ah, yes, that is completely true; some products are better produced in some areas than in other areas. My argument is generalizing this to "if you fix things

ah, yes, that is completely true; some products are better produced in some areas than in other areas. My argument is generalizing this to "if you fix things or otherwise provide services, you are better off fixing things or otherwise providing services to wealthy people than doing the same for people who are less wealthy" (edit: you can substitute "productive" for "wealthy" here, if you want to change 'are better off' to 'add more productivity to the system' in the previous sentence. Or you can leave it as-is, either way works, really.) Which seems to me to follow, because my tech job involves a whole lot of "service" type fixing things for people. I'm a SysAdmin, and let me tell you, getting woken up in the middle of the night for a billion dollar product is way more renumerative (and better in other ways, too) than getting woken up in the middle of the night for a million dollar product. My argument is that what I experience as a sysadmin would probably be pretty similar if I fixed cars instead; Fixing cars for wealthy people is likely to be a lot more renumerative than doing the same for people who aren't wealthy, and regardless of the direction of causality, the correlation between degrees and money is very strong; that's where I was going with my original point that as a dude without a degree who fixes things and helps people, I'm better off around educated people than otherwise. Of course, you would be totally right to come back with other location based jobs; like if I were a mechanic, the path to income maximization would probably be to upgrade my skills to large diesel, and then move near some oil fields or something; jobs that are dependent on location are totally a thing. But most jobs depend on the people you are around more than any other location.