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A person who grows up in Los Angeles will, on average, tend to have better outcomes than a person who grows up in Youngstown: a city of about 66,000 people in Eastern Ohio.
This is a very, very broad thing to say, and there are countless variables that can tip the scales one way or the other. But although there are advantages to living in smaller towns, research conducted around the world, from the US to China, indicates that average outcomes for people in cities will tend to be more positive than those for people in more rural communities; according to some metrics, at least.
Some of these outcomes are the consequence of resource-aggregation in larger cities. Many such cities become wealthier because of favorable geographic position, an adjacency to natural resources, or historic importance—being at the crossroads of a few trade routes, for instance. These stacked decks leads to accumulations of investment and reputation, over time, which in turn translates to more pull, more social and economic gravity, over time.
What we see here, then, is something like the Matthew Effect at a city-scale: the accumulation of advantages over time resulting in relatively more advantages in the future.
One of the emergent, secondary consequences of such aggregations, is an amplification of what’s often called social capital.
Used broadly, social capital refers to the beneficial outcomes of people working together. “Capital” in isolation referring to economic assets that one accumulates through work, and social capital pointing at the often non-tangible assets we acquire through our relationships.
Social capital can measure the benefits of working together toward shared goals, of building civilizational structures like tribes and governments and economic systems, and the small- and large-scale benefits of interconnected social systems.
It can also help us measure the financial perks derived from network effects, the internal benefits derived from interpersonal relationships, and the social benefits often found in shared, commons-based infrastructure, like parks and public squares.
Social capital, then, is sort of like soft power. Rather than referring to hard assets and physical goods, it’s generally applied to fluffier metrics, like the relative benefits of working for a company that is diverse compared to working for a company that is homogenous, or the tricky-to-quantify advantages of being in a supportive relationship compared to being in one hobbled by conflict.
Soft power, though, whether we’re talking about competition between nations or between individuals, can substantially influence outcomes. There’s a reason the US military invests in the US film industry to ensure portrayals of their forces are generally favorable, and there’s a reason China applies heavy-handed filtering processes to all imported media—from TV shows to video games to films—to make it more likely that themes they don’t like won’t get as much screen time.
Pulling this back around to the comparison between Youngstown and LA, if you grow up in a region with relatively fewer people, you also tend to have less casual access to specialized, high-paying jobs, potential relationship matches, and exposure to people from wildly different backgrounds. You also tend to have relatively less casual access to cultural wellsprings (museums, theaters, indie film venues), niche tools (most technology beta-testing happens in larger cities), and active, real-life, social networks.
On that latter point, specifically, if you’re a budding developer looking to hone your coding chops, the number of meetup groups for any specific coding language, approach to development, or platform within the world of technology in many big cities will be massive—the main trouble is often sifting through the options to find the best ones for your very specific needs and wants.
The same is seldom the case in smaller cities and more rural areas, where the limited number of people means there will be relatively fewer people working in any particular industry and with any particular interest, and thus, not just coders, but everyone, will be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to cross-pollinating with like-minded people working in fields about which you’d like to know more.
This seems like a somewhat small element to focus on—who cares about in-person social groups, when we’ve all got access to the internet?—but the ramifications of casual, even accidental relationships with people in relevant and non-relevant industries and social circles can be massive, when viewed at scale. Such adjacency can allow a person to have their name in the ether so that opportunities are more likely to find them, when they arise, and it gives each person more nodes through which they might make the right secondary or tertiary connection, or have the right happy-accident encounter at the right moment, giving them a potentially significant advantage over even a relatively more skilled competitor who lives further away.
These adjacency-related bonuses are just one of a great many types of social capital that a person gains for living in a particular area, and there’s evidence that these benefits may compound over the course of one’s life, as well.
Just as advantages can compound over time for people and entities in other aspects of our lives, then, growing up amongst more of everything, and within denser connective networks, you may be relatively more likely to nudge up against the right person, have access to the right opportunities, and be first in line when social capital-related benefits are divvied out.
None of which is to say, again, that there aren’t advantages to living in more rural or less densely populated areas.
It’s just that the benefits tend to differ in nature, and a lot of the advantages enjoyed by people in larger cities are the type that translate well to just about anywhere, providing them with dividends over time. Many of the research-supported advantages of living in smaller or more rural areas, in contrast, tend to revolve around having less competition, potentially more access to the resources and advantages that are available there, and in some cases, the many potential benefits of being closer to nature; though just as is the case with urban-focused studies, none of these are universal, and they’re often tempered by the disadvantages found in similar regions, which range from generally lower-quality healthcare, to higher levels of substance-abuse, to relatively less casual exposure to new ideas and perspectives.
All of which is valuable to understand because each one of us grows up with expectations and impressions of the world that are shaped and colored by the areas in which we were raised.
For some of us, opportunities grow like weeds, and the big challenge is figuring out which ones to pluck and pursue, and how best to outcompete the people around us who might have their eyes on the same prize.
For others, opportunity is relatively more scarce, and finding and identifying such nuggets is the primary challenge, followed by figuring out how to squeeze knowledge and connections out of rocks, and how, then, to apply what we were able to glean in often wildly different environments.
There are pros and cons to both sides of this coin, and it’s important to remember that simply existing in any particular area is no guarantee that we’ll have the same experience as the person who lives next door, or as people who live in cities or towns that on paper would seem to be the same as ours, but which are, in practice, quite different because of major or minuscule differences in resources, history, or culture.
It’s also valuable to remember that social capital, like any type of asset, can ebb and flow throughout a person’s life, and based on a person’s behavior—their spendiness or thriftiness. So it can be stockpiled or blown as soon as it’s earned, sought out with abandon or picked up only when readily available.
Our perception of our own and other people’s personality, behaviors, and outcomes are shaped by a great many things, though, and this particular asset category is one of the more fundamental influences to keep in mind when comparing, contrasting, and assessing.
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