When the Internet first started to revolutionize communications in the 1990s, experts thought it would allow people to do most service jobs just about anywhere, dispersing these businesses to all corners of every country and making location irrelevant. That dispersal is happening for lower to midlevel service jobs, but as the Columbia University urbanologist Saskia Sassen has pointed out, the headquarters of service industries from finance to insurance and law are actually concentrating in a network of about fifty “global cities.” These service cities are led by New York and London but are
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