I love this! Went to a conference in CO a few years ago - met so many folks who’d relocated from other states and the repeated refrain was - here, ‘life outside of work’ is recognized and valued (by employers and employees!).
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This reminds me of a Division 1 North American Cup fencing tournament (highest level, Olympians, etc.) one of my kids was in their junior year of high school, in Colorado Springs (6000 foot elevation).
The college coaches were all there. At the time we lived at 7000 feet. As the day wore on, competitors were dropping like flies.
My kid was on the medal stand that day, and we had some great talks with college coaches. 
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After nine years living in San Diego, I think the ambition is to surf in the morning, go biking, go hiking, hit a craft brewery, take your dog everywhere, and stay outdoors as much as possible.
The big industries are military, biotech, and tourism. Not busines or finance, so that could be a factor.
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As a New Yorker, IMHO this describes a tiny sliver of the population. What I most treasure about my home town is diversity (of all kinds, especially economic) and accessibility.
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Philadelphia : Rise and Grind. Also, you don’t like us, we don’t care
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My sense has been that the big San Diego tech companies (Qualcomm, Viasat) lean heavily to the “smarter” vibe like Boston/Cambridge, but are somewhat more applied to the real world. However, like in Boston the intellectualism has sometimes been to their detriment in terms of tech industry dominance. I don’t know if the same is true in biotech.
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And Go Birds!
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Keep Austin Weird … though that feels less our identity with all the growth and newcomers. I guess Elon is doing his part as the dude definitely is weird. 
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I don’t hang out with the employed 
but the news stories tend to discuss research, development, and application rather than competition. Maybe the weather and being in the very SW corner of the country makes people more mellow? Having lived in Chicago, and son living in Seattle, San Diego really feels more like a very oversized town instead of a major metro vibe. It’s very much a city of neighborhoods. And beaches.
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“Keep Knoxville Scruffy!”
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Agree, I think that image (not surprising) is NYC as the place where you go to become Gordon Gekko (though these days with financial firms all over the place, it isn’t quite as true) is just a sliver of why people come here. NYC attracts people for different reasons. Lot of people when they are young it is being in a 24 hour city where everything isn’t necessarily homogenized, where there are people from all over , or where if you are different you aren’t necessarily treated badly. Though with the city being so expensive and the edge gone from it to a large extent, there is still some of that. Sadly, the artists and musicians that used to come here has died off from what it was, but there is still an arts scene too. For older people it is the things you can do, from free to expensive, including museums and galleries and music venues.
Even as gentrified as it has become and even with the issues, there is still an attraction there that doesn’t exist other places (and before it sound like it is NYC above all, no way, other cities interest people for other reasons. There are cities honestly I don’t see the attraction either, ones that quite frankly remind me of huge suburbs with a few interesting areas (Houston, Atlanta comes to mind), not fond of sprawl cities or cities where they are pretty homogenous…but that is me.
If there is a focus on making money, it usually has been for a long time being able to afford to live there.
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I’ve never been to Knoxville, but I have a good friend there and he resembles that remark. Hoping to visit next year while driving through.
I live on way, way less than the average CC parent, in fact less than the median household income in NYC, Brooklyn (where my rental apartment is), and the US. NYC is definitely a working-class family city and I am so grateful to have raised my daughter in a place where she always had classmates and we had neighbors with more and with less than we had.
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In an article about the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, the Wall Street Journal referred to Knoxville as “a scruffy little city on the Tennessee River.” Since then, Knoxvillians have embraced that phrase, and turned an attempted slur into a badge of pride.
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But what do the ambitious people seek to do? Maybe this is generalizing about Texas, but my sense is the question is “what have you built”? In other words an emphasis on creating the biggest and best physical things, whether that’s industrial (oil and gas, albeit not Austin, Elon Musk’s biggest factory, biggest rocket etc) or just building roads, new suburbs (biggest houses!) etc. Having the biggest population growth, most people moving there etc seems to be a point of pride.
My parents used to live outside of Knoxville. The people are very nice there.
I’m not sure about ambition but I’ve never met people who were more proud of their city than Cleveland residents. Lots of civic pride. Maybe Pittsburgh?
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This is an interesting thread! I’m in low-level academia, so—a complete nobody by elite standards. However, my impression of Atlanta is that it’s a who-you-know and government-connections town. I’m not sure I am informed enough to really know what other cities are like, though.
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I’m not sure that I get your point. Tons of ambitious people live in Austin. We used to have a commercial where a guy is sitting in a coffeeshop and the tagline was something “Down on his luck or tech millionaire?” The point being that really successful people and really rich people just blended in. No one dressed ostentatiously or drove fancy cars. Definitely feels different now. Also, different parts of town have more tolerance for the new-money attitude.
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That seems to be the opposite of some places in Orange County (south of Los Angeles), where I saw more Rolls Royce and Bentley cars on a weekend trip than I would see over years everywhere else. There were also very large ostentatious houses on the water with very large ostentatious boats on their private docks.
The point in the original article was what sources of prestige do ambitious people seek in different cities? So money in NY, power in SV, influence in DC, contacts in LA and intellectual credibility in Cambridge. My sense is that success in Texas is defined more by building physical things than in any of those other cities. Even in NY or SV where developers have made lots of money I’m not sure that’s particularly prestigious (Donald Trump had to do more than just be a property developer to be famous/important).
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