More of a question than an idea.

I wonder if there are actual costs of disaggregation, associated with companies and people moving to edge cities and exurbs, that help pump up the price of doing business to the point where it’s cheaper to outsource the work, particularly to urban areas of foreign countries.

I’m certain that the cultural decision to move to a less-than-central location, implicit in suburbanization, makes the notion of doing some of the work somewhere even further away seem more sensible. I’m not sure that in a world where people lived and worked entirely in cities that outsourcing would be an entirely comprehensible idea.

Of course, it might still make economic sense, and if such a metropolis-centric world believed in free trade, it would eventually emerge as a business strategy. But I suspect that the same logic that drives edge cities drives outsourcing to foreign countries.