The current pandemic has been a crash course in remote work and led to discussions about the decline of cities as people are allowed to work from anywhere. Despite the speed to which we have all learned to work remotely, I don’t believe that remote work is sustainable for economies, companies, or people. Ignoring academic … Continue reading Virtual Work Will Make Cities Larger

A little while back, I wrote that changing opportunities in the UK relative to continental Europe following Brexit would result in a tipping-point for migration (here). Once the tipping point is reached, there would be a notable shift towards out-migration, a Brexodous. My suspicion is that the recent pandemic likely kick-started the Brexodous. I suspect … Continue reading The Pandemic Has Likely Hastened Brexodous

The current pandemic has resulted in a lot of speculation that city life will be forever altered. Journalists and academics have made claims that current practices will become normal, that people will be hesitant to go back to the old ways once the pandemic is over and that these new norms will increase the premium … Continue reading City Life Will Be Fine

In everything that I have read on regional economies and regional economic development, it is a passage on self-righteousness that is perhaps my favorite. At a minimum it is the passage that I find myself returning to most frequently. The reason that I return to this passage again and again is because of how frequently … Continue reading Humility and Regional Economic Development

St. Martin was hit extremely hard by Hurricane Irma in 2017. The island, split between the French and Dutch, is still recovering in the waning days of 2019. Boats are still submerged in the bays, garbage is piled on the streets, and innumerable houses remain concrete shells.[i] The slow recovery coupled with policies on the … Continue reading Island Economies and Regional Economic Resiliency

Boris Johnson won big during the recent election and has said that he will force Brexit with or without a deal. While much is still unclear, it seems to me that Britain will likely set in motion a series of events that will be beneficial for mainland Europe. My guess is that after leaving the … Continue reading Brexodus

The Agent-Based Paradigm Keith Waters   I have been involved in several discussions regarding the usefulness of agent-based modeling to skeptics. Somewhere along the way, the discussion has always involved some version of, “it’s very interesting, but so what?” After tempering initial defensiveness, I’ve tried to highlight the advantages of the approach. The most practical … Continue reading Agent-Based Paradigm

For me, truly understanding increasing returns has been more enlightening than nearly any concept I've come across. While the notion that a process, once started, will reinforce itself is known in complexity science, economic geography and economics more broadly as increasing returns, I find myself describing everyday instances of this phenomenon with a more dynamic … Continue reading Feedback

Even the most casual empiricism reveals significant differences in the geographic distribution of both the type and amount of economic activity. Driving through the vast open ranges of the United States, one can’t help but wonder why some places seem to have little beyond farmland while other regions have glass-clad sky-scrapers. Furthermore, this distribution is … Continue reading Agent-Based Economic Geography