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OyCrumbler: Again, the capital-of-everything-else part keeps the Bay Area from knocking New York off its #1 perch.
And I think a lot of us are forgetting that, the entertainment industry aside, LA has one of the nation's most diversified economies and is also the biggest West Coast port, having seized that title from the Bay Area some time back. Its case for #2 status is probably stronger than that of the DMV or the Bay Area.
Which brings us back to jockeying with one another and with Chicago for the 3, 4 and 5 spots.
I don't think either of those responses had anything to do with knocking anywhere off any perch.
Your post made it seem like there was government for DC, Entertainment for LA and all the rest goes to NY.
The two posts were just stating that there are other big industries that NY does NOT dominate in and they highlighted the Bay and Tech as an example.
So no, its not NY the capital of everything else. It does better than most in a wide variety of sectors but it does not dominate Tech, Biotechnology, Energy, Logistics , Education...
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl
I spent four years courting a Washington journalist in the 2010s. Several of his relatives live in the region, but he told me he never felt totally at home in it either (he grew up in Kentucky, in a small city southeast of Louisville). He never lived there, but he seemed far more comfortable tooling around my native Kansas City with me on a 2013 road trip back (the chain he worked for owns The Kansas City Star).
I know from a native of Washington the City who moved here that Official Washingtonians occupy a different mental plane. (Another widely-cited example of this difference: their propensity to ask right off the top on a first meeting or date, "So what do you do?")
Maybe it is a complex, but it's one informed by some personal experience, tempered with the caveat that "the plural of anecdote is not data."
I'm talking about what's being said in the thread. No one here has said DC's first other than posters not from there. So your earlier post about natives tooting it's horn, is false regarding this thread.
OyCrumbler: Again, the capital-of-everything-else part keeps the Bay Area from knocking New York off its #1 perch.
And I think a lot of us are forgetting that, the entertainment industry aside, LA has one of the nation's most diversified economies and is also the biggest West Coast port, having seized that title from the Bay Area some time back. Its case for #2 status is probably stronger than that of the DMV or the Bay Area.
Which brings us back to jockeying with one another and with Chicago for the 3, 4 and 5 spots.
NYC is the capital of a lot of things, but it's certainly not everything-else aside for more than just federal government and the tech industry. Higher ed and medicine/pharmaceuticals arguably goes to Boston or the Bay Area or at least tied with NYC. TV and film though with a large presence in NYC and elsewhere is pretty squarely based in LA as is much of the entertainment industry. Energy is more or less Houston. Agricultural commodities is Chicago. NYC does pretty well in a lot of categories, but the recent decades has meant a lot of other places have taken on the role of capital of pretty prominent industries.
I'm pretty biased towards New York City (and LA), but I'd like to try a devil's advocate argument for the Bay Area for #1. Devil's advocate as in I don't really believe there's a weighting of criteria that makes a huge amount of sense that would work, but I'd like to give it a shot.
The Bay Area has decent GDP and population size but certainly nowhere near #1 or #2. It's sizable though and it has a very high GDP per capita with a massive concentration of wealth. It also doesn't have the largest number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered there, but it does have a pretty sizable number. I think where the argument for the Bay Area on top lies in just how influential that concentration of wealthy individuals and corporations are and what their reach is.
The Bay Area's top Fortune 500 companies are massive in terms of market capitalization in ways that eclipse many other companies (save for two prominent Seattle-based tech companies) and also do quite well in terms of annual revenue. Their products unlike say the big four banks or national retail chains like Walmart also are global products with global reach and name recognition whereas most of the others like retail giant Walmart or the large US banks reside more on national recognition. These are also products that globally are used by billions of people every day in a very direct manner in a way which has relatively little analogous products I can think of for most of what is made by the more prominent companies of the Tri-State Area or other US metropolitan areas to anywhere near the same extent. Embedded in these products built and maintained mostly in the Bay Area are underlying systems that direct what to monetize and what to present to billions of users which greatly impacts what gets amplified whether it's entertainment or news and whether you're actively searching or passively consuming even though much of the content itself usually isn't made in the Bay Area. These also includes not just tools for distribution but the tools for production whether it's the designs for hardware or software as those companies are also often HQ'd in the Bay Area as well. And again, this doesn't just apply to the US, but rather applies to most of the entire world.
On top of that, the Bay Area seems to have a process and culture of quickly developing these companies and making them massive. There's a concentration of very *large* (like, the student populations and faculty themselves are numerically very large) and high performing research universities in the area, the largest collection of federal national laboratories are also in the area, and private corporations incubate massive r&d centers in the area while a variety of financial instruments are wielded in the area. The Bay Area generates billion dollar companies year after year. Even when it loses companies as it has for decades, more and more just keep popping up either starting there (Tesla) or having key periods of their incubation there (Facebook). These tech companies have also quickly been moving into all other sectors at a rapid pace. Telecommunications, finances, insurance, automotive, energy, logistics, etc. (seemingly *any* industry) all have seen a slate of new entrants from Bay Area companies over the last couple of decades. I think this constant mover of change where the direction of various key industries appear to be radically altered via Bay Area companies and that kind of ecosystem that feeds into it is where the Bay Area's argument for #1 would be.
How'd I do? I reckon under this kind of weighting of criteria that could place the Bay Area at #1, the Boston area and Seattle area would also do quite favorably though possibly still not within the top four.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 05-18-2022 at 10:51 AM..
New York is the main financial center, arguably the main center of international relations... Tech is important but finance is the backbone of a lot, in many sectors.
By "finance" I mean the largest stock trading center, the largest commercial banking center...making some assumptions about world rankings here.
New York is the main financial center, arguably the main center of international relations... Tech is important but finance is the backbone of a lot, in many sectors.
By "finance" I mean the largest stock trading center, the largest commercial banking center...making some assumptions about world rankings here.
No assumptions.
Let me put it this way, if Amazon, Apple or Facebook where to go belly up tomorrow, Congress wouldn't step in the way they would for a financial institution.
New York is the cultural and financial capital of the US. Those are 2 of the biggest parts of American society. Technology (Bay area), entertainment (LA) and government (DC) would probably be the other heavyweights. Other sectors are either not as large or are simply too diffusive to be of importance to a single city.
After looking at the above, I see that covers 4 of the 5 cities being discussed at the top. The other (Chicago) grew in a different era, when industry was king, and has managed to retain it's legacy status ever since. It won't be in the foreseeable future, but I do wonder at what point Chicago starts getting passed by others.
New York is the cultural and financial capital of the US. Those are 2 of the biggest parts of American society. Technology (Bay area), entertainment (LA) and government (DC) would probably be the other heavyweights. Other sectors are either not as large or are simply too diffusive to be of importance to a single city.
After looking at the above, I see that covers 4 of the 5 cities being discussed at the top. The other (Chicago) grew in a different era, when industry was king, and has managed to retain it's legacy status ever since. It won't be in the foreseeable future, but I do wonder at what point Chicago starts getting passed by others.
NY is also the commercial/retail capital, largest international air hub, and media/publishing capital.
Let me put it this way, if Amazon, Apple or Facebook where to go belly up tomorrow, Congress wouldn't step in the way they would for a financial institution.
Not only that, but there's nothing that happens in the Bay Area on one single day that really has immediate national or global ramifications. Not to the point where every major news organization in the world sets up shop in Palo Alto waiting for Larry Ellison to announce his latest business venture.
Not only that, but there's nothing that happens in the Bay Area on one single day that really has immediate national or global ramifications. Not to the point where every major news organization in the world sets up shop in Palo Alto waiting for Larry Ellison to announce his latest business venture.
Product announcements from Apple do get a lot of global media coverage--too much I think. The bigger picture though is that a massive proportion of the world, not just the US, gets its news (and even commentary and misinformation) of things of immediate national or global ramifications via services headquartered in the Bay Area. The basic underlying infrastructure is what the Bay Area and its companies have built. Do I buy that and other related factors are enough to argue for #1 given that there are other places with substantially larger populations and GDP? Probably not, but I can see some points in it.
I'd put software and connectivity high on the importance list. But we'd read about news somewhere even certain distribution platforms went away.
And we need the platforms we use to conduct business.
One question is how much of each would survive if the HQ city went away. Would the stock and bond markets? Would software platforms? That's in terms of both short-term resilience and long-term ability to remain viable with the people in that vanished city.
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