“Workers are more productive in large cities” (Bacolod et al., 2020). This has been well established for years, but the reasons behind the phenomenon remain a bit of a chicken-or-egg question: Does being together make workers more productive, or do inherently more productive workers tend to congregate? And, what exactly makes them more productive in the first place? Economists Marigee Bacolod (Naval Postgraduate School), Marcos Rangel (Duke), and Bernardo Blum and William Strange (University of Toronto) offer a novel contribution to this question with a study using Lumosity data. In it, they find that cities are magnets for people adept at certain types of learning. Their paper “Learners in Cities” distinguishes between “crystallized intelligence”—accumulated knowledge and facts—and “fluid intelligence,” or the ability to solve new problems. By looking at the scores of people who played a variety of Lumosity games and comparing them to the density of the population where they live,(1) ...
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