The recent decision by Amazon to locate in NYC and near DC reminds me of the “communication, collaboration, colocalization” propaganda shoved down my throat when my company BigPfarma moved to Kendall Square. “We will be near our MIT collaborators”, “Serendipity will enrich our research”, “the restaurants are great” (I kid you not - spoken by the director of research). For most of us, one way commutes increased from ~15 minutes to over an hour. That is two hours a day of commuting. Two hours not spent maintaining our property, enjoying our families, volunteering in the community. Multiply that by thousands. A huge cost extracted from the workers and, assuming there is some value added to the colocalization, transferred to the elites.
I cannot recall where I read that the overarching goal of moving to Kendall Square is to outsource the vetting of your employees to MIT. If you run a technology company, the most valuable employee is an MIT graduate. MIT, due to its reputation as the top technology school in the world, has its choice of the most intelligent, ambitious, and innovative students from around the world. If you hire an MIT graduate, not only do you get an extremely motivated and intelligent individual, but most likely that individual is young, unmarried, childless, does not own property, etc. essentially no other reponsibilities. That graduate will work 60 hours a week for their 40 hour salary. If all your employess were MIT graduates, you would have a great competitive advantage. If all other technology companies are moving to Kendall Square to hoover up the MIT graduates, you better move there also.
You can’t advertise for young, unmarried, childless MIT graduates but you can do the next best thing - move into their backyard such that you become an attractive employer. Furthermore you discourage parents of children from applying for your positions. Parents don’t want to live in Kendall Square where you never know what you might find on your street in the morning. Parents want to live in the suburbs where the schools are good, yards are large, and diversity is limitted.
So now we see Amazon utilizing a similar approach. They don’t want parents who might have to stay home to tend a sick child, or leave early for a ballet recital. They want careerists who will go the extra mile, step out of their comfort zone, show initiative, etc. etc. further amplifying the differences between the haves and the have nots.
Michael Seibel of Y Combinator knows the value of young people:
“Your 20s (are) your best chance of starting a company early, you wake up one day and you’re out of the game. Big companies know how disruptors get started. They take talented people, lock them down with stock options, and put them in the corner somewhere.” He continued, “What’s tricky about being a young founder enticed by big company jobs is that it’s at the time of your life when you have the fewest obligations. You can get a big company job at any point in your 20s but only at the beginning and middle of your 20s do you not have the mortgage and the family.” Seibel added, “It’s a massively underused period of time.”
America’s worst place to live … families are distractions…
You don’t have to be curing cancer
The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors
90 percent of growth in high-tech jobs happened in just 5 metro areas
Biotech living and walking dead
Cities aren’t the innovative incubators they used to be
Agglomeration is good for research scientists, even taking costs into account.
Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation?