“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”
I assume you mean because of the social engineering aspect of incentivizing "CNR workers" to move to big cities and discouraging other kinds of workers from being there.
If so, I agree. It's this idea of nationwide economic efficiency being the be-all and end-all goal of social policy, which completely ignores the actual "social" aspect of gutting small towns even more than already happens, not to mention instituting systems of effective apartheid that attempt to exclude people from important economic hubs.
Edit: ironically, Princeton itself is a pretty small town - 17,487 people in Princeton proper. Of course it's probably not what the study had in mind, and it's about 1.5 hours from NYC and an hour from Philadelphia, making it part of the Northeast megalopolis. Still, "small town" may not be the right term for what they're getting at.
Nothing can bridge that divide, because of the simple nature of economics in an industrialized country. Unless you are dealing with raw resource extraction, cities are more productive, period.
The thing about living in an industrialized country is that raw resource extraction does not employ all that much labour.
It doesn't even matter how you structure your economic system. Even if we install radical socialism, with very heavy emphasis on wealth redistribution, there is still going to be a huge social divide between urban and rural.
We're better off not pretending that up is down, and black is white, and instead dealing with a world where we acknowledge that these differences exist, and will always exist.
A bit off-topic, but you citing 17k as the population of Princeton "proper" is quite wrong. While it is true that Princeton Township and Princeton Borough were once different municipalities, they shared most resources and, importantly, a cultural identity and school system.
The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.
The population of Princeton is 25k+.
Anyway the moral of my story is that calling the township Princeton "proper" attempts to create a divide that the residents don't care for, and dismisses many of them as not being from the "real" Princeton.
Source: native of Princeton (specifically township, but I actually have no idea which of the borough or township my friends lived in) with a slight stick up his butt.
I just picked the wrong number off Google - it comes up as a box result when searching for "Princeton population."
> The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.
That's exactly what I meant by "proper". As you know, there are a lot of e.g. medical and financial business headquarters in those other towns (including Plainsboro), making the Princeton region quite a business powerhouse.
My point was looking at the size of a town alone is not a good criterion for this kind of thing. You'd have to look at surrounding towns, whether there are nearby universities, what kind of businesses exist in the area, etc. (And whether it has an Institute for Advanced Study :))
This also suggests that an alternative to further entrenching the dystopian morlock vs. eloi divide might be to encourage more town groupings like Princeton's throughout the country. With modern communications, that's much more practical than it used to be. I.e., such regional hubs can fully participate in the global economy even though they're not within major cities, although it would probably be more challenging further from major cities.
I agree with the sentiment: people are too often regard as mere tools. But I believe (hope) the paper was a theoretical exercise. In the same way one might discover human flesh is nutritious. And I image no society (expect maybe China) would view the paper as a how-to manual.
Rather than using this information to create a dystopian (and kinda click baity) future, it could be used to examine current social forces and make predictions and, ideally, prepare/compensate for them.
Indeed it would be just as easy spin the paper in a multitude of ways. For example, one might use it to justify taxation earmarked to aid the rural poor by saying it's not only ethical but also efficient.
Business is just proxy for the desires of your fellow humans. They provide things people think are worth paying for. Everyone is being efficiently exploited by one another through mutually beneficial transactions. You're party to all of this just by being part of society.
That's got to be some of the biggest nonsense I've ever read, and that from an institute with such a pedigree. Surprising. No, if you are short of workers of a certain skillset the idea is not to hover them up for the high density population centers to monopolize them, they have all the advantages anyway. The solutions are (1) ensure more of these people are educated and (2) that the pay disparity between the high density centers and the more remote location gets leveled to the point that money alone will not cause a brain drain.
The same is happening on an international level and the effect is terrible. It causes local shortages of just about all important experts including doctors, IT specialists and so on.
It’s an odd list. They also include doctors, which besides being a very routine work, are needed in direct proportion to the local population. Doctors are already being subsidized to move out of larger cities into places where they are actually needed in direct contradiction to the economist’s premise.
Quoting from the article that quotes the paper: "Furthermore, their productivity is tremendously enhanced by living with other CNR workers." Where "CNR" workers includes "computer programmers".
I really take issue with that. I think it is blatantly untrue. I've worked in small towns and I've worked in large metropolises (London, for example). I am not more productive in a metropolis. It's handy to go to meetups occasionally, but I have to say that with the internet I learn more by watching interesting talks and emailing people occasionally than I ever did going to the pub and chatting with super famous people in person.
I mean, I enjoy going to the pub and chatting with people in person and I really miss that about London, but I'm way more productive in my current rural setting.
It is, however, instructive to note that I am a remote worker. As a business, if you want to have people who are local, then it helps tremendously to be able to select from a large pool. That's obvious. As an individual it's much easier to network in person and so it's easier to get a job. But, when you are actually on the job? I really don't see this increase in "productivity" at all.
I took the article to mean that the collective effect of CNR workers is enhanced when many are in the same location. The productivity of each person enhances the rest. That’s not the same thing as being individually productive.
So it benefits lazy corporations and not smart corporations or astute talented individuals. Not really something beneficial to the greater society IMO.
If society relied merely on astute talented individuals, it wouldn't get very far. Most of the most astute talented individuals that have had an impact on society have had that impact as a result of all the less astute individuals in the organizations (corporations or otherwise) of which they were a part. The Manhattan project is exemplary of this.
Well you are productive as long as your kids have access to good teachers, family has access to good doctors etc. Once you need those things frequently and can afford it , small town life can turn into a big headache.
On the contrary, most small towns (I have lived in) have much finer grained community support networks, many ad-hoc, that can provide better quality of life. This is however highly dependent on your local community. However it is never too late to start something. I find if there is a need, there is a huge untapped well of hands-on support you just don't find in urban environments. The fact that people still know their neighbors is a huge enabler and stimulus of compassion and support.
That matters when you're an individual that works on solo or small projects, but once you start working on project at scale with many individual teams, the time you spend coding matters less relative to time spent collaborating. There's no the teams I work with daily could be just as productive if we were not all in the same office.
Companies like Google or Facebook would not be more productive if thousands of engineers worked remotely from small towns.
The paper in question: "Cognitive Hubs and Spatial Redistribution", by Esteban Rossi-Hansberg (
Princeton University), Pierre-Daniel Sarte (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond), Felipe Schwartzman (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond). September 3, 2019
I hate when these articles cite “outrage” by linking a tweet with 6 likes. I wish journalists had an ethics board that banned outlets from trying to stir up controversy like this.
You should check out the paper. It is 83 pages (a bit longer than a tweet) and very dense with math. It tries super hard to reduce a social issue to a mathematical one with an optimum solution and is probably the best example I've seen of a disconnect between science and real life consequences.
Agree. This paper is just another attempt at modelling economies of agglomeration. It's a pretty well-studied bit of urban economics. This paper just sounds a little socially tone-deaf.
The paper's primary policy points appear to be, using quotes from the paper:
1) CNR workers work better in "cognitive hubs" that specialise in this type of work.
2) "The main culprit of spatial misallocation is the existence of large occupation-specific externalities combined with potential distortions due to land use regulations."
3) Small towns are misguided in trying to lure "tech" to their cities, and should instead find a non-CNR industry to concentrate on that is not already concentrated in a specific city. ("the economics of the problem suggest that, with the appropriate transfers, small industrial cities in the U.S. should attract non-CNR workers and not try to become the next San Jose. The concentration of CNR workers in a few “cognitive hubs” should be encouraged, not scorned.")
4) CNR cities should be subsidizing non-CNR workers outside of the hub, at a UBI (wealth transfer) to non-CNR workers of about $17,000 a year per worker. ("CNR workers, who earn substantially more, end up paying a base transfer of $16,856. One interpretation of this base transfer is that of a 'universal basic income' paid to all non-CNR workers.")
We can distill this further, to:
a. In general, CNR workers work better around other CNR workers due to positive externalities of location. I think this is tough to deny, with SF/the Valley for tech, NYC for finance, LA for entertainment, Shenzhen for hardware manufacturing, et cetera.
b. We should be removing any restrictions that stop this cycle from growing, from land use regulations, to stopping incentives and funding to small towns to create their own 'tech hubs', to just straight paying people to leave the city that are not part of that industry and stay out. It's the latter part of this everyone seems to be latching onto, however it's pretty common in economics to just model incentives as direct quantifiable costs.
This also explains what is happening in the Bay Area right now:
"Otherwise, cognitive hubs might use other indirect means of pushing out non-CNR workers such as, for example, housing supply constraints, zoning restrictions, or a lack of investment in transportation networks to aid commuting. Such efforts can generate occupational polarization across space without Pareto gains for all workers."
This is the exact kind of thinking that got you Trump. Keep in mind that by the time 'some' amounts to a substantial part of the voting public that the disenfranchised can turn around and throw a spanner in the works. It would be socially much more productive to study how to re-balance society in such a way that the gains are not realized locally.
Think of it this way (very much simplified):
If cities A and B create are producing 10 units of value each and small towns C, D, E and F are producing 3 each and you relocate all the 'important' (again, simplifying) people to A and B so they produce 20 units of value each while the small towns drop to 1 each you've according to the paper optimized and reduced the waste. After all 43 > 29. But from society's view this is a net loss. It would be much better to see how the small towns go from 3 to 5 each in order to reduce the gap.
Of course this is super simplified and in the end wealth distribution is a complex subject but this paper strikes out for me.
Inequality is best addressed by free healthcare, education and direct money transfers, not by slowing down things that create wealth and increase efficiencies.
Nonsense. Inequality is best addressed by ensuring resources are spread equally so that chance is distributed equally. If you don't do that then you're simply locking in and further accelerating any advantage already there. That's a positive feedback loop which will eventually lead to vast inequality that no amount of free healthcare, education and money are going to solve.
Paul Graham, who started this website, wrote: "Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups. And that doesn't seem a wise move." How would you respond to that?
His point wasn't about VC, it was about the fact that introducing new goods and services usually fails, so if we remove the big reward for success, people will stop taking that risk.
Lots of people start startups that they know will never make them billionaires, and even the founders of Google never expected the huge rewards they've reaped.
And there are ways of reducing the risk by not growing too quickly, building a company with actual revenues instead of burning VC cash.
The only thing reduced inequality would kill is the Silicon Valley variety of startup, which would be a good thing for everyone outside Silicon Valley. It would give sustainable businesses a chance to grow without having to compete with companies who burn billions of dollars to buy the market.
I would respond that that quote is taken severely out of context if applied to such entities as cities and towns. Besides that I think PG has a bit of a vested interest there; you rarely see a rich person argue for more equality in wealth.
That said PG did more to lift up people to riches than the bulk of the paper penning econometrists.
So, start-ups are fine, but making it harder for people from smaller towns or rural areas to get proper medical care, legal representation, education and so on because of perceived economic benefits of letting them rot in favor of improving the lives of those in the cities is missing the wood for the trees and will do a large amount of harm.
nabla9 said: "Inequality is best addressed by free healthcare, education and direct money transfers". To which you replied "Nonsense" and demanded more drastic measures, otherwise healthcare and education won't help. But now you say healthcare and education are what matters. I'm confused.
It was nabla9 missing the point the article advocates for reallocating resources to where they have the most economic effect: the big agglomerations.
Providing free (but crappy) healthcare and education will not close the divide thus created.
So these things are not going to be solved without capable people in places that are behind already. You need good healthcare and good education at the same cost as in the big cities to make it make sense. If the price is free then so much the better but first and foremost this is a discussion about quality.
For example: in a certain third world country healthcare may be free. But all the good doctors have left for the United States because that's where they get paid the most. So now the locals have 'free healthcare' but it doesn't really help them. They probably would like access to better and affordable healthcare.
That's totally unfair when the twitter user in question has thousands or even millions of followers.. checking this user.. oh, 42 followers.
Unfortunately, this is modern "journalism". Check out any "fans outraged over X" story and you'll find that it was ~5 people who collectively have 50 followers, 48 of which are probably bots.
That's why "critics say" and "some believe" are such meaningless and worthy-of-derision qualifiers. You can find anyone who believes anything if you dig deep enough and can search effectively.
Even if they have millions of followers, it can be totally unremarkable. For example, if Kim Kardashian tweeted on this issue, it would be just as dismissible as this person with 42 followers.
You obviously think of the internet as of one jurisdiction thing.
P.S. I agree that's ugly manipulation on journalism's side here, but those manipulations happen through the whole history of organized news (which predates not only internet, but printing as well), and it seems that bans either do not work, or have a lot of sad consequences.
While I agree with you, I'm not sure this is all that different from the older "man on the street" interviews that consisted of four or five seemingly random people with two or three sentences from each. It wouldn't be difficult to get the opinions you wanted to print by just asking people on the street until you enough of them said things you wanted to quote.
When you have millions of men, on millions of streets, the tone changes. Instead of being beholden to limited people you could run into, even in a dense city, who would express a view in person, you get the attention-seeking tweets of the litteral world to choose your narritve from. The ease of creating a new account and attaining followers, legit or not, is worth mentioning as well. Its not even an easily manipulatable resource at that point, just a blank check for insanity.
I don't think the general thesis is so controversial or untrue. If your goal is singly maximizing for economic output, you're going to make silly trade-offs.
"In a summary of the paper, they emphasized that the research was an “academic exercise” and that they didn’t address all the factors or potential repercussions of such a policy."
Ehh, it's a very simplistic model (relative to the complexity of the domain). It might be somewhat true in a very narrow sense. Naively implemented, it would be sure to result in many unforseen consequences.
Setting aside the primary claim, I think there would be lots of secondary effects if this were taken to an extreme. Diversity is good in any system; in this case, exposure to people with different levels of income, different life priorities and personalities, different backgrounds, increases empathy and broaden's one's understanding of the world. This exposure is especially important in a large, democratic society. We've already started to see the loss of some of this cross-pollination in recent years, and the country's divides haven't been this deep in decades. Increased homogenization would be catastrophic, I think.
Don't read too much into it, economic models like this are wrong in the same way the original version of Einstein's theory of general relativity fails to model 90% of the stuff in the universe, except that in this case it's more like 99.9%. The original paper[1] describes a spacial equability models where selfish agent move to maximise some utility function. It's in the vein of Shelling's segregation model. It's the sort of idea that the non-cognitive repeat ad nauseam.
I'm old enough to remember times when prestigiously-educated experts claimed big cities are going to disappear because of developing communications. Great to know they didn't stop generating their valuable prophecies since then!
"Cognitive non-repetitive," work as described is basically political work. I've heard it referred to lately as "durable skills." Soft skills are useful tools like others, but the elevation of them above competent work makes for soft ideas.
In the article, the examples of CNR work included "computer scientists," with lawyers, doctors, and managers - all jobs that computer scientists are rapidly augmenting, if not replacing with machine learning. So called CNR work isn't intrinsically valuable. It's artificially gated and the market for them is distorted because of regulatory capture. Tech is changing that.
However, I also think the availability of information on the internet has reduced the status of formerly elite schools to mere managerialist tribes. The schools offered networks and information, and those can't compete with social media. They're still politically influential, but the culture is leaving them behind and they're rapidly becoming just another faction. So, my bias is that the article is about some self-interested critical nonsense advocating a political agenda that won't have cultural traction. I look forward to arguing that point from my farm.
The unicorn within the unicorn was this pair. Unless pair programming gets mainstreamed, and superpairs are allowed to stick together, this effect will never be realized to it's full potential.
I don’t really see why people are conflating this with a recommendation or opinion on upwards mobility. Its just a study on cause and effect to see if a conclusion can meet a hypothesis without the noise of conjecture.
what this study is missing is that a lot of non-CNR work is going to be automated away. there is a likely future in which CNR work is the only work left for humans to do.
if the conclusion of the study is even valid, then it only supports a trend that has been going on for a long time: we all move into cities, and living in the countryside may become a thing of the past.
this is not necessarily a good future as far as living conditions are concerned, but this is the current trend we are seeing everywhere.
silicon valley is a case in point. the reason why the startup ecosystem thrives there is because all resources needed are in one place.
what we really need to learn from this is how to enable this kind of collaboration without all needing to live and work in close proximity.
that a lot of non-CNR work is going to be automated away. there is a likely future in which CNR work is the only work left for humans to do.
Hilariously untrue. There will still be plumbers and hairdressers long after the last lawyers and accountants have been AI’d away. I bet there will still be nurses long after doctors have gone the same way.
yes, but plumbers and hairdressers are needed everywhere. it's not good to send them away from the cities. those jobs that can be sent away will be those that can also be automated away.
While the thesis may be true, I also believe that society’s intellectuals will generally come up with intellectual arguments for whatever society was going to do anyway.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
If so, I agree. It's this idea of nationwide economic efficiency being the be-all and end-all goal of social policy, which completely ignores the actual "social" aspect of gutting small towns even more than already happens, not to mention instituting systems of effective apartheid that attempt to exclude people from important economic hubs.
Edit: ironically, Princeton itself is a pretty small town - 17,487 people in Princeton proper. Of course it's probably not what the study had in mind, and it's about 1.5 hours from NYC and an hour from Philadelphia, making it part of the Northeast megalopolis. Still, "small town" may not be the right term for what they're getting at.
The thing about living in an industrialized country is that raw resource extraction does not employ all that much labour.
It doesn't even matter how you structure your economic system. Even if we install radical socialism, with very heavy emphasis on wealth redistribution, there is still going to be a huge social divide between urban and rural.
We're better off not pretending that up is down, and black is white, and instead dealing with a world where we acknowledge that these differences exist, and will always exist.
The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.
The population of Princeton is 25k+.
Anyway the moral of my story is that calling the township Princeton "proper" attempts to create a divide that the residents don't care for, and dismisses many of them as not being from the "real" Princeton.
Source: native of Princeton (specifically township, but I actually have no idea which of the borough or township my friends lived in) with a slight stick up his butt.
> The distinction between Princeton "proper" and otherwise is not between the Township and Borough (which were legally joined for good several years ago), but between Princeton and Princeton Junction, West Windsor, Kingston, etc.
That's exactly what I meant by "proper". As you know, there are a lot of e.g. medical and financial business headquarters in those other towns (including Plainsboro), making the Princeton region quite a business powerhouse.
My point was looking at the size of a town alone is not a good criterion for this kind of thing. You'd have to look at surrounding towns, whether there are nearby universities, what kind of businesses exist in the area, etc. (And whether it has an Institute for Advanced Study :))
This also suggests that an alternative to further entrenching the dystopian morlock vs. eloi divide might be to encourage more town groupings like Princeton's throughout the country. With modern communications, that's much more practical than it used to be. I.e., such regional hubs can fully participate in the global economy even though they're not within major cities, although it would probably be more challenging further from major cities.
Rather than using this information to create a dystopian (and kinda click baity) future, it could be used to examine current social forces and make predictions and, ideally, prepare/compensate for them.
Indeed it would be just as easy spin the paper in a multitude of ways. For example, one might use it to justify taxation earmarked to aid the rural poor by saying it's not only ethical but also efficient.
The same is happening on an international level and the effect is terrible. It causes local shortages of just about all important experts including doctors, IT specialists and so on.
I really take issue with that. I think it is blatantly untrue. I've worked in small towns and I've worked in large metropolises (London, for example). I am not more productive in a metropolis. It's handy to go to meetups occasionally, but I have to say that with the internet I learn more by watching interesting talks and emailing people occasionally than I ever did going to the pub and chatting with super famous people in person.
I mean, I enjoy going to the pub and chatting with people in person and I really miss that about London, but I'm way more productive in my current rural setting.
It is, however, instructive to note that I am a remote worker. As a business, if you want to have people who are local, then it helps tremendously to be able to select from a large pool. That's obvious. As an individual it's much easier to network in person and so it's easier to get a job. But, when you are actually on the job? I really don't see this increase in "productivity" at all.
That matters when you're an individual that works on solo or small projects, but once you start working on project at scale with many individual teams, the time you spend coding matters less relative to time spent collaborating. There's no the teams I work with daily could be just as productive if we were not all in the same office.
Companies like Google or Facebook would not be more productive if thousands of engineers worked remotely from small towns.
https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf
The fact that productivity increases in big cities is not new finding. Economies of agglomeration is well studied subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
This study is modelling just one of the reasons why it is so little better.
The paper's primary policy points appear to be, using quotes from the paper:
1) CNR workers work better in "cognitive hubs" that specialise in this type of work.
2) "The main culprit of spatial misallocation is the existence of large occupation-specific externalities combined with potential distortions due to land use regulations."
3) Small towns are misguided in trying to lure "tech" to their cities, and should instead find a non-CNR industry to concentrate on that is not already concentrated in a specific city. ("the economics of the problem suggest that, with the appropriate transfers, small industrial cities in the U.S. should attract non-CNR workers and not try to become the next San Jose. The concentration of CNR workers in a few “cognitive hubs” should be encouraged, not scorned.")
4) CNR cities should be subsidizing non-CNR workers outside of the hub, at a UBI (wealth transfer) to non-CNR workers of about $17,000 a year per worker. ("CNR workers, who earn substantially more, end up paying a base transfer of $16,856. One interpretation of this base transfer is that of a 'universal basic income' paid to all non-CNR workers.")
We can distill this further, to:
a. In general, CNR workers work better around other CNR workers due to positive externalities of location. I think this is tough to deny, with SF/the Valley for tech, NYC for finance, LA for entertainment, Shenzhen for hardware manufacturing, et cetera.
b. We should be removing any restrictions that stop this cycle from growing, from land use regulations, to stopping incentives and funding to small towns to create their own 'tech hubs', to just straight paying people to leave the city that are not part of that industry and stay out. It's the latter part of this everyone seems to be latching onto, however it's pretty common in economics to just model incentives as direct quantifiable costs.
This also explains what is happening in the Bay Area right now:
"Otherwise, cognitive hubs might use other indirect means of pushing out non-CNR workers such as, for example, housing supply constraints, zoning restrictions, or a lack of investment in transportation networks to aid commuting. Such efforts can generate occupational polarization across space without Pareto gains for all workers."
Think of it this way (very much simplified):
If cities A and B create are producing 10 units of value each and small towns C, D, E and F are producing 3 each and you relocate all the 'important' (again, simplifying) people to A and B so they produce 20 units of value each while the small towns drop to 1 each you've according to the paper optimized and reduced the waste. After all 43 > 29. But from society's view this is a net loss. It would be much better to see how the small towns go from 3 to 5 each in order to reduce the gap.
Of course this is super simplified and in the end wealth distribution is a complex subject but this paper strikes out for me.
Inequality is best addressed by free healthcare, education and direct money transfers, not by slowing down things that create wealth and increase efficiencies.
Didn't Paul Graham himself start a startup without VC money?
And there are ways of reducing the risk by not growing too quickly, building a company with actual revenues instead of burning VC cash.
The only thing reduced inequality would kill is the Silicon Valley variety of startup, which would be a good thing for everyone outside Silicon Valley. It would give sustainable businesses a chance to grow without having to compete with companies who burn billions of dollars to buy the market.
That said PG did more to lift up people to riches than the bulk of the paper penning econometrists.
So, start-ups are fine, but making it harder for people from smaller towns or rural areas to get proper medical care, legal representation, education and so on because of perceived economic benefits of letting them rot in favor of improving the lives of those in the cities is missing the wood for the trees and will do a large amount of harm.
Providing free (but crappy) healthcare and education will not close the divide thus created.
So these things are not going to be solved without capable people in places that are behind already. You need good healthcare and good education at the same cost as in the big cities to make it make sense. If the price is free then so much the better but first and foremost this is a discussion about quality.
For example: in a certain third world country healthcare may be free. But all the good doctors have left for the United States because that's where they get paid the most. So now the locals have 'free healthcare' but it doesn't really help them. They probably would like access to better and affordable healthcare.
Unfortunately, this is modern "journalism". Check out any "fans outraged over X" story and you'll find that it was ~5 people who collectively have 50 followers, 48 of which are probably bots.
That's why "critics say" and "some believe" are such meaningless and worthy-of-derision qualifiers. You can find anyone who believes anything if you dig deep enough and can search effectively.
P.S. I agree that's ugly manipulation on journalism's side here, but those manipulations happen through the whole history of organized news (which predates not only internet, but printing as well), and it seems that bans either do not work, or have a lot of sad consequences.
"In a summary of the paper, they emphasized that the research was an “academic exercise” and that they didn’t address all the factors or potential repercussions of such a policy."
Refusing to pay based on employee value of a highly skilled worker in a remote location is a waste of opportunity.
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf
In the article, the examples of CNR work included "computer scientists," with lawyers, doctors, and managers - all jobs that computer scientists are rapidly augmenting, if not replacing with machine learning. So called CNR work isn't intrinsically valuable. It's artificially gated and the market for them is distorted because of regulatory capture. Tech is changing that.
However, I also think the availability of information on the internet has reduced the status of formerly elite schools to mere managerialist tribes. The schools offered networks and information, and those can't compete with social media. They're still politically influential, but the culture is leaving them behind and they're rapidly becoming just another faction. So, my bias is that the article is about some self-interested critical nonsense advocating a political agenda that won't have cultural traction. I look forward to arguing that point from my farm.
The unicorn within the unicorn was this pair. Unless pair programming gets mainstreamed, and superpairs are allowed to stick together, this effect will never be realized to it's full potential.
I don’t really see why people are conflating this with a recommendation or opinion on upwards mobility. Its just a study on cause and effect to see if a conclusion can meet a hypothesis without the noise of conjecture.
I don't know what on Earth their criteria was, but this is not a study conclusion I can remotely agree to get behind.
if the conclusion of the study is even valid, then it only supports a trend that has been going on for a long time: we all move into cities, and living in the countryside may become a thing of the past.
this is not necessarily a good future as far as living conditions are concerned, but this is the current trend we are seeing everywhere.
silicon valley is a case in point. the reason why the startup ecosystem thrives there is because all resources needed are in one place.
what we really need to learn from this is how to enable this kind of collaboration without all needing to live and work in close proximity.
Hilariously untrue. There will still be plumbers and hairdressers long after the last lawyers and accountants have been AI’d away. I bet there will still be nurses long after doctors have gone the same way.
The reason of course is Moravec’s Paradox.