I only bring this up because I’m fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society’s founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome. Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor. Powerful concepts control behavior. Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn’t evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.

Ideas cannot become shared ideas without some awareness of those ideas. You and others will not share beliefs and behaviors regarding water ice in comets without first having awareness. But, in an age of markets, networks and organizations, we all can and do become aware of ideas without regard to their accuracy. Our understanding —even if completely inaccurate and wrong — can and does lead to shared ideas and shared values. When this happens, truth deviates from accuracy. We share ideas and accept them as truth even though they are inaccurate. All of which suggests that our future and the future of our children and others around the globe will become more sustainable when our markets, networks, organizations, friends and families put more effort into the shared idea of accuracy than the shared idea of truth.

Idea-intensive industries have long tended to locate disproportionately in the cores of urban areas, where—as in New York—the same closeness that once moved garments onto rail cars now speeds the flow of ideas.

The intellectual advantages of proximity keep industries like advertising, publishing and finance—which offer the highest returns to those with the most information—in dense urban cores.

Secondly, the thing everyone wants to know: who thought up the chicken? Everyone makes a big mystery out of it, but if you ask me, the mystery is more about why everyone wishes it was a single person in an ah-ha moment. We get that a lot still. People want it to be dramatic. As if doing things methodically until you get a great idea is disappointing. As if coming up with a good idea should be easy.