Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Karen M. King have a new working paper out called Winner-Take-All Cities .
It is about the phenomenon of “winner-take-all urbanism” and how a select number of alpha cities seem to overrepresent when it comes to talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation.
In this study they look at economic output, innovation (venture capital-backed startups), and billionaire wealth in each city. They then compare these factors to the distribution of the population.
Here are the Alpha cities they looked at:
In some cases the above concentrations were multiples of what the city’s population would lead you to predict. Their conclusion: “We find clear evidence of a winner-take-all urbanism across the global economy and the world’s cities.”