If you’re a very talented person, you have two choices: you either move to New York or you move to Silicon Valley. This is the message that Peter Thiel delivered to a conference being held in Chicago earlier this month. Not surprisingly, it pissed a few people off.

Peter responded by saying that he was simply illustrating the “extreme version” of a metaphor about the impacts of globalization and technology. And while it certainly doesn’t sound very nice if you’re sitting in Chicago, or the countless other fantastic cities between the coasts, I can appreciate what Peter is getting at.

Saskia Sassen is known for coining the term global city. These are cities which play an important role in the functioning of the global economy. But what has happened, she acknowledges, is an even further concentration of activity within a select few “super-places.”

Here is an excerpt from a Financial Times article by Simon Kuper (2014) talking about Amsterdam’s position in the world:

“…a new, higher category of cities may now be emerging: global capitals. Amsterdam has risen but New York, London and Hong Kong have risen faster. The Dutch elite is moving to Amsterdam; but many ambitious Dutch people no longer want to join the Dutch elite. They want to join the global elite. That often requires moving to a global capital.”

Anecdotally, I can say that almost everyone I know who has left Toronto for an opportunity has moved to New York, Silicon Valley, London, and so on. They have moved up the rank of global cities/capitals.

So while Peter may not have chosen the right way to deliver this message, I do believe it is a message worth delivering.

The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published an interesting report called The Geography of the Global Super-Rich.

What they did was use the Forbes 2015 Billionaire List to chart billionaires and billionaire wealth by location and by industry. They also looked at the wealth gap in each location and whether the wealth was self-made or inherited.

A correlation analysis was also done to see what key variables – such as population, density, economic output, global city standing, VC investment, and so on – were positively correlated with a greater concentration of super rich people.

There are 1,826 billionaires across the world according to Forbes. The researchers were able to match 99% of them to a specific metro area / primary residence.

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of the number of billionaires:

Look at Miami at #9. 

I suspect that this may surprise some of you. But Miami has grown into a significant global city. As one of my friends from Miami likes to tell me: “The best thing about Miami is that it’s a Latin American city that’s so close to the United States.”

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of total billionaire wealth: 

A bunch of changes on this list because of extremely wealthly people and families in places like Bentonville (Arkansas) and Omaha.

One of the conclusions of the report is that the size of the city generally matters:

“The geography of the super-rich is a function of larger cities. Both the number of billionaires and their net worth are positively associated with the population of global cities, with correlations of 0.56 for the number of billionaires and 0.44 to their net worth.”

Here is a chart comparing population to the number of billionaires:

Cities such as New York, Moscow, and Hong kong, which sit far above the blue line, have more billionaires than their population size would predict.

Here is a similar chart comparing venture capital investment to the number of billionaires:

Once again, there is a positive association.

Finally, here are a two charts that show which industries have produced the most billionaires:

If you’re interested in this study, you can download the full report here. All of the charts were sourced from the report.

Arup, the global consulting firm, has an interesting publication out called Cities Alive: Towards a walking world. The report highlights 50 benefits of walking and then 40 actions that city leaders can take today to transform their cities. The entire study was informed by examining 80 international case studies.

As I was going through the report, the following diagram caught my attention. It compares journeys on foot vs. journeys by car for a collection of global cities.

The turquoise circles represent % of journeys by walking. On the left is Los Angeles at 4%. And on the right is Istanbul at 48%.

The red circles represent % of journeys by car. On the left is Miami at 79% (with Los Angeles right beside it). And on the right is Kolkata at 2%.

The map in the middle of the circles represents pedestrians killed in traffic crashes per 100,000 people.

I’m not sure where the data was drawn from, but it’s not all that surprising to see a few North American cities clustered towards the left (less walking; more driving). Still, I wonder how “journey” is defined.

To view the full report, click here. Arup also produces a lot of other great content that you can download for free, here.