Silicon Valley is the canonical example of economic agglomeration. The knowledge of how to build, program, and operate computer components was a shared, scarce resource in the early 1960’s. Programmers and technicians often moved between companies, transferring best practices. This collaboration caused companies to release products with complementa... See more

By 1965, Detroit’s big three still had 90 percent of the US car market; now they do not have even 45 percent. Until 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing village, when it became China’s first special economic zone, and now it is a megacity with more than 12 million people: what role will it play in 2050? A mass-scale, rapid retreat from the current st

... See more

In the Information Age, it will be technologically feasible to impose tolls, including congestion fees, that accurately price access to highways, runways, and other infrastructure without interrupting traffic flow. Thus the provision transportation infrastructure could be discretely privatized and financed directly by those who use the service. Eco

... See more

What I see to be the study’s second-most important finding is that, contrary to common perception, only about 18 percent of the global goods trade is now driven by lower labor costs (labor arbitrage), that in many chains this share has been declining throughout the 2010s, and that global value chains are becoming more knowledge-intensive and rely i

... See more