The forces that decided where ambitious people had to live for a century are weakening. For the first time in a very long time, Kansas has an opening.
"For the first time in a very long time,
Kansas has an opening —
if it understands what is being offered
and chooses accordingly."
A friend's son is staying in my apartment in New York this week. He's from Kansas — great family, good school, sharp kid, doing a summer internship at a firm that didn't exist in Wichita to recruit him.
I don't blame him. I left too.
But I keep thinking about a question that rarely gets asked in Topeka: what if the economic logic that made leaving feel necessary is beginning to change?
Kansas has already lived through one great productivity revolution.
We called it agriculture.
In 1900, four out of ten Americans worked on farms. Today, fewer than two out of one hundred do. The tractors won. The combines won. The fertilizers won. Productivity won.
Many towns did not.
Agricultural technology made farming dramatically more productive while dramatically reducing the number of people it took. Output rose. Labor requirements fell. Fewer people were needed where food was grown, and so fewer people stayed. The farms survived. The communities built around the old labor model did not always follow.
Kansas won the productivity revolution and lost the population battle. We fed the world with a fraction of the people it once took — and the fraction that remained watched their neighbors leave for Wichita, then Kansas City, then Denver, then both coasts.
Technology increased productivity. Geography suffered the consequences.
Something analogous may now be happening to cities.
For most of the last century, the great urban advantage was concentration — density of capital, employers, information, and talent. If you wanted access to the network, you moved to the network. A young Kansan who left for New York in 1975, or 1995, or even 2005 was making a rational calculation. The opportunities were genuinely unavailable at home. The premium New York charged — the cost of raising children, the tiny apartment, the punishing commute — was worth paying because the alternative was foreclosing on a version of yourself that Kansas, at that moment, could not offer.
That logic is beginning to weaken.
Remote work let millions discover that productivity does not require proximity. AI is accelerating the trend, making expertise more scalable and geography less decisive. A team of twelve now does what a team of thirty once required, and the premium is shifting away from routine execution toward what cannot be automated: judgment, leadership, relationships, the ability to build something and convince people to follow.
Many of those functions can now be performed from anywhere.
The twentieth-century story was this: technology reduced the importance of where food was grown and increased the importance of where people clustered. The twenty-first-century story may be this: technology reduces the importance of where knowledge workers cluster and increases the importance of where people want to live.
It may be the reversal Kansas has been waiting a century for, without quite knowing it.
Many of the places people are leaving still seem to assume that talent will tolerate ever-higher costs because it always has — that the density of opportunity they offer is irreplaceable enough to justify the taxes, the rents, and the policy built for an era when mobile talent had nowhere else to go. That may prove a dangerous assumption.
Florida, Texas, and Tennessee compete aggressively on tax. Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland have built explicit regimes to attract high-earning professionals — not because those countries suddenly became more charming, but because they recognized that mobile talent is now genuinely mobile, and decided to compete for it.
Living in London, I hear versions of the same conversation. A decade ago, internationally mobile professionals debated whether to leave. Today they debate where to go. My New York partners and clients are leaving for Florida and Texas; my London clients are relocating to Lisbon and Zug. They are not leaving because the great cities stopped being great. They are leaving because the premium those cities charge is no longer obviously worth paying — and because, for the first time in a generation, serious alternatives exist and are competing for them.
And talent leaving is not a closed loop. When high earners go, they take their tax base with them — but not the obligations. The pensions, the transit systems, the aging infrastructure all remain, now supported by fewer people. A city that loses its most mobile taxpayers faces a hard choice between raising rates on those who stay or letting services decay, and either accelerates the next departure.
Kansas now faces the same question confronting cities around the world: is what worked yesterday enough for tomorrow? The opportunity is real. So is the competition for it.
None of this means the great cities are finished. They keep real advantages — capital, institutions, the chance collisions remote work cannot reproduce. New York is not dying, and Kansas is not about to become New York. But New York's monopoly on ambition is weakening. The forces that determined where ambitious people had to live for the past century are losing some of their pull. For the first time in a very long time, Kansas has an opening — if it understands what is being offered and chooses accordingly.
The opening is not simply to recruit more employers. It is to keep more people.
Kansas educates thousands of talented young people every year. It just keeps too few of them. K-State's own data shows only 57% of recent graduates stayed and worked in Kansas after graduation. A University of Kansas study found the state loses roughly 17,500 college graduates between the ages of twenty and thirty-five every year, and concluded the single most effective thing Kansas could do is keep more of the people it already educated — not recruit outsiders, not land another factory.
Every August, Kansas imports ambition. Thousands of students arrive at K-State and KU from across the state, the country, and the world. Four years later, nearly half leave. The universities work, in economic terms, like a conveyor belt — assembling human capital at one end, shipping it to Denver and Dallas and Chicago at the other. Kansas has, over the decades, become remarkably good at this. This made sense when leaving was a necessity. It makes less sense as the necessity fades.
Kansas keeps measuring jobs. A factory creates 300. A stadium creates 20,000 — though many are temporary, or seasonal work that lasts only as long as the events do. Governors and legislators of both parties have spent decades on the same strategy: recruit an employer, count the payrolls, cut the ribbon.
Jobs are an input. Careers are an outcome.
A career ecosystem does what a stadium cannot — it creates demand up and down the skill ladder. When an engineer stays in Kansas and builds a company, she hires people who never set foot in a university. The entrepreneur who keeps his headquarters in Overland Park rather than moving it to Austin after the Series B keeps lawyers, accountants, designers, and skilled tradespeople employed in Kansas rather than Texas. North Carolina understood this. The Research Triangle succeeded not by building a better highway but by connecting universities to careers — so the graduate who might have defaulted to Boston could see a twenty-year path that didn't require leaving. That path filled office parks with engineers and neighborhoods with the contractors, teachers, and mechanics who built lives around them.
Kansas already has the raw material. The Animal Health Corridor and NBAF. Wichita's aviation manufacturing ecosystem. Two flagship universities importing talent every fall. Affordable housing, short commutes, schools, and the kind of community the coasts increasingly cannot offer. These were once consolation prizes. They are becoming competitive advantages — but only if Kansas learns to value them accordingly, and makes retention a central objective of economic development.
The friend's son in my New York apartment is making a perfectly rational decision. The city is extraordinary in your twenties. Nobody should be talked out of that.
But the question Kansas needs to start answering is what comes next — for him, and for the plumber and the electrician and the project manager whose futures depend, more than any economic model now captures, on whether people like him come back.
The first productivity revolution reshaped Kansas by letting us feed the world with fewer farmers.
The second may reshape it by letting Kansans build the world without leaving it.
Josh Dambacher is a Managing Partner at an international law firm in London, where he advises on investment funds, capital markets, and cross-border transactions. A fifth-generation Kansan, he writes about economics, law, and policy at The Plains Ledger. He is a spokesman for Republicans Overseas and a regular commentator on BBC, CNN International, and GB News.
— J.D.
One essay like this, every week.
Subscribe free to read on.
Already subscribed? Click to continue reading.
Economics, law, policy, and capital — delivered free, every week.
Subscribe to The Plains Ledger