Welcome! You probably have questions.
Yes, a few. Where exactly am I? What is happening here?
This is Agglomerations, the Substack newsletter of the Economic Innovation Group, which is a bipartisan public policy organization — a think tank, yes — that advocates for ideas to make the American economy more dynamic and inclusive.
Ideas such as…?
We push for ways to expand high skilled immigration, for instance, and to redesign the skilled immigration system so that it is less bureaucratic, more sensible, and more beneficial for American workers and businesses. Our proposal for a Heartland Visa to revitalize struggling communities is one good example.
We want the U.S. to ban noncompete agreements, which are bad for workers and bad for economic dynamism.
We have an idea for how to improve access to retirement plans for workers who can’t get them from employers.
We also produce a lot of research about economic geography, illuminating the reasons why some places in the US manage to thrive while others get left behind. Our idea for the U.S. to establish Opportunity Zones, which incentivize private investment into communities that struggle to access capital, was passed into law in 2017.
But that’s just a taste, really. Go to our website at eig.org to see more of our specific views and research on a bunch of other topics.
Okay, and what can I expect to read here?
All kinds of great stuff, but we find the Substack format especially good for certain kinds of writing:
Lively debates with our critics. We love to engage — respectfully and in good faith, but spiritedly — with people who disagree with us. But social media isn’t always the best place for a considered argument. Not enough space, too intemperate, bizarre memes everywhere. This newsletter gives us the space we think is needed for nuanced, high-minded debates.
Q&As. We’re in touch with a lot of social scientists and other thinkers whose intellectual contributions often inform our work. We benefit enormously from their insights, and we think our readers will too.
New ideas from EIG, introduced here first. Our post about Density Zones is a perfect example. We might still be fleshing out the details of a specific proposal or idea, and sharing it with the public early can start a useful discussion and, through your feedback, generate new ways for how to improve it.
A spotlight on salient or interesting points from our writing. We’re quite proud of the research we do, but we know that some of our reports are both long and dense. Heavy reading. A newsletter is a great place to highlight and encourage discussion about one particular topic at a time — an intriguing theme or idea that otherwise might get lost on page 37.
Original charts and graphs. Some visuals are so powerful and provocative that they don’t need a lengthy report or post. They speak for themselves. This is the perfect place to present them without much verbal adornment.
Random fun. Quizzes, economics-themed crossword puzzles, fake-award ceremonies. It’s gonna get weird on occasion, just how we like it.
I previously signed up for the mailing list at the EIG web site. Does this newsletter replace those updates?
No! That will remain a separate mailing list, which we plan to continue using to announce big new developments at EIG and to release our economic research. If you had previously signed up for our mailing list, then we automatically signed you up for this Substack because we thought you might enjoy what we offer here. But if you choose to unsubscribe from this Substack, we’ll understand even if we’ll also be sad to lose your readership — but regardless, you will remain on our mailing list to receive alerts of our research.
If you’re a new visitor, perhaps referred to us by another writer or merely intrigued by something we’ve posted here, we’d love for you to sign up at the button below for full access to the newsletter, including our publication archives (or subscribe via the Substack app):
Fine, how much is that gonna run me?
Agglomerations is free and will remain free.
But my economist friends are always telling me there’s no free lunch. So what does EIG get out of giving away this content?
Fair question. Our research is already read widely by politicians and policymakers, economists, journalists, pundits, and others with a professional interest in our work. We think Substack offers a great platform to broaden our reach to a more general audience — to people with a personal interest in the themes we cover.
Last thing. “Agglomerations” is a strange word. What does it mean, and why is it the name of your newsletter?
The plain-language definition of an agglomeration is “a large group of many different things collected or brought together”.
In economics, an agglomeration is typically a cluster of people, businesses, and customers. Agglomeration economics is the study of how these clusters work — how they form and grow, how knowledge spreads within them, how the proximity of people and businesses to each other might spark new ideas and innovative new businesses.
The performance of these clusters and the industries they attract can have profound effects on the economic geography of a country, perhaps our deepest fascination at EIG. That’s one reason for the title of this newsletter.
There’s another. Traditionally, an agglomeration has referred to a cluster in a particular place, a city or region of the country. A physical location. But as improvements in communications technology have made it easier and easier for people and businesses to collaborate across vast distances, the possibility has emerged that the dynamics — and the benefits — of agglomeration economies can be recreated without the physical proximity that once defined them.
Not to be pretentious about it, but we’d love for this Substack to be just such an example. We’d love for it to be a virtual place where EIG writers are in a constant, productive conversation with readers and other writers — sharpening each other’s thinking and generating the kinds of imaginative ideas that would be unlikely to emerge without the interaction.
The title Agglomerations therefore carries a double-meaning for us. It represents a primary focus of our work, and it describes what we very much hope this newsletter will become.
