Thread by @Noahpinion

1/OK so here's a thought I had about superstar cities and crappy politics.

Short version: Superstar cities lull people into believing that nothing could ever hurt the economy.

2/I had this thought because of Amazon. In the end, it doesn't matter if NYC boots Amazon, because NYC is a superstar city. Companies will still want to come to NYC, and there will still be plenty of jobs.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1099163270663958529

3/NYC has this magic invincibility because it's a superstar city.

Thanks to the awesome power of KNOWLEDGE-INDUSTRY CLUSTERING EFFECTS, NYC can relax. Its prosperity is basically assured.

csmonitor.com/Business/2018/…

4/And knowledge-industry clustering effects aren't going away anytime soon. They're the foundation of the modern American economy.

amazon.com/New-Geography-…

5/But because these clustering effects let New Yorkers - or at least, educated middle- and upper-middle-class New Yorkers - rest secure, that means elite New Yorkers feel free to advocate economic policies that, anywhere else, would hurt the economy.

6/And because of NYC's outsized influence on the media and politics, these ideas end up getting exported all over the country.

politico.com/magazine/story…

7/You see a similar thing happening in San Francisco.

SF knows the tech industry isn't going to abandon Silicon Valley anytime soon. So rich landowners feel free to restrict housing and pump up rents, secure in the knowledge that it won't cause an economic crash.

8/At the local level, NIMBYism or other bad policies hurt some poor and vulnerable people, but overall they don't cause wholesale economic devastation. The clustering effect provides a magical deflector shield, at least for the educated and skilled.

9/The real danger is if the policies get exported nationally. If New Yorkers, immersed in the reality of their own invincibility, push the country to accept policies that harm places that don't have New York's magical deflector shield.

10/I still want America to take advantage of clustering effects. I want us to make more cities with magical deflector shields.

But in the meantime, I desperately want political programs that don't come out of Brooklyn or the San Francisco Marina.

(end)