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and arguably less stimulating. When I asked Jacobs some years ago about the effects of escalating real-estate prices on creativity, she told me, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave." With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate. AhmmcA'S "FAsr" CnaEs: CRisis AND REDnTT N c)N In his zoos book, The Yt'ortd Is Fiat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn't quite right, and doesn't accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years. In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine ("The World is Spilcy,' October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy —and the competitive advantage of the world's most successful city -regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it's important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more. Worldwide, people are crowding into a discrete number of mega -regions, systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburban rings like the Boston -New York -Washington Corridor. In North America, these mega -regions include SunBelt centers like the Char-Lanta Corridor, Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle of Houston -San Antonio - Dallas, and Southern Florida's Tampa -Orlando -Miami area; the Pacific Northwest's Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver; and both Greater Chicago and Tor -Buff -Chester in the old Rust Belt Internationally, these mega -regions include Greater London, Greater Tokyo, Europe's Am -Bros -Twerp, China's Shanghai -Beijing Corridor, and India's Bangalore-Mumbai area. Economic output is ever -more concentrated in these places as well. The world's 40 largest mega -regions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world's population, produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in ro new patented innovations. Some (though not all) of these mega -regions have a clear hub, and these hubs are likely to be better buffered from the crash than most cities, because of their size, diversity, and regional role. Chicago has emerged as a center for industrial management and has rolled up many of the functions, such as finance and law, once performed in smaller midwestern centers. Los Angeles has a broad, diverse economy with global strength in media and entertainment. 7