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This article is badly informed and badly reasoned. Adam Smith - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ” It is not, accordingly, in th
by babesh 6y ago
This article is badly informed and badly reasoned.
Adam Smith - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
” It is not, accordingly, in the richest countries, but in the most thriving, or in those which are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest.”
In those places, you are willing to pay the most since it will make you the most.
Brooke’s Law
Wikipedia
“ Communication overhead increases as the number of people increases. Due to combinatorial explosion, the number of different communication channels increases rapidly with the number of people.[3] Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing.”
You want to cluster people together since distributing people creates communications overhead.
Adam Smith also explains why innovation tends to cluster. It is because communication lets learning and innovation occur more rapidly.
Lastly, labor moves to where there are the highest wages.
You saw all this the last 10 years. Facebook willing to pay top dollar. Companies growing their offices bigger and bigger. People moving to Silicon Valley for the money. Silicon Valley companies copying best practices in the blink of an eye.
It also explains why Zoom has such good margins. Their engineering wasn’t distributed. It was in China. Labor arbitrage but with a minimization of communications overhead.
Companies don’t attack all markets at once. They attack them one at a time (usually local market first).
It is in fact in an efficient market that you have disparities in wages.
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoThe desire to cluster makes sense, but why cluster where the salaries are most expensive? If you want to start a software company, why start it in the Valley and not some town that has lots of programming talent but way lower pay? We see so many startups that are paying top dollar for San Francisco office space and a dozen six digit programmers, but the same company in suburban Georgia would cost only a tiny fraction of that, and putting it in the country George would cost only a small fraction of that yet again.
- babesh 6y agoYou already see that happening but not Georgia as much as far as I can tell. Also there is labor movement. If the labor can get better salaries elsewhere why should they move to your smaller, less wealthy location? Salaries there would need to rise. The bigger the cluster the bigger the network effect in the cluster. My opinion is that there are probably less than 10 viable clusters in North America. If it is too small or the culture is against it, then it fails. There have been such attempts, a few succeeded, most failed. It shall be interesting which (new) clusters grow. My bet is on Toronto. AI talent. Large cosmopolitan city. Good universities.
- brenden2 6y agoWealth of Nations is such a good book, I implore everyone to read it. I think a lot of people misunderstand what Adam Smith was about, and it's good to go back to the early ideas of what capitalism was meant to be, and how far we have diverged from it.