Joel Kotkin of Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, author of a forthcoming book on the geography of theinformationage, sees the favourite cities of the Internet economy, such as San Francisco and Seattle, as boutiques for the young, single and rich.
For the rest of the United States- which has impressively restructured its economy for the challenges of the productivity-driven informationage- the Northeast is not so much unnecessary as it is irrelevant.
We humans are an "information economy" and middle age is the time when we pass on most of that information - this is why middle-aged people like being listened to.