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Notes -
Cities are always more innovative than the countryside. Cities have lots of people. Institutions are in cities, education is to be found in cities. People who want education will come to the city to get it, they then stay there, jobs that require education are in cities. So the educated people are in cities, where they are in contact with the other educated people. Wealth concentrates in cities, so the capital you need is also in the city, probably generated by the previous innovators.
And all of this used to be even more so when travel and communication were a lot harder than they are nowadays. Nowadays you can learn from the Internet. A hundred years ago people in the countryside wouldn't have had access to libraries. You'd have to move to a city first.
Not all immigrants went to the cities. The Germans mostly settled the Midwest to become farmers, and didn't invent much of anything, except the ones who did go to the cities.
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