Cities & Ambition

Paul Graham | paulgraham.com | May 2008

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

There's an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like that between gaining and losing money. Most people overvalue negative amounts of money: they'll work much harder to avoid losing a dollar than to gain one. Similarly, although there are plenty of people strong enough to resist doing something just because that's what one is supposed to do where they happen to be, there are few strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares about.

The Human Cost of Governing by Spreadsheet

Rebecca Jayde | The SpinOff | May 21, 2026

We are living in a time where our instinct that some things matter more than their bottom line is being systematically challenged by a government that has decided that our quality of life can be measured only in terms of its fiscal output. Every organisation and department measured by this metric alone. Every worker assessed against cost, and every service evaluated by whether it can be cheaper, faster or, ideally, done away with entirely.

Max Weber identified the same danger a century earlier, coining the phrase “the iron cage” to describe what happens when rational efficiency becomes the organising principle of all human life – not that institutions fail, but that they succeed so completely at reducing everything to measurable procedure that the people inside them lose the capacity to ask what any of it was for. That is precisely the trap a government falls into when it announces thousands of job cuts and describes them, without apparent discomfort, as “optimisation”.

Ambulance. Hospice. Plunket. Playcentre. Legal aid. We value those things – instinctively, immediately – because we understand that a society is not a corporation. It does not exist to generate returns. It exists to allow human beings to live with some degree of dignity, security and meaning. We valued those needs and decided to build those institutions – public and private, funded by donation and taxpayer alike – because we understood that economic policy, in and of itself, does not care for the dying, does not sit with the grieving, does not visit the new mother at the moment when everything feels impossible. People do.