by Jonah Lehrer
Of course, Israel isn’t the only place trying to attract venture-capital investment. Cities have been attempting to replicate the Silicon Valley model for decades, striving (often in vain) to create the kind of region from which companies like Google and Apple emerged. So how did Israel — this tiny nation with a long list of disadvantages — become such a vibrant high-tech incubator? What is it about the weak ties of Tel Aviv that make its entrepreneurs such a consistent source of new ideas?
One of Vardi’s answers is surprising: the military. Because Israel is an extremely small country, it’s never been able to maintain a large standing army. As a result, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are entirely dependent on their reserve units; most Israeli men under the age of forty-five are required to serve several weeks a year.
While many Israelis complain about the mandatory service — it’s long been seen as a drag on economic productivity — there’s a growing recognition that it’s also a crucial source of innovation. The reason, Vardi says, is straightforward: the reserve forces maintain a vast network of weak ties across the country, since the soldiers reacquaint themselves with everyone else in their unit every year. Instead of just hanging out with close friends, they are forced to mingle with all sorts of different people. “It’s like a college reunion that goes on for a month,” Vardi says. “You meet people, you schmooze. Reserve duty is a big part of what helps keep this place feeling so tiny.” This socializing helps explain how a single unit in the Israel Defense Forces could give rise to three successful tech companies: ICQ, Check Point Software, and NICE Systems.
The larger point is that Israel’s social networks have come to resemble those in the most effective urban neighborhoods. What Jane Jacobs celebrated about Hudson Street is also true of Tel Aviv. These places have found a way to maximize their human capital, forcing their inhabitants to mingle.
5.
In the late 1990s, when the dot-com fever was at its peak, many technology enthusiasts predicted that cities would soon become obsolete, a relic of the analog age. After all, with an online world of email and video chats, why should we sacrifice our quality of life to live amid strangers? Cheap bandwidth would mean the end of expensive rents; the zeros and ones hurtling across the fiber-optic cables would supply each of us with all of our human interactions.
And yet this pessimistic forecast for cities has not come to pass. In fact, the data suggests that the opposite has occurred: cities have become more valuable than ever. (Just look at the continued vitality of Silicon Valley. One might expect high-tech companies to embrace the possibility of remote communication, but this hasn’t happened. Instead, the tech sector continues to concentrate itself in a single California valley, despite the high rents. That’s because the best innovators in the world know that the best way to interact is face to face.) Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, has studied the effects of the Internet on face-to-face exchanges. Interestingly, he’s found that the online world has increased the returns of such conversations, at least as measured by metrics such as rents in urban areas and attendance at industry conferences. “Modern life has made being smart and creative even more important,” Glaeser says. “And how do we get smart? Even in this age of technology, we still get smart being around other smart people. That’s why we pay a fortune to live in Manhattan or Cambridge or Silicon Valley. The printing press didn’t make cities less important. And the Internet won’t either.” Take a study led by researchers at the University of Michigan. They brought several groups of people together and had them play a difficult cooperation game. Then they gave the exact same task to a different set of groups, except these people had to communicate electronically, using e-mail and instant messaging.
The groups meeting in person quickly solved the problem, finding clever ways to cooperate. The electronic groups, in contrast, struggled to interact. Although they exchanged roughly equivalent amounts of information, these groups were missing the surprising exchanges that occur when people meet in the flesh. As a result, their problem remained impossible.
A similar lesson emerges from a 2010 study by Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. Kohane’s question was simple: How does physical proximity affect the quality of scientific research? To find out, he analyzed more than thirty-five thousand peer-reviewed papers, mapping the precise location of every single coauthor. (According to Kohane, this task took a “small army of undergraduates” several years to complete.) Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear: when coauthors were located closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality, as measured by the number of subsequent citations. In fact, the best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten meters of one another, while the worst papers tended to emerge from collaborators located a kilometer or more apart. “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures and facilities that support frequent physical interactions,” Kohane says. In other words, our most important new ideas don’t arrive on a screen. Rather, they emerge from idle conversation, from too many scientists sharing the same space.
This doesn’t mean we should give up on the Internet. Instead, the limitations of technology should inspire us to rethink the nature of our online interactions. The first thing we have to ensure is that our new digital contacts don’t detract from our real connections, from the analog conversations of the physical world. Twitter has its uses, but it’s no substitute for the ballet of Hudson Street, just as the weak ties of Facebook cannot replace the weak ties of life. While the Internet has evolved primarily to maximize efficiency and make it as easy as possible to find information, it needs to do a better job of increasing serendipity. Sometimes, the most important idea is the one we don’t even know we need.
And this returns us to the enduring power of the metropolis, a place that constantly introduces us to the unexpected and curious.
When we stroll down a crowded sidewalk, we meet people we didn’t want to meet and get answers to questions we didn’t even think to ask; knowledge leaks from everywhere. If the Internet is going to become an accelerator of creativity, then we need to design websites that act like our most innovative cities. Instead of sharing links with just our friends, or commenting anonymously on blogs, or filtering the world with algorithms to fit our interests, we must engage with strangers and strange ideas. The Internet has such creative potential; it’s so ripe with weirdness and originality, so full of people eager to share their work and ideas.
What we need now is a virtual world that brings us together for real.
The importance of cities is a testament to the necessity of sharing ideas. It doesn’t matter if this sharing takes place on Hudson Street or at bar full of engineers or during army reserve training — the exchange is all that matters. What’s interesting is that this urban dance cannot be choreographed in advance or controlled from above. Instead, the creativity of the metropolis is inseparable from its freedom, from the natural chaos of a densely populated Zip Code.
Geoffrey West makes this clear by comparing cities to corporations. At first, urban areas and companies look very similar. Each is a large agglomeration of people interacting in a well-defined physical space. They both contain infrastructure and human capital; the mayor of the city is like the CEO of the corporation.
But it turns out that cities and companies differ in one very fundamental regard: cities almost never die, while companies are extremely ephemeral. As West notes, a cataclysmic hurricane couldn’t wipe out New Orleans, and a massive nuclear bomb failed to erase Hiroshima from the map. In contrast, the modern corporation has an average lifespan of only forty-five years.
This fragility doesn’t apply to just small companies; only two of the original twelve companies in the Dow Jones Index are still in business, while 20 percent of the companies listed in the Fortune 500 disappear every decade.
This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting? After spend
ing twenty-five thousand dollars for statistics on more than eighty-five hundred publicly traded companies, West and Bettencourt discovered that corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, didn’t increase with size. In fact, the opposite happened: as the number of employees grew, the amount of profit per employee shrank. (While cities are superlinear, companies are sublinear, scaling to an exponent around 0.9.) According to West, this decrease in per capita production is rooted in a failure of innovation. Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity, they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.
The danger, of course, is that this shortage of useful new ideas eventually leads to a decline in profits, which makes a large company increasingly vulnerable to market volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff — overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to massive losses, because the company is unable to adapt. “The psychology of Wall Street is that companies can never stop growing,” West says. “But the sublinear nature of the data suggests that such growth comes with real disadvantages.”
For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “Mayors can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people bump-ing into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. And it’s that spontaneous mixing, all those unpredictable encounters, that keeps the city alive.”
West illustrates the same point when talking about the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), the think tank where he and Bettencourt work. The institute itself is a disjointed collection of common areas, old couches, and tiny offices; the coffee room is always the most crowded place. “Sfiis all about the chance encounters,” West says. “There are no planned meetings, just lots of unplanned conversations. It’s like a little city that way.” (It’s also a bit like Pixar — everybody has to use the same bathrooms.) When I was visiting the institute, West and I ran into the novelist Cormac McCarthy in the lobby of the building, where McCarthy does much of his writing. The physicist and the novelist ended up talking about fish without gills, the editing process, and convergent evolution for forty-five minutes. “It’s moments like that that make this place so great,” West says before listing all the recent ideas to come out of SFI. (A short list of the important ideas pioneered at Sfiincludes emergence, biological scaling, chaos theory, and quantum cosmology.)“It might seem like we’re just bullshitting here, wasting time. And I guess maybe we are. But that’s also where all the breakthroughs come from.”
This is the purpose of cities: The crowded spaces force us to interact. They lead us to explore ideas that we wouldn’t explore on our own, and converse with strangers we’d otherwise ignore. The process isn’t always pleasant — there’s a reason people move to the suburbs — but it remains essential. The superlinear equations of West and Bettencourt quantify this remarkable process, measuring the predictable surges in innovation that happen whenever people share the sidewalk with lots of other people. Sometimes, these encounters will lead a person to invent a new patent or think about an old problem in a slightly different way. And sometimes they’ll lead him down the street to a Latin dance club where he’ll hear a rhythm he’s never heard before. It is the human friction that creates the sparks.
Ch. 8 THE SHAKESPEARE PARADOX
No man is an island.
— John Donne
A few years ago, David Banks, a statistician at Duke University, wrote a short paper called “The Problem of Excess Genius.” The problem itself is simple: human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight, local clusters. (As Banks put it, genius “clots inhomogeneously.”) In his paper, Banks gives the example of Athens between 440 b.c. and 380 b.c. He notes that the ancient city over that time period was home to an astonishing number of geniuses, including Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. These thinkers essentially invented Western civilization, and yet they all lived in the same place at the same time. Or look at Florence between 1450 and 1490. In those few decades, a city of less than fi fty thousand people gave rise to a staggering number of immortal artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Ghiberti, Botticelli, and Donatello.
What causes such outpourings of creativity? (The musician Brian Eno has a clever name for these local bursts of innovation. They are examples, he says, of “scenius,” which is the “communal form of genius.”) Banks quickly dismissed the usual historical explanations, such as the importance of peace and prosperity, noting that Athens was engaged in a vicious war with Sparta, and that Florence had recently lost half its population to the Black Plague. He also rejected “the paradigm thing” hypothesis, which argues that genius flourishes in the wake of a major intellectual revolution. The problem with this explanation, Banks said, is that it fails to account for all the paradigm shifts that did not inspire a burst of brilliance. The academic paper concludes on a somber note. “The problem of excess genius is one of the most important questions I can imagine, but very little progress has been made,” Banks wrote. The phenomenon remains a mystery.
And yet, it’s not a total mystery. While we may never know how Athens gave rise to Plato or why Florence became such a center of artistic talent, we can begin to make sense of the clustering of geniuses. The excess is not an accident.
1.
When William Shakespeare arrived in London, sometime in the mid-1580s, the city was in the midst of a theatrical boom. There were more than a dozen new playhouses, many of which staged a different play six days a week. On a typical night, approximately 2 percent of Londoners went to see a performance, with more than a third attending at least one play a month. This meant that the theater industry was both extremely competitive — there were at least a dozen different companies — and hungry for new talent.
And so, although Shakespeare had little theatrical experience, he left behind his wife and two young children and moved to London. Shakespeare’s new hometown was one of the densest settlements in human history. Approximately two hundred thousand people were packed into a few square miles on the banks of the Thames. In fact, the demand for space was so high that the new-est neighborhoods were stacked on top of old graveyards; basement walls were full of bones. While this unprecedented density came with drawbacks — riots and plague were a constant threat — it also had its economic advantages: wages in the metropolis were about 50 percent higher than elsewhere in the country.
(It turns out that the superlinear equations of West and Bettencourt applied even in the sixteenth century.) As a result, London continued to attract throngs of young people like Shakespeare. It’s estimated that by 1590, more than half of the city’s population was under the age of twenty.
The playhouses were at the center of this human maelstrom; they were the densest places in the densest city. Most of these new theaters were built on the outskirts of London, next to the brothels, prisons, and lunatic asylums. Land was cheaper here, but the playhouses also benefi ted from being just beyond the city line, which meant they were able to operate largely without regulation. Shakespeare probably performed for the first time at the Rose, a brand-new playhouse in Southwark with plaster walls and a thatched-straw roof. Although the inner yard of the Rose was only forty-six feet in diameter, it could accommodate an audience of nearly two thousand, giving it a density three times that of the typical modern playhouse.
In 1587, sho
rtly after Shakespeare arrived in London, the Rose introduced Tamburlaine the Great, a new play by Christopher Marlowe. It was an epic drama, full of rampaging chariots, live cannons, and fake blood. While the plot was fairly straightforward — it’s about a Scythian shepherd who rises to become a dom-inant king — Marlowe pioneered a new kind of dramatic writing known as blank verse, in which the lines are bound by their meter and not their rhymes. This new literary form allowed Marlowe to fi ll the play with natural-sounding speech. It moved theater away from poetry — Marlowe castigated “rhyming mother-wits” — and toward narratives driven by their characters.
For the impressionable Shakespeare, Tamburlaine was a revelation. Marlowe had shown him what was possible onstage, creating a work that was both popular and profound. He had bent the predictable arc of the morality play into something more interesting, a vernacular drama with eternal themes. This was mass entertainment that did more than entertain. This play lingered in the mind.
But Tamburlaine must also have been diffi cult for Shakespeare to watch. Surely it was tough to see a playwright with such a similar biography — Marlowe had also been born in 1564 to a commoner father in a provincial town — create the kind of play that he himself wanted to create. Furthermore, Marlowe had been blessed with a crucial privilege that Shakespeare had been denied: a university education. In the early 1580s, Marlowe had been awarded a full scholarship to the University of Cambridge.
(The scholarship was intended to encourage “poor students of promise . . . such as can make verse.”) Marlowe decided to major in the arts and spent much of his time translating Ovid and Virgil.
