Comment by majormajor

> This is sold as a major efficiency of US capitalism, but in fact it's a major inefficiency because it's a severe physical and cultural constraint on opportunity.

I don't think social relationships and their geography are a particular characteristic of capitalism - let alone US-specific capitalism.

They - and the resulting hub/centralization effects - predate it by millennia. There is no shortage of historical cities or state that became major hubs for certain industries or research. How much of the effort in those places is "wasted" seems hard to quantify in an objective way, but again, the pattern of low-hanging fruit being more available to the first wave and then a lot of smart, hard-working people in the future generations working more around the edges is not capitalism-exclusive.