Update on allegations regarding this post: Pangram Exposes Me As A Slop Artist
New York has more Starbucks than most cities have coffee shops, and also more places where a barista will explain the fermentation of Nepalese beans. Shouldn’t scale flatten variety? How do large markets produce both consolidation and specialization?
The mechanism is easier to see in the labor market. If thousands of people do roughly what you do, “lawyer” or “artist” stops distinguishing you. You escape competition by becoming an immigration lawyer for founders, or a Soviet papier-mâché art therapist.
The latter does not stand out by becoming a more extreme artist. She combines interests, skills, and biography into a niche that appeals to several overlapping audiences. Nothing in the bundle needs to be rare, because the combination is.
But specialization alone does not explain metropolitan individuality. Thick markets support the partial separation of our social worlds. Your rare-illness support group, climbing gym, and Russian lit club can each survive knowing only one slice of you.
This partitioning gives urbanites the freedom to test draft ideas. In the village, blame-gossip could cascade one group’s ostracism across every available relationship. As social worlds multiply and decouple, the parochial tyrant’s reign of terror weakens.
Anonymity makes individuality cheaper to produce. Without one permanent communal reputation, people can try more combinations, fail forward, and keep what fits. The city gives unfinished people room to become more particular and peculiar.