人类的进步取决于城市的发展

Human progress, to a large degree, has depended on the continual expansion of social networks, which enable faster sharing and shaping of ideas. And humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city. As our cities grow larger, the synapses that connect them—people with exceptional social skills—are becoming ever more essential to economic growth.

人类的进步在很大程度上取决于能够促进理念形成，加快思想传播速度，不断扩大的社交网络。人类最大的社交创新是城市的发展。就经济发展而言，随着城市的扩大，连接它们的突触——拥有特殊社交技能的人——越来越重要。

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图解

The bars on this map show three types of job skills—analytic, social, and physical . (The categories have been created by the author and his colleagues, based on detailed data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on more than 800 occupations.) The height of each bar is a measure of the average mix of skill within a given city’s labor force—the higher the bar, the more advanced the skill level within that city.

地图中的条状物代表三种类型的工作技能——分析能力、社交能力和体能。（本文作者及其同事依据美国劳动统计局统计有关800多种职业的详细数据做了分类。）条状物的高度代表对特定城市劳动力三种技能的平均衡量——条状物越高，说明那座城市的技能等级越高。

Circles measure average income within each city.

圆圈内是每座城市平均收入的估量值。

The history of human progress is intimately intertwined with that of cities. The Epic of Gilgamesh—perhaps the oldest known work of literature—closes with an awed description of the walls of the city of Uruk. Plato’s Republic—which envisioned an ideal city—was a product of the cultural and intellectual flowering of the earthly city of Athens, as well as a broadside against its politics. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and Michelangelo all were born in or near the city of Florence. Great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs—what I call the creative class—rarely come out of nowhere. They cluster and thrive in places where the conversation and culture are the most stimulating.

人类进步的历史与城市发展的历史密切相关。《吉尔伽美什史诗》（The Epic of Gilgamesh）是已知最古老的文学作品，其结尾描述的乌鲁克城墙令人惊叹。柏拉图共和国（Plato’s Republic）设想了一个理想之城，是尘世之城雅典成熟文化知识的产物，也是对其政治的大肆抨击。但丁（Dante）、彼特拉克（Petrarch）、薄伽丘（Boccaccio）、布鲁内列斯基（Brunelleschi）、达芬奇（da Vinci）、和米开朗吉罗（Michelangelo）都出生在佛罗伦萨城内或其附近。那些伟大的思想家、艺术家和企业家（我称他们为创意阶层）很少有人出自无名之地。他们聚集在社交和文化最具激励性的地方、茁壮成长。

Even deeper in our past, the congregation of populations into progressively larger, denser, and less isolated groups may have been what enabled humanity’s rise. Archaeologists and anthropologists have long noted evidence of a flowering of artistic and material creativity that occurred roughly 40,000 years ago in Europe, reflected in everything from cave paintings, figurines, and jewelry to the complex tools that allowed our ancestors to begin actively transforming nature. Some scientists attribute this leap to evolutionary advances in cognition and memory alone. But more-recent research puts communities—not genes—at the center of this evolutionary watershed.

在更遥远的过去，人口逐渐汇集成更大、更密集的群体，不再与世隔绝，可能促进了人类的进步。考古学家和人类学家早已注意到那些能够证明约4000年前欧洲艺术和材料创造力兴旺的证据，反映在各个方面：从洞穴壁画、雕刻工艺品和珠宝，到允许我们的祖先积极动手改造自然的复杂工具。有些科学家认为，这只是认知和记忆的进化飞跃，而最近的研究把社区而不是基因置于进化转折点的中心。

Research by Stephen Shennan at University College London, Robert Boyd at UCLA, and others indicates that shifting demographics was an important cause of early leaps in human development. Shennan’s research—which notes that artistic and technological leaps similar to the one in Europe had occurred in Africa and the Middle East tens of thousands of years earlier—suggests that what all these leaps had in common was the growth of local population density beyond a certain threshold. (Many of these cultural blooms withered, Shennan observes, when populations subsequently shrank.) Boyd’s research shows the close relationship between toolmaking advances and population size. As people gathered into larger groups and came into contact with one another more frequently, knowledge was shared, retained, and advanced more easily. From the earliest periods of modern human history, cultural development and technological development have been closely linked to rising population density.

由伦敦大学学院的史蒂芬·深南（Stephen Shennan）、加州大学洛杉矶分校的罗伯特·博伊德（Robert Boyd）及其他研究人员进行的研究指出，人口统计资料的变化是人类发展早期飞跃的重要目标。深南的研究发现，数万年前非洲与中东发生了与欧洲类似的艺术和技术飞跃，表明所有这些飞跃的共同点在于当地人口密度的增长超过了某个临界点。（深南注意到，后来人口减少，其中许多精华文化衰退了。）博伊德的研究显示了工具制造技术提高与人口规模增大之间的密切关系。随着人口聚集为更大的群体，彼此间的联系更频繁，分享知识、保存知识、发展知识也更容易。从现代人类史的最初阶段开始，文化建设和技术发展一直与人口密度的提高密切相关。

They still are today. One simple indication of the economic advantages held by large, dense cities is their explosive growth over the past century and more—growth that is still continuing rapidly. America’s largest cities, each of which held no more than a few hundred thousand people in the mid-19th century, surpassed 1 million by the century’s end. By the middle of the 20th century, New York City had surged past 10 million residents; today, Greater New York contains more than 20 million people.

如今，依然如此。人口密集的大城市拥有经济优势，其基本象征是上个世纪的爆炸性增长，而且增长依然在迅速发展。十九世纪中期，美国那些最大的城市都只不过有几十万人口，到世纪末，都超过了100万。二十世纪中期，纽约市的居民人口猛增超过1000万，如今，大纽约容纳了2000多万人。

More than half the world’s population now lives in cities and metro areas, a proportion that is projected to grow to more than 70 percent by mid-century. China’s economic development in recent decades has been propelled by the rise of its cities—130 of which are home to 1 million people or more, including Shanghai with a metro population of 19 million and Beijing with 17.5 million. The Tokyo metro area, home to more than 35 million people, produces almost $1.2 trillion in economic output each year, roughly as much as Australia.

如今，世界一半以上的人口生活在城市和大都市地区，预计，到本世纪中期，其所占比例将增至70%以上。最近几十年，城市的发展推动了中国的经济发展——中国有130座城市拥有百万或超百万人口，其中包括上海（人口为1900万）和北京（人口为1750万）。东京大都市区人口超过3500万，每年经济产出近1.2万亿美元，大致与澳大利亚相同。

Researchers affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute have identified the mechanism that underpins city growth and development as an accelerated rate of “urban metabolism.” Unlike biological species, whose metabolism slows as they get bigger, successful cities exhibit faster metabolism as they grow—a phenomenon that the researchers dubbed “superlinear” scaling. “By almost any measure,” they wrote, “the larger a city’s population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.” There seems to be no limit, as yet, to the relationship between greater density and faster growth.

圣塔菲研究所（Santa Fe Institute）的研究人员已经确定，支持城市成长和发展的机制加快了“城市新陈代谢”的速度。城市的新陈代谢与生物物种不同。生物物种的新陈代谢速度随着成长而减慢，而成功城市的新陈代谢速度随着成长而越来越快——研究人员称这种现象为“超线性”缩放。他们写道，“几乎从各方面来说，城市人口的规模越大，每个人的创新与财富创造力就越大”。至今，人口更密集与发展更快之间的关系似乎仍然没有限度。

For centuries, the specific geographic advantages of cities tended to obscure their underlying social role. When agriculture powered economic development, cities grew near fertile soils. In the industrial age, access to raw materials and ports became critical, along with the presence of enough physical labor to run large factories. But as those factors become less important, we can see more clearly what has arguably mattered the most all along.

几个世纪以来，城市的特殊地理优势更易于掩盖其潜在的社会作用。促进经济发展的因素是农业时，城市就在肥沃的土地附近成长。而在工业时代，重要的是靠近原材料和港口，还要拥有经营大工厂所需要的足够劳动力。而当那些因素都不那么重要时，我们可以更清楚地看到一直都最重要的是什么。

Cities are our greatest invention, not because of the scale of their infrastructure or their placement along key trade routes, but because they enable human beings to combine and recombine their talents and ideas in new ways. With their breadth of skills, dense social networks, and physical spaces for interactions, great cities and metro areas push people together and increase the kinetic energy between them.

城市之所以成为我们最伟大的发明，不是因为其基础设施的规模，也不是因为其靠近重要贸易路线的位置，而是因为它们能让人类以新的方式组合或重组自己的才能与思想。随着技能、密集社交网络以及互动物理空间的扩展，大城市和大都市区促使人们相互配合，从而增加彼此之间的动能。

As highly skilled people concentrate in these places, the rate of innovation accelerates, new businesses are created, and productivity—and, ultimately, pay—grows. Wages generally increase with city size, as opportunities for specialization and interaction multiply. Pay for manufacturing workers tends to rise above the national average, for instance, as communities grow beyond 120,000 people. When my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I looked at the distribution of work across U.S. cities and metros, we found that the wages for knowledge-based jobs were markedly higher than average in locations where labor markets number 1 million people or more. In other words, the critical mass for knowledge work is higher than for manufacturing: the knowledge economy thrives at a larger scale.

因为高技能人才都集中在这些地方，所以创新的速度加快，新业务得到开发，最终，生产力——工资——得以增长。通常，工资随着城市规模的增长而增长，因为专业化和互动的机会在成倍增加。例如，当社区人口的增长超过12万人，生产工人的工资往往会高过国民平均工资。我和同事查洛塔·麦兰德（Charlotta Mellander）查看了美国各城市的工作分配后发现，知识型工作者的工资明显高过劳动力市场人口为百万或百万以上地区的平均工资。换句话说，知识型工作的关键质量高过生产型工作：知识经济在更大规模上茁壮成长。

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics now provides detailed information on more than 800 occupations, allowing us to see, with finer resolution, how different skills lose or acquire value, as cities grow larger and the economy evolves. With three Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues, Mellander, Adrienne Ross, and Kevin Stolarick, I grouped those skills into three categories: analytic, social, and physical.

Even a cursory glance at the relationship between these skills and income confirms how far the U.S. economy has evolved beyond the industrial age. Analytic and social skills add greatly to wages and salaries: after ranking every occupation by the type of skill required to perform it, we observed that on average, occupations in the top quarter as measured by required analytic skill pay $25,600 more than those in the lowest quarter; those that rank in the top quarter by required social skill pay $34,600 more than those in the lowest quarter. Occupations in the top quarter by required physical skill, on the other hand, pay $13,600 less than those that demand the least physical skill (not uncommonly, knowledge-based jobs). That’s not to say that an individual construction worker will make less as he or she becomes more skilled—the opposite is true. But by choosing an occupation in which physical skill is predominant, workers are, by and large, isolating themselves from the more dynamic and higher-paying parts of the economy.

即使粗略地看看这些技能与收入之间的关系也能确定工业时代之后美国经济发展的深度。分析和社交技能大大提高了工资和薪金：依据完成各种工作所需技能的类别为这些职业排名之后，我们发现，根据所需分析能力来衡量，排在前三分之一的职业比排在后三分之一的职业工资多25,600美元，根据所需社交能力衡量，排在前三分之一的职业比排在后三分之一的职业工资多34,600美元。但是，依据所需体能衡量，排名前三分之一的职业比需要最少体能的职业（非稀少知识型的工作）工资少13,600美元。这并不是说，某个建筑工人的技术更熟练时，收入会更少——恰恰相反。总的来说，工人们选择了体能占优势的工作，就避开了更具活力和更高工资的经济角色。

What’s perhaps more telling about the data is the way that skills are distributed around the country. Jobs requiring physical skill cluster in small and medium-size metro areas—industrial centers where land for factories is relatively inexpensive. Jobs featuring analytic skill are sparse in these places, and heavily concentrated in larger metro areas—indicating the rising benefits of having high numbers of well-educated, highly intelligent people working close together. And jobs requiring the highest level of social skill are the most concentrated in the very largest metro areas—where, combined with the high prevalence of analytic skill, they underpin faster rates of innovation and growth.

也许更能说明这个数据的是这些技能在全国的分布方式。需要体能的工作集中在中小型都市区——对工厂而言土地相对便宜的工业中心。突出分析能力的工作在那些地方很少见，主要集中在较大的都市区——这表明大量受过良好教育、智商高的人密切合作提高了利润。需要最高水平社交能力的工作大都集中在最大的都市区——在那里，他们融合广泛存在的分析能力，加快了创新和发展的速度。

Highly developed social skills are different from mere sociability. They include persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project, the ability to help develop other people, and a keen sense of empathy. These are quintessential leadership skills needed to innovate, mobilize resources, build effective organizations, and launch new firms. They are highly complementary to analytic skills—and indeed, the very highest-paying jobs (and the most robust economies) usually require exceptional skill in both realms. Nonetheless, social skills seem to grow ever more essential as local economies grow larger and more complex. In this sense, cities are like brains: their growth and development require the growth and development of an increasingly dense web of synaptic connections.

高度发达的社交技能与单纯的社交能力不同。它们包含坚定的信念、社交洞察力、把合适的人选安排进同一个项目的能力、帮助培养他人的能力，以及强烈的同理心。这些都是创新、调动资源、建立有效组织，启动新公司所需的领导能力精华。它们与分析能力高度互补——确实，最高薪的工作（以及最具活力的经济）往往需要这两方面的超常能力。尽管如此，随着地方经济日益发展，更加复杂，社交能力的发展似乎也越来越重要。从这种意义上来说，城市好比大脑：它们的成长与发展需要越来越密集的突触连接网络的成长与发展。

There is a signal irony in the concentration of social skill within big cities. Not so long ago, many people deplored cities as dirty, dangerous places, where residents did their best to avoid chance encounters with strangers. City dwellers were thought of as cold, cynical, and unfriendly. Yet highly developed social skills are in fact a hallmark of our big cities—and the cities are prospering because this is so.

大城市社交能力的集中具有明显的讽刺意味。不久前，许多人哀叹，城市是肮脏而危险的地方，那里的居民竭尽全力避开陌生人。城市居民被视为冷漠、玩世不恭，不友好之人。而实际上，高度发达的社交能力是大城市的品质证明——正因为如此，城市在蓬勃发展。

The high and rising importance of human connectivity has significant implications for the future. When we think about helping city-regions run smoothly and efficiently, we typically focus on transportation improvements and other measures to keep people moving—and indeed, the efficient circulation of people and goods is critical to the success of large cities. So too is finding ways to keep cities and metro areas at a human scale, encouraging easy interaction even as cities grow more populous. Ever-higher buildings allow greater density, for instance, but skyscrapers that are too tall risk becoming vertical suburbs, whose residents and occupants are less likely to engage frequently and widely with the hurly-burly of city life. And ultimately, the ease, frequency, and range of interaction in cities are what really matter.

人类连通性日益增强的重要性对未来具有重要的意义。在考虑帮助城市地区平稳而高效运转的时候，我们通常会关注交通和其他确保人口流动设施的改进——确实，对成功的大城市而言，人员和货物的有效循环至关重要。同样重要的是，要找到将城市与都市区保持在人类尺度内的方式，即使城市发展了更多的人口，也能激励人们轻松互动。例如，攀升的建筑使其密度更高，但是过高的摩天大厦面临成为垂直郊区的风险，其居民和占有者不大可能频繁而广泛地参与喧嚣的城市生活。最终，在城市中轻松、频繁而广泛的互动就成了真正重要的东西。

Whatever their layouts and transportation systems, cities can’t work as innovative engines unless they are populated by people who can effectively promulgate, and marshal support for, new ideas. Given the rising demand for social skills in our economy, it is curious that we devote so few of our educational resources to building them. A growing chorus has noted the failure of U.S. schools to adequately teach math, science, and technology, but social intelligence is equally important, and we need to cultivate it more systematically. In the 19th century, the public-school system grew partly from the need to teach the growing immigrant workforce rudimentary reading, writing, and math skills. University education in the years around World War II was predicated, to some extent, on the training of a cadre of technicians and managers to run the country’s increasingly sophisticated factories. Today’s students need a stronger focus on teamwork, persuasion, and entrepreneurship; a better integration of liberal arts with technological literacy; and an emphasis on the social intelligence that makes for creative collaboration and leadership.

无论其布局和交通系统如何，城市都不可能像创新的引擎那样运转，除非那里有能够有效传播、整理并支持新思想的人。我们的经济对社交能力的需求在上升，但是令人好奇的是，我们为培育社交能力而投入的教育资源却那么少。越来越多的人注意到美国学校教不好数学、科学和技术，可是社交智能同样重要，而我们需要更系统地培养这种智能。十九世纪，公立学校兴起，其部分原因是需要教会越来越多移民劳动力基本的读、写、算技能。第二次世界大战前后那几年，大学教育在一定程度上侧重于培养技术和管理干部，使他们能够经营国家日益复杂的工厂。今天的学生需要更强的团队合作精神、坚定的信念和企业家精神；人文科学与科学素养更好地整合；强调创新合作和领导力的社交智能。

Sociability has been the key to humanity’s progress for thousands of years. As we look toward the future, we need to find ways to hone and enhance it, and to keep enabling the crucial interactions on which new innovation will depend.

数千年来，社交能力一直是人类进步的关键。展望未来，我们需要找到磨砺和加强社交能力的方法，保持必将能够促进新创新的至关重要的互动。