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Urban demographics vary widely over space and time, and for widely varied and often counterintuitive surprising reasons. With that less-than-profound statement I have summarized much of this Berkley economist’s thesis. Ergo, there is little reason for anyone else to waste their time reading this boring, outdated, humourless, and dry book.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. The author is obviously knowledgeable, sincere, and concerned about the future of America Inc. He makes a valiant but somewhat unconvincing attempt to explain the clustering of high tech companies and headquarters in very limited settings, and to predict the future of many cities and what their demographics will look like, based on a lot of data that often conflates correlation with cause. And, like almost all economists, his unstated assumption seems to be that the holy grail of all human existence is continuous growth in the GDP. In many places, this book reads like a Chamber of Commerce pitch for Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose, close to where the author happens live and work.
He gives no consideration in his wild predictions to effects of climate change, as Manhattan becomes a Venice and eastern parts of Boston join the Atlantic Ocean due to rising sea levels, or to the less likely Black Swan effect when the San Andreas Fault tosses Silicon Valley into San Francisco Bay, my predictions that are themselves uncertain. As Yogi Berra is said to have noted, paraphrasing a Danish proverb “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. A recent review in The Atlantic definitively concludes that, in many fields, the predications of narrowly focused experts even with specialized information, are less accurate than those of well-read generalists, witness the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The overuse of buzzwords and the hyperbole used to describe the trends and studies he attempts to explain -“profound”,“surprising”,“staggering”,”remarkable”, “ striking”, “stunning”, “breathtaking”, “incredible”,“astonishing” “fascinating”, and “dramatic”- becomes annoying and most of those trends require no doctorate in economics to detect and analyze rationally. Any clear thinker could deduce that when an unskilled, unemployed worker moves from Detroit to seek work in a low-unemployment city, the prospects for work for those in the smaller pool of the Detroit unemployed improve. And one does not need a doctorate in any field to realize that physicians in large cities tend to be more specialized than those in small centres, the Mayo Clinic notwithstanding.
This book was given to me by a Ph.D economist with expectations that I would read it and write a review of it, so I slogged through it. Now you don’t need to.
The Passionate Reader 