THE NEW GEOGRAPHY: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape.

• Author: Bradley, Jennifer
• Position: Review

THE NEW GEOGRAPHY: How the Digital Revolution is Reshaping the American Landscape

IN 1956, ECONOMIST CHARLES Tiebout published a short article introducing the notion of "the consumer-voter," a person who chooses where to live based on local government services and the taxes levied to pay for them. His idea was powerful and, as the suburban era continued its crescendo, it applied to more and more Americans. People were shopping for entirely new communities, not just nicer apartments.

And, particularly if they were white, people had a lot of choices. Cities in the 1950s were morphing into large metropolitan areas. Cheap mortgages and new highways allowed people to break, or at least loosen, the tight link between the jurisdictions in which they lived and the ones in which they worked.

The New Geography presents readers with what happens when Tiebout's consumer-voter meets the technological realities of e-mail and cell phones. The links between work and home become, if not more tenuous, certainly more complicated, and the choices available to talented, educated people multiply exponentially. Where you work is now largely determined by where you want to live, rather than vice versa. This ability to choose widely, based not on Tiebout's package of local government services, but on a much broader set of lifestyle criteria, is "reshaping the American landscape."

Although the book's author, Joel Kotkin, a right-wing-ish academic and commentator, does not mention Tiebout, he is drawn to Tiebout's basic theory. Kotkin fervently believes in the power of basic economic concepts to explain sweeping social trends. His long list of professional affiliations also suggests a certain ideological bent. Kotkin is a fellow at Pepperdine University's public policy school, at the libertarian-minded Reason Public Policy Institute, and at the Milken Institute. He also works as a newspaper columnist and "director of content" at a high-tech venture-capital firm. In other words, he is a very successful entrepreneur of ideas, and entrepreneurial folks like him populate his book.

Kotkin argues that "increasingly, companies and people now locate not where they must but where they will." Industry is no longer reliant on region-specific natural resources or heavy, unwieldy materials that have to be unloaded at a port, rail terminal, or other fixed point, but rather on highly mobile human skills and intelligence. This means, at least in theory, that a large and growing...