Okay. Here is how I look at it. I am a smart, focussed, imaginative guy. I believe pretty strongly that if I lived in a city where I was in close proximity to a lot of other smart, talented people, I could make some great things happen. I have a lot of ideas that would require teams of such people to realise, any one of which could become an important business or non-profit venture. The Internet is great, and web-based collaboration and idea-realisation tools are certainly developing and making the world flatter, but proximity is still a very large catalyst to things happening. San Francisco happens to sound like one of the best cities for someone like me to move to. I happen to live very far from San Francisco, in another country. I am sure there are a lot of people like me around the world. The cost and difficulty and unknowns of the idea of moving to SF are pretty intimidating.
Now what would happen if all the people like me were able to easily move to San Francisco, and start meeting and talking and coming up with ideas and doing things together? If those big walls of distance, national borders, and evidently prohibitively expensive real estate were broken down? I imagine some very great things could happen. One thing this article pin-pointed is interesting: salaries at major SF tech companies are high because of the housing shortage. What might happen if you could concentrate the world's smartest people in one great city with affordable housing, so that the companies they might start could pay lower wages? Well you could definitely start companies a lot easier, and they could be profitable at lower levels, so it would encourage I think better and more diverse companies and internet services. I think San Francisco would also benefit hugely.
I think eventually a city like this has to come along eventually. If there is going to be a global village, there needs to be a global hub where the best and the brightest can meet and work together. Currently the world doesn't have such a place. It seems like SF has as good a shot as any of becoming that hub. Doing so would of course require some sacrifices, so the question for SF seems to be, do you want to go on being sorta great but holding off true greatness because you don't want to give up any of the things you like about the way you have things now, or are you willing to aim high?
The question for anyone else is, what can you do to make it much much easier for people from around the world to gather together in a single place? There are a lot of legislatory hurdles to be dissolved. Also anyone who made it their business to help people make the jump could do well I think.
Also, as an aside, nation-states and borders are so 20th century. Eventually the world will have no borders - a truly united world has to happen eventually. Removing borders should be a priority for everybody.
Now what would happen if all the people like me were able to easily move to San Francisco, and start meeting and talking and coming up with ideas and doing things together? If those big walls of distance, national borders, and evidently prohibitively expensive real estate were broken down? I imagine some very great things could happen. One thing this article pin-pointed is interesting: salaries at major SF tech companies are high because of the housing shortage. What might happen if you could concentrate the world's smartest people in one great city with affordable housing, so that the companies they might start could pay lower wages? Well you could definitely start companies a lot easier, and they could be profitable at lower levels, so it would encourage I think better and more diverse companies and internet services. I think San Francisco would also benefit hugely.
I think eventually a city like this has to come along eventually. If there is going to be a global village, there needs to be a global hub where the best and the brightest can meet and work together. Currently the world doesn't have such a place. It seems like SF has as good a shot as any of becoming that hub. Doing so would of course require some sacrifices, so the question for SF seems to be, do you want to go on being sorta great but holding off true greatness because you don't want to give up any of the things you like about the way you have things now, or are you willing to aim high?
The question for anyone else is, what can you do to make it much much easier for people from around the world to gather together in a single place? There are a lot of legislatory hurdles to be dissolved. Also anyone who made it their business to help people make the jump could do well I think.
Also, as an aside, nation-states and borders are so 20th century. Eventually the world will have no borders - a truly united world has to happen eventually. Removing borders should be a priority for everybody.