A Massachusetts reader of the site sent along this paper, which is from a journal that I am sure I have never looked into (!) It's from a multicountry team looking at human connectivity and networks in several forms (social media friendships, physical moves between cities, and scientific co-authorships) and comparing those between the US and China.
For example, at right is the social media graph for China, displayed in two different ways: a geographic map and a minimum-spanning-tree network plot. The latter makes it extremely obvious that Beijing really does seem to be the Hauptstadt of China by this measure, since huge areas like Shanghai only show up as subsidiary notes compared to the huge centality of Beijing itself. If you go to the paper and look at the US version, New York is indeed in the center of the graph, but nowhere near as much as Beijing is in the center of the Chinese one. There are notable subsidiary nodes for Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and several other cities, and there's more of a multibranched topology rather than the all-roads-lead-to-Beijing look of the Chinese graph.
I won't discuss the city mobility graphs, although they're certainly worth a look, because I wanted to highlight the scientific co-authorship ones. These were extracted from the Web of Science data as of 2017, and for the US, reported author zip codes were then matched up with cities and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) to capture regions more usefully by not counting every nearby municipality as a separate city unto itself. At left you see first the minimum-spanning tree for China in scientific collaborations, and again, Beijing is at the center of it, and quite dominant. But you can see that the topology is different than the social media one, with larger cities/research centers connecting to Beijing and smaller ones being more compactly described as connecting to those.
Below that is the US scientific co-authorship graph, and will you look at Boston. At no other point in any of the graphs does a city that's a smaller player in the other plots suddenly leap into a position in the center like this. San Francisco makes a pretty good leap into prominence too, as you would expect, but Boston displaces New York and all the other larger population centers to take the center. As mentioned, "Boston" in this definition includes Cambridge, Watertown, Lincoln, Waltham, Lexington and all the other municipalities that carry university, technology, and biopharma research centers, but it has to be noted that "San Francisco" does not go so far as to include San Jose (which is a node off to its right). My impression is, though, that if you bunched the whole Bay Area together in this measurement that you still wouldn't displace Boston from the center. Washington surely benefits from the inclusion of Rockville, Bethesda, and so on as well.
This illustrates something that residents, businesses, and policymakers alike already feel that they know - that yeah, the greater Boston area is a pretty big deal in science and engineering - but I think it shows it in a more emphatic way than usual. It's a very unusual situation, and it would be wise not to take it for granted. As it is, people in all sorts of disciplines move to this area because of the employers and the opportunities, and the employers move here because of the opportunities and the people. It doesn't have to be that way, though. It would take some work to mess it up, since the momentum of Harvard and MIT and Brandeis and Tufts and Northeastern all the rest of them, as well as the industrial momentum of all the biopharma companies, etc., would take time to dissipate. As Adam Smith said after Britain lost the US colonies, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation". On the optimistic side, which is where Smith was likely coming from by temperament (see The Theory of Moral Sentiments), you can read that as how difficult it is to mess something up that large and how such things are more resilient than you might imagine. But it can also mean that ruin is already in process, running slowly enough that you can pretend that all is well and that nothing needs to be addressed. It would be prudent not to lean too far into either of those viewpoints!
Rather, I try to remember and appreciate that I live and work in a very strange and unusual area, with a weird concentration of weird people. I like to think that I fit right in!