Why You Should Live in a Nerdopolis

(funky music) Jonathan Dingel: For the first time in recorded history, the majority of people in the world live in cities. Millions of people in developing economies are migrating from rural to urban areas. The character of American cities is shifting as well. In today’s economy, college graduates are clustering together in large metropolitan areas in order to take advantage of the opportunities they find in these cities.

Frances MacLeod: I work for Leo Burnett full time. Before I moved to Chicago, I lived in Wichita, Kansas, for 18 years. It’s really important for me to be near some of the best and smartest people in my industry, and Chicago really offers that.

Jonathan Dingel: Larger cities are talent factories. They’re places where young people can start their career and refine their skills. That makes them a valuable launching pad for somebody in the early stages of employment.

Brad Malouf: I always wanted to work in Chicago because architecture is huge here. It’s not big where I grew up in Crystal Lake [in Illinois]. There’s a few firms that don’t really do much. But Chicago is at the forefront of the industry, and there’s no better place to work.

Frances MacLeod: I think my most valuable interactions are with people who are interested in new ideas and interested in growing things. I don’t think I could live anywhere else and do what I do.

Jonathan Dingel: Big cities have more educated populations. The fraction of people in the city that have a college degree, for example, rises with the size of the population. And they’re also advantageous in terms of earnings. So if you look at the college wage premium, which is the gap between the earnings of a college graduate compared to a high-school graduate, that premium in wages is rising with the size of the cities population as well.

Nathaneal Filbert: I’m a photographer. So, if I wasn’t gonna live in Chicago, I was gonna leave the state and move to another city somewhere else. Yeah, the city life—and the opportunities that it provides—is something that’s really important to me.

Jonathan Dingel: These are places where young people are searching through jobs, searching through opportunities, refining their skills, and discovering where they can find their best match in terms of employment prospects.

Vivian Jones: I’ve been lead into a new path that I would never see coming and have opened my own restaurant with my boyfriend. Being in Chicago has introduced me to a lot of various people from different parts of Latin culture. I have friends that are from Cuba, from Columbia, from Venezuela, from Spain, and it’s really influenced me in making the decisions for my restaurant.

Jonathan Dingel: When changing residences, about one in five high-school graduates will be switching metropolitan areas. For college graduates, that number is one in three. And when they change residences, a college graduate tends to move about 80 percent farther on average than a high-school graduate.

Frances MacLeod: I would definitely move to another city before I move to the suburbs. I feel like a lot of ideas get lost along the way and a lot of energy is lost.

Vivian Jones: It has benefited me to come here. I was able to find stuff that I wouldn’t been able to find staying in Kansas City.

Jonathan Dingel: When you look at big cities, what you see is that younger people are switching occupations and switching industries more often than their counterparts in smaller cities.

Brad Malouf: Everyone’s changing positions. Everyone wants to move up in the business. Most of the people I’ve graduated with have switched firms already and they’ve been out of school for only four years. Me in included, I’ve switched jobs in the last year.

Jonathan Dingel: Fundamentally, cities are about the benefits of scale. When you bring more people and put them together in a place, you have more conversations. You talk to each other. You exchange ideas. You discover more opportunities.

Nathaneal Filbert: In this industry, in general most work comes as referrals. Very few things happen as cold calls.

Frances MacLeod: Most of my clients came through word of mouth. A lot of the people that I know in Chicago have freelancing backgrounds or are independent people who are making their own way.

Jonathan Dingel: And so to the extent that there are benefits from having greater diversity, in which you have more meetings, more idea exchanges, or that there are benefits that you can look for the best idea, or discover the best opportunity, the best match, then bigger cities with their larger scale are gonna be a place of opportunity.

Nathaneal Filbert: It’s less about the city and more about the opportunities that I engaged within the city, the types of people that I mix with. Those sorts of things begin to be the things that inspire me, not so much the fact that I’m in an urban environment.

Jonathan Dingel: Cities bring people together. And that proximity is a powerful economic force. The advantage of proximity is that it reduces the cost of trading goods, changing jobs, discovering new opportunities, and exchanging ideas with other people. That makes proximity and the concentration of population in cities an important part of the American economic landscape.