7 ms·

High-skilled workers in small towns are a ‘waste of resources,’ says study

72 points by SQL2219 7y ago

dredmorbius 7y ago
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 https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf
jstewartmobile 7y ago
“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.” ― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
a3n 7y ago
One of the most blood chilling things I've recently read.
- antonvs 7y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It's not only institutionalizing the social divide between 'rural' and 'city', it is effectively deepening that divide.
    - vkou 7y ago
      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.
  - skj 7y ago
    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.
    - antonvs 7y ago
      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.
- jstewartmobile 7y ago
  I salute you sir.
erichocean 7y ago
Yet another study where humans are "resources" to be "efficiently" "exploited" by business. No thanks.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  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.
- malandrew 7y ago
  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.
jacquesm 7y ago
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.
abricot 7y ago
They had me until they included "managers" in their list...
- bloomer 7y ago
  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.
algaeontoast 7y ago
This article immediately lead to the mental image of Patrick Star from SpongeBob saying “We’ll take the poors, and move them over there” .
mikekchar 7y ago
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.
- orev 7y ago
  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.
  - droithomme 7y ago
    So it benefits lazy corporations and not smart corporations or astute talented individuals. Not really something beneficial to the greater society IMO.
    - malandrew 7y ago
      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.
baron816 7y ago
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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  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.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    Are you saying that economists should not study subjects that can have negative consequences for some? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration This study is modelling just one of the reasons why it is so little better.
    - rarecoil 7y ago
      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."
coralreef 7y ago
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."
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  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.
_bxg1 7y ago
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.
LanceH 7y ago
Disallowing work from small towns where a high skilled worker resides is a waste of resources. Refusing to pay based on employee value of a highly skilled worker in a remote location is a waste of opportunity.
wrnr 7y ago
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. [1] https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
brokenkebab 7y ago
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!
motohagiography 7y ago
"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.
crb002 7y ago
True in so much as the Jeff/Sanjay effect. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... 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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rolltiide 7y ago
Good study on optimum efficiency. 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.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
So, basically, "blue collar workers don't need no stinking doctors" (among other things). I don't know what on Earth their criteria was, but this is not a study conclusion I can remotely agree to get behind.
em-bee 7y ago
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.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  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. The reason of course is Moravec’s Paradox.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    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.
finnmagic 7y ago
For maximal efficiency, why don’t they just decide what we should do professionally and then move us into the most convenient commune?
bigred100 7y ago
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.

72 points by SQL2219 7y ago

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 https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf

jstewartmobile 7y ago

“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.” ― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

a3n 7y ago

One of the most blood chilling things I've recently read.

antonvs 7y ago
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.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It's not only institutionalizing the social divide between 'rural' and 'city', it is effectively deepening that divide.
  - vkou 7y ago
    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.
- skj 7y ago
  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.
  - antonvs 7y ago
    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.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
I salute you sir.

erichocean 7y ago

Yet another study where humans are "resources" to be "efficiently" "exploited" by business. No thanks.

TomMckenny 7y ago
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.
malandrew 7y ago
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.

jacquesm 7y ago

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.

abricot 7y ago

They had me until they included "managers" in their list...

bloomer 7y ago
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.

algaeontoast 7y ago

This article immediately lead to the mental image of Patrick Star from SpongeBob saying “We’ll take the poors, and move them over there” .

mikekchar 7y ago

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.

orev 7y ago
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.
- droithomme 7y ago
  So it benefits lazy corporations and not smart corporations or astute talented individuals. Not really something beneficial to the greater society IMO.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    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.

baron816 7y ago

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.

jacquesm 7y ago
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.
- nabla9 7y ago
  Are you saying that economists should not study subjects that can have negative consequences for some? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration This study is modelling just one of the reasons why it is so little better.
  - rarecoil 7y ago
    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."

coralreef 7y ago

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."

dwaltrip 7y ago
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.

_bxg1 7y ago

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.

LanceH 7y ago

Disallowing work from small towns where a high skilled worker resides is a waste of resources. Refusing to pay based on employee value of a highly skilled worker in a remote location is a waste of opportunity.

wrnr 7y ago

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. [1] https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~erossi/CHSR.pdf

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

brokenkebab 7y ago

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!

motohagiography 7y ago

"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.

crb002 7y ago

True in so much as the Jeff/Sanjay effect. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... 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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rolltiide 7y ago

Good study on optimum efficiency. 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.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

So, basically, "blue collar workers don't need no stinking doctors" (among other things). I don't know what on Earth their criteria was, but this is not a study conclusion I can remotely agree to get behind.

em-bee 7y ago

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.

goatinaboat 7y ago
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. The reason of course is Moravec’s Paradox.
- em-bee 7y ago
  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.

finnmagic 7y ago

For maximal efficiency, why don’t they just decide what we should do professionally and then move us into the most convenient commune?

bigred100 7y ago

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.