Cities and Ambition

| "In Boston they ask, How much does he know?
In New York, How much is he worth?
In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?"- Mark Twain |

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Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you
walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a
message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New
York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are
other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should
be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be
richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message
there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to
reading all those books you've been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising
answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the
message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That's not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters
in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a
billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley
no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters
in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The
reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth
but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically
everyone.

_____

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically,
the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had
enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend
your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple
percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence,
it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things
were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was
done at the time.

You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about
earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo.
Practically every
fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence,
even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't
genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born
in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened
to him?

If even someone with the same natural ability as Leonardo
couldn'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 this
force. I'd rather use it. So I've thought a lot about where to
live.

I'd always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place — that
it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I
finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not
to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life
in Berkeley is very civilized. It's probably the place in America
where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But
it's not humming with ambition.

In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so
pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of
life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge.
The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You
have to make sacrifices to live there. It's expensive and somewhat
grubby, and the weather's often bad. So the kind of people you
find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the
smartest 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 capital
of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What
makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere
else. American universities currently seem to be the best, judging
from the flow of ambitious students. And what US city has a stronger
claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a
much larger number of neanderthals in suits. The Bay Area has a
lot of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are two great
universities, but they're far apart. Harvard and MIT are practically
adjacent by West Coast standards, and they're surrounded by about
20 other colleges and universities.
[1]

Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is
ideas, 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 really
talking about is collections of people. For a long time cities
were the only large collections of people, so you could use the two
ideas interchangeably. But we can see how much things are changing
from the examples I've mentioned. New York is a classic great city.
But Cambridge is just part of a city, and Silicon Valley is not
even that. (San Jose is not, as it sometimes claims, the capital
of Silicon Valley. It's just 178 square miles at one end of it.)

Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the
most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and
it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on
it. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the
ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.

One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every
spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see
into the houses. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening,
you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see
shelves full of promising-looking books. Palo Alto was probably
much like Cambridge in 1960, but you'd never guess now that there
was a university nearby. Now it's just one of the richer neighborhoods
in Silicon Valley.
[2]

A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see
through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something
you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off. One of the
occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the
conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative
sentences. But on average I'll take Cambridge conversations over
New York or Silicon Valley ones.

A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst
thing 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 quality
eavesdropping so important that it would affect where you chose to
live? Now I understand what she meant. The conversations you
overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.

_____

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced
by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a
city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around
you cares about the same things you do.

There's an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like
that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue
negative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losing
a dollar than to gain one. Similarly, although there are plenty of
people strong enough to resist doing something just because that's
what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few
strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares
about.

Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration
is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition.
The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that
there's a concentration of smart people there, but that there's
nothing else people there care about more. Professors in
New York and the Bay area are second class citizens — till they
start hedge funds or startups respectively.

[...]

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