thatthere's a concentration of smart people there, but that there'snothing else people there care about more. Professors inNew York and the Bay area are second class citizens — till theystart hedge funds or startups respectively.This suggests an answer to a question people in New York havewondered about since the Bubble: whether New York could grow intoa startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. One reason that's unlikelyis that someone starting a startup in New York would feel like asecond class citizen. [3]There's already something else people in New York admire more.In the long term, that could be a bad thing for New York. The powerof an important new technology does eventually convert to money.So by caring more about money and less about power than SiliconValley, New York is recognizing the same thing, but slower.[4]And in fact it has been losing to Silicon Valley at its own game:the ratio of New York to California residents in the Forbes 400 hasdecreased from 1.45 (81:56) when the list was first published in1982 to .83 (73:88) in 2007.Not all cities send a message. Only those that are centers forsome type of ambition do. And it can be hard to tell exactly whatmessage a city sends without living there. I understand the messagesof New York, Cambridge, and Silicon Valley because I've lived forseveral years in each of them. DC and LA seem to send messagestoo, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure whatthey are.The big thing in LA seems to be fame. There's an A List of peoplewho are most in demand right now, and what's most admired is to beon it, or friends with those who are. Beneath that, the message ismuch like New York's, though perhaps with more emphasis on physicalattractiveness.In DC the message seems to be that the most important thing is whoyou know. You want to be an insider. In practice this seems towork much as in LA. There's an A List and you want to be on it orclose to those who are. The only difference is how the A List isselected. And even that is not that different.At the moment, San Francisco's message seems to be the same asBerkeley's: you should live better. But this will change if enoughstartups choose SF over the Valley. During the Bubble that was apredictor of failure — a self-indulgent choice, like buyingexpensive office furniture. Even now I'm suspicious when startupschoose SF. But if enough good ones do, it stops being a self-indulgentchoice, because the center of gravity of Silicon Valley will shiftthere.I haven't found anything like Cambridge for intellectual ambition.Oxford and Cambridge (England) feel like Ithaca or Hanover: themessage is there, but not as strong.Paris was once a great intellectual center. If you went there in1300, it might have sent the message Cambridge does now. But Itried living there for a bit last year, and the ambitions of theinhabitants are not intellectual ones. The message Paris sends nowis: do things with style. I liked that, actually. Paris is theonly city I've lived in where people genuinely cared about art. InAmerica only a few rich people buy original art, and even the moresophisticated ones rarely get past judging it by the brand name ofthe artist. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you cansee that people there actually care what paintings look like.Visually, Paris has the best eavesdropping I know. [5]There's one more message I've heard from cities: in London you canstill (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic.If you listen for it you can also hear it in Paris, New York, andBoston. But this message is everywhere very faint. It would havebeen strong 100 years ago, but now I probably wouldn't have pickedit up at all if I hadn't deliberately tuned in to that wavelengthto see if there was any signal left.So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is:wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, politicalpower, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality oflife.My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightlyqueasy. I'd always considered ambition a good thing, but I realizenow that was because I'd always implicitly understood it to meanambition in the areas I cared about. When you list everythingambitious people are ambitious about, it's not so pretty.On closer examination I see a couple things on the list that aresurprising in the light of history. For example, physicalattractiveness wouldn't have been there 100 years ago (though itmight have been 2400 years ago). It has always mattered for women,but in the late twentieth century it seems to have started to matterfor men as well. I'm not sure why — probably some combinationof the increasing power of women, the increasing influence of actorsas models, and the fact that so many people work in offices now:you can't show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory,so you have to show off with your body instead.Hipness is another thing you wouldn't have seen on the list 100years ago. Or wouldn't you? What it means is to know what's what.So maybe it has simply replaced the component of social class thatconsisted of being "au fait." That could explain why hipness seemsparticularly admired in London: it's version 2 of the traditionalEnglish delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand.Economic power would have been on the list 100 years ago, but whatwe mean by it is changing. It used to mean the control of vasthuman and material resources. But increasingly it means the abilityto direct the course of technology, and some of the people in aposition to do that are not even rich — leaders of importantopen source projects, for example. The Captains of Industry oftimes past had laboratories full of clever people cooking up newtechnologies for them. The new breed are themselves those people.As this force gets more attention, another is dropping off the list:social class. I think the two changes are related. Economic power,wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing atdifferent stages in its life: economic power converts to wealth,and wealth to social class. So the focus of admiration is simplyshifting upstream.Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city?No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren'tthe only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need isa handful of talented colleagues.What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. Thesearen't so critical in something like math or physics, where noaudience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficientlystraightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do itreliably. In a field like math or physics all you need is adepartment with the right colleagues in it. It could be anywhere — inLos Alamos, New Mexico, for example.It's in fields like the arts or writing or technology that thelarger environment matters. In these the best practitioners aren'tconveniently collected in a few top university departments andresearch labs — partly because talent is harder to judge, andpartly because people pay for these things, so one doesn't need torely on teaching or research funding to support oneself. It's inthese more chaotic fields that it helps most to be in a great city:you need the encouragement of feeling that people around you careabout the kind of work you do, and since you have to find peers foryourself, you need the much larger intake mechanism of a great city.You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefitfrom it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle onesof your career. Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city.Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one. To mostcollege students a world of a few thousand people seems big enough.Plus in college you don't yet have to face the hardest kind ofwork — discovering new problems to solve.It's when you move on to the next and much harder step that it helpsmost to be in a place where you can find peers and encouragement.You seem to be able to leave, if you want, once you've found both.The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born allover France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all overFrance, but what defined them were the years they spent togetherin Paris._____Unless you're sure what you want to do and where the leading centerfor it is, your best bet is probably to try living in severalplaces when you're young. You can never tell what message a citysends till you live there, or even whether it still sends one.Often your information will be wrong: I tried living in Florencewhen I was 25, thinking it would be an art center, but it turnedout I was 450 years too late.Even when a city is still a live center of ambition, you won't knowfor sure whether its message will resonate with you till you hearit. When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It'san exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I justwasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridgeof New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptownby air.Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, butin most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specificto be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great.They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rockstar or a brain surgeon. There's nothing wrong with that. But itmeans if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probablyhave to figure out where to live by trial and error. You'llprobably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort ofambition you have.Notes[1]This is one of the advantages of not having the universitiesin your country controlled by the government. When governmentsdecide how to allocate resources, political deal-making causesthings to be spread out geographically. No central goverment wouldput its two best universities in the same town, unless it was thecapital (which would cause other problems). But scholars seem tolike to cluster together as much as people in any other field, andwhen given the freedom to they derive the same advantages from it.[2]There are still a few old professors in Palo Alto, but one byone they die and their houses are transformed by developers intoMcMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev.[3]How many times have you read about startup founders who continuedto live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continuedto dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had ingrad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people wouldtreat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in SanFrancisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; whoknows who you might be? Not in New York.One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the numberof restaurants that still require jackets for men. According toZagat's there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York, and 20 in Paris.(Zagat's lists the Ritz Carlton Dining Room in SF as requiring jacketsbut I couldn't believe it, so I called to check and in fact theydon't. Apparently there's only one restaurant left on the entire WestCoast that still requires jackets: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.)[4]Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so it'sconceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one dayhave an edge over Silicon Valley like the one the Valley has overNew York.This seems unlikely at the moment; if anything Boston is fallingfurther and further behind. The only reason I even mention thepossibility is that the path from ideas to startups has recentlybeen getting smoother. It's a lot easier now for a couple of hackerswith no business experience to start a startup than it was 10 yearsago. If you extrapolate another 20 years, maybe the balance ofpower will start to shift back. I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn'tbet against it either.[5]If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New Yorkthe center of gravity of the art business? Because in the twentiethcentury, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. New York iswhere the richest buyers are, but all they demand from art is brand,and since you can base brand on anything with a sufficientlyidentifiable style, you may as well use the local stuff.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston,Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, and David Sloo for reading draftsof this.
