Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

The author raises good points which are hard to disagree with. I'm troubled by the decision to choose the odd and seemingly arbitrary "95-20 ratio" though, instead of a more typical 80-20.

Does anybody know what these graphs look like at 80-20?

Before industrialization, land that mattered was farmland. Then as industrialization took hold, urban land became more important as the grouping of people together allowed for economies of scale in manufacturing. But then the petrochemical revolution put things in reverse, as people could live anywhere and travel by car. Suddenly, open space was economically desirable, as it made more sense to build a factory in super-cheap Nowheresville, Arkansas than crowded, expensive Philadelphia.

But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc)

Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class.

Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area.

Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.

Don't worry. Programming is becoming a blue collar job.

Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.

Or a straight up power-law curve fit, which is what those are both (implicitly) based upon.

What happens when we eventually train AI to write code for us? Then "programming" would be a lot more like data entry than creative work.