Slow Ambition, Tech Clusters, & Hometown Pride
Small Cities Weekly | 03.01.2024
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
Slow Ambition
I hate the “it’s a cheap place to live” value proposition attached to small cities.
It’s true and it does matter, but it feels wholly underwhelming for the kind of relationship I want to have with the place I decide to call home.
It also feels like a consolation prize. You have to give up ambition, but, hey, at least it’s cheap.
This is one of the biggest things I feel like small cities struggle with. How do we talk about ambition in an authentic way? How do we talk about what our cities could be without trying to name them with the prefix “Silicon”?
I was listening to a podcast yesterday, interviewing Cal Newport. You might know him as the author of the book, Deep Work, or from his columns for The New Yorker. He has a new book out called Slow Productivity. The book is based on the premise of “accomplishment without burnout” in today’s workforce. The three tenants of the theory are: (1) obsess over quality, (2) do fewer things, and (3) work at a natural pace.
He is quick to note that following these principles aren’t a tradeoff with ambition. This isn’t “you won’t achieve as much, but you’ll be happier”. This is about achieving more because of how you choose to work. From the podcast:
You can't be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with 100 projects. If you're obsessed about doing something really well, it's incompatible with that.
Now, doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together, but it is incompatible with being busy. Like Chris Nolan, the director, doesn't even own a smartphone - it’s just I'm making Oppenheimer and that's what I'm doing for the next three years. And then when I'm done, I'm going to go away for six months and just read. That's what I do.
Listening to this, it struck me that what the stereotype of small cities being quieter, calmer, and cheaper does offer is a home for slow ambition. A place for people who want to build things that could take a long time. That will require a lot of focus. That cannot be built where there is noise, social pressures, or a now culture. That thing may be a company. It may be a creative project. It may be a family. What they have in common is being measured in decades and lifetimes, not weeks and months.
I’d be excited about that identity. Small cities are where people go who are slow ambitious. The type of people who see patience as an input, not a sacrifice. The type of people who see the marginal decrease in “things to do” as increased time to focus on what matters. The type of people who see cheaper cost of living as longer runway for building.
A home for slow ambition isn’t a change to what these places offer. It’s a change to the story of what these places offer. And the story is often all that matters.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation?, Brian J. Asquith, American Affairs
Innovation is influenced not by peer effects but also by the problems that innovators see in their environment and that capture their interest, either as adults or as children.62 A recent paper by Jacob Moscona and Karthik Sastry highlighted how this works at a global scale.63 They investigated how R&D dollars tend to be directed at agricultural pests that are a problem in high-income countries where the research happens but not in the developing countries where the technology is sold, resulting in significantly lower crop productivity globally. A similar mismatch between the needs and interests of twenty- or thirty-something innovators living in the Bay Area and non-college-educated middle-aged workers living elsewhere may also be causing the United States to generate too much “inappropriate” technology.64
…
…even as the number of researchers and papers increases in a networked cluster, the marginal impact of each paper declines. Some evidence suggests that scientific papers and patents are in fact becoming more deferential to previously published work and less likely to disrupt the chain of citations and references.66 By this logic, geographically diffuse researchers may be less productive in the ways that urban economists typically measure output (fewer papers, fewer patents, etc.), but they may be more creative, original, and disruptive because these researchers worry less about having to see someone in person whose work they publicly disagree with.
If you can’t tell, reading this research review also sparked the slow ambition idea. The last line above really struck me as a great way to frame the value proposition: “a place to be more creative, original, and to worry less about what other people think.”
Bridging the Regenerative Agriculture Financing Gap, Colin Custer & Alex Healey, Yale Center for Business and the Environment
But the question remains: If regenerative farming is profitable, and financiers can make money funding it, why isn’t everyone doing it?
…
The farmers we spoke with stressed that their wealth of experience gives them a deep, intuitive understanding of a place, what works and what does not, what has been tried before, and what has yet to be tested. That understanding has been earned through years of hard work, and investors who discount this experience do so at their own peril.
You could take this exact report and replace regenerative farming with small city entrepreneurship and have a really similar argument. Some of the innovative financial structures were really interesting to read about.
You may know Terry McFadden as South Bend's newsman. To us, he's just dad., Michael, Sean and Charlie McFadden, South Bend Tribune
Dad often tells us he’s the last of a dying breed — a local kid who never got the urge to sail off in search of greener pastures. He’s right. It's rare to find someone with such a long tenure in one place. Especially a journalist, especially today. We admire him for it. It’s why his oldest son already moved back home, his middle son will move back in a month, and his youngest will return in due time. South Bend is our father’s town, and it’s our town too.
Terry McFadden’s retirement on March 1 marks the end of an era. He won’t be on your television screens to bring you Michiana’s news each night. But he’ll always be here to tell your stories, visit your businesses and walk your neighborhoods as he’s done his whole life. That’s because he’s proud of his town.
We’re proud to be his sons.
My friend Camille, a South Bend native, shared this with me yesterday and the timing is almost too perfect given today’s theme of slow ambition. It’s an opinion piece written by the three sons of a local news anchor who has announced his retirement after 25 years on the desk. I hate that this might be paywalled for the majority of you, but I had to share it.
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